Deceived by invisibility

By -

The Newlyn-Phillips machine is an analogue computer for calculating the value of certain macroeconomic variables when other such variables are changed. It is a hydraulic machine that circulates colored water through a series of pipes and valves:







If you showed a bunch of people this machine in operation, and then asked them, "So, this machine sure knows a lot about the macro-economy, doesn't it?" I'd bet most would reply, "What? It's just a bunch of water running around in pipes. It's only humans who interpret the levels as economic aggregates." In fact, it is entirely possible (albeit unlikely) that someone built a machine that functions identically, but is actually used to flush clean some manufacturing equipment or run a fancy bathroom. In those cases, no one would even imagine that there was anything to do with macroeconomics going on.

But once the parts of a machine of essentially the same type are hidden in tiny microchips, and the machine circulates electrons instead of water, many people act like a cargo cult, willing to attribute to the machine powers like "knowing" how to play chess.



UPDATE: This post is not meant to prove that computers don't think. Perhaps they do, for all I know! It just shows we have no more reason to believe they do than we have to believe the Newlyn-Phillips machine thinks about macroeconomics.


Comments

  1. Samson Corwell4:49 AM

    Couldn't sufficiently advanced circuitry give rise to thought?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:33 AM

      Could sufficiently advanced plumbing give rise to thought?

      Delete
    2. Ken B2:28 PM

      "Asking if a computer can think is like asking if a submarine can swim."

      (It is worth googling to find out whom I am quoting.)

      Delete
  2. Bob Murphy11:35 AM

    Good one Gene, but alas it won't work on people who are still materialists. ("Was I any different at his age?")

    If you think human thoughts are "really" just electrical impulses in the nervous system, then...

    ReplyDelete

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