[FRIAM] Dennett on agency

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Again, according to me, the intention is neither in  the program or in the computer but in the relation between the omputer and its environment over time and space.  I guess, I would have to say, then, that computers can't dointention, but robots can. 

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2020 4:28 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dennett on agency


On 10/20/20 3:35 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> I'm not sure you can have this conversation with a *gradation* of intent. I'm fond of the insult "He's a tool", because people can be *used*. If a person is used by another person, does that imply the "intent" of the tool is a degraded form of "intent"? I think that's a reasonable conclusion. But the argument suffers some sort of causa prima problem or recursion problem.
>
> Our common conception of a computer program defines it as a Pure Tool, no agency whatsoever. But perhaps *some* kinds of computer program (e.g. an individual S-expression grown by a genetic algorithm) might have a tiny bit more agency/intention than a hand-written program.
And is it entirely rhetorical to say that a computer virus or worm "intends" to infect/co-opt your system, even though it was hand written?   Can the intentions of the creator transitively pass through the artifact? 
> The fundamental problem, though, is the ideal, in the limit, ultimate agency/intention. I suspect we can narrowly escape that recursion problem by only allowing co-evolutionary structures where the "objective functions" are all implicitly defined by the churning milieu. That way agency/intention can be *locally* transitive but not globally transitive. E.g. I can be Renee's tool, but not the tool of someone I've never met in some small village in Kazakhstan. Similarly, a cell might be a tool of its local tissue, but not the tool of some distant cell in some other organism on Venus or somesuch.
I like the juxtaposition of "agent" and "tool".   I suppose I would argue against the above distinctions by contriving a chain of influence/persuasion/control from the Kazakh to you?   Yes, on the face of it, you are more likely a tool of Renee's than that of the mysterious Kazakh, but maybe this (counter)example is too contrived/banal to  mean anything.
>
> On 10/20/20 11:06 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Computer programs can certainly be described using intentional 
>> language. Does that mean that a computer program can have intention? If so, that seems to degrade the notion of intent.


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