The Smart argument
"Paul Ziff, discussing robots (Analysis, January 1959, pp. 64-68), gives a number of reasons why it is not to be said that they feel tired and so on. I shall urge that his reasons would not persuade a determinist, except insofar as he is bringing out this point: that his robots do not feel because they do not have proper bodies. I shall then argue that this does not help much to see why certain artifacts do not feel. One does not, of course, need to be a determinist; but if one is not, and unless unrealistically one is going to compartmentalize human beings, the reasons why human beings feel tired and robots do not must go much deeper. 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, he argues do not feel because:--
1. "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).
Reference
Smart, Ninian. 1959. Professor Ziff on Robots. Analysis, Vol. XIX, No. 3. Reprinted in Minds and Machines (1964). Alan Ross (Ed.), pp. 106-8.
|