Chinese Room Argument The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment of John Searle. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI), c'est, to claims that computers do or at least can (or someday might) pense. According to Searle’s original presentation, the argument is based on two key claims: brains cause minds and syntax doesn’t suffice

Sigmund Freud (1856—1939) Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and

Objects of Perception The objects of perception are the entities we attend to when we perceive the world. Perception lies at the root of all our empirical knowledge. We may have acquired much of what we know about the world through testimony, but originally such knowledge relies on the world having been perceived by others or ourselves using our five senses: sight, hearing, touche, goût,

Desired Articles by Area The following list is of areas of philosophy. Each area is linked to a list of the most desired articles in that area. Contact the relevant area editor if you would like to write one of the articles on one of those lists. All expected due dates for completion of an article need to be 12 months or less. The IEP

Emergence If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties