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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Anthropomorphization</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="construction.html" title="Chapter 4. Jargon Construction"/><link rel="previous" href="inarticulations.html" title="Spoken inarticulations"/><link rel="next" href="comparatives.html" title="Comparatives"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Anthropomorphization</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="inarticulations.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 4. Jargon Construction</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="comparatives.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="anthropomorphization"/>Anthropomorphization</h2></div></div><div/></div><p>Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
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tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and
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academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for
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anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior to
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be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize
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freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and
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desires.</p><p>Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it
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has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires.
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Thus, one hears “<span class="quote">The protocol handler got confused</span>”, or that
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programs “<span class="quote">are trying</span>” to do things, or one may say of a routine
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that “<span class="quote">its goal in life is to X</span>”. Or: “<span class="quote">You can't run those
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two cards on the same bus; they fight over interrupt 9.</span>”</p><p>One even hears explanations like “... and its poor little
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brain couldn't understand X, and it died.” Sometimes modelling things
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this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because
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it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex
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behavioral repertoire as ‘like a person’ rather than ‘like a
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thing’.</p><p>At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually
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work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know
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best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that
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seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency
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thus demands examination.</p><p>The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a
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naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling
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empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on
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every day are ‘alive’. To the contrary: hackers who
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anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but
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a mechanistic view of human behavior.</p><p>Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology
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of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with
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contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines
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— consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is
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implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in
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information-processing capacity from computers. </p><p>Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference
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between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and
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metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing
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‘alive’, is information and richness of pattern. This is animism
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from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and
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rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of
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‘consciousness’ according to their information-processing
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capacity.</p><p>Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is
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therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other
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complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical,
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it is neither more or less absurd to say that “<span class="quote">The program wants to go
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into an infinite loop</span>” than it is to say that “<span class="quote">I want to go eat
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some chocolate</span>” — and even defensible to say that “<span class="quote">The
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stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the
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earth</span>”.</p><p>This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel
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Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the
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“<span class="quote">physical stance</span>” (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object),
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the “<span class="quote">design stance</span>” (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and
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the “<span class="quote">intentional stance</span>” (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with
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desires and intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of
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abstract truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from
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the design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled using the
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intentional stance.</p><p>It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and
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hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and his
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artifacts — the human qualities belong to the programmer and the code merely
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expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a hacker saying a
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piece of code ‘got confused’ is really saying that
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<span class="emphasis"><em>he</em></span> (or she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the
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computer to do, the code naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code
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expressed the programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise
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misbehaving. </p><p>Note that by displacing from “<span class="quote">I got confused</span>” to “<span class="quote">It
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got confused</span>”, the programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but
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rather getting some analytical distance in order to be able to consider the
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bug dispassionately.</p><p>It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is
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actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple rules we
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do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent behavioral
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complexities that we don't completely understand.</p><p>All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be
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considered complementary rather than competing.</p></div><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="inarticulations.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="construction.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="comparatives.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Spoken inarticulations </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Comparatives</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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