"Perhaps you read about the case a few year's ago involving Target. The store began sending coupons for pregnancy related products to a teenage girl. The girl's father was incensed. Were they trying to get her to have a kid in high school? Target's management was embarrassed and apologized profusely. It turned out the girl was pregnant. Target — no one exactly, a computerized pattern detecter — surmised this before she had told her father, based on information about her shopping behavior. It is possible...to know what someone knows before she has made the information public to anyone at all...
Actually, the point is more far-reaching still. What it is to be thinking this or that, what it is to intend this or that, is precisely for one to be integrated, in the right sort of way, in a complex causal or informational network. This is controversial, but it is remarkably well established. Indeed, it is the very foundation of the theory of computation. Computers aren't smart because they have, inside them, clever thoughts. No. What makes the micro-electronic states of a computer intelligent, or just contentful — for example, what makes it the case that a computer is performing this or that task — is the way those internal states are hooked up, causally, and systematically, to the right kinds of inputs and outputs. Computers don't need to understand what's going on inside of them to solve problems."--From NPR, 13.7.
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