Animal Rights

In his paper “The Case for Animal Rights” Tom Regan argues from a roughly Kantian perspective that animals have intrinsic value equal to that of humans and as such should cease to be used as mere resources for others.  In this paper, I will detail both Regan’s position as well as the argument which he mounts in its favor.  It will be shown that though his argument is valid, it is not sound, being based on a number of unacceptable premises.  Whether attempts at replacing the unacceptable premises with more appropriate ones provide a legitimate defense of animal rights or not is left as an open question.

The Chinese Room, pt. 8

The systems objection, which I take to be identical (or at least nearly so) with the virtual mind reply, suggests that the Chinese Room argument is entirely beside the point. When Searle says “It seems to me quite obvious in the example that I do not understand a word of the Chinese stories,” the computationalist merely need reply, “So what?” The English speaker has a representation of Chinese-speaking syntax, a phenomenon which is entirely independent of the representation which is supposed to be created by the latter. This confusion of representation/consciousness/understanding of syntax and the syntax of representation/consciousness/understanding is the primary motivation which makes Searle’s conclusion so ‘obvious’ or intuitive.

The Chinese Room, pt. 7

The Chinese Room is not merely intended as a refutation of Strong AI, but also as demonstration of the unreliability of the Turing Test for intelligence.  According to John Searle, the Chinese Room passes the Turing Test without being intelligent in the relevant sense, therefore passing the Turing Test is not sufficient for having intelligence.  It is, partially, for this reason that Searle reintroduces all the chauvinistic and prejudicial preconditions for intelligence (I will use the terms ‘intelligence’, ‘conscious’ and ‘understanding’ rather interchangeably) that Turing attempted to dispose of with his test in the form of causal powers.

The Chinese Room, pt. 6

Here is the outline of a presentation I am going to give tonight in my Philosophy of Mind seminar:

The Chinese Room, pt. 5

Many have seen a glaring problem with Searle’s use of the Chinese Room Argument, namely that it shows too much.  If we place the necessary conditions for the mental too high, we run the risk of thereby disqualifying human-mentality.  It is with this very idea in mind that Searle embraces a seemingly vague position in which biological matter has some undefined and undescovered capacity to cause mental states, whatever those are for Searle.  This appeal to our “causal powers” is essentially the only vangaurd which Searle has against the brain-simulator reply.

The Chinese Room, pt. 4

Last year I put out quite a few posts concerning John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument.  Well, I’ve returned to the subject to find that my comments and criticisms miss the point to some degree or another.  Since I will be writing a decent sized paper on the subject over the next few weeks, you can expect to see a few posts of varying length in the near future.

Conserving Natural Resources

(This is a rought draft of a paper which I am writing for my environmental ethics class.)

In his book The Ultimate Resource Julian Simon presents a number of arguments in support of claim that natural resources are infinite. In this paper I will limit my attention to his argument by induction from history. First I will attempt to clearly articulate what Simon’s thesis actually is. Second, I will consider which arguments are crucial for Simon’s case. Finally, it will be argued that the inductive inferences which Simon makes are unreliable due to their being drawn from a biased as well as only partially relevant sample of history. A less biased view of history, I will conclude, supports the conservationist’s position.

Selective Relativity

(This is a rough draft of a paper I am writing for my phil. of biology class. Comments and criticisms are certainly appreciated.)

In this paper I will describe and argue for a position which I will call selective relativity. I follow C. Kenneth Waters in arguing that the debate surrounding which is the uniquely correct level at which selection operates derives in part from a deep-seated conceptual confusion. This confusion is in not realizing that all notions of fitness, selective force, etc. follow from rather than constrain the biologist’s identification of a unit of selection. The only things which constrain the biologist’s choice in unit are pragmatic concerns and I will defend this claim against gene-centrist arguments and counterexamples. Finally, I will demonstrate that all such objections are based in the same conceptual confusion mentioned above.