4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
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The climax and denouement of our summer philosophy of mind series: Ned Block visits to fill in the gaps about functionalism and attributing consciousness to machines and discuss essays from Blockheads (2019), focusing here on Brian McLaughlin’s “Could an Android be Sentient?”
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0:00.0 | You are listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys who are at one |
0:11.1 | point set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it. |
0:14.4 | Our question for episode 223 is still what is the mind, and we are joined by Ned Block, |
0:20.1 | professor at New York University to discuss two sections of the new book about his work |
0:23.6 | Block Heads edited by Adam Potts and Daniel Stoljar. |
0:27.4 | We'll be looking at Brian McLaughlin's essay in that collection, Could an Android be sentient |
0:31.8 | and Ned's functional role, superficialism and commander data, replied to Brian McLaughlin, |
0:36.2 | and then Michael Ty's essay, Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips, The Importance of History |
0:40.3 | to Phenomenology, and Ned's reply, Fading Qualia, a response to Michael Ty. |
0:45.3 | For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com. |
0:48.6 | This is Mark Linson Meyer, quasi-sentient in medicine, Wisconsin. |
0:51.9 | This is Seth Passen, full of Qualia in Austin, Texas. |
0:55.5 | This is Wes Alvin in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
0:57.7 | This is Dylan Casey, consumed with elementary homunculi in medicine, Wisconsin. |
1:03.5 | This is Ned Block on Martha's Vineyard. |
1:06.1 | So we've been building up to this for a while, the past few episodes. |
1:09.7 | We've been covering some of your other essays, some of the things that those essays were |
1:14.8 | responding to in the first place, trying to give our listeners some grounding here, and |
1:19.6 | Block Heads is just full of so much cool stuff. |
1:21.9 | I skim through several of the other essays. |
1:24.4 | There are just a lot of big names, a lot of interesting people in there. |
1:27.2 | Do you want to say a little bit about how this book came about, how this relates to your |
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