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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> If that piece of plastic was made with the intent of being eye-catching than I think it's fair to say that "it's trying to catch the eye"

Ok, but the intent does not reside in the plastic, the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye.

> Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?

The article seems to imply that these inanimate objects exert some kind of influence on us (and possibly on other inanimate objects?). If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them? The philosopher in the article seems to be saying that they can draw her form a distance without her even seeing them.

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> the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye.

What if the creator is dead? The only place the intent can reside, then, is in the things they left. And the only thing I'm trying to say here is that 'intent' is a word with undefined semantics. Its only job is to be useful, not to actually point to a thing in the physical world.

> If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them?

I'm not sure where in the article 'influence' was described in this way - as an aether, basically. It doesn't follow that if inanimate things have influence, we don't need to interact with them in order to feel it, or that if I were 300 light years away, I would still be able to feel the influence of a shiny plastic thing. What the writer is talking about isn't well defined, but it's not acausal either.

> What if the creator is dead? The only place the intent can reside, then, is in the things they left

Then the intent died with the creator. The can opener doesn't have as it's intent the opening of cans. The designer of the can opener designed it with that intent in mind. The can opener has no mind. We can see the designers intent in the can opener, sure, but the can opener has no intention in itself to open cans and cannot do so without some human picking up the can opener and using it to open the can.

As you're kind of implying, both 'intent' and 'design' are ideas that sort of revolve around the 'mind', which makes this whole discussion prone to being metaphysics. If for example you think that the designer doesn't have a mind, then intent isn't something that people do but rather something that sort of happens to things. It could be the case that the designer made the can opener exclusively for right-handed people and doesn't even know about it. We can still say the can opener is intended only for right-handed people, but the origin of that intent is much more ephemeral- it's the intent of a predominantly right-handed society or whatever.

The observer effect xD

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