18th
ok, I guess I’m inspired: more Lyotard / this time: “Can thought go on without a Body”
You know—technology wasn’t invented by us humans. Rather the other way around. As anthropologists and biologists admit, even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae synthesized by light at the edges of tidepools a few million years ago) are already technical devices. Ant material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behaviour, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts the environment so as to assure its perpetuation at last. A human being isn’t different in nature from an object of this type. It’s equipment for absorbing data isn’t exceptional compared to other living things. What’s true is that this human being is omnivorous when dealing with information because it has a regulating system (codes and rules of processing) that’s more differentiated and a storage capacity for its memory that’s greater than those of other living things. Most of all it’s equipped with a symbolic system that’s both arbitrary (in semantics and syntax), letting it be less dependent on an immediate environment, and also ‘recursive’ (Hofstadter), allowing it to take into account (above and beyond raw data) the way it has of processing that data. That is, itself. Hence, of processing as information its own rules in turn and of inferring other ways of processing information. A human, in short, is a living organization that is not only complex but, so to speak, replex. It can grasp itself as a medium (as in medicine) or as an object )as in thought—I mean aesthetic as well as speculative thought). It can even abstract itself from itself and take into account only its rules of processing, as in logic and mathematics. The opposite limit of this symbolic recursiveness resides in the necessity by which it is bound (whatever its meta-level of operation) at the same time to maintain regulations that guarantee its survival in any environment whatsoever. Isn’t that exactly what constitutes the basis of your transcendence through immanence? Now, until the present time, this environment has been terrestrial. The survival of the thinking-organization requires exchanges with that environment such that the human body can perpetuate itself there. This is equally true of the quintessential meta-function—philosophical thought. To think, at the very least you have to breathe, eat etc. You are still under he obligation to ‘earn a living.’
The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought. If this body is not properly functioning, the ever so complex operations, the meta-regulations to the third or fourth power, the controlled deregulations of which you philosophers are so fond , are impossible. Your philosophy of the endless end, of immortal death, of interminable difference, of the undecidable, is an expression, perhaps the expression par excellence, of meta-regulation itself. It’s as if it took itself into account as meta. Which is all well and good. But don’t forget—this faculty of being able to change levels referentially derives solely from the symbolic and recursive power of language. Now language is simple the most complex form of the (living and dead) ‘memories’ that regulate all living things and make them technical objects better adjusted to their surroundings than mechanical ensembles. In other words, your philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called ‘man’ is endowed with very sophisticated software. BUt also, this software, human language, is dependent on the conditions of the hardware. NOw: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames.
So the problem of the technological sciences can be states as: how to provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth.
That is: how to make thought without the body possible. A thought that continues to exist after the death of the human body. This is the price to be paid if the explosion is to be conceivable, if the death of the sun is to be a death like other deaths we know about. Thought without a body is the prerequisite for thinking of the death of all bodies, solar or terrestrial, and of the death of thoughts that are inseparable from those bodies.
But ‘without a body’ in this exact sense: without the complex living terrestrial organism known as the human body. Not without hardware, obviously.
So theoretically the solution is very simple: manufacture hardware capable of ‘nurturing’ software at least as complex (or replex) as the present-day human brain, but in non-terrestrial conditions. That clearly means finding for the ‘body’ envisaged a ‘nutrient’ taht owes nothing to biochemical components synthesized on the surface of the earth through the use of solar energy. Or: learning to affect these syntheses in other places than on earth. In both cases then this means learning to manufacture a hardware capable of nourishing our software or its equivalent, but one maintained and supported only by sources of energy available in the cosmos generally.
It’s clear even to a lay person like myself taht the combined forces of nuclear physics, electronics, photonics and information science open up a possibility of constructing technical objects, with a capacity that’s not just physical but also cognitive, which ‘extract’ (that is, select, process and distribute) energies these objects need in order to function from forms generally found everywhere in the cosmos.
So much for the hardware. As for the software such machines are to be equipped with—that’s a subject for research in the area of artificial intelligence and for the controversies surrounding such research. You philosophers, writers and artists are quick the pathetic track record of today’s software programs. True—thinking or ‘representing’ machines (Monique Linard’s term) are weaklings compared to ordinary human brains, even untrained ones.
It can be objected that programmes fed into such computers are elementary and that progress can be expected in information science, artificial languages and communications science. Which is likely. But the main objection concerns the very principle of these intelligences. This objection has been summed up in a line of thought proposed by Hubert L. Dreyfus. Our disappointment in these organs of ‘bodiless thought’ comes from the fact that they operate on binary logic, one imposed on us by Russell’s and Whitehead’s mathematical logic, Turing’s machine, McCulloch’s and Pitt’s neuronal model, the cybernetics of Wiener and von Neumann, Boolian algebra and Shannon’s information science.
But as Dreyfus argues, human thought does not think in a binary mode. It doesn’t work with units of information (bits), but with intuitive, hypothetical configurations. It accepts imprecise, ambiguous data that don;t seem to be selected according to preestablished codes of readability, it doesn’t neglect side effects or marginal aspects of a situation. It isn’t just focused, but lateral too. Human thought can distinguish the important form the unimportant without doing exhaustive inventories of data and without testing the importance of data with respect to the goal pursued by a series of trials and errors. As Husserl has shown, thought becomes aware of a ‘horizon,’ aims at a ‘noema,’ a kind of object, a sort of non-conceptual monogram that provides it with intuitive configurations and opens up ‘in front of it’ a field of orientation and expectation, a ‘frame’ (MInsky). And in a such a framework, perhaps more like a scheme, it moves towards what it looks for by ‘choosing,’ that is, by discarding and recombining the data it needs, but none the less without making use of preestablished criteria determining in advance what’s appropriate to chose. This picture inevitably recalls teh description Kant gave of a thought process he called reflective judgement: a ode of thought not guided by rules for determining data, but showing itself as possibly capable of developing such rules afterwards on the basis of results obtained ‘reflexively.’
This description of a reflective thought opposed to determinate thought does not hide (in the work of Husserl or Dreyfus) what it owes to perceptual experience. A field of thought exists in the same way that there’s a field of vision (or hearing): the mid orients itself in it just as the eye does in the field of the visible. In France, this analogy was already central to Wallon’s work, for example, and also to Merleau-Ponty’s. It is ‘well known.’ None the less it has to be stressed this analogy isn’t extrinsic, but intrinsic. In its procedures it doesn’t only describe a thought analogous with an experience of perception. It describes a thought taht proceeds analogically—not logically. A thought in which therefore procedures of the type—’just as … so likewise …’ or ’ as if … then’ or again ‘as p is to q, so r is to s’ are privileged compared to digital procedures of the type ‘if … then’ and ‘p is not non-p.’ Now these are all paradoxical operations that constitute the experience of a body, of an ‘actual’ or phenomenological body in its space-time continuum of sensibility and perception. Which is why its appropriate to take the body as a model in the manufacture and programming of artificial intelligence if it’s intended that artificial intelligence not be limited to the ability to reason logically.
It’s obvious from this objection that what makes thought and the body inseparable isn’t just that the latter is the indispensable hardware for the former, a material prerequisite for existence. It’s that each of them is analogous to the other in its relationship with its respective (sensible, symbolic) environment: the relationship being analogical in both cases. In this description there are convincing grounds for not supporting the hypothesis (once suggested by HIlary Putnam) of a principle of the ‘separability’ of intelligence, a principle through which he believed he could legitimate an attempt to create artificial intelligence.
