Dace:
> > > I forget who said that a thermostat is a computer with two thoughts
Michael Pollak:
> It was David Chalmers, and I think it was three: it's too cold in here,
> it's too warm in here, and it's just right in here.
Gordon Fitch wrote:
> > This doesn't answer my objection. How can we differentiate a computer
> > from anything else if it's just a box full of stuff?
Michael Pollak:
> The modern-classical argument is John Searle's "Chinese Box" argument:
> that computers don't think because they lack consciousness and
> intentionality. You can find various forms of it, and answers to it, all
> over the internet (where interest in AI runs high). Chalmers in
> particular has posted Searle's review of his book (where he devotes a
> chapter to the thoughts of thermostats and in defense of panpsychism) as
> well as a reply from each.
>
> As to how we can differentiate computers from thermostats, both sides seem
> to agree we can't. It's the one thing both sides do agree on, that a
> thermostat is just a very simple computer. Hence the argument.
The question I asked, however, was not how we differentiate a computers from thermostats, but how we differentiate them from anything, if they're just boxes of stuff. This is a somewhat different issue -- the problem of mentation becoming associated with seemingly mindless objects.
I thought Agre's paper was interesting in that he shows that computer engineering is involved in a process of providing an illusion of the mind in which it is Cartesianly omnipotent, bodiless, and non-local, a purpose which shows up at the very lowest material levels with the wire. In "real life", the mind is always found to be localized, limited in scope, and associated with physical bodies (hence the idea that it is an attribute of matter -- panpsychism). After the invention of slavery, history, and progress, however, philosophers appeared who were dissatisfied with this arrangement and spun tales of other and better arrangements. I think there is a political dimension to this dissatisfaction: if the master, the great king, is limited by the body just like his slaves, if he puts his pants on one leg at a time, if he eventually croaks and turns to dirt, what's so great about him? Hence the popularity of these philophers with great kings and masters, the thrust to build a mind independent of the body, to escape from the earth and its lesser denizens.
Ubi politica, ibi economica: the computer allows the mind to think it floats freer of the body than it used to, and the richer and more powerful people get to buy bigger, faster, and floatier computers. But that's not the end of the story.