On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There's nothing tortuous about it. No matter how you slice it, there's > a set of conscious, thinking, Turing-test-passing entities that have > fundamental controls that are behind every shell we've allowed to register, > that are "final" causal agents, in that things are sent because "they" > want them to be sent. It might be a "collective" They that set an > automatic process in motion, but it's still comes down to such entities. > Hide the shells all you want, but we thinking entities are still the > originating "cause" of all game actions. (Yes, I believe it ultimately > comes down to the source of Free Will; even if Free Will doesn't exist > we are playing agora as if it does). > > I will change my tune the day you show me that a group of you have let > loose a new entity that on its own can actually pass a turing test etc.
Well, there's a fundamental practical problem with this viewpoint: it's more common, of course, for a single human, rather than Googlebot, to cause the PNP to send messages. However, it is possible for no record to exist of which human did so: unless you want to ask the administrator of the server on whcih PerlNomic runs for the httpd access logs, that is already true for voting messages. Anyway, there's no reason that the ability to pass a Turing test should be the determinant for whether something can send messages. In ordinary language, if I sign up on a website, and the website sends me an email to confirm my email address, I don't say that the email was sent by myself, or by the board administrator; I say it was sent from the website, or more specifically, from some script there. In THIS case, though, if Phill is not ehird, it is an entity with no basis in the physical world which certainly does not have the capability to send email messages. So I'd agree with you that it might be impossible to ratify that it did so, but that doesn't hold true for all entities. Heh, maybe I should set up a script that plays on behalf of a partnership without any human intervention, voting on proposals in some odd manner (FOR if it contains an odd number of lines or the word "repeal"). Even better if the partnership were, say, elected CotC...
