I happened to think of a toy I had when I was a kid. It was an orange car, maybe a foot long, that was ‘programmable’. It had a slot in the front that accepted a purple plastic ‘card’ about an inch wide and about four inches long. There were notches in the sides. Levers inside of the car read the notches and caused the motor to start and the wheels to steer. One strip would send the car in a figure-eight, another would make it run an oval, and so on. When the strip had run through the car it the motor was turned off and the strip was ejected out the back. I wish I could remember what it was called.
I’m sure most of us have seen clockwork or electric toys that sense the end of a table or an obstacle and change direction. This seems a bit more ‘adaptable’ to me than my toy car, as the car will happily run off a table while following the route it was programmed to do and the other toys will exercise a form of ‘self preservation’.
The next link in my chain of thoughts is a suggestion in an article about whether fish feel pain are nothing more than ‘clockwork toys’. (I think that’s the wording. I no longer have the magazine.) The debate was whether fish respond to stimuli out of ‘pain’, or if they are merely exhibiting preprogrammed behaviour. (If a fish has nociceptors, then it has the apparatus to feel a sensation that might be construed as ‘pain’; though I personally don’t believe that they have the ‘brainpower’ to experience the emotional component of pain, and thus do not feel ‘pain’ as we know it.)
And of course, there’s Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent where (boxed, just in case):
A god creates the cockroach and gives it simple instructions: Head for the dark, eat, and reproduce.
Given that some animals’ ‘programming’ seems pretty simple, how far removed from
clockwork toys’ are they, who carry on their programmed tasks and then die when their springs run down? And if a paramecium is a clockwork toy, then at what point does an animal become ‘real’?
I agree completely. That’s why I’m not a vegetarian.
Hm. I really didn’t want to get into the ‘free will’ thing. I guess it isn’t avoidable though. Does a microscopic animal have free will? Does it choose to eat or not eat? Or do its instructions say ‘You will eat now.’?
I don’t know about that – some animal behaviour is clearly on a much lower order of complexity.
There’s a species of wasp called the sphex that can easily get stuck in a loop stuck in a loop stuck in a loop, if you interrupt it while it runs its “program.”
It digs a burrow, paralyzes its prey, drags it back to the entrance of the burrow, leaves it there and goes in to “inspect” the hole.
If you move the prey while the wasp is inside, it knocks it back in its program – the bug must be a specific distance away from the entrance, and then the hole is checked out. Change that condition, and it runs the subroutine again, and it doesn’t matter that the conditions of the following subroutine have already been met, it doesn’t know that. When the prey is consistently moved during the inspection, researchers have observed the wasp ceaselessly going through the same motions, until the researcher gets bored and lets the program complete.
The wasp is not frustrated, confused, angry, or anything. It’s just running the wasp program.
Maybe we’re just running human programs, too – but our behaviour is more complex than anything that is analogous with clockwork.