The Sorta Operator

21. THE SORTA OPERATOR

Why indulge in this “sorta” talk? Because when we analyze—or synthesize—this stack of ever-more competent levels, we need to keep track of two facts about each level: what it is and what it does. What it is can be described in terms of the structural organization of the parts from which it is made—so long as we can assume that the parts function as they are supposed to function. What it does is some (cognitive) function that it (sorta) performs—well enough so that at the next level up, we can make the assumption that we have in our inventory a competent building block that performs just that function—sorta, good enough to use. This is the key to breaking the back of the mind-bogglingly complex question of how a mind could ever be composed of material mechanisms. At the dawn of the computer age, Alan Turing, who deserves credit as the inventor of the computer if anybody does, saw this prospect. He could start with mindless bits of mechanism, without a shred of mentality in them, and organize them into more competent mechanisms, which in turn could be organized into still more competent mechanisms, and so forth without apparent limit. What we might call the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin’s gradualism in evolutionary processes (more on this in part VI). Before there were bacteria, there were sorta bacteria, and before there were mammals, there were sorta mammals, and before there were dogs, there were sorta dogs, and so on.

We need Darwin’s gradualism to explain the huge difference between an ape and an apple, and we need Turing’s gradualism to explain the huge difference between a humanoid robot and a hand calculator. The ape and the apple are made of the same basic ingredients, differently structured and exploited in a many-level cascade of different functional competences. There is no principled dividing line between a sorta ape and an ape. Both the humanoid robot and the hand calculator are made of the same basic, unthinking, unfeeling Turing-bricks, but as we compose them into larger, more competent structures, which then become the elements of still more competent structures at higher levels, we eventually arrive at parts so (sorta) intelligent that they can be assembled into competences that deserve to be called comprehending. We use the intentional stance to keep track of the beliefs and desires (or “beliefs” and “desires” or sorta beliefs and sorta desires) of the (sorta-) rational agents at every level from the simplest bacterium through all the discriminating, signaling, comparing, remembering circuits that comprise the brains of animals from starfish to astronomers. There is no principled line above which true comprehension is to be found—even in our own case. The small child sorta understands her own sentence “Daddy is a doctor,” and I sorta understand “E = mc 2.” Some philosophers resist this anti-essentialism (see chapter 43): either you believe that snow is white or you don’t; either you are conscious or you aren’t; nothing counts as an approximation of any mental phenomenon; it’s all or nothing. And to such thinkers, the powers of minds are insoluble mysteries because minds are “perfect,” and perfectly unlike anything to be found in mere material mechanisms.