Matter, Machines, Spirit and Consciousness

Code:

MFIL013

Acronym:

MMEC

Instance: 2010/2011 - 2S

Active?	Yes
Responsible unit:	Department of Philosophy
Course/CS Responsible:	Masters in Philosophy

Cycles of Study/Courses

Acronym	No. of Students	Study Plan	Curricular Years	Credits UCN	Credits ECTS	Contact hours	Total Time
MFIL	7	MFIL - Study Plan	1	-	10	-

Teaching language

Portuguese

Objectives

The main goals of this seminar are as follows: a) to clarify the basic concepts which form the seminar's title and analyze the relations between them; b) to present, in a systematic way, current debates in philosophy of mind which involve these concepts; c) to make the students familiar with the most relevant positions formulated in the context of those debates, in particular by analyzing their explicative advantages as well as their theoretical problems.

Program

A) Description
The program is divided in two parts. The first part concerns the philosophical problems of Artificial Intelligence. Can a machine think or, more specifically, can it realize states that we should take to be genuinely mental? And how are we to consider the relation between the mind and its material substrate? These issues will be addressed by reading and discussing classical papers on the topic, starting from Alan Turing’s seminal article from 1950.
The second part concerns the relation between mind and consciousness. Is having a conscious experience simply being in a certain mental state? And is it possible to explain consciousness without giving up the physicalist picture of the world? In this case, the discussion will focus on a selection of more recent articles which provide not only alternative answers to these questions, but also offer different perspectives on the more general problem of the mind-consciousness relation.

B) Seminar’s basic structure
Part I – Matter, machine and mind
- The beginning. (Turing 1950)
- The most famous critique. (Searle 1980)
- The Test revisited. (Harnad 1990 and Davidson 1990)
- The Nouvelle (Embodied) AI. (Brooks 1990)
- The Extended Mind thesis. (Clark/Chalmers 1998)

Part 2 – Matter, mind and conscience
- Terminological introduction. (G. Strawson, 2008)
- Mary’s case. (Jackson 1982)
- How to save physicalism: the phenomenal concepts strategy. (Loar 1997)
- The intentionalist position. (Crane 1998)
- Rediscovering phenomenology. (Gallagher/Zahavi 2008)

C) Primary literature

Note: There are possible alterations to the program and to the subject’s structure, including primary literature.

Teaching methods and learning activities

Each session will consist of a critical discussion, moderated by the teacher, of a paper (or parts of a paper), according to a work calendar to be indicated at the beginning of the seminar.