Mattel IntelliVision II 5872 Manuel d'utilisateur télécharger pdf (Page 36)

anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a

person' rather than `like a thing'.

At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually

work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people

who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would

use language that seemds to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set

behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a

naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of

feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the

things they work on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers

who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program

behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.

Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic

ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the

minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are

biological machines - consciousness is an interesting and valuable

epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not

fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from

computers.

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Mattel IntelliVision II 5872 Manuel d'utilisateur Page 36