PHIL 1301 Study Guide - Spring 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes -
PHIL 1301
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Thomas Nagel and Minds, Brains and Machines
1. Nagel chooses to focus on bats because he supposes that the bats, which are mammals,
have conscious experiences just like the human beings. But different to the human beings, bats
have diverse activities and sensory systems. For instance, bats will perceive size, distance, shape
or motion through echolocation or sonar. This makes him believe that the experiences of the bats
are not subjectively like that of human beings (Nagel 2).
2. Nagel’s subjective character of experience is what it is like to be a particular creature.
Every organism has a unique, distinctive perspective and conscious experience which is only
understandable from the organism’s point of view. He states that even if one has a brilliant
imagination and is capable of imagining what it's like to perceive through echolocation or sonar,
it would still be impossible to know how the experience of being a bat is (Nagel 3). What makes
the mind-body problem unmanageable is consciousness. According to Nagel, the nature and
structure of the minds of bats might make it quite impossible to feel our subjectivity and the
opposite also applies to us. Being unable to understand the experience of a bat doesn’t mean that
we can say to have more or less meaningful subjective experiences (Nagel 4). As humans, we
should not make an objective imagination to describe the personal experience in a manner that it
is understandable by beings who do not share such an experience. Every being have their own
interpretation of what it is to be like them. Since we have distinct experiences, we can be sure
that such experiences exist (Nagel 4).
3. Nagel's analogy for humans thinking about being a bat and not other creatures might
be of concern to us because bats have conscious experience, which are absent in other birds since
bats are mammals and close to humans. It is not moral to conclude that physicalism is wrong
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since physicalism is a situation we cannot understand because currently, we do not have any
understanding of how correct it might be. Nagel proposes that we create a new basis and
implement a new technique that is, an objective phenomenology which describes the sonar
experiences of bats and not dependent on imagination (Nagel 5).
4. The Imitation Game is a game which Turing (294) used to get the meaning and
answers to the question “can machines talk.” The game involves three people in different rooms.
Participant A is a male, participant B is a female and Participant C, acting as the questioner,
could be male or female. In the game, participant C cannot see any of A or B but recognizes
them as X and Y. Participant C can only converse with them by notes which have been written or
whichever format which does not disclose about their sexes. Participant C attempts to decide on
who the man is and who the woman is questioning them. Participant A tricks the questioner in
producing the incorrect conclusion, but B tries to help the questioner in providing the correct
one. If a machine replaced the role of the man in this game, and it achieves the level of success,
it would mean that the machine was to be successful and reliably 'win' the game (Turing 295).
5. Lady Lovelace's objection to the concept of a "thinking machine" was that machines
are not capable of learning on their own. Machines are unable to originate things or to innovate
new ideas. She argues that machines only do the things that we already know because it is human
beings that have programmed the machines to perform the tasks that they do. What she implies is
that without any programming from human beings, machines would not do the jobs (Turing
303). The objection presents a strong challenge to the idea of a thinking machine because
according to Hartree (qtd. in Turing 303) she argued against Analytical Engine which could not
think on its own but do whatever commands it was ordered to perform.
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Document Summary
Thomas nagel and minds, brains and machines: nagel chooses to focus on bats because he supposes that the bats, which are mammals, have conscious experiences just like the human beings. But different to the human beings, bats have diverse activities and sensory systems. For instance, bats will perceive size, distance, shape or motion through echolocation or sonar. This makes him believe that the experiences of the bats are not subjectively like that of human beings (nagel 2): nagel"s subjective character of experience is what it is like to be a particular creature. Every organism has a unique, distinctive perspective and conscious experience which is only understandable from the organism"s point of view. What makes the mind-body problem unmanageable is consciousness. According to nagel, the nature and structure of the minds of bats might make it quite impossible to feel our subjectivity and the opposite also applies to us.
