Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I’ve refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I’d post to say the very final installment is done.
I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it’s ridiculous.
Anyway now the series is done I’m going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture’s propensity to far-right politics. I’ll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that’s your jam.
It seems to me like when you say “human minds are computational things” you can mean this in several ways that can be roughly categorized by what your ideas of “minds” and of “computational things” are.
You can use “computational things” to be an extremely expansive category, capable of containing vast complexity but potentially completely impractical for fully recreating on a drawing board. In this use, the word user would often agree with the statement but it wouldn’t belittle the phenomenon that is the human mind.
Or you can use “human minds” in a way that sees them as something relatively simple - kinda like a souped up 80486 computer, maybe. Nothing all too irreplaceable or special, in any case. Maybe an Athlon can be sentient and sapient! Most who say it like that would probably disagree with the sentiment because it small-mindedly minimizes people.
Then there’s the tech take version, which somehow does both: “Computation is everything and everything is computation, but also I have no appreciation for complexity nor a conceptualization of what all I don’t see about the human mind”. Within the huge canvas of what can be conceived of if you think in computation terms, they opt for tiny crayon scribbles.
Shorter: “Minds are computers” can imply views of (1) minds as simpler than they are, (2) computers as potentially very complex and general, or (3) both.
1 and 3 are not only wrong but also bad.
I guess (4), neither, is also thinkable, but internally quite contradictory.
Those "you"s were meant as general yous. ESL here, sorry.