L2 - Computers and Free will

Question 1

What is the status quo regarding brain states and mental states?

Answer 1

The majority believes that ‘Individual mental states within a person at a certain time do correspond to brain states in that person at that specific time’.

Question 2

What is the effect of mental states being realized differently in different people?

Answer 2

This is known as Multiple realizability and because of this, there is no type-type identity possible.
Because of this, the construction of “bridge laws” is blocked, meaning you can’t reduce laws/theories at the higher level to laws/theories at the lower level

(Bonus question, which position is this? It’s non-reductive materialism)

Question 3

What does token-token identity theory say about reduction?

Answer 3

Usually, shit ain’t possible because the mental state might be the same, but the brain state ain’t shared at all.
You need type-type identity theory to do reduction.

Question 4

So, why do you need type-type identity theory, not token-token

Answer 4

The lower-order collection of realizations from the lower-order perspective is heterogenous and arbitrary. It can only be grouped from the higher order perspective

Note that reduction is an incredibly great achievement that is also rare in exact sciences. Brain science is still interesting ygm??

Question 5

What are the implications of functionalism regarding multiple realizability?

Answer 5

It really helps, because it supports the idea that regardless of what brain is running it, it allows for this multiple realization

Question 6

What does functionalism give rise to? along with the history at the time?

Answer 6

The idea of whether computers can think, and if so, at what point do we grant them consciousness?

Question 7

What is the turing test?

Answer 7

You ask a human and a computer the same question, and once you are unable to differentiate which answer the robot gave, then it has passed the turing test.
You should then say it has consciousness

ChatGPT is getting very close to this, but not yet

Question 8

What do some people think about the turing test?

Answer 8

They think it’s too simple of a test to allocate consciousness with.
Additionally, people wonder whether the computer is actually consciously producing the outputs, or just following rules.

Question 9

What is John Searle’s Chinese Room?

Answer 9

It’s a thought experiment where there is a room with someone inside. Letters get put in the room and the person takes the letter and checks his big book. He finds the symbols on the letter and the book tells him which symbol to put. He does this for the whole letter and puts response in a box connected to the outside.

From the outside, it appears as if he is speaking and understands chinese, but in reality he is just matching the symbols and doesn’t actually understand what they mean.

Question 10

So, does the Chinese room pass the turing test? Does it have consciousness?

Answer 10

It passes the Turing test, but it isn’t sufficient ground for consciousness.

The computer/chinese room can never develop meaning.

Question 11

What is the weak/strong AI thesis?

Answer 11

Weak AI thesis: Computer is a useful tool for understanding human cognition
Strong AI thesis: Appropriately programmed computer has a mind.

According to Searle and his logic, the Strong AI thesis fails.

Question 12

What does Searle say consciousness is?

Answer 12

He says consciousness is a essential biological phenomenon.

Question 13

What did the functionalists say back to Searle? (regarding the chinese room and its conclusion)

Answer 13

They got very angry, they said the although the person doesn’t understand Chinese, the system as a whole does.

Searle says, stfu loser,simulating is not the same as realizing.
If you don’t realize what you’re doing, then do you actually understand it? (e.g. think about when doing a questionnaire, once you understand the interviewer’s intentions, your responses shift slightly.

Question 14

Does ChatGPT pass the Turing Test?

Answer 14

It passed it 41% of the time, where humans passed 63%, so it does kinda pass, but not as well as humans.

Question 15

Ignoring whether ChatGPT passes the test or not, should we ascribe consciousness to it?

Answer 15

It’s a big question with AI, because it leads to the issue of if it does have consciousness, then is turning off the computer just shutting down a program or something closer to murder?

Question 16

What is Qualia?

Answer 16

Yippee we’re back to qualia, it’s qualities of cinscious thought that give the thoughts a rich and vivid meaning.

Question 17

What is the example of Mary the color scientist?

Answer 17

Mary is hired by a physicalist to see if she can tell whether physical knowledge can result in complete knowledge about the world or is something missing.
She’s put into a black and white room and given all the information regarding how the brain behaves when it sees colour, (e.g. what wavelengths appear when you look at the sky, and so on).
She was then released into the colourful world, and she gained so much more meaning even though she knew exactly what the brain would do.

Just read this flashcard, the conclusions are on the next.

Question 18

What conclusions were drawn from the ‘Mary the colour scientist’ thought experiment?

Answer 18

It showed that even if you have all the physical information of a sensory input, you need the qualia in order to understand how the sensory experience is. Without it, it isn’t the whole deal ygm?
Knowledge about physical processes is therefore not the same as knowledge about subjective experience

Question 19

What did Thomas Nagel say about qualia?

Answer 19

He wondered whether it is possible to learn from “objective” descriptions what it is like to be a bat and use echolocation.

He concluded that it’s impossible, we cannot do this due to qualia, we only have our own subjective experience.

Question 20

What does the ‘what is it like’ aspect say about consciousness?

Answer 20

It is essential for consciousness, as then we can say that the entity has something that only it knows what it is like.
Confusing, ik, but think about echolocation, we cannot fully comprehend what thats like, we are limited to what our mind can imagine.

Question 21

What position do thought experiments about qualia pose a problem for?

Answer 21

It’s especially a problem for functionalists, because what allows us to have these subjective experiences, but not computers.
It also poses a problem for materialism, as if all there is is physical, why do qualia escape a physical description of the world (mary the colour scientist example)

It doesn’t pose a problem for dualists.

Question 22

What is the ‘Hard Problem’

Answer 22

It’s the problem of how the we can have subjective experiences, and what produces them.

Some say the brain somehow produces experiences. E.g. “If a certain brain process occurs, then there is subjective experience, and otherwise there is not.”

Question 23

What does David Chalmers say about the hard problem?

Answer 23

He says that standard research only deals with the “easy problem”, that being only investigating which brain processes are at the basis of which experiences.
He also argues that the problem of consciousness - why do we have qualia at all - is not addressed at all.

Question 24

What does Patricia Churchland say about the hard problem?

Patricia is an eliminative materialist

Answer 24

She rejects the hard problem, and says we should just put in the hard work of understanding the neuroscience of consciousness, the same way we tackle other higher-process problems.

Question 25

What is the cognitive closure hypothesis?

Answer 25

It is an explanation for why we won’t be able to understand consciousness.
It basically says that we are not physically smart enough to understand it, and thus we will never be able to understand it, so why bother. Essentially, a cognitive closure to the problem (you see the name now right)
E.g. A dog can’t learn the pythagorean theorem, and never will (i think neve could learn it).

Question 26

What is the problem of free will?

Answer 26

We see that humans operate autonomously, that we have free will, that our behaviour comes from ourselves.
This is seen in law (in making the distinction between performing an act voluntarily or not)

Question 27

What is implied by saying free will is when behaviour is the outcome of an intention?

Answer 27

It implies that
- The intention of the behaviour precedes behaviour
- The behaviour wasn’t necessary (you could’ve done something else)

The next flashcards will go over whether these points are true

Question 28

Does the intention actually precede the behaviour?

Answer 28

A study by Libet (some old dude) was done that investigated the timing of decisions vs behaviour
It found that behaviour is already being started in the brain before the decision is made. (e.g. so our hand starts moving before we decide to move it (ofc in the millisecond range))

Question 29

Could you have done something else?

Answer 29

Many people have the intuition that the physical state of the world at t fully determines the physical state at t+1.
This is known as determinism: This implies you there is no choice to make, the environment and factors control what will happen.

Question 30

What does quantum physics say about determinism?

Answer 30

You could think that since there is inherently some randomness in particle behaviour, then not everything is fully determined.
However, even with these “quantum jumps” (random behaviour), it still isn’t free will, as it’s just random jumps.

Question 31

Going away from these points, what does materialism say about “are intentions causes of behaviour?”

Answer 31

If you believe that
1. The physical state of the world at t fully determines the physical state at t+1
2. The physical state of the world at t realizes the mental states in that world

Then the valid conclusion is that mental states are not independent causes
Look at figure 1.
If P fully causes P*, then how could mental states play a causal role?

Question 32

Can free will be saved?

Answer 32

You could
- criticize Libet’s experiments
- Maintain that physics does not fully describe the world
- Become compatibilist (maintain that free will is consistent with the laws of physics)
- Conceptualize free will differently (not as a cause)

Question 33

How can you criticize Libet’s experiments?

Answer 33

You can say that the preceding movement is just random activity breaking the threshold which gives you the awareness of the movement, and you can then make the decision to continue or inhibit the movement.
It’s based on an article and even she was confused, i doubt you should try to understand it

Question 34

How can you conceptualize free will differently?

Answer 34

You can consider it an explanatory entity (something that explains), or you can also see it as a phenomenon to be explained.
E.g. we clearly differ in autonomy from cars and stones. You can call this phenomenon “free will”.

Question 35

Lecture conclusion

Answer 35

Still no one really understands how the mind relates to the body.
Subjective experience is a complete mystery
The demand for free will puts these things on edge.

Question 36

What are two types of consciousness? (As defined by Block)

The following flashcards are based on 7.4 onwards. I tried merging if possible

Answer 36

Access consciousness: Access conscious information can be reported by the patient, used for reasoning, and acted upon intentionally
Phenomological consciousness: Refers to the fact that human experiences possess subjective qualities that seem to defy descrption; experiences have a meaning that goes beyond formal report.

Question 37

What does Blindsight illustrate about consciousness?

Answer 37

Blindsight is the condition in which patients are unable to see anything in part of their visual field (after visual cortex damage).
However, despite not being able to see things, the content in the field still affect the patient’s processing.
In this case, this information doesn’t have access consciousness.
It also doesn’t have the phenomenological richness of conscious experiences.
Thus, we can say confidently that blindsight affects the brain unconsciously.

Question 38

Whats the third component of consciousness according to Deheane et al.

Answer 38

Self monitoring: The ability of a cognitive system to monitor its own processsing and obtain information about itself.
The book didn’t really have much more information about this beyond some examples of self-monitoring.

So we will talk about the other 2 aspects
As a reminder, they are access consciousness and phenomological consciousness

Question 39

Access consciousness

What are some other examples of unconscious processing?

Answer 39

• Masked priming
• Implicit memory
• Libet’s experiment
• The global workspace model

We will get into each in the following flashcards

Question 40

What is masked priming?

Answer 40

It is an experimental technique to investigate information processing, consisting of briefly presenting a prime between a forward meaningless mask and a subsequent target, and examining the effect of the prime on the processing of the target.

It was the product of scientific progress of unconscious information processing

Question 41

What notable techniques came before masked priming?

Answer 41

Unconscious stimulus processing: Briefly flashing a shape, and then asking the participant to try and identify which shape they saw, and also which shape they prefer out of the two.
- They can’t identify it, but usually they like the one that was primed.

Semantic priming: Two stimuli are presented one after another (the prime and the target). The usual finding is that the target is recognised faster when it is after a semantically related prime (e.g. the target ‘boy’ is recognised faster after a prime of ‘girl’ than of ‘goal’.

This is a long flashcard, but just understand masked priming as it contains both these techniques

Question 42

What is implicit memory

Answer 42

The performance benefits found on tasks even when the participant doesn’t remember the recently presented information.

In other words, the memories we dont have but still affect our behaviour

Question 43

What is the implicit memory example involving H.M.

Answer 43

The task where H.M. had to trace a star using a mirror. He had no memory of performing the task, but he showed improvements in his performance of the task.

(Side note, but there are also examples of implicit memory in other areas than motor learning, but they were only briefly mentioned, just know implicit memory is not limited to motor skills)

Question 44

What was Libet’s study on the initiation of movement.

Answer 44

As said before, it measured the brain activity, the time the movement was initiated, and when the participant reported that they intended to move their finger.
Results showed that the brain began getting ready for movement well before the participant had the conscious impression of starting the movement.

Question 45

What can you potentially conclude from Libet’s study?

Answer 45

That consciousness didn’t control the initiation of movement, but that it was notified by the unconscious part of the brain when reverything was ready for a movement.
Aka, there was no free will involved in the initiation of the movement.

However, you also have to be aware that the study isn’t the most comprehensive, and free will probably still plays a role.

Question 46

What is the global workspace model?

Answer 46

It’s a model that explains the role of consciousness by analogy to a theatre: Consciousness is meant to make some information available to the whole brain so that the various background processes can align their functioning to what is going on centrally.

Question 47

What is the global workspace model in non-yap terms?

Answer 47

It basically explains that consciousness is what makes all the different parts and processes of our brain know whos doing what, allowing for further processing, etc.

Question 48

What’s an example with visual stimuli that shows the global workspace model

Answer 48

There’s a study that scanned participants brains whilst flashing visual stimuli at them.
When stimuli were briefly presented and not consciously perceptible, only the brain areas response for visual object identification activated.

When stimuli were clearly presented, a large network of areas activated.

(see figure 2)
This means that something is activating these regions, and consciousness is one explanation.

Question 49

What are some examples of phenomenological consciousness?

Answer 49

The phenomenological richness of human conscious experiences can only exist with qualia.
Examples of why we need qualia are
* The Chinese room
* Mary the colour scientist
* The zombie world

Since ive already discussed the first two, ill only explain what the zombie world is next

Question 50

What is the zombie world thought experiment?

Answer 50

It is a thought experiment by David Chalmers where one imagines there is an exact molecular copy of us, but the only difference is that the ‘zombie’ lacks conscious experience with qualia.
The fact that we can imagine this means that qualia and consciousness cannot be reduced to functionalism.

Question 51

How does embodied cognition boost the importance of qualia?

Answer 51

Since we are unsure why we consciously add extra details to a thought in the form of qualia, some people tried to explain it by showing that
When one thinks of a task/object, the brain regions for the associated area are activated by consciousness.
E.g. When reading the word ‘kick’, the motor regions in control of the leg become slightly activated.

Question 52

Why does this show that qualia/consciousness is important?

Answer 52

The fact that perceptual and motor areas become co-activated when we say or hear perceptually or motor-related words is the reason why conscious experiences are so rich that they can’t be fully communicated to others by means of words.

Question 53

What are the different kinds of coma/comatose states and what level of consciousness do they have?

Answer 53

Locked-in syndrome: Patient is fully conscious but cannot move or communicate verbally due to a nearly complete paralysis of the body

Vegetative state: A condition of wakeful unconsciousness less severe than coma.

Minimally conscious state: Severly altered consciousness characterized by minimal behavioural evidence of self/environmental awareness.

Question 54

What issues has brain imaging studies raised regarding consciousness and comas?

Answer 54

They suggest that more information processing takes place than expected on the basis of clinical diagnosis of comatose patients.
This raises ethical issues about the treatment as we now know they might be more conscious then we thought.