Re: Machines that think...

A.E. Manier Sr. (A.E.Manier.1@ND.EDU)
Sun, 18 May 1997 20:58:20 -0500

>Why do I feel the need here to recant and swear allegiance to dogma?

I haven't the foggiest idea. Not what I had in mind.

Civilized folks and competent scholars can disagree about that for which,
if anything, the Turing Test is crucial.

Perhaps Wade Riddick and I disagree about how to interpret science
fiction. I am guilty of reading it for nothing but entertainment,
humor, a harmless form of fantasy about possible worlds with more content,
character and story lines than those discussed by philosophers.

Thinking about other possible worlds can be very serious business and
competent scholars take science fiction very much more seriously than I.

Sci fi writers and scholars may have a variety of more or less dogmatic
criteria of their own for distinguishing the good stuff from the bad in
their genre.

My bias about sci fi is that it should make some sort of sense(s): it
should avoid blatant self-contradiction and the begging of interesting
questions. Otherwise, it's escapism, but there is nothing wrong with a
great escape now and then.

I understand the fictional world in which Frankenstein made a monster. I
understand the idiom by which one might refer to Frankenstein's artefact
as a creature. I understand the extension of that trope to the creation
of a set of images in which the creature has feelings, hopes, fears,
perhaps even a sense of justice. I understand the moral force of calling
this possible world to the attention of the industrializing west.

I think the world imagined by Mary Shelley may well assist our moral
reflection upon the course of history in the real world.

I don't think her imaginative world has any clear and obvious relevance
to the world in which we live and argue about the significance of the
Turing Test. This is, after all, a world in which there is a difference
between programming a computer to play chess and intervening in the
computer's execution of the program during a match to make a better move.
In this world we understand Kasparov when he implies that IBM cheated.

The colloquial usage of 'create' refers to what S. Spielberg does to
other folks' novels when he makes films, or to what the process of natural
selection accomplishes when amphibians escape total confinement to brine,
or to what may have been done if the world were created ab nihilo.

Do I want to legislate ambiguity out of English? Not even in the state
of Texas.

I must have misconstrued the intent of the initiator of this thread.
The thread quite appropriately, deals with the world of Walker Percy, and
that doesn't happen to be the world I live in. Walker finished things
that I only began (medical school), and I'm still working on things
(philosophical anthropology) that he only began.

Would Percy have used science fiction to explore the puzzle of Kasparov and
Deep Blue. Why not?

Would Percy have written essays in which he might explore that very same
world from the perspective of Peircean semiotics. There's precedent for
that.

Is semiotics a discipline that is indifferent to the distinction of
fantasy, fiction, hallucination and reality? From what I know of
semiotics, that wouldn't suprise me.

Such indifference risks incoherence and self contradiction, simply because,
if the various possible worlds are really different, they may have
different laws of physics, biology, and either different patterns of
evolution or no evolution at all. So it may be pleasing to combine in
various possible worlds in a fictional account of one world, a world,
say, in which the speed of light is both regularly exceeded and can be
exceeded by nothing else whatsoever, but it surely makes very good sense to
say such a world is incoherent.

Is a fictional world in which artefacts are totally indistinguishable from
evolved organisms, including language using artefact makers, like the
world in which we live?
I wouldn't want to take that for granted without seeing an argument.

Is this a new inquisition? To the contrary, I have utterly no interest
in closed sectarian or parochial inquiry.

Is this a new Platonism, seeking to expel poets for telling lies about
absolute reality?
I'm a lot more tolerant than that.

But there is a problem about combining fiction with philosophy, or at least
there was, once upon a time. The problem is that perfectly good
fiction can beg important questions and eschew consistency as the hobgoblin
of small minds. Philosophers and scientists get low marks for that sort
of thing.

Did Walker Percy have too many tigers by the tail? That's possible.
Isn't it?

ez ed

A. Edward Manier, Professor
Philosophy & History and Philosophy of Science
Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values
314 Decio
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556

(o) 219-631-6520
FAX 219-631-8209
Dept 219-631-6471
http://www.nd.edu/~amanier/index.html