JargonFile/entries/Anthropomorphization.txt

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 consciousness 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 other 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 abstract 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. It has also been suggested that
anthropomorphizing complex systems is actually an expression of humility, a
way of acknowleging that simple rules we do understand (or that we invented)
can lead to emergent behavioral complexities that we don't completely
understand. All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and
should be considered complementary rather than competing.