[FRIAM] Warring Darwinians for Glen, Steve

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Your interpretation is not quite what I would have said, but close enough. 

You're also right about what I meant by "black box". But the point I was making is that if we take EricC's principle seriously, then anything that goes on inside the box can be accurately and precisely "surmised" from outside the box. Anything else would be lost or random.

Also, my comment was in response to Dave's claim that behavior is not a basis for determining whether the box is thinking or not. I'm suggesting that if there's a large "random" component to the box's behavior, then perhaps it is thinking -- i.e. there's stuff going on inside the box that *cannot* be "surmised" from outside it.

On 5/5/20 1:09 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Eric believes that everything that is going on in a black box is evident from outside the box.
> [...]
> That, you rightly perceive, I disagree with.  In fact, the whole idea of a black box is that you don’t know and can only surmise what is going on within it.  If you could “see” within the box, it wouldn’t be black.  If I owned a “golden goose”, I might surmise all sorts of internal arrangements by which the goose took in food and produced gold, but I would never kill the goose for the gold “inside”.  That’s to confuse a behavior of an entity with the internal processes that mediate that behavior.  And I really DO mean “internal” here.  


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