Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ethics-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 16:10:07 -0500
From:         vwsetzer@IME.USP.BR
Subject: Re: Computers at elementary levels
Comments: To: ETHICS-L@UGA.bitnet

Woody Weaver writes (Tue, 17 Nov 1992):

>First of all, I am an animal, and there are times that I want to do
>conditioning.  I see nothing wrong with training reflexes.  The
idealist
>perspective that we are not animals may well be consistent but I think
is
>neither desirable nor effective in the classroom.

When Woody writes "I am an animal", he is proving that  he is not,
because
no animal is self-conscious and can say (or feel) "I". As a matter of
fact,
Woody, stand up and look at yourself with arms down. What do you see? An

I!!! No animal has this erect position (sometimes a 4-legged animal may

stand up but this is uncommon and it cannot stay very long in that
position). To stand up, one has to be conscious (the body falls down
if one gets asleep), that is, one's "I" has to be present. Now, what is
this "I"? Let's use language again - it reveals an intuitive knowledge
which we have lost during the development of our present-day thinking
abilities. One says "I have a body", and not "this body has me". We
also
say "I have a feeling, a thought". So our "I" is above all these
aspects.
No animal has an "I"; an animal belongs to a group-"I", which is unable
to
create as the human "I".
I consider one of the first ethical questions exactly this one: that we
are
not animals. Because if we consider ourselves as being just animals,
and
animals have no ethics - because they have no "I"... - many things will
be permissible. For instance, killing others. A further worse situation
arises when one considers the human being as a machine. Then
"suffering"
has no meaning. My fear is that AI induces the notions that humans are
machines - by using the latter to explain the former -, and that
machines will reach human status. I have already read some comments by
an AI researcher considering if we are allowed to disconnect a computer
from the wall socket... Unfortunately, I did not keep the reference.
So I consider it absolutely essential that we do not treat children
as animals - neither as machines - in the classroom. If one conducts
a class as some animal training (conditioning) we are reducing the
children
to animals, we are not considering them as superior beings, having an
"I" who is in the process of taking possession of everything that is
below "him" (I have a problem referring to the "I" as "it"...) - and
this
process is completed only at about 21 years of age. I would expect the
teacher to have respect and love towards his pupils in a degree that is
not possible towards animals. I would expect him to consider that he is
helping those "Is" to develop themselves, in order to become free
beings.
Animals are not free beings, they are slaves of their body and
conditioning.

Well, all this requires a certain vision of the world, a
"Weltanschaaung".
A materialist will not agree with me. But I do not consider myself as
being
mystic. I try to have no faith and try to be objective. But being
"objective" does not mean that one has limit oneself to what one's
sensory organs and mathematics reveal.

As for a program being a mathematical "object": it is exactly that, and
nothing more. It may have some aesthetics, as simple mathematical
proofs and formulas also have. The fact that a machine runs the program
and gives some "seeable" result does not change the program's degree
of abstraction, which does not depend on the level of the language
being
used - be it machine language or some algorithmic one.
When a child does some programming or uses text editor commands,
he/she  is using pure abstract thoughts - which I consider
to be proper only at a later age (at least after puberty - preferably
after age 17).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+using computers in elementary education means polluting the child's
mind+
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



Valdemar W. Setzer
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Sao Paulo
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU