Personal Identity
Derek Parfit's view that "you" are a "bundle" of different mental states held together by causal relations
What is the Bundle Theory?
Bruce Hinrichs argues the mind is a "quality" of the brain, just as this is a "quality" of water.
What is wetness?
The subjective, first-person quality of experience—what it feels like to perceive, think, or feel something "from the inside."
What is consciousness?
The philosophical theory that the mind is a non-physical entity separate from the physical body
What is Mind-Body Dualism?
The test proposed by Alan Turing to determine if a machine can think by fooling a human questioner.
What is the Turing Test?
The theory that the self is a single, unified, separately existing entity, like a "soul".
What is the Ego Theory?
A key difference in Hinrichs' view is that a brain's "software" (like learning a language) physically changes this.
What is the hardware?
Epstein uses an experiment where a student draws this object "from memory" to show representations aren't "stored."
What is a dollar bill?
A hypothetical being that is physically identical to a human but has no inner conscious experience.
What is a Philosophical Zombie (or P-Zombie)?
This thought experiment argues that perfectly manipulating symbols (like in a chatbot) is not the same as true understanding.
What is the Chinese Room argument?
This thought experiment asks if you "survive" after being destroyed on Earth and a perfect replica is created on Mars.
What is the Teletransporter thought experiment?
In Hinrichs' analogy, your senses are the "input" or "keyboard," and your conscious mind is this part of a PC.
What is the monitor (or display)?
Materialist theories struggle to grapple with the problem understood simply as mental states are always about things other than themselves, e.g., My desire to see Kyoto is about Kyoto.
What is intentionality?
According to this theory, pain is any feature of a physical system that serves the same functions, in that system, as the neuron firings serve in us when we are in pain.
What is functionalism?
One current limitation of generative AI systems like ChatGPT that cause them to "reset" or "forget" previous interactions.
What is a context window?
According to Derek Parfit, this, not identity, is what truly matters for survival.
What is psychological continuity?
Epstein highlights this "anti-representational" example to show how an organism directly interacts with its world without "computations."
What is catching a fly ball?
A major problem for materialist theories, it's the challenge of explaining "what it's like to be" something, like a bat.
What is the problem of subjectivity?
The belief that one's own self is the only thing that can be known to exist.
What is Solipsism?
This example of "alien" consciousness is distinguished by distributed cognition over nine neural-processing sites.
What is an octopus? 🐙