A Functionalist View of Consciousness in Bicentennial Man

mind, philosophy

Based on Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, the 1999 film Bicentennial Man stars Robin Williams as an increasingly lifelike robot. One fundamental question is: at any stage, does Andrew possess “consciousness”? Withholding the belief that humans over all other things have been supernaturally “chosen” or imbued with consciousness, a naturalistic assessment of qualitative experience permits Andrew to […]

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, and how G.E. Moore Fails to Respond to the Skeptics

analytic philosophy, philosophy, skepticism, Wittgenstein

Beginning with Descartes, traditional forms of epistemology have attempted to create a foundation of knowledge that can not be doubted. The skeptical tradition, employing and developing Cartesian doubt among other variations of it, has sought to undermine the possibility certainty about the external world and, more generally, all knowledge. The philosopher G.E. Moore attempted to

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An Argument Against Qualia (and some stuff about Robots and Consciousness, too!)

epistemology, philosophy

Samuel Butler’s speculation (in Erewhon‘s Book of the Machines)  that machines could eventually develop consciousness was something of a joke, but the debate on robot consciousness has developed into a major issue in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience, as well as becoming a huge pop-culture phenomenon. The Matrix details robots taking over the world;

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Liberal and Conservative Voters in America on the Role of Government

conservatism, liberalism, politics

With all the grandstanding that goes on in politics, all types of claims are made that appeal to voters: belief in the individual, the common man, self-determination, non-interference, etc. These issues are even framed in terms of partisan politics, meaning that voters commonly interpret one party to espouse a certain set of ideas relating to

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W.V.O Quine: On What There Is (Summary & Critique)

analytic philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy

On What There Is: Quine’s Theory of Ontology and Position on Universals A universal describes a member of a class of mind-independent entities in reality that is not a particular thing, but an attribute, relation, etc. The realist position on universals posits that individuals share attributes with other individuals and that this commonality is manifested

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The U.S. Invasion of Grenada: the American Government’s Justification and Narrative

American Foreign Policy, history, politics, war

Reasons for the U.S. Intervention in Grenada When discussing the 1979-1983 U.S. actions in Grenada, one must ask the first and most important question: what interest could the world’s capitalist superpower possibly have in a tiny island less populous than a South American football stadium? The miniscule nation’s economy, lacking any significant natural resource or

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Summary and Critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosophy, Political Philosophy, social contract theory

At the foundation of modern moral justifications for the establishment of a coercive state is the voluntarization of that coercive power – in other words, the implication that obedience to governments is in some way chosen and thus morally binding. The philosophical construct that has come to embody this approach is described by the term

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