Miguel Alex Cardenas
Cindy Skach
Title: The Complete Works of Aristotle - "On Plants"
Editor: Jonathan Barnes
Summary:
This paper was written to figure out if plants have souls. Aristotle says plants desire food, which leads to other things such as sensations. Because they can desire it leads to things like joy and sadness. It was said that joy and sadness is represented by the falling of their leaves. Aristotle then goes on to analyze plant traits such as their ability to sleep and wake. Many more things are compared to make Aristotle think plants only have partial souls.
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| Aristotle |
Discussion:
This is an interesting paper because it can be compared to computers as well (hence the title "On Computers"). Aristotle goes through all of the characteristics of a plant that sound humanly, what about computers? This could relate to the idea of the Chinese Room idea. The computer in this idea is able to trick a human into thinking it is another Chinese person and not a computer. This is done with the ability to communicate. This is interesting because the more stuff we make computers do, one thing that comes to mind is robots, it seems like they get more humanly, when infact they are just hardware and software designed by humans. Reading this made me think of Walle. Even though I think that computers in no way have a soul it is cool to compare all of the similarities with Aristotles ideas. Maybe he would change his opinion if he saw the world today.
Computers do indeed have more cognitive thinking than plants. I agree that Aristotle's arguments for plants can easily be abstracted to apply to computers. The lines between humanity and computers are more blurred with every passing year. After all, isn't the best computer one that behaves exactly like one would think it would, thus like a human?
ReplyDeleteYou make a very good point by bringing up the topic of communication. Does the ability of a computer to seamlessly communicated with a human make it intelligent? does this mean is it a living object?
ReplyDeleteEven though this paper makes a reasonable argument given his data, after reading the Chinese Room paper you would have to refute Aristotle's argument.
ReplyDelete