[emodendroket]

Even if I take the more expansive possible interpretation of “body” typically applied to vehicles, the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile.

Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? It’s so ridiculous I would be shocked to see it outside of a story intended for children or an obvious nonnative speaker of English.

[hackinthebochs]

>the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile.

That's a choice to limit the meaning of the term to the rigid/immobile parts of the external boundary of an object. It's not obviously the correct choice. Presumably you don't take issue with people saying planes fly. The issue of submarines swimming seems analogous.

>Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”?

I don't think I've ever had a discussion about submarines with anyone, outside of the OceanGate disaster. But this whole approach to the issue seems misguided. With terms like this we should ask what the purpose behind the term is, i.e. it's intension (the concept), not the incidental extension of the term (the collection of things it applies to at some point in time). When we refer to something swimming, we mean that it is moving through water under its own power. The reference to "body" is incidental.

[emodendroket]

Which parts of the car does a "body shop" service?

[hackinthebochs]

Irrelevant, for the reasons mentioned

[emodendroket]

It's not really a "choice" to use words how they are commonly understood but a choice to do the opposite. The point of Dijkstra's example is you can slap some term on a fundamentally different phenomenon to liken it to something more familiar but it confuses rather than clarifies anything.

The point that "swim" is not very consistent with "fly" is true enough but not really helpful. It doesn't change the commonly understood meaning of "swim" to include spinning a propeller just because "fly" doesn't imply anything about the particular means used to achieve flight.

[hackinthebochs]

>It's not really a "choice" to use words how they are commonly understood but a choice to do the opposite.

I meant a collective choice. Words evolve because someone decides to expand their scope and others find it useful. The question here shouldn't be what do other people mean by a term but whether the expanded scope is clarifying or confusing.

The question of whether submarines swim is a trivial verbal dispute, nothing of substance turns on its resolution. But we shouldn't dismiss the question of whether computers think by reference to the triviality of submarines swimming. The question we need to ask is what work does the concept of thinking do and whether that work is or can be applied to computers. This is extremely relevant in the present day.

When we say someone thinks, we are attributing some space of behavioral capacities to that person. That is, a certain competence and robustness with managing complexity to achieve a goal. Such attributions may warrant a level of responsibility and autonomy that would not be warranted without it. A system that thinks can be trusted in a much wider range of circumstances than one that doesn't. That this level of competence has historically been exclusive to humans should not preclude this consideration. When some future AI does reach this level of competence, we should use terms like thinking and understanding as indicating this competence.

[emodendroket]

This sub thread started on the claim that regular, deterministic code is “thought.” I would submit that the difference between deterministic code and human thought are so big and obvious that it is doing nothing but confusing the issue to start insisting on this.