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I think maybe you interpret the concept a little too literally. The point is that beyond a certain level of incomprehensible complexity, you can no longer model
by dTal 7y ago
I think maybe you interpret the concept a little too literally. The point is that beyond a certain level of incomprehensible complexity, you can no longer model things as deterministic machines - you must adopt a "theory of mind". The abstractions you use resemble those you apply to conscious beings. You don't say "this machine is behaving in this manner because it possesses internal state reflecting X fact about the world and it has been designed to execute Y instructions on that basis" - you say "the computer wants to do Y because it believes X".
The reason we believe in spirits is because it allows us to co-opt our over-evolved social brains to model otherwise intractably complex systems.
- Terr_ 7y ago^ This. Even just on a linguistic level, personifying technology creates a subtext of: "The details are not relevant to my point or is too complicated to explain." For example, talking about bodies of water "wanting" to be level.
- carapace 7y agoNot even very complex systems: up until very recently anything that exhibited more-than-merely-physical behavior was alive. The spinning governor, arguably the first feedback-based machine, processing information, was described as "alive" and "making decisions" by contemporary observers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor Line-following robots, as simple as they are, appear alive. Nothing like this existed in the world other than living things until the last ~250 years.