Denial

It is the mistaken view that there are propositions, Quine mantains, that results in a mentalistic view of meaning and what he refers to as "the myth of the museum". This myth holds that there are specific mental states, for example, ideas or thoughts, that we express when we use language. Quine claims this is a mistake because, just as we can translate sentences in another language differently depending on which translation manual we choose, we can interpret the sentence we use to specify the content of a propositional attitude differently depending on which interpretation manual we choose. (Interpretation, for Quine, is logically comparable to translation. In both cases we are equating one set of words with another.) Imagine that someone tries to tell us that he or she believes that evolution ocurred by natural selection. Because Quine claims that we can give alternative interpretations, in our own words, of the sentence representing what is believed, he denies that there is anything determinate that the person believes. Because we can apply the indeterminancy thesis to our own inner discourse by translating our own words into different words in our language, Quine further denies that there is something determinate that we believe.

In the place of science of intentionality, Quine proposes the development of a thoroughly behavioristic analysis of human behavior. He acknowledges that we do use intentional idioms like believes in daily life to describe ourseleves and other, but, because such terms are groundless,they must be dispensed with when we return to science: "If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms".

~ Quine

Interactivity

We can find a similar account of simulation’s sex appeal in the rise of multimedia computing, particularly for websites. Here the measure of computing power is most often presented in terms of “interactivity.” Yet formal assessments for interactivity, as could be produced through the Chomsky hierarchy, are never brought to bear. To understand this, it is useful to first examine similar questions about the assessment of intricate behavior in simple biological organisms. Spiders are not taught how to spin a web; the behavior is genetically programmed. Even semi- learned behaviors such as bird songs are often characterized as the result of a “serial pattern generator.” Tightly sequenced behaviors such as spider webs and bird songs can be modeled as finite state automata, because they require little adaptive interaction with their environment. They may appear to be complicated but they are in fact a “preprogrammed” sequence of actions. This stands in strong contrast to animal behaviors that require spontaneous interaction, as we see for example in the social cooperation of certain mammals (wolves, orca, primates, etc.). Even lone animals can show this kind of deep interactivity: A raccoon learning to raid lidded trash cans is clearly not clocking through a sequence of prepared movements.

In the same way, our interactions with websites can vary from “canned” interactions with a limited number of possible responses—pressing on various buttons resulting in various image or sound changes—to truly interactive experiences in which the user explores constructions in a design space or engages in other experiences with near- infinite variety. Such deep interactivity does not depend on the sophistication of the media. The 1970s video game of Pong, with its primitive low- resolution graphics, has far greater interactivity than a website in which a button press launches the most sophisticated 3- D fl y-though animation. As Fleischmann points out in his analysis of web media, rather than measure interactivity in terms of two- way mutual dependencies, commercial claims for interactivity depend on an “interrealism effect” that substitutes flashy video streaming or other one- way gimmicks for user control of the simulation. Such multimedia attempts to create the effect of interactive experience without relinquishing the producer’s control over the simulation. At least speed, for all its elitist ownership, has a quantitative measure that allows us to compare machines; for interactivity we have only the rhetoric of public relations. Even in cases in which we are not duped by this interrealism effect, and strive for deep interactivity, the informational limits of interactive computing power (the bandwidth of the two- way communication pipeline) is carefully doled out in accordance to social standing, with the most powerful using high- speed fiberoptic conduits of Internet II, lesser citizens using cable connections on Internet I, and the poorest segments of society making do with copper telephone wires—truly a “trickle- down” economy of interactivity.

~ Ron Eglash, 2008

User, goes here.

A	User-friendliness is a word that never should have been invented.
Q	What word should have been invented to connotate the idea?
A	The idea is wrong! It is a long story about the user, which I will try to condense. The point is that the computer user, as functioning in the development of computer products is not a real person of flesh and blood but a literary figure, the creation of literature, rather poor literature. 15 years ago I Inoticed that Dutch computer scientists developing products, when talking of the needs of the user would use—in the middle of a Dutch sentence—the American word user, which of course is perfectly translatable, as you and I both know. Our cigarette packages have english on them as well.........; but then I discovered that in spite of their anglophobia, the word user is perfect French. Then I discovered that it is also perfect Russian and the two of us also know more Japanese than you think. Well the mere fact that that little word is not translated, but it is taken over as a foreign body, in Dutch, French, Russian and Japanese discussions, means that it has lost its original meaning. Now, if you start to analyze the many character traits of that literary figure, you discover that he is most uninspiring. He is stupid, education resistant if not education proof, and he hates any form of intellectual demand made on him, he cannot be delighted by something beautiful, because he lacks the education to appreciate beauty. Large sections of computer science are paralyzed by accepting this moron as their typical customer. Rare are the computer companies that are prepared to make a Mercedes, the analog the high quality product for the discerning customer. As it turns out, particularly in the USA mathematics is the pinnacle of user unfriendliness, if you read the catalogs of text book publishers, then it is quite clear that the major recommendation that they give a book is that it is a-mathematical, that it does not require mathematical knowledge, etc. So, user friendliness is, among other things the cause of a frantic effort to hide the fact that eo ipso computers are mathematical machines.

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Q

Speaking of programming bottlenecks—what will the impact of the research in artificial intelligence be?

A

Can you research something that is not science? I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.

~ Dijkstra