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68 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

itself away if all you have to go on are electrical readings. (I dare say the cat would make its displeasure know if left in there for any time.) The contents are, therefore, said to be black box equivalent.

The reason for teaching engineers about black boxes is to help them understand how to simplify things. We could construct option four, with a cat and some food, but it would cost a great deal of money. Option 1 is functionally identical from an electrical point of view, but for a fraction of the cost. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were so successful when they started Apple because Wozniak was brilliant at simplifying logic circuits. He could take a design with thirty chips and come back with a black box equivalent solution using only five. It was a fraction of the cost and far more reliable.

Scientists put great store in black box equivalence because of a principle called Occam's Razor. William of Occam was an English Franciscan friar living in the fourteenth century. He proposed the idea of minimal explanation. It states that, ‘among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected’. When trying to explain the workings of a black box, the more complicated inner workings should be discarded, as they have no externally verifiable effect over the simpler mechanism. Our extraneous animal must be eliminated! Sorry.

Ironically, given his calling, Occam's Razor is sometimes wheeled out as a disproof of the existence of God. Surely God is a complication unnecessary to the explanation of our Universe. The argument is illustrated beautifully in Carl Sagan's book Contact and the film of the same name. God gets the last laugh in Sagan's book when the difficulty with Occam's Razor is brought into sharp focus. Occam's Razor contains an inherent paradox. At any moment in time we only have evidence to support the simplest of explanations, yet we know many of these simple explanations are incomplete. We regularly discover new phenomenon – dark matter and dark energy being some recent examples. If we stopped discovering new things, Occam's Razor would be a good way to simplify our thoughts. Occam's Razor is a useful intellectual tool to prevent us over complicating explanations, but there will often be explanations that are correct, but for which there is not yet any observed effect.

If we go back to our black box example, we see the flaw in concluding the boxes are identical from examining only their inputs and outputs. Opening them would clearly show they are not identical! But, how would this fact reveal itself if they remain closed? The answer is: over time. If something in the box has memory or understanding, it could present one set of results for a while and a completely different set of results later.

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