work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people
who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would
use language that seemds to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set
behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a
naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of
feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the
things they work on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers
who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program
behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.

Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic
ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the
minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are
biological machines - consciousness is an interesting and valuable
epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not
fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from
computers.

Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference
between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon
and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a
thing `alive', is information and richness of pattern. This is animism
from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins
and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of
`consciousness' according to their information-processing capacity.

Because hackers accept a that a human machine can have intentions, it
is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to