Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the
hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software.
English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look
down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software,
considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive
misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely,
frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and
desires.
Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as
though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with
intentions and desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got
confused", or that programs "are trying" to do things, or one may
say of a routine that "its goal in life is to X". One even hears
explanations like "... and its poor little brain
couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things
this way actually seems to make them easier to understand,
perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything
with a really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a person'
rather than `like a thing'.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs
actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among
the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd
that they would use language that seemds to ascribe conciousness
to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands
examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't
done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the
sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe
that the things they work on every day are `alive'. To the
contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a
vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of
human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic
ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the
minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people
are biological machines - consciousness is an interesting and
valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery
which is not fundamentally different in information-processing
capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the
difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a
substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one;
what matters, what makes a thing `alive', is information and
richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it
implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all
machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of `consciousness'
according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept a that a human machine can have
intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe
consciousness and intention to complex patterned systems such as
computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or
less absurd to say that "The program wants to go into an infinite
loop" than it is to say that "I want to go eat some chocolate" -
and even defensible to say that "The stone, once dropped, wants
to move towards the center of the earth".
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy.
Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three
stances: the "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a
physical object), the "design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as
an artifact), and the "intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained
as an agent with desires and intentions). Which stances are
appropriate is a matter not of truth but of utility. Hackers
typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more
complex ones are modelled using the intentional stance.
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