Anthropomorphization definition

Anthropomorphization





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From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  Anthropomorphization
  
  Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
  tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and
  academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
  anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior


  to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers
  anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of
  wants and desires.
  
  Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it
  has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires.
  Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are
  trying" to do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in life is
  to X". Or: "You can't run those two cards on the same bus; they fight over
  interrupt 9."
  
  One even hears explanations like "... and its poor little brain couldn't
  understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things this way actually
  seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively
  natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as
  `like a person' rather than `like a thing'.
  
  At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually
  work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who
  know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use
  language that seems to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set behind
  this tendency thus demands examination.
  
  The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a
  naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling
  empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work
  on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are
  expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view
  of human behavior.
  
  Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology
  of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with
  contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines
  - consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is
  implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in
  information-processing capacity from computers.
  
  Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference
  between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and
  metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing
  `alive', is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the
  flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are
  all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of `consciousness' according
  to their information-processing capacity.
  
  Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is
  therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to complex
  patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is
  neither more or less absurd to say that "The program wants to go into an
  infinite loop" than it is to say that "I want to go eat some chocolate" -
  and even defensible to say that "The stone, once dropped, wants to move
  towards the center of the earth".
  
  This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel
  Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the
  "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the "design
  stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the "intentional
  stance" (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and intentions).
  Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of truth but of utility.
  Hackers typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more
  complex ones are often modelled using the intentional stance.
  
  It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and
  hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and his
  artifacts - the human qualities belong to the programmer and the code
  merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a hacker
  saying a piece of code 'got confused' is really saying that _he_ (or she)
  was confused about exactly what he wanted the computer to do, the code
  naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code expressed the
  programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise misbehaving.
  
  Note that by displacing from "I got confused" to "It got confused", the
  programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting some
  analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug
  dispassionately.
  
  Both explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be
  considered complementary rather than competing.
  
  

















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