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The Chinese Room Argument

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:57:50 +0500

The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle’s argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.

Grave of The Fireflies (1988). Review by Roger Ebert.

Thu, 09 May 2013 03:27:00 +0500

Grave of The Fireflies (1988). Review by Roger Ebert.

Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, Or How the Reader became a Writer

Sun, 05 May 2013 07:11:51 +0500

Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, Or How the Reader became a Writer

The legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche by Roger Kimball

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:56:11 +0500

The legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche by Roger Kimball:

The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of supreme strength, of a life of maximum vigor, which has also been called the ideal of aesthetic greatness. That life is in truth the ultimate attainment of the barbarian, and unfortunately in these days of civilization’s withering it has won a great many adherents. In pursuance of this ideal man becomes a hybrid thing, a brute-spirit, whose cruel mentality exerts a horrible spell upon weaklings.
—Novalis

I am no man, I am dynamite.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

What Makes Rain Smell So Good?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:55:55 +0500

What Makes Rain Smell So Good?:

A mixture of plant oils, bacterial spores and ozone is responsible for the powerful scent of fresh rain

Adds to what I’ve loved knowing about rain.

Friday Poem: SamaView Post

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:00:22 +0500

Friday Poem: Sama

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Impertinent Questions with William M. Reddy

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:33:04 +0500

Impertinent Questions with William M. Reddy:

Reddy’s newest project, funded by an NEH fellowship, looks at changing attitudes toward romantic love in Western culture. Here we asked Reddy, the chair of Duke University’s history department, to meditate on the realm of Venus.

Nietzsche Is Dead

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:30:51 +0500

Nietzsche Is Dead

Not Exactly a Hermit: Henry David Thoreau

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:30:17 +0500

Not Exactly a Hermit: Henry David Thoreau

Friday Poem: Ancestral TombsView Post

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:02:47 +0500

Friday Poem: Ancestral Tombs

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Hanif Kureishi reads Kafka’s ‘A Hunger...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:09:00 +0500

Hanif Kureishi reads Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’

Franz Kafka’s story of a man who starves himself for entertainment, The Hunger Artist, is ‘absurd, moving and timely’, says Hanif Kureishi.

One thing is needful

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 14:48:38 +0500

One thing is needful.— To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:—it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,—if only it was a single taste!—

from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (section 290, translated by Walter Kaufmann)

How does the brain generate consciousness? Baroness Susan...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:20:36 +0500

How does the brain generate consciousness? Baroness Susan Greenfield

Lines On A Spotted Dove

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:01:42 +0500

Friday Poem: Lines On A Spotted Dove

The mud that makes a man
molds women into birds,

although we know avians
come from dinosaurs and

humans from a heavenly
jubilation of glad apples.

The spotted dove between
the flowerbed and a melody line

bobs on the grass and scans
in peace for pearl…

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Metaphysics

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:26:00 +0500

It is precisely by means of … modes of knowledge, in a realm beyond the world of the senses, where experience can yield neither guidance nor correction, that our reason carries on these enquiries which owing to their importance we consider to be far more excellent, and in their purpose far more lofty, than all that the understanding can learn in the field of appearances. Indeed we prefer to run every risk of error rather than desist from such urgent enquiries, on the ground of their dubious character, or from disdain and indifference. These unavoidable problems set by pure reason itself are God, freedom, and immortality. The science which, with all its preparations, is in its final intention directed solely to their solution is metaphysics; and its procedure is at first dogmatic, that is, it confidently sets itself to this task without any previous examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason for so great an undertaking.

Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant, 1781

A Little Girl

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:02:08 +0500

Friday Poem: A Little Girl

A little girl sleeps
with magnolias by her side

and the longest lasting pink
carnations in her hair.

There are clouds
in the window and a sunny

tune in her mind and a dream
suffused with the sweet and spice

of blossoming, and a yellow
ladybird is crawling…

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Enlightened: Schiller at the Hohe Carlsschule

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 07:01:00 +0500

Enlightened: Schiller at the Hohe Carlsschule:

At 14, Friedrich Schiller was sent to a military academy. The oppressive atmosphere became a theme in his work. “After all,” he wrote, “it’s in the deepest dungeons that the most beautiful dreams of freedom are dreamt.”

Narrative Selves: Alexander Nehamas

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 06:33:23 +0500

Narrative Selves: Alexander Nehamas

Purpose

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:01:08 +0500

Friday Poem: Purpose

In a room laden with dust and books sleeping in cartons,
under a roof baking in the sun, a pair of hands hems in
the halos of time with a list of chores and a letter…

A beaming face, a lovely you ordering the day
in minutiae, pruning it like a bonsai elm
r…

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The Search for the Origins of Life

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:25:23 +0500

The Search for the Origins of Life:

Broadcast-hour commissioned through the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Distributed by PBS International 2013.