From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc Mon Dec 16 11:01:31 EST 1991
Article 2082 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <gVkucB2w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 12 Dec 91 15:00:27 GMT
References: <1991Dec11.180924.37884@spss.com>
Lines: 60

markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
> Picture a program used to maintain the books of a bank.  When deposits or
> withdrawals are made, the program adjusts the values found at various disk
> locations.  Are these adjustments financial transactions, or merely
> simulations of financial transactions?
> 
> It's hard to maintain that the computer's transactions are anything but real.
> If the computer changes a certain value somewhere on disk to n, then $n is
> what you have in the bank.  Your money has become data.  There is nothing mor
> concrete in the bank that corresponds to your money (certainly not the bank's
> store of cash, which is much less than the sum of all depositors' balances).

Let's go back further in time to a Phoenician trader in is
counting house in Tyre in 2,000 B.C.  A wealthy tribesman comes
with a herd of camels to sell. The herd has actually arrived in
two separate camel drives, one led by himself and the other by his
eldest son. Now both herds having arrived and having been driven
into pens he enters the Phoenician trader's counting house to be
paid. He expects the Phoenician to go out with him to the camel
pen to count the camels, since that is the way transactions are
done at the primitive oasis bazaar where he usually trades.  He
knows that the Phoenician trader was present only when he himself
arrived with his portion of the camels and did not see his son and
his men drive the second batch of camels into the pen.  But
instead the merchant makes some marks on papyrus with a stylus and
says, "That was 35 camels at 7 drachmas per camel, here's your 245
Drachmas." The chieftain is amazed.  "But how do you _know_ there
are 35 camels?  You did not count them.  You only counted the 19
camels that I brought with me."  The Phoenician smiles.  "Yes, "
he says, "That is true, but my clerk counted the 16 camels brought
by your son and I added the figures on this papyrus to get the
total sum of 35.  35 Camels."

The tribal chieftain takes the money but all the way home he
wonders how the Phoenician could count the camels without being
there in the pen to see them all at once.

Isn't the operation taking place on papyrus in the merchant's
counting room exactly the _same_ as a financial calculation taking
place in the bank's computer?  It is using a symbolic process
which happens to map onto a concrete process perfectly. What was
really happening is a real economic exchange, as when the first
hunter traded some meat for an arrowhead or a story to be told to
his family sitting around the fire in front of his cave. The only
difference is that as the transactions become more abstract and to
less and less resemble the face-to-face barter, we forget that
they began as ways of symbolically representing things like pieces
of meat, or arrowheads or stories or camels.

What does all this mean?  It means that you can say anything you
want about these transactions, call them anything you want to call
them, but unless you understand them diachronically
(developmentally, historically, genetically, whatever) you don't
know what they really are.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


