This course is an introduction to philosophy in the analytic tradition, organized around questions about minds, intelligence, agency, and moral status:
We’ll begin with problems about “other minds.” How can we tell what kinds of mental lives other beings have? What does an animal’s behavior justify us in attributing to it: beliefs, purposes, understanding, self-awareness, or experiences? What role does language play in thought, and how can we describe the thoughts of nonverbal animals?
We’ll then turn to “the metaphysics of mind.” What are minds, and how are they related to brains and bodies? Are minds made of different stuff than bodies, or are they just properties of physical organisms? Could the same kind of mind be realized in very different physical systems?
These questions lead naturally to artificial intelligence. What can a machine’s “intelligent behavior” show us about its mental capacities? Can such performances be produced without genuine understanding? Would implementing the right program suffice for real thinking, or is something more required for a system to have meaningful thoughts of its own? If a machine duplicated the organization and activity of a human brain, would it thereby have the same mental states the human has?
Finally, we’ll ask how mentality and intelligence connect with agency and moral status. How are being an “agent,” being a “person,” having moral duties, and having moral rights related to one another? What makes a being matter morally in its own right, rather than merely because of its effects on others? Animals and artificial systems will serve as test cases for thinking about whether intelligence, autonomy, consciousness, interests, or having a “good of one’s own” can ground personhood or moral rights.
Most of this class will be focused around the notion of having a mind (sometimes people say “souls,” “selves,” “consciousness”… we’ll introduce ways these words can be understood differently later) — that is:
having opinions, being able to think things through, solve problems, and learn
having feelings, experiences, emotions
having ambitions, preferences, plans
aware of itself as “me”, reflect on its own states (maybe to revise them), and its own limits (maybe to compensate for them)
Part of our class will focus on questions about the relations between minds and morality, for example: