Week 6 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 6 — Minds, Brains, and Programs: Testing Three Answers — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 6 of the term — credit this week's cases to their authors, key three arguments about the mind for validity, state the three mind-body positions at their strongest, and explain the Turing test to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned the mind-body problem, substance dualism and the problem of interaction, the identity theory, functionalism, the Turing test, Searle's Chinese room, Nagel's bat, and Jackson's Mary. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and the valid and invalid forms, and in Week 5 you saw how one well-chosen case can test a general claim. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources, Dataset E (the three mind-body positions), and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). Dataset B's premises are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys its arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the sources right, then reconstruct. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Turing's Chinese room proved that computers can never think, and Nagel's bat showed that machines can't feel anything." Do four things:

Correct the post. Name who devised the Chinese room, the paper it comes from, and its year; say what the room is meant to show, and why "computers can never think" overstates it; say whose case the bat is, the paper's title and year, and which position it presses; and say whose imitation game the Turing test is.
Key argument 2. Write Dataset B's argument 2 in standard form ("If the mind is the brain, then mental states have locations. Mental states have no locations. So the mind is not the brain."), name its form, key it for validity with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity, and name the premise an identity theorist rejects.
Key argument 8. Write Dataset B's argument 8 in standard form ("If a machine understands Chinese, it can answer questions in Chinese. This machine answers questions in Chinese. So it understands Chinese."), name its form, key it for validity, and build one same-shape argument of your own, on a new topic, whose premises are true and whose conclusion is false.
Reconstruct the Chinese room. Write the reasoning of the Chinese room in standard form, mark any premise you add as "(added)", name the form, and say whether it is valid. Then state the systems reply in one or two sentences.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" dates from 1974, and Searle's "Minds, Brains, and Programs" dates from 1980. How many years separate them?

Part B — weigh the three positions. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" dates from 1963, and Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" dates from 1974. How many years separate them?

Then do two things:

State all three positions at their strongest. State substance dualism, the identity theory, and functionalism each as its best defenders would, give the case or objection that presses each (the problem of interaction, Nagel's bat, Jackson's Mary, or Searle's Chinese room, as Dataset E pairs them), and give a reply from each position's own side.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where the three positions disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A neighbor who has never taken philosophy reads a headline about a talking computer program and says, "It passed the Turing test, so now it's conscious." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what the Turing test checks, why passing it is not the same as being conscious, and one honest limit of what the test can show. Explain any term your neighbor might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a teammate who asks how an argument can be valid when its conclusion is false. Model answer: "Valid only means the conclusion would have to be true if the reasons were true. It is about how the reasons fit together, not about whether they are true. So a valid argument with a false reason can still end in a false conclusion. One limit: knowing an argument is valid tells you nothing yet about whether to believe it."

Use that pattern for your message to your neighbor, with your own explanation of the Turing test.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 6. For the correction, check each author, title, and year against the chapter's record; for each reconstruction, underline any added premise and check the form's name against Week 2's list; for your counterexample, confirm that its premises are true and its conclusion false; for each position, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; and check that your neighbor message keeps conversation apart from consciousness. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or one of your reconstructions more exact, and which definition or pinned fact showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one of the three positions stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction, your keying of arguments 2 and 8 with your counterexample, your Chinese room reconstruction with the systems reply, and your first year gap;
your Part B year gap, the three positions with their pressing cases and replies, and your plain sentence;
your message to your neighbor;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the reconstructions, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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