Comment by xg15
4 hours ago
Was thinking the same. Air, water and fire have no intents and yet we get hurricanes, flash floods and wildfires.
Also, repeating a point from a similar thread: Software can have "intent" in the sense that it steers itself towards a predefined goal without having to be "alive" or "conscious" in any way. Some classic examples are thermostat control loops, navigation systems and chess engines.
We don't try to "align" those things themselves - so maybe there are some learnings there about control, containment, processes etc.
> Air, water and fire have no intents and yet we get hurricanes, flash floods and wildfires
yes but we don't blame the hurricane, we blame the people who didn't do any hurricane prevention or didn't put the snow avalanche sign up.
>Some classic examples are thermostat control loops, navigation systems and chess engines.
Those don't have intent. The people who made them for a purpose have. In fact this is true for all computers. Computers don't compute, people do, using computers. This is the nonsense of modern ontology that David Bentley Hart frequently writes about. The computer is only computing insofar as an intentional mind instructs it do so, and then because of their reductionist assumptions some people use the computer metaphor, and that is all that it is, to deny that human minds possess intent to begin with in the first place.