Friday, May 3, 2019

Mind

The philosopher Richard Rorty has said that "To say that a ...given machine has a mind is just to say that...it will pay to think of it as having beliefs and desires."* A.s.a. H. believes, for example, that collisions will result in it experiencing forces and accelerations and damage. A.s.a. H. desires, for example, good health: high battery charge and little pain. By Rorty's definition A.s.a. H. is a mind.

*Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989, chapter 1.

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