Sadler's Lectures

This lecture discusses key ideas John Searle's article "Minds, Brains, & Programs", first published in The Behavioral And Brain Sciences In 1980, considered to be an important contribution to theorizing about the possibility and nature of artificial intelligence, not least by introducing his famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Specifically it examines the actual framing of the "Chinese room"...

This lecture discusses key ideas John Searle's article "Minds, Brains, & Programs", first published in The Behavioral And Brain Sciences In 1980, considered to be an important contribution to theorizing about the possibility and nature of artificial intelligence, not least by introducing his famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Specifically it examines the distinction he makes between weak an...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, Alan Turing's article "Computing Machinery And Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind. This is an important early work on artificial intelligence, which proposes what later has come to be called the "Turing Test". Specifically it examines his dicussion at the end, motivated orig...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, Alan Turing's article "Computing Machinery And Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind. This is an important early work on artificial intelligence, which proposes what later has come to be called the "Turing Test". Specifically it examines what he calls "arguments from various di...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, Alan Turing's article "Computing Machinery And Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind. This is an important early work on artificial intelligence, which proposes what later has come to be called the "Turing Test". Specifically it examines Turing's framing of a set of objections...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, Alan Turing's article "Computing Machinery And Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind. This is an important early work on artificial intelligence, which proposes what later has come to be called the "Turing Test". Specifically it examines the "imitation game" as Turning develops...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, chapter 1. Specifically it examines his argument for why each of us who are not in extreme poverty ought to devote a portion of our resources in order to prevent the death of at least one child living in extreme poverty. It looks at how he constructs the argument, beginning with a hypothe...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher Peter Singer's book, The Life You Can Save, chapter 1. Specifically it examines his discussion of what extreme poverty consist in, whether or not we can do anything about it as individuals, and the relatively better-off condition of poverty in affluent societies. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/s...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 18th century philosopher, essayist, and historian, David Hume's work A Treatise of Human Nature Specifically it examines his final portion of the discussion, where he turns back to considering the notion we have of personal identity and an identifiable "self" that runs throughout a person's entire life. Hume considers this a fiction and inquires as to how...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 18th century philosopher, essayist, and historian, David Hume's work A Treatise of Human Nature Specifically it examines what our conception of identity is for various objects over time, which Hume thinks is actually a fiction created by our own mind out of our perceptions, associating them in relation to each other in terms of resemblance, contiguity, and...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 18th century philosopher, essayist, and historian, David Hume's work A Treatise of Human Nature Specifically it examines his argument that there is no such thing as a human self in a metaphysical sense of a substance or soul that remains the same throughout changes. Instead, what we have or are is a bundle or collection of perceptions in the mind. While we...

This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon the "speculative proposal" Nagel ends the article with, namely that of developing a more objective "phenomenology" which would perhaps allow greater clarity and precision to be given to descriptions of the experiences of "what it is like to be a . . . " To support my o...

This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon one of the key points Nagel makes in his criticisms of reductionist projects aimed at explaining mind entirely in physical terms, namely that in order to make the deceptively clear "is" or "are" involved in those putative identifications make sense, what is required is...

This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon Nagel's analysis of one way that a person who acknowledges that we cannot imagine or conceptualize the subjective experience of a bat might try to get around that, by appealing to more objective concepts and facts about the organs, body, and brain of the bat. He notes...

This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon he portion of his article in which he begins to explore what subjective experience of other species would be and whether we have the capacity to imagine or understand what it is like to be to be that animal. He selects bats in particular since they are mammals but have...

This lecture discusses the 20th century Analytic philosopher, Thomas Nagel's essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat", and focuses upon the first part of the article, in which Nagel raises a number of general problems for adopting a physicalist reductionist analysis of mind to resolve the mind-body problem by explaining conscious experience in terms of something non-mental, e.g. the brain. To support m...

This lecture discusses key ideas from the modern philosopher Thomas Hobbes' work De Corpore, specifically ch 11. "Of Identity and Difference", part 7 In this section, Hobbes explores questions and problems of what makes a thing remain the same thing throughout its changes over time or in composition. He considers several different philosophical approaches to the issue, one which focuses on the mat...

This video focuses on chapter 6 of Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae, specifically the section “Personality and Information”, which discusses thought experiments that bear on turning a person into information and reconstituting that person somewhere else or at a different point in time. Specifically it examines on a somewhat different kind of thought-experiment, involving freezing a person, takin...

This video focuses on chapter 6 of Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae, specifically the section “Personality and Information”, which discusses thought experiments that bear on turning a person into information and reconstituting that person somewhere else or at a different point in time. Specifically it examines one feature of these types of situations that is morally problematic, namely that it s...

This video focuses on chapter 6 of Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae, specifically the section “Personality and Information”, which discusses thought experiments that bear on turning a person into information and reconstituting that person somewhere else or at a different point in time. Specifically it examines the paradoxes and problems that arise when we start thinking through the implications...

This lecture discusses the William Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics Of Belief", in which he makes and argued for the central claim "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." It focuses on the third section of his essay, titled "The Limits Of Inference" in which Clifford discusses conditions for having well-founded beliefs of matters we don't...

This lecture discusses the William Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics Of Belief", in which he makes and argued for the central claim "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." It focuses on portion of part 2 of the essay that is devoted to Clifford's analysis of tradition. He distinguishes between particular traditions, developing within a spe...

This lecture discusses the William Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics Of Belief", in which he makes and argued for the central claim "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." It focuses on Clifford's criteria for determining when and whether we ought to give credence to the testimony of other people, especially those who have made assertions...

This lecture discusses the William Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics Of Belief", in which he makes and argued for the central claim "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." It focuses on Clifford's contention that the beliefs people hold, even if they seem to be quite trivial, can have significant importance and consequences. His argument i...

This lecture discusses the William Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics Of Belief", in which he makes and argued for the central claim "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." It focuses on the two cases that Clifford's essay uses to illustrate the ethical duty he argues that we have not to believe anything without having gathered and weighed...