Contemplating the Newlyn-Phillips Machine

By -

As mentioned earlier, the Newlyn-Phillips machine is an analogue computer for calculating some macroeconomic variables based on others. (Mary Morgan makes a good case that the dropping of Newlyn from the machine's name was an injustice, so I will use her term for the gadget.) You can get a sense of how it works by watching the video above.

Imagine that someone had created this machine as a work of art, or a student exercise in a hydromechanics class. (I don't see any reason that this could not have happened.) Then along come Phillips (the same Phillips of "Phillips Curve" fame, by the way) and Newlyn, who simply notice that they can use it as a macroeconomic computer.

If you believe that computers think, then at what point would that one have started thinking? Was it already contemplating the macro-economy when it was an art project, or did it suddenly begin thinking about it when Newlyn and Phillips noticed it could be used in that fashion?

Comments

  1. The Arthurian4:54 PM

    In case you've not seen it, there is an animated, annotated model of the Phillips machine at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand:

    http://www.rbnzmuseum.govt.nz/activities/moniac/Introduction.aspx

    Takes a couple clicks to get it going.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:33 PM

      Thanks! I've been looking for that sort of demo.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more