You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
The Culture of Computationalism In Silicon Valley you will meet Buddhists, anarchists, goddess worshippers, Ayn Rand fanatics, self-described Jesus freaks, nihilists, and plenty of libertarians, as well as surprising blends of all of the above and many others who seem to be nonideological. And yet there is one belief system that doesn’t quite mesh with any of these identities that nonetheless serves as a common framework. For lack of a better word, I call it computationalism. This term is usually used more narrowly to describe a philosophy of mind, but I’ll extend it to include something like a culture. A first pass at a summary of the underlying philosophy is that the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as subprocesses. In this chapter I will explore the uses of computationalism in scientific speculation. I will argue that even if you find computationalism helpful in understanding science, it should not be used in evaluating certain kinds of engineering.
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