The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness.
[1]
The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence.
The brain in a jar asks whether thinking requires a thinker.
The 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes deserves much blame for the brain in a jar.
This philosophy of the mind was named cartesian dualism.
This kind of solipsistic thinking is unwarranted but was not a personality disorder in the 17thcentury.
[5]
There is reason to sympathize with Descartes.
In many ways, dualism is no exception.
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Consequently, one can never use behaviorism to explain mental phenomena since the focus is on external observable behavior.
says one to the other.
This is the reason why behaviorists fail to define intelligence.
[11]They believe there is nothing to it.
[12]Consider Alan Turings eponymous Turing Test.
Turing dodges defining intelligence by saying that intelligence is as intelligence does.
Turing was a behaviorist.
Behaviorism saw a decline in influence that directly resulted in the inability to explain intelligence.
By the 1950s, behaviorism was largely discredited.
The most important attack was delivered in 1959 by American linguist Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky excoriated B.F. Skinners bookVerbal Behavior.
[15]
Chomsky sparked a reorientation of psychology toward the brain dubbed thecognitive revolution.
The revolution produced modern cognitive science, and functionalism became the new dominant theory of the mind.
Unlike behaviorism, functionalism focuses on what the brain does and where brain function happens.
It doesnt care if the thing that thinks is a brain or if that brain has a body.
If it functions like intelligence, it is intelligent like anything that tells time is a clock.
It doesnt matter what the clock is made of as long as it keeps time.
The American philosopher and computer scientist Hilary Putnam evolved functionalism inPsychological Predicateswith computational concepts to form computational functionalism.
Unfortunately, functions do not think.
They are aspects of thought.
John Searles famousChinese Room thought experimentis one of the strongest attacks on computational functionalism.
The irony of the brain in a jar is that Descartes would not have considered AI thinking at all.
Descartes was familiar with the automata and mechanical toys of the 17thcentury.
However, the I in Descartess dictum Ithink, thereforeIam, treats the human mind as non-mechanical and non-computational.
The cogito argument implies that for thought, there must also be a subject of that thought.
Hubert Dreyfus explains how artificial intelligence inherited a lemon philosophy.
To be sure, the field of AI was born at an odd philosophical hour.
This has largely inhibited progress to understand intelligence and what it means to be intelligent.
The reason is that the philosophy adopted most frequently by friends of artificial intelligence is pragmatism.
Pragmatism is not a philosophy of the mind.
It is a philosophy that focuses on practical solutions to problems like computer vision and natural language processing.
However, pragmatism shows that metaphysics is not necessary for real-world problem-solving.
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