X-Message-Number: 21359
Date: Fri,  7 Mar 2003 08:38:55 -0700
Subject: What thinks? (was emergence and ignorance)
References:  <>
From:  (Tim Freeman)

Message #21355
From: 
>1. The most radical--including some very respected names--hold that thinking 
>and feeling exist whenever any information processing whatever takes place. A 
>thermostat thinks and feels--one of three things: "It's too cool in here," or 
>"It's too warm in here," or "It's just right in here." But clearly this 
>position is vacuous, since it tells us nothing, predicts nothing, and 
>suggests no further investigation. It's just empty words. 

Straw man argument.  You already know what the thermostat is going to
do, so there's no use in reasoning about its thought processes.  The
purpose of reasoning about another entity's thoughts is to predict
what it is going to do. 

When I'm using computers, it's routinely useful to think about it's
thought processes.  "The program thought the file pointer was here.
It was really there.  That's why the file went corrupt when it was
written to."

Caring whether the thoughts "really" "exist" is not useful.  They
exist in the same sense that the number three exists: they are
abstractions you can use to make predictions about the world.  You
don't have to use the abstraction if you don't want to.  I could
figure out why the program corrupted the file by reasoning about the
invariants in the code that writes the file.  I could figure out when
I'll run out of apples by using a physics simulation instead of by
counting.

>Or worse than that, maybe, if it is interpreted to mean that a fairly
>sophisticated program is close to human and deserving of some degree
>of respect as a person.

Whether I intend to respect an entity depends on how I believe that
entity is going to behave in the future.  Its thoughts are irrelevant,
except to the extent that reasoning about its thoughts helps me to
accurately predict its behavior.

I don't know what you mean by "respect as a person".  I think the
simpler concept of "respect" is more useful.

If you adopt goals that are about getting something done in the world,
rather than about manipulating your own internal states, then all
these issues of identity and so forth are either easy to resolve or
obviously unimportant.

-- 
Tim Freeman                                                  
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
GPG public key fingerprint ECDF 46F8 3B80 BB9E 575D  7180 76DF FE00 34B1 5C78 

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