Humans are programmed

If you accept determinism, then you accept that nature has programmed you to behave in certain ways in certain contexts, even though that programming is subtler than the programming a computer receives.

Smart notes that, "I shall not deal with all Ziff's reasons, but will concentrate on certain of them to be found in Section 9 of his article, which I take to be crucial.

Robots do not feel because:

"The way a robot acts (in a specified context) depends primarily on how we programed it to act." For the sake of simplicity I introduce the notion of Nature to represent the sum of causes going towards the creation of a human being considered as beginning with conception or at any later time in his life. What is wrong, for the determinist, in saying that the way a man acts, in a specified context, depends primarily on how nature programs him to act? Subtle programs, of course; much subtler than computer programs, but the subtle cell circuits still determine the way I act, given a situation" (N. Smart, 1959, p. 107).

Source: Smart, Ninian. 1959. Professor Ziff on Robots. Analysis, Vol. XIX, No. 3. Reprinted in Minds and Machines (1964). Alan Ross (Ed.), pp. 106-8.

RELATED ARTICLESExplain
Artificial Intelligence
Can computers think? [1]
No: computers can't have free will
Computers only exhibit the free will of programmers
Preprogrammed robots have no psychological states
Preprogrammed humans have psychological states
Humans are programmed
Humans are programmed
Graph of this discussion
Enter the title of your article


Enter a short (max 500 characters) summation of your article
Enter the main body of your article
Lock
+Comments (0)
+Citations (0)
+About
Enter comment

Select article text to quote
welcome text

First name   Last name 

Email

Skip