Tyler A. Young’s Blog

This is an abstract of the first chapter of John Haugeland’s Mind Design II, an edited collection of important works in cognitive science. It provides an overview of the framework used by cognitive scientists and, in particular, those interested in designing intelligent artifacts.

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This is an abstract of Alan M. Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” paper, which outlines what is, in many circles, the accepted standard test to determine if a machine is intelligent. You can read the original paper on the Hugh Loebner’s site, here. It’s a straightforward read, even if you aren’t a computer scientist.

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The radical difference between the mind and the physical material of the universe has intrigued many philosophers throughout history. Mental “stuff”—thoughts, beliefs, morals, and so on—appear so wildly different from rocks and plants and bodies that many have gone so far as to declare that the material cannot produce the mental. René Descartes, one of the most famous of these so-called dualists, believed the mind to be an immaterial entity outside the physical world, in contrast to the body, which he thought of as a sort of mechanical entity obeying the laws of physics. Continue reading…

In a monist, materialist world, how is it that the mind can act on the body? Virtually no one today believes that the mind is of a separate substance from the body, immaterial and ethereal; most believe instead that it is a product of the physical brain. If this is the case—and it certainly appears it is—must we contend that the conscious mind is epiphenomenal? The standard physics-inspired argument goes something like this: since the mind arises from the brain, and since causation acts from foundations to outward effects, the mind must not be able to change its material foundations. Continue reading…

John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”-based egalitarian justice, as he describes it in “Justice and Fairness,” presents a very different view of what a fair society looks like compared to Robert Nozick’s account in “Distributive Justice” of the libertarian stance. As I will argue, Rawls’ position is not only undesirable in light of the alternative presented by Nozick, but is indefensible on its own grounds. Continue reading…

In his essay “The Will to Believe,” William James argues that in special cases, a person is justified in believing a hypothesis which has positive implications for the believer but is not necessarily supported by sufficient evidence. Continue reading…