Thanks for the footnote. I read through most of the article and though I do think there are entities that just behave and reason by values — largely machines and animals — I think it can be shown fairly simply that humans do not, regardless of the hypotheses that are out there. I think the problem can be given a definitive response either working axiomatically or experimentally.

For the purposes of this short response a simple thought experiment based on Pavlov’s classic experiment suffices to bring out the point: a dog in the presence of a turned on light is given food, then conditioned to expect this food every time the light is turned on. As the experiment classically goes, when the light is turned on and the dog is not presented food, the dog goes into a fit, a sort of nervous breakdown. Translated into a value argument, once the values of on = food and off = non-food are not respected, it sends the conditioned system (= dog) into a breakdown.

What is the difference with a human?

Many experiments have tried to reproduce these Pavlovian results with humans with dismal failures from the beginning. For instance, a human when conditioned with a light on=food and light off=nonfood, will actually at some point (out of boredom, play, hallucination, perversion, etc.) turn the system around so that when the light is on and food is present, a human will still claim there is no food, or inversely when the light is off and there is no food, a human will claim there is food. Anyone who has tried to feed a child as compared to a dog automatically notices how much more difficult it is to feed a child.

Moral of the story? The ability of the human to hallucinate and make up values that are not there — or not read values that are there — is crucial to really beginning to distinguish a human act of reading/writing from mere decoding/coding of values. This much said,admittedly there are humans who can reason and act like animals and machines.

In any case, thanks for the opportunity to work a few things out on my morning tea break …

S