Tuesday 7/30

"Ex Machina"

Today we will watch Ex Machina, the 2014 tech noir movie which draws on many of the puzzles we have been discussing the past few days:

• The Mind-Body Problem;
• Computational Theories of Mind;
• The Turing Test for Machine Intelligence;
• The Chinese Room Thought Experiment;
• The Hard Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness;
• The Case of Mary;
• The Problem of Other Minds; and,
• The Problem of Philosophical Zombies.

Since the movie runs 1 hour 50 minutes, we'll begin promptly and skip our usual mid-class break.

Synopsis

We finished the film today, but we didn't have time to discuss it. Assume there will be at least one, perhaps two in-class essays tomorrow. The advantage of the film is that it neatly and concretely illustrates some of the problems we've been discussing (and a few we haven't). So it is reasonable to ask, what conclusions should we draw in light of all the arguments we've been considering?