Re: virus: Belief and Knowledge (was: The truth about faith)
Eva-Lise Carlstrom (eva-lise@eskimo.com)
Fri, 12 Sep 1997 16:54:14 -0700 (PDT)
On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, Reed Konsler wrote:
> You can't tell the difference between a robot and and agent. Taking an
> "Intentional Stance" with respect to something is an investment of faith.
> You must assume the entity is willful as a precondition of the stance. In
> essence, we are all successful Turing machines, even to ourselves.
Speak for yourself! In a text-based virtual environment I spend a lot of time
in, I once had great difficulty convincing a newcomer that I was in fact a
human being and not a preprogrammed 'bot. In fact, I am not sure I
succeeded; the friend I was with at the time and I wear our "I failed the
Turing test" buttons with amused ambivalence.
Eva,
the *usually* successful Turing machine