A lot of what's said in On the Internet makes sense. I have just recently experienced the frustration of searching a database for a relevant article. (I had to have a relevant article from a database for my project.) It took me upwards of three hours to find anything remotely relevant and even then I had to have a friend of mine retrieve it from UK as Thomas More didn't have access to the full work. Frustrating. As I was doing this I couldn't help but desire wandering through the stacks and finding something new and fun and complete. In a library, there is no tempting you with the snippet of a book and then saying that, sorry, they don't have it. In that respect, then, Dreyfus seems to have a valid point. It's his reasoning for the failure of technology to predict human behavior that I am having trouble agreeing with.
Obviously, the fact that human beings have a body is a large difference between us and machines. But I am having a hard time grasping what exactly Drefus means by "body." Does he mean just the physical entity and parts (including the brain) or does he include the consciousness that comes from that? Human thought is, obviously, erratic. But is that caused by the body? Human reason seems to me to set us apart from machines in that we do not behave consistently and we have the ability to adapt and learn but I wonder if that is what Dreyfus means by "body?" Or does he just mean that the body is the reference point from whence all thought and common sense begins?
I am thinking about this.
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