Stephen Donahue
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82 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Do ~~Machines~~ People Think?
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date: 2026-04-02
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layout: column.njk
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tags: column
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permalink: /columns/2026/do-people-think/
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---
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## Rough Notes
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- Thinking:
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- Can we flip this around, and define it by reduction? What isn't thinking?
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1. Reaction
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2. Reflex
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3. Conditioned behavior
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- But what part of thinking isn't grounded in some conditioned behavior? Some reflex triggered by a problem to solve?
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- But thinking seems to involve "modeling," and for our purposes, we mean a mental model.
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- This mental model gets tested, calibrated, exercised.
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- So how is this different than a program?
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- Digital vs. Analog?
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- Inputs, the decisions, are much fuzzier for organic mental models (and thinking)
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- Computers are (seemingly) deterministic
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- But, if we shed this assumption, what happens to our distinction?
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- If computers can "approximate" the fuzziness with digital values...
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- same question, what happens to our distinction?
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- Thinking as a survival skill
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- Thinking as communication
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- Socialization
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- Connecting with neighbors and "vibing."
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- Thinking as an emergent behavior, among a pool of people
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- Maybe the mob mentality is the purest expression of thought.
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- Without self, or ego.
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- What does it map to, in the scheme of things?
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- I keep thinking about connections
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- And how stifling it is to exist in isolation
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- But to become ingrained in something
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- And to connect with the people, the pieces
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- To have an exchange, that's the essence of thinking
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- Some kind of transformation, born from the coordination and interaction of many players
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- Bottling it within youself, just as senses, impressions without a voice, with no expression or transformation
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- We form groups, we organize, and we process together. That's thinking
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## Quotes
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> "[he thinks] that the idealistic creations of his mind... also represent reality." - Claude Bernard
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> "Much thinking is done in completely personal, idiosyncratic terms, so much so that how it is done is incommunicable." - Gerald Weinberg
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## Questions
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- Who is Claude Bernard?
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- Famous French Physiologist (1813-78).
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- How would I define "thinking?"
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- Is "thinking" in isolation really thinking? Or, is thinking in a social / anthropological sense a connector?
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- Do machines Think?
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- Yes
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- True thought has structure, a sequence, clear logical steps.
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- It is neither random nor unpredictable. It follows clear, irrefutable logic.
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- Anything else is noise
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- No
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- Machines are bound by rules. They can only follow a pre-programmed sequence of steps
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- The sequence may have rich variety, but lacks in originality.
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- Thinking is about novelty. Making leaps of intuition and instinct.
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- If we can pave the way between with logic or reasoning, that's nice, but not essential.
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- I reject this approach as flawed, lacking both nuance and merit.
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- Total aside: the point shouldn't be to subscribe absolutely to one side or the other, and claim it the undeniable truth.
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- These are devices, anchor points around which we can scaffold our reasoning, and draw tighter bounds around the concept being examined.
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- They themselves are not to be confused with the subject at hand.
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- by extension, we won't say that one or the other, both or neither are the thing itself.
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- Like confusing the map for the terrain.
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- these are navigational aids
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- So probably not a single definition of thinking
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- there's the intuitive kind, that machines might struggle with
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- There's the expansive, logical kind, machines are better suited for.
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## Links
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[1] - Hamming, R. (1997). The art of doing science and engineering: Learning to learn. CRC. <https://archive.org/details/artofdoingscienc0000rich>
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[2] - Weinberg, Gerald M. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. Wiley, 1975. Internet Archive, <https://archive.org/details/introductiontoge00gera>. |