Week 6 Quiz

In this course, which statement is the central claim of the identity theory?

Select one.

• Mind and body are different kinds of thing
• Mental states are brain states
• Mental states are defined by their causal roles
• Mental states are whatever passes a typed conversation test

Which objection, in the course's set of mind-body positions, presses substance dualism?

Select one.

• Nagel's question of what it is like, for the creature itself, to be a bat
• Searle's Chinese room
• Turing's imitation game
• The problem of how an immaterial mind moves a body

According to functionalism, what makes a state a pain?

Select one.

• Its causal role: what typically causes it and what it typically leads to
• Its being one particular kind of human brain process
• Its being a state of something that is not physical
• Its being reported in a conversation a questioner cannot tell from a person's

True or false: functionalism holds that only a brain can be in a mental state.

True or false.

• True
• False

Who devised the Chinese room thought experiment, and in which paper?

Select one.

• Alan Turing, in proposing the imitation game
• Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974)
• John Searle, "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1980)
• Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982)

What is the Chinese room meant to show?

Select one.

• That no machine could ever be intelligent
• That running the right program is not, by itself, enough for understanding
• That the Turing test measures whether a machine is conscious and has feelings of its own
• That a person following rule-books gives poor answers in Chinese

Consider this illustrative argument from the course's argument set: "If a machine understands Chinese, it can answer questions in Chinese. This machine answers questions in Chinese. So it understands Chinese." Which judgment of the argument is accurate?

Select one.

• Valid, by modus ponens
• Valid, by denying the consequent
• Sound, since fluent replies in a language always require understanding it
• Invalid, since it runs the conditional backward

What does Turing's imitation game, now called the Turing test, check?

Select one.

• Whether a questioner can tell a hidden machine from a hidden person by typed replies
• Whether a machine has experiences that it is like something, from the inside, for the machine to have
• Whether a machine's states are the same as brain states
• Whether a machine understands the symbols it uses

A substance dualist points out that you know your own pain from the inside, even while you could be wrong about the world outside. Which earlier finding in the course does this inside knowledge most resemble?

Select one.

• Locke's comparison of the mind at the start to white paper
• Hume's problem of induction
• The Second Meditation's conclusion that Descartes exists whenever he thinks
• The allegory of the cave, which opens Book VII of Plato's Republic, about shadows taken for reality

In the course's set of mind-body positions, which cases press the identity theory? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Nagel's bat (1974)
• Searle's Chinese room (1980)
• Jackson's Mary (1982)
• The problem of interaction
• Turing's imitation game