"Why did Helen Keller drown?... She couldn't swim."
Can a computer be existentialist?
If I were more informed or knowledgeable about the computer "thought" process, AI, and existentialism, that could be an essay or an article title/intro question or some other crap about the future of awareness or consciousness in computers. m-w.com, which is Websters website, defines existentialism as:
"A chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad."
I have barely 2 years of programming experience, but from what I've seen, computers seem to make decisions based on commands or through evaluating the decisions available to them (the functions or programs available) and deciding which action will lead them to the desired outcome, return Success or whatever. Pretty much the same thing as humans, but with a far narrower definition of possible outcomes and with a greater ability to analyze outcomes known to them. But can one, without prompting, without it being programmed into the database, arriving to it of it's own will, question it's own programming? Is this a point that can possibly be reached by Artificial Intelligence, when it questions the options presented to it by it's own functions and wonders why other functions can't be present, without this questioning itself being a programmed function?
So can a computer (or other implementation of Artificial Intelligence) ever be an existentialist? It's just a question to throw against a wall that I started asking myself after reading a short article in mental_floss, which I scan through in order to make up for reading Fangoria at Barnes and Noble. Pretty weird question to just come up with, especially since the other ones seem to revolve around whether I could beat up Jesus and if Helen Keller ever got caught masturbating because she was deaf and blind.
Hey, at least I'm not asking about eating hypothetical zombies.
If I were more informed or knowledgeable about the computer "thought" process, AI, and existentialism, that could be an essay or an article title/intro question or some other crap about the future of awareness or consciousness in computers. m-w.com, which is Websters website, defines existentialism as:
"A chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad."
I have barely 2 years of programming experience, but from what I've seen, computers seem to make decisions based on commands or through evaluating the decisions available to them (the functions or programs available) and deciding which action will lead them to the desired outcome, return Success or whatever. Pretty much the same thing as humans, but with a far narrower definition of possible outcomes and with a greater ability to analyze outcomes known to them. But can one, without prompting, without it being programmed into the database, arriving to it of it's own will, question it's own programming? Is this a point that can possibly be reached by Artificial Intelligence, when it questions the options presented to it by it's own functions and wonders why other functions can't be present, without this questioning itself being a programmed function?
So can a computer (or other implementation of Artificial Intelligence) ever be an existentialist? It's just a question to throw against a wall that I started asking myself after reading a short article in mental_floss, which I scan through in order to make up for reading Fangoria at Barnes and Noble. Pretty weird question to just come up with, especially since the other ones seem to revolve around whether I could beat up Jesus and if Helen Keller ever got caught masturbating because she was deaf and blind.
Hey, at least I'm not asking about eating hypothetical zombies.