PHIL 1050 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Thomas Nagel, Scientific Outlook On Development, Cosmological Argument
12 Apr 2016
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Content big mistake to confuse false with doubtable. Information from senses are only doubted, not false. Dream and demon hypothesis: a priori knowledge is taken into question, demon hypothesis calls into question arithmetic and knowledge from matters of fact. The beliefs adopted from senses may be false, not the senses being false. Think of the mind, no longer as descartes did, but as itself a natural/physical system that we can understand from science. Alan turing helped develop some of the first computers during wwii and was arrested for being gay (sexuality regarded as illness) Thought it was possible that devising a good enough computer program we could give something a mind. Asked how would you know that some artificial material had mental states. If a computer that could converse with people, and these people would not be able to know they were talking to simply a computer. If it walks and talks like a mind, then it has mind states.
