AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Well OK not sure how serious he was, but to take this at face value means he's more ready to grant reality to a demon possessing a machine than the machine itself having agency. Which is perfectly consistent with the dualist position I guess. Meat Machines can't think either, unless they are ensouled.
I come from a background of fairly radical materialism – my late advisor Marvin Minsky delighted in calling humans " Meat Machines ". I think this was mostly to deliberately needle his humanist enemies, who were incapable of appreciating that machines can be wonderfully intricate embodiments of intelligence. He was not a nihilist, but the materialist concept of mind that he advocated could seem that way from the outside.
I come from a background of fairly radical materialism – my late advisor Marvin Minsky delighted in calling humans " Meat Machines ". I think this was mostly to deliberately needle his humanist enemies, who were incapable of appreciating that machines can be wonderfully intricate embodiments of intelligence. He was not a nihilist, but the materialist concept of mind that he advocated could seem that way from the outside.
OK, so, are we meat machines? Is this a good way to think about people? Obviously it depends on what associations you have with "machine". Forget about people for awhile, are living things (eg a mouse, or a tree, or an amoeba) machines? Sort of! They are composed of functional parts that AFAWCT obey the laws of physics. But machines as we know them are kind of rigid, and are designed and built through processes that are quite different from how living things come into being.
Oh I'm sorry this is really boring. The question has been done to death and the answer is that as we develop computational and other technologies, the domains of the mechanical and the biological are overlapping more and more.
The real reason people ask this question is that "humans" "meat" and "machine" have very different moral connotations. Humans have moral status, machines don't, and "meat" (living animals) occupy an uncomfortable middle ground (we treat them well or appallingly based on no logical principles, just convenience and prejudice).