Dramatic Foundations - Computers as Theatre - page 68

element of thought in a given play may be described as concerned with cer-
tain specifi c ethical questions, for example). Although it may be explicitly
expressed in the form of dialogue, thought is inferred , by both the audience
and the other characters (agents), from a character's choices and actions. In
his application of a theatrical analogy to the domain of artifi cial intelligence,
Julian Hilton (1991) puts it this way: “What the audience does is supply the
inferencing engine which drives the plot, obeying Shakespeare's injunction
to eke out the imperfections of the play (its incompleteness) with its mind.”
If we extend it to include human-computer interaction, this defi nition
of thought leads to a familiar conundrum: Can computers think? There
is an easy way out of it; computer-based agents, like dramatic characters,
don't have to think , they simply have to provide a representation from which
thought may be inferred .
When a folder on my Macintosh opens to divulge its contents in re-
sponse to my double-click, the representation succeeds in getting me to
infer that that's exactly what happened; i.e., the “system” understood my
input, inferred my purpose, and did what I wanted. Was the “system” (or
the folder) “thinking” about things this way? The answer, I think, is that it
doesn't matter. The real issue is that the representation succeeded in getting
me to make the right inferences about its “thoughts.” It also succeeded in
representing to me that it made the right inferences about mine.
Thought is the formal cause of language; it shapes what an agent com-
municates through the selection and arrangement of signs, and thus also
has a formal infl uence on pattern and enactment. Language is the material
of thought in two senses. First is the perhaps overly limiting assumption
that agents employ language, or the language-like manipulation of sym-
bols, in the process of thinking. This assumption leads to the idea that char-
acters in a play use the language of the play quite literally as the material
for their thoughts.
I favor a somewhat broader interpretation of material causality; the
thought of a play can appropriately deal only with what can reasonably be inferred
from enactment, pattern, and language . Most of us have seen plays in which
characters get ideas “out of the blue”—suddenly remembering the location
of a long-lost will, for instance, or using a fact to solve a mystery that has
been withheld from the audience thus far. Such thoughts are unsatisfying
(and mar the play) because they are not drawn from the proper material. In
ancient Greek theatre, the Deus ex Machina (Latin for “god in the machine”)
serves as an excellent example. A god shows up, typically lifted by a crane,
to provide the solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem.