Even if they had a materialist account of mind, why would their experience of mechanism lead them to believe mechanism could be sped up or greatly enhanced as in intelligence explosion scenarios? I’m not familiar with Greek atomist approaches to the mind, but later materialist ideas viewed the nervous system as analogous to a pneumatic system, with “animal spirits” or corpuscles being pumped into muscles from the brain. Given the mechanist analogy with a pneumatic system, why would they think this system could be greatly improved by operating on itself? Can any sense be made of a self-modifying pneumatic system? It’s not until you get computation that self-improvement seems “obvious.” It was Turing who first proposed that a self-modifying computer program could learn and improve and I’m not sure that you could come to that conclusion with anything less than what Turing knew, since you need both the generality of recursion theory and the notion of a mechanical implementation of it (the latter of which Turing supplied).
Even if they had a materialist account of mind, why would their experience of mechanism lead them to believe mechanism could be sped up or greatly enhanced as in intelligence explosion scenarios? I’m not familiar with Greek atomist approaches to the mind, but later materialist ideas viewed the nervous system as analogous to a pneumatic system, with “animal spirits” or corpuscles being pumped into muscles from the brain. Given the mechanist analogy with a pneumatic system, why would they think this system could be greatly improved by operating on itself? Can any sense be made of a self-modifying pneumatic system? It’s not until you get computation that self-improvement seems “obvious.” It was Turing who first proposed that a self-modifying computer program could learn and improve and I’m not sure that you could come to that conclusion with anything less than what Turing knew, since you need both the generality of recursion theory and the notion of a mechanical implementation of it (the latter of which Turing supplied).