By Matt Carter
Matt Carter is a Lecturer within the Philosophy division at Melbourne college. this is often his first e-book.
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Extra resources for Minds and Computers: The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Sample text
The midbrain connects the pons to the upper brain stem. It is known to be implicated in secondary processing involved with vision and audition. It also contains the substantia nigra which stimulate production of the neurotransmitter dopamine and which play a role in assisting fine motor control. Parkinson’s disease, whose sufferers experience uncontrollable fine tremors, is a degenerative condition of the substantia nigra. The final part of the brain stem – the upper brain stem – contains the thalamus and the hypothalamus, as well as the pineal gland and the pituitary gland.
By the end of the 1960s, behaviourism in psychology had waned in popularity, in favour of the newly emerging cognitive psychology. There are good reasons for the loss of faith in the behaviourist conception of psychology. For one thing, it became clear that positivism is, simply put, a false doctrine. Modern science is frequently in the business of theorising about unobservable entities. Such treatment of unobservables does not make theoretical physics, for instance, ‘pseudoscientific’. More importantly, it became increasingly clear that many essential aspects of mentality are simply not directly connected to observable behaviour.
These next three objections, however, are sufficient to defeat even the most nimble-footed behaviourist. For starters, pain hurts. Being in pain essentially involves a privileged first-person qualitative experience of hurtfulness. It is precisely this hurtfulness that characterises what it is to be in pain and distinguishes real pain behaviour from pretend pain behaviour. There is, in short, something that it is like to be in pain. So it is with other mental states. There is something that it feels like to be in love, or to be angry, or to be excited about an upcoming holiday.