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reason, appetite, slavery, computers, bridges

What if our first person description of the operation human reason reveals it as being inseparable from appetite, i.e., from the desire to know how things fit together, etc.?

Could a machine engage in reasoning if it had no appetite?

If yes, then if we could genetically engineer a human to reason as directed without appetite, would our use of it constitute slavery?  So what about computers whose reasoning we direct?

A way out of these problems:  instead of saying that computers think, might it not be more reasonable for us to say that computers model reasoning?  Consider how computers model everything from weather patterns to nuclear explosions: we don't imagine that storms or explosions are occurring inside the computers, yet we are confident that the computers can tell us what the outcomes of those processes are likely to be.  Can't the same be the case for thinking?

A computer can deliver the message "Socrates is rational" after receiving the inputs "Socrates is human" and "All humans are rational," but the ability to do this does not suffice to indicate that the computer is thinking: it may only indicate that thought has been modeled well.


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