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My notes and slides for a series of upcoming videos.

Counterquestions

How Do I Know I'm Not a Robot? Doubts and Counterquestions

A counterquestion is a way to respond to a doubt, especially when the doubt is total, so that are to doubt everything we know or could possibly know.

Doubt: "How do I know that I'm not a robot?"

• Social studies teacher Mr.Merton, Calder Junior High School
• Science fiction, Isaac Asimov
• The impossibility of addressing this question with facts as the question has me doubt everything I know.
• I may check if I bleed. But can I trust my vision? Can I trust my mind?
• Imagine that a robot, or any form of artificial intelligence, is given this question. How could it deal with such a Turing test?
• How do I know that I am not such a robot?

Most people address a doubt by brushing it aside and "going back to sleep". But a doubt is an opportunity to check our thinking, to consider new ways of thinking, to keep an open mind. How can I embrace a doubt?

Pause to ask yourself, how would you respond to such a doubt?

Counterquestion: "Would it make any difference?"

• Maybe I am a robot - maybe I am not.
• It doesn't depend on any particular facts. Rather it has you give me the facts.
• It separates the question of whether I am a robot and what are the implications.

Examples: Doubts and Counterquestions

Examples of each doubt and counterquestion.

Exercises: Examples of Doubts (from every day life)

Bonus questions

• Think up more examples.
• Give examples from literature or scripture.
• How many kinds of doubts and counterquestions are there?
• How can we categorize them?
• How do we know that our categorization is complete?

Exercises: Examples of Doubts (from literature)

Consider science fiction and fantasy but also psychological fiction (Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov).

Exercises: Examples of Doubts (from Scriptures)

Consider examples from the Bible and from other scriptures.

Answers to Exercises

8 Counterquestions: Framwework for Intelligence

Structural framework

• Relates two representations of the foursome: Observer and Situation

Engaging the Violent

Truths of the Heart and of the World

Exercises: Examples of Structures

Answers to Exercises