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