Title: POPULAR FUNCTIONALISM:
Last saved by: Department of Philosophy
Company: University of Western Ontario

February 21, 2002

EXAM TIME CHANGE:  
10am (not 9) Sunday April 28

POPULAR FUNCTIONALISM:

Basement of MC: 	Cognitive Engineering Laboratory
60s Sci-fi:	confused computers/robots  (Bladerunner/Austin Powers/Star Trek)

The Chinese Room
•	Against strong AI: mind = computer program
•	Computers use syntactic manipulation, but this is not sufficient for semantics, or the contents

Aleksander: MAGNUS (Neural Representation Modeler)
•	Programming using direct representation of experience:
o	silicon neurons
o	feedback mechanisms
o	ego-centred representation
•	Problem with building an imaginative machine: consciousness remains ill-defined
•	“machine consciousness”?

NEIL POSTMAN:		
“INVISIBLE TECHNOLOGIES”

Stages of relationship between technology and culture:

Tool Use
Technology:
•	Is subject to some binding social or religious system
•	Serves either this system or practical problems

Technocracy
•	Technology plays a more important role in human thought.
•	There arises the notion of progress through invention that exists in tension with traditional social and religious systems;  tools conflict with culture and bid to become culture.

Technopoly
•	Technology  becomes secular religion —“totalitarian technocracy”

LANGUAGE: “INVISIBLE” TECHNOLOGY
Hidden (inconspicuous) ideological agenda:
•	Ideology integrated into our personalities and world-view; seems natural
•	More hidden than machines because inside us

EXAMPLES:

Questions
1.	multiple choice 
2.	smoking and praying
3.	no one buried alive/everyone buried dead

Zero — calculation without an abacus
•	makes calculation more accessible
•	makes complex calculations easier …

STATISTICS

Reification
=	making an abstract idea into a (“real”) material thing
[in other contexts associated with problems of essentialism]

1.	Francis Galton

SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPIC #2

According to Neil Postman, languages as much as machines are technologies, in part because how they work is “invisible”, that is to say inconspicuous.  Does this make languages the sort of technological devices David Strong argues are problematic?  Consider Margaret Lowe Benston’s argument that the popularity of language about technology reinforces sexist social structures.