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v. t. e. The wax argument or the sheet of wax example is a thought experiment that René Descartes created in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy. He devised it to analyze what properties are essential for bodies, show how uncertain our knowledge of the world is compared to our knowledge of our minds, and argue for rationalism. [1][2]
e. The evil demon, also known as Deus deceptor, [1] malicious demon, [2] and evil genius, [1][3] is an epistemological concept that features prominently in Cartesian philosophy. [1] In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes imagines that a malevolent God [1] or an evil demon, of "utmost power and cunning has employed ...
Demon (thought experiment) In thought experiments, philosophers and scientists occasionally imagine entities with special abilities as a way to pose thought experiment or highlight apparent paradoxes. The word "demon" here does not necessarily connotate a demon, a malevolent being. For instance, when William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) came up with ...
The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as " I think, therefore I am ", [a] is the "first principle" of René Descartes 's philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. [1]
In her 2018 interview with Tyler Cowen, Agnes Callard described Descartes' thought experiment in the Meditations, where he encouraged a complete, systematic doubting of everything that you believe, to "see what you come to". She said, "What Descartes comes to is a kind of real truth that he can build upon inside of his own mind."
In philosophy, the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness, and meaning. Originated by Gilbert Harman, [1] Hilary Putnam turned the scenario into a modernized version of René Descartes 's evil demon ...
A thought experiment is a device with which one performs an intentional, structured process of intellectual deliberation in order to speculate, within a specifiable problem domain, about potential consequents (or antecedents) for a designated antecedent (or consequent). [14]
The Chinese room argument holds that a computer executing a program cannot have a mind, understanding, or consciousness, [a] regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented in a 1980 paper by the philosopher John Searle entitled "Minds, Brains, and Programs" and published in the ...