I was so exasperated by the Donald Knuth thing the other day that I wrote this on a post about it:
There is a rhetorical move here supporting a metaphysical claim that conflates a human activity with the activity of a machine. This, again, is not scientific; it also demands explanation and justification that goes beyond presenting evidence. If someone rides a bicycle down the road, nobody says that the bicycle walked down the road. If someone flies a simulated plane from Boston to Chicago in a flight simulator, nobody says the person traveled to Chicago. Yet somehow when people think with the aid of a certain kind of AI machine, we're meant to refer to that as the machine doing the thing humans do (thinking, solving a problem, inventing, or what have you). We're meant to believe that what the machine is doing is not meaningfully different from what humans do despite the obvious layers of metaphor involved. This conflation is not scientific, it's metaphysical. It demands an explanation and justification that goes beyond just presenting evidence because it is making a claim about how the world works or is structured.

@[email protected] I don't understand the connection. Can you please elaborate a bit?
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@abucci @olivia the idea that a machine spinning has the same value as human prayer is not that different from "metaphysical claim that conflates a human activity with the activity of a machine".

@[email protected] Ah, OK, I understand now. Thank you!

I know very little about Buddhism, so I am speaking from a position of near total ignorance. That said, it occurs to me that perhaps the person's relation to the wheel is what's important. Someone who thinks they can offload prayer to a physical object is in trouble spiritually already, I would think. At that level the analogy with conflating machine activity with human thought is quite interesting.

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