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 think the answer isn't in the box, for sure. I think the short form of an answer is that we have socialized computers--as in raising them as if they were social animals, something like domestic pets. We name them, think of them as assholes, idiots, or reluctant pack mules, burros, bad, slow children.
And I think you're right about mentation, except I would call it personification. And it is one of the more basic things we do.
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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. ...
....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.
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Physics is full of casual terminology that makes believe material is animated with will, needs, motivations, desires and so forth. Just about any textbook explanation of electricity and magnetism is full of these personae and so they get passed on to the science and engineering students, who of course end up thinking in those terms. Engineering and comp sci is much worse in this regard. Engineers have their babies, their idiot children who they are convinced will end up in college some day, hopefully soon, before the grant runs out. AI carries this pretend business into a kind of religious fervor, a sort of techno-mysticism. On the other hand cognitive science turns the process around and from a personification of the material, I get the impression they re-mapp that mechanical personification back onto the biological phenomenon of mind and body.
Chuck Grimes