The Thinking Toilet

 Recently, I started reading this book by Douglas Hofstadter called I Am A Strange Loop. It is a very complex and interesting book about the realities of consciousness and reality. I'm only on chapter 5, but it has already blown my mind with new and interesting ideas. One of which is the thinking toilet.

Hofstadter introduces this topic by explaining how a toilet works; without going into extreme depth, the handle raises a rubber plug that initiates a siphon that flushes the toilet. When this rubber plug misses the hole, the toilet will automatically refill and flush again in an attempt to get the plug back into its spot. We can explain this phenomenon by saying that the toilet is trying to fix the leak, but it can't. These words are italicized because it sounds as if the toilet has a desire to flush correctly. But can a toilet desire something like we can?

The knee-jerk reaction to such a question would be no, a toilet cannot think and therefore cannot desire something like I desire a coffee, or even like a sunflower desires to face the sun. Hofstadter tackles this problem by defining a feedback loop system. A soccer ball, thrown into a halfpipe, would eventually fall to the very bottom of the structure, because, due to physics, that outcome is the state that the system ultimately desires, similar to the toilet desiring to be successfully flushed. If we watched a time-lapse of a sunflower, we would see a similar behavior: the seemingly random attempts to reach a desired state.

What do you think? Do these systems desire? Are we just complex systems?