-----Original Message----- From: Gordon Fitch
>> 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.
>
As I've made clear, they're boxes of stuff that just happen to do the same
things people do when they compute.
>Chuck Grimes:
>> 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.
>
>You could personify a rock, but it wouldn't bring you lbo-talk
>
That's because rocks don't contain the kind of material organization that
lends itself to computation.
>A computer -- or a piece of paper with writing on it, or a
>hammer, even -- all embody (for me, anyway) ideas -- a history
>of experiences, theories of how we do things, re-presentations
>of various parts of the world, even aesthetics. A person can
>pick one up and, never having met or heard of any of the people
>who made them, differentiate and use them in a way closely
>corresponding to the ideas of those other persons. So -- as
>Agre seems to be doing -- we can ask what these ideas are,
>where they come from, and where they seem to be going. Because
>they aren't just stuff or the objects of someone's arbitrary
>construction. They're full of messages -- pointed ones.
>
They're full of messages for people who know how to interpret them. Their
history does not inhere to the objects themselves but arises only by
imagination in the mind of the interpreter. The history of computers is not
alive in each computer. That's why there's nothing holding it together but
glue. That's why if you break it, it won't heal itself. It doesn't know
how. Over time it will disintegrate, just like a body will-- a dead body.
What makes computers different from other kinds of technology is that they mimick life. The basic principle of computers-- cybernetics-- is also the principle of life. Norbert Wiener got that right. Life is based on a circuit. This circuit feeds the effects of our actions back onto ourselves, like a pilot steering a ship and noticing that it's drifting too far one way or the other and altering course accordingly. Of course, the computer isn't the first machine to mimick this effect. It all goes back to the steam engine, for which Watt created a device, called the centrifugal governor, which regulates the amount of steam powering the engine. It consists of a rotating spindle with two weights attached. As the spindle rotates faster, the resulting centrifugal pressure forces the weights to move outwardly. This reduces the supply of steam, which slows down the spindle and allows the weights to fall back in, thereby expanding the steam supply. Thus this "computer" has two "thoughts." One: we're going too fast. Two: we're going too slow. (It's always moving one way or the other, so there's no intermediate "thought.")
But machines are merely following physical necessity. Computers are built in such a way that self-corrective behavior proceeds automatically. Organisms, on the other hand, are self-generative, and it's from our self-nature that our self-corrective behavior (naturally) arises. Cybernetic automation is the *impersonation* of autogenesis.
Ted