C+ Gang - Simon Penny's "Making Sense" - Week 5

We started this week's session with a fierce argument pertaining to Penny's Chess analogy. One of the members of our group argued that Penny's argument was 'self-indulgent' and that as opposed to what Penny was saying; we program computers to think like us and thus they are structured the same way. Another member of the group then argued that this member was looking at it from 'machine to human', whereas Penny was looking at it from 'human to machine' and saying that while there may be similarities, "human memory is creative" (5) and among other reasons, don't necessarily operate in according to such a "system of logical rules" (10).

Going back to the broader topic addressed in the book, we all acknowledged that Penny was trying to "revalorize artistic practices in terms of embodied and situated cognition" (xxix), among other things. From what we've read in chapter 1, he made a point that ideologies that equate the human mind and machine thinking used self-reinforcing evidence to support their claims of the brain being the same as a computer. Our group had mixed reactions to Penny's arguments on the matter — thus resulting in the aforementioned argument — but in the end, we all came to see that his points certainly had some validity. Following that, we asked ourselves whether or not the military already had a computer system that includes the elements that Penny feels are missing. On that same line of thought, we also considered his points about the metaphors being adopted into our language as if they weren't metaphors anymore and wondered what these would become as our technology shifts further and further forward.