Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness

Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness

by Robert Kirk
Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness

Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness

by Robert Kirk

Paperback

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Overview

Could robots be genuinely intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could there be zombies? Prompted by these questions Robert Kirk introduces the main problems of consciousness and sets out a new approach to solving them.

He starts by discussing behaviourism, Turing's test of intelligence and Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, and goes on to examine dualism - the idea that consciousness requires something beyond the physical - together with its opposite, physicalism. Probing the idea of zombies, he concludes they are logically impossible. Having presented the central problems, he sketches his solution: a version of functionalism, according to which consciousness consists in the performance of functions.

While there is wide agreement among philosophers about what the main problems of consciousness are, there is little agreement on how to go about solving them. With this powerful case for his version of functionalism, Kirk offers an engaging introduction to both the problems and a possible solution.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474286596
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 02/23/2017
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Robert Kirk is Emeritus Professor in the Philosophy Department at Nottingham University, UK. His books include Raw Feeling (OUP 1994), Mind and Body (Acumen 2003), Zombies and Consciousness (OUP 2005), and The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental (OUP 2013).

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction
2. Behaviour is not enough
3. Computers and other machines
4. Intelligent robots?
5. Must there be something non-physical?
6. Zombies
7. What's wrong with the zombie idea?
8. The basic package
9. What's needed on top of the basic package
10. Functionalisms
11. Functionalism is compulsory
12. Is there an explanatory gap?
13. Brains in vats and buckets

References
Index

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