David McFarland (1938–)
Auteur van Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds
David McFarland is David Sawyer McFarland (2). Voor andere auteurs genaamd David Sawyer McFarland, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.
Over de Auteur
David McFarland is the University Reader in Animal Behaviour at Oxford.
Werken van David McFarland
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Geboortedatum
- 1938-12-31
- Geslacht
- male
- Beroepen
- professor
lecturer - Organisaties
- Balliol College, Oxford
University of the West of England
University of Pennsylvania
University of Durham - Korte biografie
- [from Barnes & Noble website]
David McFarland is Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, having retired from his post of University Reader in Animal Behaviour at the Department of Zoology in 2000. Since then he has held a post as Professor of Biological Robotics at the University of the West of England, and is currently President of Casa Cantarilla, an Association of Teachers in the Arts and Sciences in Spain. He has also held posts as Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lecturer in Psychology at the Universities of Durham and Oxford. He has published in the fields of animal behaviour, philosophy, physiology, psychology and robotics, and has written numerous books, most recently The Oxford Dictionary of Animal Behaviour (2006).
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Statistieken
- Werken
- 8
- Leden
- 159
- Populariteit
- #132,375
- Waardering
- 3.3
- Besprekingen
- 4
- ISBNs
- 120
- Talen
- 8
It'd been some time since I'd read one of these philosophy-of-mind books, and going back to it now, I find I may have become a bit weary of the topic. Not that these questions aren't interesting. Indeed, I think minds are some of the most fascinating things in the universe, and probably not entirely just because I happen to be one myself and am not immune to narcissism. But I don't know. So much of it just seems to be what Sherlock Holmes called theorizing in advance of the facts. Because I really do think a lot of this stuff is more a matter for scientists than philosophers, or at least requires a lot more scientific knowledge to be able to philosophize about very usefully, and we just really don't have the scientific tools we need for it yet.
But if we're going to delve into this stuff anyway, is this a good book on the subject? Well, my feelings about that are a bit mixed, too. The first two chapters, in which McFarland spends a lot of time imagining some example robots that act kind of like animals seem to me really strange and unnecessary and not very useful at all to whatever point he's trying to make. Which is an annoying way to start off. After that, though, the rest of the book is more of an overview (albeit not, I think, a completely unbiased one) of different schools of thought and different takes that modern philosophers have on this stuff. It seems to be intended as something of an introduction to the topic, and I think McFarland does at least kind of try to be a little less jargony and dense than you usually get in this kind of writing, but that's saying very, very little, and my eyes did glaze over completely at least once.
Much of the time, I really just wanted to argue with McFarland, or the people he was talking about, or both. Sometimes it involved literal shouting at the page. There was a lot of me yelling stuff like, "Excuse me, but dogs aren't actually aliens, despite your subtitle, but share a common evolutionary ancestor with humans, and their brain functioning is in many respects much the same as ours, probably especially when it comes to very basic things like perception of and response to pain, so don't you think that just maybe the most parsimonious conclusion is that they can be said to feel pain in essentially the same way we do? Does this consideration really not deserve more than a brief, dismissive shrug-off in the epilogue?!" Or "Oh, you did not just seriously appeal to Searle's Chinese Room analogy and then airily wave aside all the objections to it without even bothering to discuss them? You come back here, sir! You come back here right now, and you face up to all the reasons why that's a really stupid argument!" (Spolier: he did not come back and do that. The coward.)
But, you know, allowing one the opportunity to yell at philosophers may actually be a large part of the appeal of this kind of thing, even if they can't hear you doing so. And McFarland does seem to be primarily interested in getting the reader to think about the topic and decide which approaches they find the most convincing, so arguably he's actually achieving his goals pretty well.… (meer)