In his article, “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that there are facts about conscious experience that are subjective and can only be known from that subjective perspective. Even if we know all the objective facts about bats, we may not actually know what it would really be like to … Nagel’s “What is it Like to be a Bat?”
Can a computer think? Do computers have minds? John Searle’s Chinese Room argument can be used to argue that computers do not “think” because computers do not understand the symbols that they process. For example, if you’re typing an email to your friend on the computer, the computer does not understand what your message to … Do computers think?
For much of modern science, since the Enlightenment, animals were generally thought to be automatons: materialist robots programmed to behave in certain ways. Rene Descartes drew a sharp distinction between thinking beings, humans, and everything else, matter. 20th Century behaviorism continued to think of animals in this way but added humans to the mix. “Mind” … Animal Minds & Consciousness
Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. How should the car be programmed if it encounters an unavoidable accident? After watching the video on the ethical dilemma of self-driving cars, use the discussion questions … The Ethics of Self-driving Cars 1
Materials Needed: Legos (the more the better) Something on which to display/write out class thoughts (chalkboard, whiteboard, SMARTboard) Camera (optional) Preparation: Have Legos divided up according to how groups will be organized, e.g. in separate piles or in one large pile. Description: 1. (Optional) Warm up and get a sense of our intuitions about the … Identity & Essence Lego Activity
The new technology of driverless cards has opened up a real-world corollary to the 65- year-old philosophical tradition of trolley problems. The basic question here involves how these cars should be programmed: is the goal to protect passengers or others out on the road? Read these the two articles and watch the video, which focuses … The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars 2
In this high school philosophy lesson plan, students will engage with Gottfried Leibniz’s The Monadology.
The Ethics of the Creation of Dual-Species Chimeras On November 6, 2015, NPR aired a story about the controversial topic of stem cell research. This story can be used as the basis for a philosophical discussion of a variety of topics, including what it is to be human and the ethics of medical research. Here … The Creation of Dual-Species Chimeras
One of the practical consequences of the Scientific Revolution was a suggestion that one should only believe things that are both true and justified. Eventually, there was even the proposal by mathematician William Clifford that it is morally wrong to believe things without good justification. While early thinkers suggested we need to justify all of … Demarcation and Falsifiability
Overview One of the most fundamental questions philosophy of science raises involves the problem of scientific realism, which asks us to think about the status of scientific claims. For instance, when your chemistry teacher talks about atoms, are these real entities (and what does that mean?) or are they just a linguistic model that’s a … Scientific Realism and the Weird World
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