You wrote a fascinating piece here about the computer creatures. You wrote:
>>The
creatures have some ability to utilize the computer's facilities -- network
connections, attached videocameras (the chaos theorist works in an
industrial vision research lab) to find out about the world around them,
and they carry on dialogs with their creator in an effort to understand
their world. The creator tries to answer their questions, but no matter
how many times he answers certain questions, regardless of the level of
detail, there seems to be little or no understanding on the part of the
electronic creatures. For example, the question of why he created them in
the first place. He has answered quite honestly that he created them
because he thought there would be considerable value in having "smart
assistants" available which could perform various search and control tasks.
He has answered that question many times, and he has told them many times
why he needs to do the tasks in the first place. They seem somewhat
satisfied with the answer "to learn things," but he's also told them that he
needs to perform these tasks to put food on the table, and that has
invariably led to more questions with ever more detailed answers, with the
creatures finally breaking off the questioning, indicating they have given up
and are drifting off to other, more fruitful, pursuits.
Could it be that we simply lack the sensory and/or mental capacity to
understand the answers? <<
Granted that there is much we can not understand, but in your analogy, the
programmer did answer his creatures questions honestly. He didn't tell them
falsehoods i.e., that he didn't eat food or that He wrote them in fortran or
even that the creatures were flesh and blood. Assuming that the creatures
had the ability to learn and grow, as we do, then someday they might
understand the answers or at least some of them. That is the problem with
trying to get out of the issue in this fashion.
glenn