Sorry for the extended break, but I’ve got a prelim to write. I should be back to normal after the conference.
Footnote 21 from my dissertation proposal, “Rethinking Machines”, section 2.3, in which I discuss the objection that my view is suspiciously pan-psychist.
In other words, if I want to take out the trash, I can do it, I can get someone else to do it, I can get a robot or my pet to do it if I trained them in the right way, but waiting for the wind to take it out is rather futile. One might say the weather just isn’t very competent- it doesn’t play along.
Oh dear god what am I doing with my life.
Of course you know you need to cash out “play along” in such a way that it doesn’t beg any questions against your challengers who think that neither animals or robots “play along”. I don’t think that should be a problem for you, since you’re going to do so in terms of “participation”. But there again you need to cash out this term without begging any questions. This could go on ad infinitum. At some point you’re just going to have to bite some bullets and say “animals and robots really do ____.” Where ‘___’ is a structural descriptive name for a word or phrase in your metalanguage, which has been defined recursively via a Tarski-style deflationary truth definition…. wait. That don’t make no sense!
This excerpt is followed by a discussion of metaphoric uses of the notion of participation (including the one above), and why that’s not what I’m doing.
Don’t spend too many words focusing on what you aren’t doing. In terms of definining an idea, concept, species, etc it is usually best to stick to what attributes it does have since everything else is what it doesn’t have.