scholarly journals Dismantling the Chinese Room with linguistic tools: a framework for elucidating concept-application disputes

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Lengbeyer
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Chinese Room ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
Concept Application ◽  
Rhetorical Features ◽  
Linguistic Categories ◽  
The Right

AbstractImagine advanced computers that could, by virtue merely of being programmed in the right ways, act, react, communicate, and otherwise behave like humans. Might such computers be capable of understanding, thinking, believing, and the like? The framework developed in this paper for tackling challenging questions of concept application (in any realm of discourse) answers in the affirmative, contrary to Searle’s famous ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, which purports to prove that ascribing such mental processes to computers like these would be necessarily incorrect. The paper begins by arguing that the core issue concerns language, specifically the discourse-community-guided mapping of phenomena onto linguistic categories. It then offers a model of how people adapt language to deal with novel states of affairs and thereby lend generality to their words, employing processes of assimilation, lexemic creation, and accommodation (in intersense and intrasense varieties). Attributions of understanding to some computers lie in the middle range on a spectrum of acceptability and are thus reasonable. Possible objections deriving from Searle’s writings require supplementing the model with distinctions between present and future acceptability, and between contemplated and uncontemplated word uses, as well as a literal-figurative distinction that is more sensitive than Searle’s to actual linguistic practice and the multiplicity of subsenses possible within a single literal sense. The paper then critiques two misleading rhetorical features of Searle’s Chinese Room presentation, and addresses a contemporary defense of Searle that seems to confront the sociolinguistic issue, but fails to allow for intrasense accommodation. It concludes with a brief consideration of the proper course for productive future discussion.

scholarly journals A Thought Experiment on Sustainable Management of the Earth System

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Wolfram Barfuss ◽  
Jonathan F. Donges
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Optimal Control ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Right ◽  
Safe Operating ◽  
Qualitative Decision

We introduce and analyse a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of climate change. In it, each generation can choose between just two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as this one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyse this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Despite the simplicity of the setup, we find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches.

The Good Green Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hale
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Right

This chapter addresses the book’s core distinction by contrasting the right and the good. It utilizes a thought experiment – the Parable of Wicked and Wild – to argue that the imperative of justification is paramount to building a viable environmental ethics. Such an environmentalism would seek to build a “viridian commonwealth” in which citizens and industries act with and for reasons that are or could be subjected to the scrutiny of all citizens.

The Legal Challenge of Arms Control in Space

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-201
Author(s):  
Jinyuan Su
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Space Environment ◽  
The Core ◽  
Legal Challenge ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Space Security

The research and development, testing, production, storage, and deployment of antisatellite weapons (ASATs) is limited directly by the law of space arms control and indirectly by the law of environmental protection. The former only prohibits the testing and deployment of ASATs in a partial manner, with conventional space-based ASATs and ground-based ASATs unaddressed. The latter may constrain the right to test and use ASATs, by limiting their exterior impact on the environment and/or their potential interference with others’ activities. While the law of environmental protection is complementary to the law of space arms control in protecting the space environment from damage caused by military activities, to address the core issue of space security lies in the strengthening of space arms control itself.

scholarly journals قتل اور خودکشی ،اسلام اور بدھ مت :تقابلی مطالعہ

rahatulquloob ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 189-197
Author(s):  
Muhammad Sulaiman Nasir ◽  
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Right ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Present World

The sanctity of human life is the core issue in almost all religions of the world. In the present world scenario, human beings are suffering a lot. Human life is at risk. The most important and precious figure in society is human beings as it is the greatest creature of Almighty Allah. Buddhism and Islam both emphasize the sanctity of human life. The stress laid by the teaching of Islam on the sanctity and respect of human life can be understood by the fact that Islam does not allow the killing of people who are not physically involved in the war. Islam also against suicide. Similarly, the teaching of Buddha has emphasized the holiness and sanctity of human life. According to the philosophy of non-violence in Buddhism (Ahimsa), Killing of human beings is far from Buddhist’s creed even they are against the killing of insects. In Buddhism, “The nonviolence is one of the five precepts of Dhamma, which form the right action, right views and right-thinking on Eightfold Path. This article focuses on the teaching of Buddhism and Islam, a comparative study regarding killing and suicide as these topics are closely related to the sanctity of human life.

Constitutional Law and Islamic Hijabs in Kenyan Schools: The Supreme Court’s Specious Constraint in Methodist Church in Kenya

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Sang YK
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
The Core ◽  
Majority Decision ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Right

ABSTRACT This article analyses the content and implications of the Supreme Court of Kenya’s judgment in Methodist Church in Kenya v Mohamed Fugicha and 3 Others. There, by majority decision, the Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeal’s ruling that reasonable accommodation be made for the wearing of Islamic hijabs by female Muslim students in Kenyan schools. While Methodist Church in Kenya was expected to clarify the scope of the right to manifest religious belief in Kenya, the Supreme Court used specious logic based on legalism to avoid that issue. This article shows how the majority decision contradicts principles of enforcement of constitutional rights by focusing unduly on procedural technicalities, avoiding the core issue of permissible restrictions on religious expression and leaving key legal questions unresolved. It also highlights the well-reasoned dissenting opinion that addressed the core issue and which has crucial import for future development of religious freedom jurisprudence in Kenya

Apt Imaginings

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Real World ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Right

Do people’s responses to works of art track their responses to the real world? Specifically, do emotions, cognitions, and desires elicited by fictional stories and visual imaginings differ—in their constitution or the norms that govern them—from those based on beliefs and perceptions? A commitment to one or another answer to this question animates reflection on the nature of art from Plato’s banishment of dramatic poetry from his ideal state to theories in cognitive science of the role of imagination in our mental life. This book defends a thesis of normative discontinuity: although the doxastic representations, emotions, desires, and evaluations that one forms in engaging with a fiction depend on much of the same psychological and neurophysiological machinery one employs in navigating the real world, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those attitudes toward what is fictional or imagined can be contrary to the norms that govern their fit to analogous things in the real world. In short, this book argues that the functions of art ground, on occasion, a kind of autonomy of the imagination: what would be the wrong way to feel or think about states of affairs in the real world could be the right way to feel or think when those states of affairs are only make-believe.

Can Robots Be Conscious?

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Reber
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Chinese Room ◽  
Other Minds Problem

The long-standing philosophical argument generally known as “hardware independent functionalism” is presented. This position maintains that consciousness is at its heart computational and any artifact that carried out all the causal functions of a mind would become conscious. This position is critiqued and shown to be hopelessly flawed. There is a long discussion on the “other minds” problem (i.e., “How do we know whether another entity, organism, person is in fact conscious?”). Included is an equally long review of Tom Nagel’s famous question (“What’s it like to be a bat?”) applied to robots and this is followed up with a review of John Searle’s “Chinese Room”—a thought experiment, now over 35 years old, which lays bare the futility of the functionalist’s position. It is acknowledged that there is a firm, almost compelling tendency to endow artifacts like human-appearing robots with sentience, and the reasons for this are discussed. The chapter ends with a summary.

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