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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that It is easier to establish that a machine exhibits understanding than to establish that a human exhibits understanding.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Dennett's heterophenomenology establishes that third-person behavioral and functional evidence is the only legitimate epistemic basis for attributing understanding to any system, human or machine.
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    • 2.If the same evidential standard applies symmetrically to humans and machines, then machines enjoy no privileged epistemic advantage merely because their substrate is physically transparent.
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    • 3.Physical transparency of substrate is categorically distinct from transparency of meaning, so inspectability of mechanism does not reduce the verification problem for understanding.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Full inspection of a machine's syntactic operations reveals nothing about whether those operations constitute genuine semantic understanding, as Searle's Chinese Room demonstrates.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Verifying that a machine uses 'appropriate intensions' requires an independent standard of intentionality that cannot itself be derived from inspecting the machine's physical states.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The internal workings of machines are fully inspectable, unlike the internal workings of human minds.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Because we can see exactly how machines work, we can verify their use of appropriate intensions directly.
      ?

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