Author: Janosch Zwerensky
Date: 02:07:41 02/20/02
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Hi, >(...) >Programmers _know_ that any program (not only chess ones) is nothing but a >secuence of mathematical calculations. > In the very end, some 1's and 0's and the >hardware they 'dance' in. I think this is only one interpretation of what the computer does. Apart from it being useful for (low-level)-programming, I also think it is not an interpretation that can claim any special status over other interpretations. For example, what the computer does could be described on a purely physical level. On that level of description, there are most definitely no ones and zeros dancing around in the machine. On the other hand, one can also describe the machine using broad, high-level abstractions - saying that it does these things with lists or those with strings or "tries to find a way to do the worst to its opponent". If one is writing a C program, this point of view isn't all-too-useful, since there is no obvious mapping of these abstract concepts to C language features, but if for example I wanted to know what the program will respond to my moves, *most of the time* the latter description will be more useful to me than the former ones (with a few exceptions where a somewhat more low-level understanding of the machine will be good for exploiting its weaknesses). When doing actual computer programming, in my experience at least the answer to the question of what mental model of the machine is most useful also *in part* depends on the language one is using; for example, I believe that an assembly programmer will definitively benefit more from a very-low-level mental image of the machine than a C programmer, who in turn might think about his machine in lower-level terms than a Lisp programmer, who in turn probably will find somewhat lower-level descriptions of the machine more useful than, say, someone doing programming in Maple (at the top of this hierarchy, of course, would be the DWIM programmer ;)...). My point here is that one level of description doesn't invalidate the others, and that what we call, for example, emotions in humans are just very, very useful high-level descriptions for human states. The fact that it really all can be described in terms of quintillions of low-level interactions of neutrons, electrons and protons does in my opinion not in any strong sense imply that the high-level view of things is illusionary, since high-level descriptions of things are useful to the extent that we could not make sense of anything without them. Another point to consider here is that, if one adopts the point of view that of several descriptions of a thing only the lowest-level one is non-illusionary, they have to bite the bullet that, for example, light bulbs are an illusion, since light bulbs are not elementary particles in any reasonable theory of physics. However, it is tremendously useful to think that light bulbs exist, because they have some interesting properties that no single part of the light bulb has. An abstracted description of something thus does not usually contradict a low-level one, but it is merely focused to different aspects of that object (and in fact in the case of the light bulb the *correctness* of some high-level statements about the light bulb might be deduced by low-level physical considerations). > But the users tend to see the program as if it was a person. Tend to used >words like 'creativity', 'aggresiveness', 'passiveness', and so on. In my opinion, whether a program has these characteristics or not depends on how one defines them in the first place. >(...) > But as >I said, in the end, it's nothing but a mathematical calculation that choses this >or that move. Well, from a purely physicalistic point-of-view the claim that a computer is a machine performing calculations might be viewed as metaphorical already. > Believing that a program can be 'creative' is like believing that >it rains because the clouds are sad and cry The hypothesis that clouds have emotional states won't help us predicting the weather. The belief that a given program is 'creative' is simply too ill-defined on its own to be either refuted or confirmed in my opinion. >(...) regards, Janosch.
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