Back in the days, there were elevator operators, people whose job was to go up and down in an elevator all day, stopping at the right floors to take on and let off passengers. Now imagine what happened when it became possible for a simple computer program to take over all the control tasks of the operator. A machine has replaced one actual human being—not a figurative homunculus. And the machine follows the same rules as the human operator. Does it really? Really? Ok, it doesn’t. It sorta follows the same rules. This is a nice intermediate case between a human being who memorizes—and hence literally represents in her mind, and consults— the rules that dictate her behavior, and the planets, whose orbits are elegantly described by equations that the planets “obey.” We human beings also often occupy an intermediate level, when we have internalized or routinized through practice a set of explicit rules that we may then discard or even forget (“i” before “e” except after “c” or when it sounds like “a” as in “neighbor” and “weigh”).
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
