Comment Re:A claim as old as electronic computers (Score 1) 47
Why do my mod points always expire right before a comment that really deserves them?!?
Your comment gets at one of the most interesting problems of the philosophy of science - how humans use metaphors, usually taken from social life and other areas of the human experience, for understanding the world around us. It is not just for explaining to lay people, some scholars (and me
Unfortunately, the problem is that there is no way out of it. There is no "one model to rule them" that can magically uplift us from our ignorance - all approaches *inevitably* have this flaw. The metaphors we live by (to borrow from Lakoff & Johnson) will inevitably help us to understand some aspects of our experience and obfuscate others. Some will help us do amazing things, like the mind-as-computer metaphor has, but stop us from doing others. I personally think that in order for us to move forward in creating "intelligent" non-biological machines we need to get away from the computational metaphor and adopt embodied, enactive, integrational approaches like those promoted by second order cybernetics, dynamical systems, behavioural robotics and other related areas. Thankfully these theories are starting to get fairly major traction and we'll get a chance to see where those metaphors take us over the next couple of decades.