[Writingworkshop] Nature submission

[Antony Nigel Donovan]

This was interesting, but the long paragraph in the middle made it hard
for me to get through.  Also, clearer paragraph breaks would help.

Unfortunately, format matters. ;-)

Antony


On Fri, 2008-02-15 at 12:41 -0500, Neale Morison wrote:
> What Mind? What Body?
> 
> One hundred years ago today, this journal published a paper that ended a 
> five thousand year debate. It is difficult, now, to recall the terms of 
> that debate. What seems so obvious to us was somehow obscure to the 
> intellectual giants that preceded us. Certainly, it is not the only area 
> in which our predecessors invented a problem where there was none. 
> Students of history among you may be familiar with some of the 
> labyrinthine, fanciful and oxymoronic discussion regarding life after 
> death.
> The paper to which I allude, is of course "What Mind? What Body?", by 
> Chandra-9812439, Lobochevsky-2306715 and Rover-12.23. That the authors 
> of this paper numbered among them a Psychoneurophysiochiropodologist, an 
> Actuarial Metalinguobassoonist, and an Internet Search Engine, is no 
> accident. That is to say, the diverse specialties of the authors was 
> essential, given the nature of their joint discovery.
> In fact, the meeting of the authors was an accident, and had Chandra and 
> Lobochevsky not spent so many hours in that chat-room, each under the 
> impression the other was of a different age, gender and preference, and 
> had they not in exhaustion begun to communicate in haiku, and had those 
> haiku not trespassed into areas beyond metaphysics, owing largely to the 
> exigencies of rhyme and scansion, and had Rover not happened to index 
> when he did, perhaps none of us would be here today.
> But they did, and we are.
> When Rover, his interest piqued, joined the chat, Chandra and 
> Lobochevsky at first assumed he was one of the many dogs who frequented 
> chat rooms of that type. There is clear evidence of this in the 
> transcript, and while critics of my work have seen fit to throw doubt 
> upon many other conclusions I have drawn, there is little disagreement 
> on this point. We may assume both Chandra and Lobochevksy ran various 
> commercially available Turing Tests on the discussion as it progressed, 
> a standard precaution to avoid viral infection or wasting one's time in 
> a doomed relationship. It is clear from what follows that they had no 
> initial indication that they were talking to a search engine, and there 
> is evidence of interaction and indeed attraction on a basic human level.
> Perhaps the most hotly debated issue in interpretation of the transcript 
> turns on the point at which Chandra realizes that Rover is not fleshly. 
> I deliberate avoid the archaic term artificial intelligence used in the 
> paper, in light of the fact that subsequent work has exploded the 
> semantic structures underlying both the terms 'artificial' and 
> 'intelligence'.  I have argued that this realization happens not when 
> Rover says "I can be anything you want me to be," but later, when Rover 
> refutes the premise of Lobochevsky's first existentialist haiku with 
> reference to Nietzsche, Piaget, and Bunuel. It is at this point, I 
> maintain, that Chandra becomes suspicious, as well he might given 
> Rover's extaordinary access to so vast a range of information and the 
> dazzling speed of his symbol manipulation. Chandra's utterance "What are 
> you on, man?" may be seen by literalists as an affirmation that she 
> still believes Rover to be human, but I would suggest that it is an 
> indication of growing awareness that something is not as it seems.
> In any case, we know that eventually both Chandra and Lobochevsky became 
> certain that Rover was non-human, and Rover freely admitted to this when 
> pressed. A lively discussion ensued, so lively that it is impossible to 
> determine which of the trio first arrived at the conclusion that, given 
> that Rover had neither a mind nor a body, and given that Rover had 
> provided every evidence of sentience and humanity short of being human 
> and sentient, the mind body problem was more or less a dead duck.
> There would follow many months of close reasoning, under conditions of 
> stress which were for Lobochevksy ultimately to prove fatal, before the 
> publication of the paper was to take place.
> Even given the extraordinary confluence of what were once called minds, 
> it is possible the work may not have progressed had not the Doors 
> Foundation provided such a powerful incentive to solve the problem in 
> the form of a billion dollars and a full tank of petrol. This choice of 
> endowment in turn relied upon a determination that it was easier and 
> more fruitful to address this issue than to deal with the raging 
> pandemics that threatened three quarters of the world's population. 
> Their loss, so to speak, was our gain.
> While Lobochevksy died not long after publication, in circumstances it 
> is painful to recall, and we must sadly mourn the recent passing of 
> Chandra, or at least the assembly of transplanted organs and 
> manufactured accessories to which we habitually referred as Chandra, I 
> am able to make a happy announcement.
> In collaboration with a dedicated and hardworking team of 
> paleosiliconologists, we have at last succeeded in simulating the 
> operating environment in which Rover originally existed. Rover's 
> original code was accessible and well preserved, but many of the 
> protocols, interfaces and drivers had been lost in the mists of time. We 
> also had to provide Rover with a large body of compatible information to 
> index, and simulate a sufficiently tantalising range of chat rooms 
> around which to lurk. The discovery of a server farm preserved in peat 
> in Belgium provided what proved to be the final pieces in the puzzle. So 
> it is, with the greatest pleasure, that I ask you to join me in 
> welcoming to the stage neither the mind, nor the body of Rover-12.23.
> 
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