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In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed the simulation argument, which suggests that if a civilization becomes capable of creating conscious simulations, it could generate so many simulated beings that a randomly chosen conscious entity would almost certainly be in a simulation.
Objections to the argument include the idea that mathematics is only used as a representational device, even when it features in scientific explanations; that mathematics does not need to be true to be explanatory because it could be a useful fiction; and that the argument is circular and so begs the question in favour of mathematical objects.
In the philosophy of mind, the China brain thought experiment (also known as the Chinese Nation or Chinese Gym) considers what would happen if the entire population of China were asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons.
The red pill or the blue pill—the famous question that frames the entirety of The Matrix.In the 1999 film, a surprisingly resolute Neo takes the red pill and decides to “see how far down the ...
The argument is directed against the philosophical positions of functionalism and computationalism, [4] which hold that the mind may be viewed as an information-processing system operating on formal symbols, and that simulation of a given mental state is sufficient for its presence.
This argument has been explored at length in philosophical literature since its publication. A potential loophole in Putnam's reference theory is that a brain on Earth that is "kidnapped", placed into a vat, and subjected to a simulation could still refer to brains and vats which are real in the sense of Putnam, and thus correctly say it is a ...
While the computer metaphor draws an analogy between the mind as software and the brain as hardware, CTM is the claim that the mind is a computational system. More specifically, it states that a computational simulation of a mind is sufficient for the actual presence of a mind, and that a mind truly can be simulated computationally.
Early objections to multiple realizability were limited to the narrow, "across structures-type" version. Starting with David Kellogg Lewis , many reductionists argued that it is very common in scientific practice to reduce one theory to another via local, structure-specific reductions.