Blaise Agüera y Arcas: evaluation

Transcript context

…of get a convex hull of your philosophy? We could try. I mean, I I hesitate to say I'm in anything ist, but but probably functionalist comes closest. Functionalist. Yeah. So the reason for that is that, you know, in in the old days, in the nineteenth century, we used to think that, you know, to be alive meant that there was some vital spirit or vital force, you know, that living things have and dead things don't. And as we started to figure out that the laws of chemistry were the same for living things and dead things, urea can be synthesized in a test tube and so on, you know, those ideas really went out of fashion. We went into a very strict materialist kind of perspective, where everything is just physics. And, you know, I I mean, I was trained as a physicist, you know, I think I I believe in physics fully, but I also think that there is more to life in the sense that, you know, if everything is just physics, then you have no way of saying what it means for you or me to be alive. And to understand what what that is, what it means to be alive, I think you have to come to grips with the idea of of purpose. You have to bring teleology back into the equation. What I mean by that is, you know, a kidney is not just a collection of atoms. It's it's an organ that performs a function or the function is to filter urea. And if you implant an artificial kidney that works on totally different principles but also filters urea, it's an artificial kidney. You know, it's still meaningful to say that. So that that means that there is something about that word kidney that means something that that that goes beyond the the matter that the kidney is made out of. You know, conversely, if I come back from the future and show you an object and and and you're like, what is that? And I I tell you it's an artificial kidney, You know, there's nothing about this set of weird carbon nanotubes and so on inside that would that would say to you kidney. It's just that, you know, if you happen to implant it in a body, you know, and set it and sewed it, you know, sewed it in the right way and so on, then all those relationships would be would would show up in the right way for your body to persist. So this this idea of things serving functions for other things and functions only have meaning in the context of yet other functions, so there's something ecological about this idea of functions. I think this is really central. You know, a a rock on an inanimate planet has no function. If I break it in half, I I now have 2 rocks. But a living thing has function, and, you know, the the the hallmark of function is multiple realizability just like just like Turing talked about for Turing machines because, you know, Turing and von Neumann are functionalists. Meaning that, you know, if you if you have a need to make ATP for energy inside your cells, you know, you're gonna have multiple pathways for doing it because sometimes the aerobic way works, sometimes you need the anaerobic way. u if you have a need to make ATP for energy inside your cells, you know, you're gonna have multiple pathways for doing it because sometimes the aerobic way works, sometimes you need the anaerobic way. Whenever you start to have multiple pathways, you know, wings and insects, wings and bats, you know that there is a function in play.…

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