The story was also dramatized in a segment of the movie Victim of the Brain, which is available in its entirety from Google Video. The relevant part begins at around 8:40.
Here is the description of the movie:
1988 docudrama about “the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter”. It was created by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos. Features interviews with Douglas Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. Dennett also stars as himself. Original acquired from the Center for Research in Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. Uploaded with permission from Douglas Hofstadter. Uploaded by Virgil Griffith.
That was fascinating. A lot of the point of the story—the implicit claim—was that you’d feel for an entity based on the way its appearance and behavior connected to your sympathy—like crying sounds eliciting pity.
In text that’s not so hard because you can write things like “a shrill noise like a cry of fright” when the simple robot dodges a hammer. The text used to explain the sound are automatically loaded with mental assumptions about “fright”, simply to convey the sound to the reader.
With video the challenge seems like it would be much harder. It becomes more possible that people would feel nothing for some reason. Perhaps for technical reasons of video quality or bad acting, or for reasons more specific to the viewer (desensitized to video violence?), or maybe because the implicit theory about how mind-attribution is elicited is simply false.
Watching it turned out to be interesting on more levels than I’d have thought because I did feel things, but I also noticed the visual tropes that are equivalent to mind laden text… like music playing as the robot (off camera) cries and the camera slowly pans over the wreckage of previously destroyed robots.
Also, I thought it was interesting the way they switched the roles for the naive mysterian and the philosopher of mind, with the mysterian being played by a man and the philosopher being played by a woman… with her hair pinned up, scary eye shadow, and black stockings.
The story was also dramatized in a segment of the movie Victim of the Brain, which is available in its entirety from Google Video. The relevant part begins at around 8:40.
Here is the description of the movie:
That was fascinating. A lot of the point of the story—the implicit claim—was that you’d feel for an entity based on the way its appearance and behavior connected to your sympathy—like crying sounds eliciting pity.
In text that’s not so hard because you can write things like “a shrill noise like a cry of fright” when the simple robot dodges a hammer. The text used to explain the sound are automatically loaded with mental assumptions about “fright”, simply to convey the sound to the reader.
With video the challenge seems like it would be much harder. It becomes more possible that people would feel nothing for some reason. Perhaps for technical reasons of video quality or bad acting, or for reasons more specific to the viewer (desensitized to video violence?), or maybe because the implicit theory about how mind-attribution is elicited is simply false.
Watching it turned out to be interesting on more levels than I’d have thought because I did feel things, but I also noticed the visual tropes that are equivalent to mind laden text… like music playing as the robot (off camera) cries and the camera slowly pans over the wreckage of previously destroyed robots.
Also, I thought it was interesting the way they switched the roles for the naive mysterian and the philosopher of mind, with the mysterian being played by a man and the philosopher being played by a woman… with her hair pinned up, scary eye shadow, and black stockings.
“She’s a witch! Burn her!”