If Men are Machines
Part of an ongoing discussion. A blissfully unthinking soul named Ingbliss remarks:
“We know that machines can think because people are machines that think.”
Only if you define the word “machines” in a non-standard way so as to include people under the term. Whereupon the argument becomes a meaningless semantic argument, as well as being circular.
Even if humans are machines, they are machines of a type that manmade machines are not.
No manmade machine is alive, or thinks, or makes decisions, or has desires, or has a point of view.
You have a faith that one day manmade machines will exhibits outwards signs of these inward properties — but this an mystical faith on your part, a belief not based on any empirical evidence, any observation, any fact.
It is, in fact, a mystic statement based on philosophy, a deduction from a metaphysical principle called monism. But one would have to pay attention to the discipline of philosophy to understand this, and at least one of the machines involved in this discussion is malfunctioning, and scorns philosophy as mostly nonsense, so I will not dwell on the point.
In the meanwhile, manmade machines were designed by intelligent designers, who have names that cane be named: Bell invented the telephone or Morse the telegraph, the Wright brothers invented the flying machine. Telephone and telegraph were invented to send messages across distances. The flying machine was invented for air travel. All machines have in an innate purpose that serves their designer.
If men are machines in the same way that manmade machines are machines, please tell me the name of the intelligent designer who designed us.
Please tell me the innate purpose of human life.
Tell me how we men can serve our Designer.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
