CSflim - yes, I guess you are right - a blank-slate is what I'm getting at (if only I could have thought of that short phrase instead of that massive and clumsy explanation!) - I mean within reason, I think there is some natural hard-wiring that needs to be considered, but having taken that into account, I'm suggesting that yes, perhaps the mind is a blank-slate, and it is the experience of growing up that shapes us.
asaris, your suspicions:
a) That was a stupid question, let me rephrase it. If all you saw was an input/output terminal, and all the gruesome workings remained hidden, how easy would it be to work out whether there was something organic inside. To put it another way, is it possible to run the
'Turing Test' the other way around?
b) On souls, that too isn't really necessary - if you believe in souls, you believe in souls, the state of the individual isn't important.
c) I'd argue that philosophy nowadays (as always) needs to embrace all fields of human knowledge. If you wish to exclude psychology, then theology, physics, logic and even common sense ought to be excluded to. The earliest philosophers pondered questions we might now relegate to physicists, but I don't think their considerations are any less philosophical now that there's a specially named branch of science devoted to the study of what things are made of and how they interact with one another. Likewise, I'd strongly argue that of all the sciences psychology is the most philosophical, because it, if nothing else is perhaps closer to answering (at least it asks more often) the question, what is it to be conscious, what is it to be self aware.