02/01/2024
The Artificiality of Natural Intelligence with David Bates
In this philosophy-heavy episode, Professor Robert Harrison and David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, discuss the “unnatural” origins of human technology and the difficulty of drawing sharp distinctions between artificial and natural intelligence. Songs in this episode: “Bourée” by Jethro Tull and “Ghost” by Fleetwood Mac.
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I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions and we're coming to you from the
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Allegiant Fields of KZSU. Our topic today is artificial intelligence and what
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it says about who we are and who we are not. The guest who joins me in the
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studio has just finished a book called an artificial history of natural
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intelligence. Do out later this year. Those of you who've heard our previous
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shows on this topic know that I for one believe that machine learning is a
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world historical event that calls for thinking. My guest is someone who responds
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to that call. He thinks beyond the technical and sociological aspects of
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AI and asks how its technology relates to, indeed, how it arises from within
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our human way of being. That human way of being is through and through historical
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but what exactly does that mean and what does machine learning have to do with
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being historical? What for that matter does it have to do with what
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hide-a-gir-called the history of being? Stay tuned friends and existential
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analytic of AI coming up.
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my guest is David Bates, a professor in the Department of
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rhetoric at UC Berkeley, whose most recent work deals with the intersections
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between technology, science and the history of human cognition. In his
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aforementioned new book to be published by the University of Chicago Press this
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spring, David Bates makes a compelling case for how the human mind is not simply a
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product of the brain but is instead the site of operations for several different
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systems, biological, sociopolitical and technical, among others. These systems, which are
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always entangled in the human condition, often conflict with one another, even as they
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work together to maintain the cohesion of social groups and the survival of
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biological individuals. Here's a quote to ponder. What we mean by the mind is
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the continuing and always failing attempt to bring unity to the multiple systems
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in play. As such, the mind is not itself a unity with given norms and therefore
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an object of scientific study, but instead an evolving contingent effort to
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capture the varying logics of survival that stem from our biological,
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sociopolitical and technical systems. The mind is both defined by these systems and is
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resolutely not these systems. With that, let's hear directly from the author of
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that quote, David Bates, welcome to entitled opinions. I'm glad you could join us today.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. And that quote I read rather
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heavy quote comes from the end of your book and there's a lot to unpack in that,
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but I'm particularly interested in the word failing in that parentheses, where
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you say that the human mind is the continuing and always failing attempt to bring
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unity to the multiple systems in play. And in a culture, an American culture that
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glorifies winning, I think it's very interesting to suggest that being human is
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in some fundamental respect and ongoing failure to achieve an ultimate
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coherence of being, you refer often to the concept of error in your book and
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distinguish it from, let's say, existential error and see. So maybe we could begin
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with how you understand this open-ended kind of self-transending
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errancy of the human condition. Sure, I think that's a great place to start.
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Maybe to begin with a metaphor that was very popular back in the 18th century,
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which is to think about metaphorically the field of knowledge as a kind of
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territory. So there's parts of the territory that are well-known, that are mapped out,
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these sort of like roads and systems of orientation. We can make mistakes
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sometimes within that orientation. We might go down the wrong road, we might go
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the wrong direction. There may be neighborhoods that we don't know very well,
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and we might make a mistake, but fundamentally the area is known and can be
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measured. The error can be measured against the truth of the map. When I think
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about errancy, it's when we go off the map and we're in a new territory, a
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territory that doesn't offer any clear indication of the path. And that's where
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a human being seems to be different kinds of creatures than animals. We seem to
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be called to this open space and capable of leaving the known territory and
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seeking insight in this new territory. Yeah, so we're thrown into the
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unfamiliar exactly. And perhaps we're always in the realm of the unfamiliar,
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but we have strategies by which we try to forget that we're in the mist of
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the strange and we live within our everyday kind of familiar worlds. I think
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that's a really important point is that it's not that we really have a known
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normal and solid reality that we then stray from to discover a new world.
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The world that is supposedly so familiar to us is actually very mysterious and
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highly contingent and actually constantly in motion as well. Yeah, for sure.
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That reminds me really of the old-on man in the famous old-on man in
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Sophocles in Tigany where heavily commented by Heidegger among others about
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there is much that is strange but nothing stranger than Anthrobus. He's thrown
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into the strange and that he dares to be violent in the mist of the
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overwhelming and the overpowering and that there's something in human nature
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that is just wrenched out of any home kind of context and that we are
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errant in that sense and that sometimes we even embrace over embrace that
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errant and we venture onto the winter storm seas and we try to bring the earth
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under our control and so forth. Exactly. So our technology it seems to be
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suggested even in that ancient ode that all the ingenious devices and
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technologies by which we domesticate animals trap birds, sail the seas is
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somehow related to this strangeness of the human. I think that's right is that
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one of the things that we can say about the human is that we break from our
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nature that if nature was the home or is the home for an animal form of
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existence is that what defines the human is that break from nature the leaving of the
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home of the natural world and we construct our own world and that's why we are
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historical creatures. There's a form of history in Darwinian evolution but it's
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not what we really mean by history in the human sense of the word. For the human
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the history is the fact that it is not necessary the form of life that we take
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on is one that is not determined by our biology but can be very open and that's
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the recognition as you said of this kind of worldlessness that is at the heart of
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even an established form of life that we have on this earth. So I gather from
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what I've read of your book that you do believe that it's because of we are
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renched out of a natural environmental context like animals maybe in
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habit that we construct our worlds through the tools that we devise and that
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therefore technology in its primitive beginnings but all the way up to the
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contemporary cheat PT things that technology is our way of what word should I
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use negotiating living with managing being thrown outside of ourselves.
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That's a good way to put it I think that rather than think of the human as
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something that achieves a certain level of intelligence and then
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it invents tools as a kind of supplement to their natural life we have to think of
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the human as wrenching themselves out of nature through the use of tools but
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that means that we have this sort of strange condition we are at one time
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forming lives forming social groups that that are supported by technologies
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as you said ways of gathering food processing food establishing territories
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and so on we're making a home through technology but technology was always a
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wrenching out of nature and therefore can never bring us back to that sort of
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stability so what we have at the same time is this constant capacity for
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being wrenched out of the lives that we're constructing and I think that
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technology is capable of doing that through its own evolution and that's
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what we see as you say from the beginning of primordial stone tools but we're
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seeing it at such a rapid pace in the recent digital revolution that we're in
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some ways being beholden to this evolution of technology that is wrenching us out of
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our own established ways of being. Do you believe there's an inner drive to
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technology that is somehow independent of our own human agency because this
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now becomes a philosophical issue of extreme importance because there are
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some who do believe that technology has its own inner sort of momentum and
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that it wants something that maybe is not in our best interest but that it's
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driven almost like could be a mindless, open-houring and kind of will but that we
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do not master whatever that drive in technology is. I think there's an element of
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that I would not want to put intentionality into the equation there but I do
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feel like following philosophers like the French philosopher of technology
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Gilbert C. Mondahl he really makes a strong case for the fact that technologies do
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evolve in their own terms there's a kind of logic to technical development a
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spear will get more accurate gas engine will become more efficient and these
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things are not human logic but logics of technology themselves and I think one
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of the things that's important today is to think about how the evolution of
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technology can actually diminish or subjugate the human mind to its evolutionary
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demands rather than the other way around. Right. The title of your book is an
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artificial history of natural intelligence maybe you could talk a little bit
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more about how you understand natural and whether intelligence this is a
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question that I keep pondering myself which I don't have an answer to whether
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intelligence has an independent kind of reality of its own from the human mind
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but if that's the case of what would we mean by natural or do you mean by
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natural intelligence? Well I think it's a complex term that could mean a number of
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different things and one of the things that I did with the title is to try and
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play on that complexity we could imagine a natural history of intelligence
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and there's books with that title Tom Stoney here for example has a book with a
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title along that line and this would play into you know dominant thinking in the
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fields of evolutionary psychology and related domains but that particular
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thinking about natural intelligence as coming from our biological
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determination can never make sense of what we might call this break into
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culture and history. Right the errands see. The errands see that takes us out of
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nature and into the world of culture and history so I think that what we mean by
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natural intelligence to a human is what's endemic to the human is natural but at that
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moment of the break it is fundamentally a wrenching that takes place through the
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medium of artificial technologies in other words it's the capacity to
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invent a non-necessary contingent organization that provides a new
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foundation for life for the human. It's not just a supplement to nature it's
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actually a new form of life so I do think that we have a form of natural
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intelligence after the break but that form of intelligence is essentially the
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capacity for technicality. And I gather from the section that you have on
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Heidegger in your book that what you're just describing there is what Heidegger
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calls world that a world is not a natural phenomenon it is always something that
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is constructed as Hannah Aaron said it you know it involves labor it involves
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work and action and therefore our tools and our technical intelligence is world
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forming the way that Heidegger distinguishes between human being and animal being
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where animals are poor in world as he puts it whereas we are rich in world and
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that we're not only rich in what we also form worlds and therefore we have
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a reliance on what we could call technology or tools equipment in order to
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keep our worlds in being and that makes it very difficult for me to understand
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why Heidegger was so concerned about the way in which modern technology seems
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to be the culminating phenomenon of nihilism of Western nihilism that is
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kind of like a denial of being because you've convinced me that no if you take a
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Heidegger and understanding of design as something that breaks from the natural order of
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being into the open-endedness of self transcendent finite transcendence let's
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say and openness to the world that yes it comes con-committant with technology
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exactly so the book is definitely very much influenced by Heidegger and I think
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if you reread being in time you can really see like everything that you said is
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true that that equipment and technology is something that dominates that book so
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the question then is is really the question of distinguishing between a human as a
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kind of technical creature who forms worlds with other people because through
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technology we're always externalizing our thinking into material forms that can
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be interiorized by other individuals this is something that constitutes the
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social world and I think that you're right to bring in a rent there on that point
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as well what we have to distinguish then is a kind of pathological condition from
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what we might take to be the condition of technology per se that defines the
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human and I think for Heidegger the pathology was really the industrialization of
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technology the move towards homogenization of repetition and
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automaticity within the realm of technology that would as you said diminish this
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capacity for human air and sea for human novelty for this disruption that that
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marks the human mind as a kind of intelligent entity so I think that that for
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Heidegger in the question concerning technology from 1950 what he's really
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arguing is it's the industrialization of technology leads to a kind of
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industrialization of reason where everything is is understood to be
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fungible everything is understood to be conditioned by means and ways of
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thinking production consumption consumption consumption exactly and
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there's never any kind of truth in itself of the technical object or the human
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mind is there another kind of thinking that is not always productive or
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inventive and world-forming but is receptive where it's a more of a kind of
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listening rather than talking speaking analogically kind of poetic thought
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which receives the intimations of being and allows being the being of being
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to kind of come into right the realm of appearance and accessibility to us and
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that may be Heidegger a lot of his later work was about the difference between
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calculative thinking or the kind of thinking that culminates in cybernetics versus
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a kind of poetic thought right in cybernetics for him was the end of philosophy
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the end of thinking yeah I think sometimes people criticize the late Heidegger
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for being overly mystical looking to the origins of language as a kind of
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way of coming into contact with this primordial being but I think what's really
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important about Heidegger's later work is this idea of clearing is that the
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errands see is what can take us into spaces of clearing the way of escaping the
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norms and demands of especially an industrialized hyper modern culture to
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spaces where we could be capable as you said of listening or of seeing
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intimations of something beyond and that does sound mystical but I think that
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there's ways of rethinking that in the 21st century when we think about how our
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brain is so dominated by socio-cultural technical political systems of
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organization that have just been amplified by the digital revolution to the
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point where our nervous systems are really being trained by our
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technologies the idea of a space of clearing in our own brains our own minds
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seems to be extremely important for for that possibility of listening to
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something that is beyond who we are and I take that as a really serious serious
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question how in the digital age in particular are we able to create this kind
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of Heideggerian space of clearing which is not simply giving up our iPads or
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iPhones for for 10 minutes during the day but a much deeper question of of how
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to what Bernard Stigler French philosopher calls dis-automatizing how do we
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make the effort to dis-automatize and that therefore be open to something
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radically indeterminate what does he mean by dis-automatize well I mean
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Bernard Stigler was very much influenced by Heidegger as well and he argues that
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both at the origin of the human and also in in terms of the industrial kind of
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amplification of technology the human mind is a plastic entity that is
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trained to become automatic and that's not necessarily a bad thing he gives the
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example of the accomplished piano player who must learn to create automatisms so
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that you can then become a creative and disciplined performer but the problem
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with industrialization of memory industrialization of culture is that our brains
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are trained to become automatic according to the logic of capitalism but the
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technologies are imposing their logic on the human mind and creating
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automatisms so it's important in that context to to recognize that the brain
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and the mind depend on automatic behaviors but we also need to learn how to
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dis-automatize in order to extricate ourselves from the overwhelming dominant
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logics of capitalism in particular and the digital infrastructure so do you
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believe that digital technology in particular is predicated on a highly
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impoverished concept of what the mind is or what intelligence is and that
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therefore it is also a forgetting of the air and sea that underlies the whole
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human way of being in the world and that just in that sense seeking to create an
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artificial zone of comfort for us absolutely I think in two ways that's
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that's an important point the first is that this historical attempt to create
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an imitation or a simulation or a new version of a human mind through
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artificial intelligence constantly fails because it constantly fails to
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acknowledge what I would consider to be this fundamental character of the
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human mind it's fundamental air and sea it's fundamental capacity for self
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disruption and for for failure and for productive invention so that's one
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side of the equation the other side is that this impoverished notion of
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intelligence that we now have with contemporary artificial intelligence
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that's based in machine learning in particular also actively seeks to
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distract us and to form new kinds of connections in our brains that are not
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intelligent that are actually predicated on a completely different logic and one
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that is through again a digital infrastructure that is so well coordinated
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and articulated through networks of of organization is constantly attacking
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our brain you might say attacking our brain and imposing its logic so we have a
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sort of deformed notion of intelligence that is actually making us stupid
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yes indeed that's what I that's my suspicion is that the more efficient
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artificial intelligence becomes the more stupid we get and here you use the
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word distracting so one could put that word distract in correlation with
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abstraction if you understand abstraction in the most etymological sense of
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abstracted which means to pull away so pull something away out of and draw it
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away from something you could say that abstraction could be another word for
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air and see what I'm trying to say is that we've been you know pulled out of
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nature we we have been yanked out of it and that we're kind of in nature and
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out of it at the same time this is the air and see we we miss the mark distraction
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is different from abstraction in that it is this constant sort of technology of
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forgetting where are true the center the center of gravity of our being actually
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lies which is which doesn't have a center it's exocentric if you want to say it
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exactly that's what helmet placenters said exactly that the human is
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eccentric eccentric yeah right in a literal sense I would completely agree with
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that idea and I would call attention to another another word that has a similar
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similar etymology which is abduction the form of reasoning that is is to
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lead you away from something to something radically novel and abduction is a
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form of reasoning that is radically different from deduction and induction
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which is the normal logical categories and I take this from Charles Sanders
|
| 00:22:41.360 |
purse this idea of abduction is being completely hypothetical a completely
|
| 00:22:46.880 |
and anticipation of something that has no precedent and and I think you're
|
| 00:22:51.240 |
right it takes us away from the norms in order to resolve a problem that is
|
| 00:22:54.880 |
radically novel or unprecedented yeah so I'm wondering quote from your book
|
| 00:23:00.640 |
again on this very issue I also want to mention what while we're since we're
|
| 00:23:04.880 |
still talking here about air and sea and error that you did write a book called
|
| 00:23:10.160 |
Enlightenment Aberrations and the subtitle is something about the role of
|
| 00:23:15.360 |
air I don't have the error and revolution in France error and revolution in
|
| 00:23:19.120 |
France yes okay now we go back to the what you were just bringing up and
|
| 00:23:23.280 |
and here you have it you're very last paragraph in the book what I can
|
| 00:23:27.200 |
tell but it says what escapes the machine even the computer even networks of
|
| 00:23:32.720 |
computers even the human mind in its automatic phases is this capacity to escape
|
| 00:23:39.920 |
from its own determination as Stigler wrote human thought has quote the
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| 00:23:46.480 |
power to disrupt and to disautomize that is to say change the rules only by
|
| 00:23:52.800 |
leaving its own normative existence through shock and decision can a new
|
| 00:23:57.280 |
norm ever be created as a function of a novel future that is imagined collectively
|
| 00:24:03.280 |
and not merely predicted and here that last word predicted of course
|
| 00:24:09.920 |
prediction is part of what machine learning is always striving for to get more
|
| 00:24:17.200 |
and more accurate predictions but you make a very interesting distinction
|
| 00:24:22.240 |
between prediction in that technical sense and the existential
|
| 00:24:28.160 |
disposition of anticipation so it's two different ways of relating to the
|
| 00:24:33.200 |
future well maybe one doesn't relate to the future except as
|
| 00:24:38.000 |
you know something pre-determined and this idea that human our human way of
|
| 00:24:42.080 |
being is it's not that it's indeterminate it has many
|
| 00:24:47.040 |
determinations but it can always change the norms and the conditions of its
|
| 00:24:53.360 |
determination and therefore it is capable of again we're getting
|
| 00:24:57.920 |
our rent in here, Natality, novelty something new unprecedented can
|
| 00:25:03.920 |
actually erupt in the midst of these determinations
|
| 00:25:07.600 |
right and one way to think about that is to say in order to be determined
|
| 00:25:11.840 |
historically which is to say contingently and in an open way not determined
|
| 00:25:16.240 |
in biology that indeterminateness which we could also call a certain kind of
|
| 00:25:20.560 |
plasticity is required for us to become determined we must become
|
| 00:25:24.800 |
automatic but there's always some sort of residue you might say of that
|
| 00:25:28.960 |
fundamental plasticity that allows us to break free to interrupt
|
| 00:25:33.040 |
to disrupt to go beyond and I think that that's one of the concepts that really
|
| 00:25:38.400 |
runs through the book strangely enough it runs
|
| 00:25:41.040 |
through even the history of artificial intelligence going back to
|
| 00:25:43.840 |
allen-turing there's some very interesting clues in his work that he knew
|
| 00:25:48.160 |
that to be intelligent was to deviate from norms to deviate from
|
| 00:25:52.560 |
programming and he was constantly trying to kind of
|
| 00:25:55.360 |
conceive of a computer that would be capable of not computing properly
|
| 00:26:01.120 |
in fact deviation is connected to air and to air and they both refer
|
| 00:26:07.760 |
to a Greek word Hammatia, Hammatia is a very interesting word in Greek it's the
|
| 00:26:13.200 |
word the Aristotle used badly translated tragic flaw of the character
|
| 00:26:17.920 |
but Hammatia originally meant to miss the mark like an arrow that deviates
|
| 00:26:23.120 |
from the straight path and it's strangely the word which
|
| 00:26:27.040 |
in the vultgate Bible is translated as "pikatum sin" and that therefore
|
| 00:26:34.640 |
original sin in a strange way understands our condition as deviant
|
| 00:26:41.280 |
as having missed the mark as errant and error and of course then
|
| 00:26:47.120 |
Christianity tries to set out a roadmap of how we can get back home to God
|
| 00:26:52.800 |
from where we have strayed away from it but this idea of Hammatia as missing the
|
| 00:26:58.160 |
mark deviation this is really the kind of reality that we
|
| 00:27:03.120 |
live in and here a question about norms for you David because the
|
| 00:27:07.360 |
there's so much obsession among especially theorists and philosophers
|
| 00:27:11.520 |
about normativity and it's one of the buzzwords in
|
| 00:27:16.240 |
especially in academia especially in Europe if you go Germans for example are
|
| 00:27:20.080 |
always can't give a talking journey without someone always coming back to
|
| 00:27:23.920 |
about normativity and what other than is the obsession with
|
| 00:27:27.600 |
providing norms credible norms either for behavior or
|
| 00:27:32.160 |
ideology or even in philosophy is that because there's so much anxiety about the
|
| 00:27:38.240 |
fact that our norms are contingent and can always be renewed or cast a new
|
| 00:27:47.600 |
because there is a nostalgia or a longing for some kind of
|
| 00:27:52.560 |
containment within a stable set of norms which is not an illegitimate
|
| 00:27:57.120 |
a sort of longing because it's difficult to continue existing within this
|
| 00:28:03.280 |
radical indeterminacy of a of a condition without any norms
|
| 00:28:07.680 |
we can't live in a chaos I think that's right and I think Heidegger you know
|
| 00:28:11.840 |
gives us some direction here as well is that we have this sort of radical
|
| 00:28:15.520 |
recognition that we're not defined by who we actually are
|
| 00:28:18.640 |
concretely historically and yet we need those historical
|
| 00:28:23.360 |
norms those social conditions to provide security and quite literally at the
|
| 00:28:27.840 |
biological level the human is a creature that needs
|
| 00:28:31.120 |
historically contingent norms in order to survive in nature we are the
|
| 00:28:35.120 |
creature that produces life artificially
|
| 00:28:38.800 |
but you're right that there's a kind of emphasis on normativity that
|
| 00:28:42.720 |
tries to distinguish norms and also to kind of justify them
|
| 00:28:48.560 |
through processes of philosophical deliberation as though there can be norms
|
| 00:28:53.040 |
that would be universal and I think that that's still behind this kind of like
|
| 00:28:56.880 |
you say a longing for normativity I'm very much influenced by the
|
| 00:29:00.960 |
controversial German legal thinker Karl Schmidt who
|
| 00:29:05.040 |
who wanted to say well what's really important is the exception to the norm
|
| 00:29:08.400 |
not the norm itself because the exception reveals the contingency of norms
|
| 00:29:13.120 |
but I would push that one step further and say
|
| 00:29:15.840 |
like with Heidegger as well the moment of recognizing that the norms are no
|
| 00:29:20.480 |
longer operating or that they're failing or that they no longer do the work that they
|
| 00:29:24.400 |
need to do is a moment for decision yes
|
| 00:29:27.680 |
and decision is what creates the new norm
|
| 00:29:30.320 |
decision is what allows us to construct a new world it's the fear of that
|
| 00:29:35.200 |
openness that I think sometimes allows us to cling to norms that are no longer
|
| 00:29:39.600 |
viable and I think we're seeing that in the digital revolution
|
| 00:29:42.560 |
we're clinging to norms that are that are in some ways peculiar to an epoch that
|
| 00:29:47.120 |
is already passed and and we're in a moment when we really need to decide
|
| 00:29:51.440 |
for the future in a way that simply isn't going back to these past norms and
|
| 00:29:55.840 |
concepts so which past norms do you see in play in the technology
|
| 00:30:01.040 |
well one of them would be in political theory I think that we're still
|
| 00:30:05.360 |
kind of like locked into a certain concepts of the state
|
| 00:30:09.360 |
certain concepts of the individual certain concepts of freedom
|
| 00:30:13.680 |
international law that don't in some ways come come to be able to kind of grasp
|
| 00:30:19.200 |
what's happening in a networked internationally organized
|
| 00:30:23.520 |
digital world it's at a planetary scale and yet we don't have concepts to
|
| 00:30:28.240 |
understand how politics has played out through technology
|
| 00:30:33.040 |
so I think that's one of the domains that I'm particularly interested in
|
| 00:30:35.920 |
yeah that means that we have to think even more thoughtfully about
|
| 00:30:39.520 |
technology in order to come to a deeper understanding of how to respond to
|
| 00:30:46.320 |
the very essence of technicality but when you talk about decision you have that
|
| 00:30:51.440 |
discourse about decision where you say that the mind is always the sight of
|
| 00:30:56.800 |
crisis of the unexpected of the event and that is why the human mind is
|
| 00:31:01.120 |
capable of genuine decision in crisis now crisis we know is already
|
| 00:31:07.760 |
has the concept of decision in it decision means to be
|
| 00:31:11.680 |
separated from and that we are always in a state of crisis because we are not
|
| 00:31:17.200 |
self-coincident we never or never will be but
|
| 00:31:21.360 |
decision also can demand being resolute you have to
|
| 00:31:27.680 |
actually decide if you're in the midst of a civil war
|
| 00:31:32.240 |
and you're Lincoln you're saying well here we are on this battlefield and
|
| 00:31:36.160 |
we have to decide is our union going to persist or is it not going to persist and
|
| 00:31:40.480 |
that you have it calls for a commitment sometimes
|
| 00:31:43.040 |
existentially historically and so forth so
|
| 00:31:47.760 |
do you believe that while we are the mind is always in this state of
|
| 00:31:52.000 |
crisis that makes commitment to certain decisions all the more imperative
|
| 00:31:59.200 |
it does especially as you say in moments of crisis where we really
|
| 00:32:03.520 |
come to face that challenge of the indeterminate or the contingency of life
|
| 00:32:08.080 |
and this is where I would come back to the the notion of anticipation
|
| 00:32:11.920 |
is the decision is always in anticipation of a future to come
|
| 00:32:16.000 |
that has not yet happened and and this is where we get a fundamental
|
| 00:32:20.720 |
opposition to to the machine learning paradigm which is to predict the
|
| 00:32:24.960 |
future based on what's happened in the past
|
| 00:32:27.520 |
there there could be anything more different than that and this is where
|
| 00:32:31.200 |
anticipation is is a particularly human we commit to a future that's
|
| 00:32:35.840 |
imagined that has never been in existence before
|
| 00:32:41.120 |
well there I think we I would say we have to be careful
|
| 00:32:43.920 |
about going too far in that direction why because if you think of the
|
| 00:32:49.280 |
French Revolution you you've written about the French Revolution but this idea
|
| 00:32:52.880 |
that you can project a whole new future
|
| 00:32:56.560 |
and politics and ideology and just
|
| 00:33:00.320 |
pretend as if the past doesn't have these continuing
|
| 00:33:05.760 |
claims upon the present and the future then you may end up having a kind of
|
| 00:33:12.880 |
crash and burn project of a revolution
|
| 00:33:18.160 |
if we go back to the Gettysburg moment where Lincoln is reminding the
|
| 00:33:24.400 |
nation that they're in a moment of crisis and of decision and that they have to go
|
| 00:33:27.760 |
forward in a new way this new nation on this
|
| 00:33:31.360 |
continent he is also invoking
|
| 00:33:35.840 |
you know the the fathers who brought forth
|
| 00:33:38.560 |
four score in seven years ago so there's a past that the future has to be in
|
| 00:33:42.560 |
relation to and I think you agree with me from what I've read about your
|
| 00:33:47.200 |
theories about what it means to be historical that to be historical it means to
|
| 00:33:50.560 |
put the past and the present into relation with one another
|
| 00:33:55.280 |
and so it's not just a brave new world to come
|
| 00:33:59.360 |
that is completely detached and severed from the past
|
| 00:34:03.680 |
right I think that's what maybe makes the American
|
| 00:34:07.040 |
experiment of the civil war quite different from the French case because the
|
| 00:34:11.120 |
French case the idea was that the norms of the historical past
|
| 00:34:14.560 |
were completely and utterly irrelevant in a modern day
|
| 00:34:18.640 |
and so there wasn't some ways the decision to start as you said from from scratch
|
| 00:34:24.080 |
which was was sort of pushed on the French by the you know the long
|
| 00:34:27.680 |
persistence of feudalism in a modern country whereas the Americans had
|
| 00:34:31.920 |
come as a rent said to kind of a new space established a new republic
|
| 00:34:37.440 |
but still I think we can think of them in the same way as that that you're right
|
| 00:34:40.480 |
there was a decision made to persist in that historical trajectory
|
| 00:34:45.280 |
a different decision could be made at that moment
|
| 00:34:47.600 |
but the decision was to persist and Lincoln's dictatorship was in essence an
|
| 00:34:52.480 |
effort to to continue that path the French case is very complicated I don't want
|
| 00:34:57.120 |
to go into the the details of the French revolution but I would say that
|
| 00:35:01.120 |
that we don't want to as as you say we rightly want to be careful
|
| 00:35:05.760 |
of destroying norms because they provide security
|
| 00:35:10.080 |
well also because when you write the past off as
|
| 00:35:14.240 |
your superstition and ignorance then somehow your future doesn't have
|
| 00:35:20.720 |
any kind of basis for for its continuation that of course I
|
| 00:35:24.000 |
you know we did a show recently on jambatista vico where
|
| 00:35:28.080 |
the past is never passed I mean it's always has its agitates
|
| 00:35:33.040 |
in the present and it can be called on
|
| 00:35:37.280 |
from the future this is I guess this is also hide a guess about this retrieval
|
| 00:35:43.120 |
be their hole where you there's a certain kind of mysterious transmission that
|
| 00:35:47.200 |
takes place but anyway that might take us a little bit off topic because
|
| 00:35:50.640 |
in the time that remains I'd like to ask you the people involved in the
|
| 00:35:55.680 |
actual making of the digital technologies that go into machine learning
|
| 00:36:01.040 |
chat GPT and and so forth what lesson would you like them
|
| 00:36:05.440 |
to derive from your book if they were to read it and take it
|
| 00:36:09.840 |
as seriously as it deserves to be taken well I think this notion that we've been
|
| 00:36:15.440 |
kind of circling around around errant c there's a number of associated
|
| 00:36:19.200 |
concepts that are fundamentally about breaking
|
| 00:36:23.040 |
about discontinuity and I think that to try and imagine intelligence as
|
| 00:36:28.480 |
as radically discontinuous something that opens up novelty like as you said
|
| 00:36:34.320 |
with the rent sort of the possibility of Natality
|
| 00:36:37.360 |
this requires actually deep philosophical work
|
| 00:36:41.840 |
and I also think historical work to think about what that means in
|
| 00:36:46.400 |
light of contemporary neuroscience contemporary artificial intelligence
|
| 00:36:51.200 |
and the way that the mind is being staged in the 21st century
|
| 00:36:54.960 |
so that's what I would like people to take away from the book is that
|
| 00:36:58.320 |
we are not at home in ourselves but that is also a kind of moment of a more
|
| 00:37:02.560 |
radical freedom that that is simply not
|
| 00:37:05.440 |
conceptualized within contemporary artificial intelligence and
|
| 00:37:08.800 |
paradigms well that's good enough for me
|
| 00:37:11.840 |
David Bates professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley it's been a pleasure to have
|
| 00:37:16.160 |
you on in title opinions and this
|
| 00:37:19.120 |
discourse is not going to go away anytime soon so I hope you'll come back and
|
| 00:37:23.520 |
continue the conversation with us thank you so much it was great to be here
|
| 00:37:27.440 |
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions thanks for listening bye bye
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| 00:37:35.280 |
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