DOCUMENT
UFD034
Reza Negarestani, Robin Mackay
Reengineering Philosophy
Reza Negarestani expands upon the major themes of
his new book Intelligence and Spirit in this edited and
expanded version of his conversation with Robin Mackay
at the launch of the book in New York in November 2018
robin mackay: Before I invite Reza to discuss some
To first give a very broad outline, Intelligence and
Spirit is a painstaking interrogation of the notions of
intelligence and artificiality. It begins with the question: What would it mean to speak, philosophically,
of an artificial general intelligence, an AGI, whose
capacities would, at least, equal our own? Is the
human the correct or the only model to start with
in trying to conceptualise such an intelligence? And,
looking at the various proposals and programmes of
research into artificial intelligence, and increasingly
into the broader notion of artificial general intelligence, are we able to clarify what exactly we mean
by intelligence? The book then culminates in a vision
of philosophy itself as a program for the artificialization of intelligence, or a program for artificialization
as intelligence.
that it does not belong to the individual but always
implies a community, a collective mind and, in particular, a shared language. And there is a strong
emphasis on functionalism, on collectivity, and on
language, although none of these are treated in an
entirely familiar sense, and with their convergence
there emerges and entirely novel philosophical approach to the intertwined notions of intelligence, artificiality, and the practice of philosophy itself.
In order to determine further this conception of a
community of automata, the toy model is further
specified using concepts drawn from computer science, research into artificial speech, and interactive
logic, to mention just a few; in short, by selecting
those currently available resources best able to satisfy the conditions for the emergence, within this
community, of artificial general intelligence.
The central chapters of the book use a ‘toy model’ to determine the conditions of possibility for the
construction of such an intelligence. What would a
simple automaton with sensors need to be equipped
with in order to attain what we would recognise as
intelligence? This is a kind of Kantian thought-experiment in transcendental philosophy, but one inflected, crucially, by two of Hegel’s crucial insights.
Firstly, that intelligence, or Geist, can only be defined
functionally—in terms of what it does; and secondly,
Answering to the profound and apparently rather diffuse philosophical questions which the book
opens up, then, we have this model that is functionally specified, experimented with, with parts
taken from various suppliers added, swapped out,
and hacked. Returning from this functionalist staging of the problem, the final chapter returns to a
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Philosophy, as a programme of constructing an outside view of
ourselves, is already a programme
for artificialization
of the themes and ambitions of Intelligence and
Spirit, I’d like to give a short, somewhat personal introduction to the book by relaying my impressions of
Intelligence and Spirit as an editor and as a reader.
philosophical vision in the grandest sense, a vision
of philosophy as a project at once transcendental
and functionalist, as having always been a program
for the construction of artificial intelligence, in the
form of a striving to understand what we are as
intelligences, how we can live up to our capacities,
and how we can make ourselves better—because
intelligence cannot be separated from its tendency
to upgrade itself, which Reza interprets in terms of
Plato’s concept of the Good.
form of unfathomable machine; uncertainty and
proliferating doomsday/singularity scenarios; the
apparent erosion of any viable concept of human
agency; a total dependency on technology paired
with a chronic difficulty in upholding any liberatory idea of technology-as-progress; and— perhaps
most upsettingly—we seem to also be surrounded
by a wilful squandering of what little human intelligence is left…. Not to mention, for those of us who
have invested our time in philosophy, the question
of whether its resources can possibly address this
set of apparently ineluctable processes which seem
refractory to any sort of philosophical judgment.
What is extraordinary in Intelligence and Spirit is
Reza’s diligence and conscientiousness in addressing these questions, his resolute refusal of both hysteria and the illusion that we can achieve a sort of
instant relief through philosophy. Throughout the
book he insists on tracking these unsettling questions so tenaciously that they are often transformed
into something unrecognizable. Sometimes we’re
led, from the ‘big’ questions we want to ask, into
dauntingly technical expositions of recent fields
of research. I think there are few people who will
read the book without learning something about
some field of which they were previously unaware.
Whether it’s Hegelian spirit or nonmonotonic logic,
there will be some new encounter here.
This is obviously then not straightforwardly a book
about AI, about the prospects of AI, about its technical possibilities as seen from the present, in a kind
of pop-science mode. Instead it’s using the problematic of AI as a way to develop a more general philosophy of intelligence. And this in turn involves us
in some acute political, ethical, and existential questions about ourselves: about the capacity of we humans to merit the name of intelligence, about the
process of allowing ourselves to be invaded by other
intelligent processes; about allowing intelligence to
grow out of us, or, inversely, our ability to make ourselves an AGI.
I see the story arc of the book like this: a set of forays out from this ambient amorphous anguish and
the huge questions it poses, into increasingly determinate and actionable engineering questions, via a
series of meticulously plotted navigational paths or
zooms between different layers or scales of the same
questions. It becomes a kind of slow-motion scream
in which the acute emotional urgency is attenuated,
and all kinds of unexpected details emerge. One result of this approach is that it is difficult to separate
the book’s methodology from the task it sets out to
achieve, because in a sense it is also a book about
methodology, about how—and how not—to do philosophy today, how to make something constructive
of the scream without betraying it.
Part of the importance of this book lies in the way it
addresses an amorphous murk of uncertainties, fears
and hopes that we are surrounded by in the present
hysterical moment. I’ve always loved Deleuze’s suggestion that every true philosophy begins with a cry
of anguish; that this is what it means to need a concept: to have something to scream. And we have
plenty to scream about. The piecemeal absorption
of the human, and human sociality, into some other
The kind of thought that is going on in this book
marks a decisive departure from the expectations
of a certain type of philosophy or theory with which
most of us are familiar, and in particular, to say it
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What’s startling about the use of philosophy here
is not just that it is articulated with many other disciplines, with other practices, but also that, rather than this being a philosophy of artificial intelligence—as if it involved some relation of application
to an independent object, it becomes evident that
philosophy itself, as a programme of constructing
an outside view of ourselves, of understanding how
changes in our self-conception necessarily lead to
the transformation of our collective modes of acting
(intelligence is what it does), is already a programme
for artificialization, for artificializing ourselves. And in
particular how Kant, and Hegel, and the program of
German Idealism in general, unknowingly furnish the
functional blueprints for a future artificial intelligence
somewhat schematically, from a certain coupling of
the ontological and the political which, in the context of this ambient political, existential, technological distress, has become something like a salve, a
philosophical arnica for the afflicted. Because an ontology—whether it’s mathematical, object-oriented,
new materialist, or whatever…an ontology always
allows us to say, firstly, everything is x. This overextension of a single conceptual articulation affords
us a clear and stabilised field for thought and action
so that, from there, we can move forwards within
the bounds of this unified vision of the world to say,
secondly if only we could do y—that is, the idea that
some great shift in our conception of the structure
of things could potentially relieve us of the burden of
a tangled, layered, enmeshed situation now seen to
be, ultimately, simple and radically subvertible.
In order to map out the question of
intelligence in all of its aspects
and its multiple scales, we will have
to assemble and articulate different
modes of knowledge
Intelligence and Spirit absolutely departs from these
cartoonish ontologies whose emancipatory promises are as brittle as their concepts are overextended.
In this book you won’t find any everything is, nor any
if only we could. In fact Intelligence and Spirit even
deprives us of the stability of any recognizable we,
because it demands that we rethink intelligence as
a virtual collectivity, one that is yet to be fulfilled as
a concrete project. The short-circuit of the ontological and the political is effectively replaced by a
functionalist approach to problems inherited more
from systems engineering than from philosophy—in
this sense, the book sees Reza going back to his
former life as a systems engineer, bringing the sensibilities and the responsibilities of the engineer into
philosophy.
In presenting us with this stringent relation between conception and transformation, the ultimate
questions the book asks us are the following: Is our
scream more than a plea for comfort, are we prepared to follow its consequences, and above all are
we ready to start building? Are we any longer willing
or capable of taking on a philosophical challenge, or
are we happy languishing within our cognitive niches, taking up positions that are vulgarisations of historical ideas left unrevised by contemporary contributions to knowledge?
The wager here is that, if there is any optimism to
be had in this situation, it begins with a commitment
to the complexity and multilevel nature of the problems, and in particular an acknowledgement that, in
order to map out the question of intelligence in all
of its aspects and its multiple scales, we will have to
assemble and articulate different modes of knowledge, understanding that intelligence is neither simple nor homogeneous.
This slow-motion scream born of anguish and frustration at the shortcomings of actually-existing-intelligence ends up giving us a minimal but robust form
of philosophical optimism that results from ruling
out well-worn philosophical consolations, quick-fix
tropes to which we may have become all too accustomed. To characterise this subtle optimism I could
cite a recent tweet by the writer and technology
Rather than a grand architecture that would afford us the classical satisfactions of philosophy,
what comes out of the book is a tentative patchwork of specifications for interlocking functional
modules that could be swapped out later in light of
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new advances in multiple fields—or what Reza has
called a kind of philosophical Lego, big toy models.
With this approach there begins a long-term labour,
both arduous and playful, the labour of the continual conception and transformation of ourselves. Or
rather, we are invited to recognise the historical
achievements of this labour (the ‘labour of the inhuman’ as defined in a previous work), and to explicitly
address the continuing of this vector forward as a
concrete task. Reza even speaks of our responsibility as intelligent beings to continue to artificialize ourselves since, deprived of its movement of
continual expansion, trapped in a box, whether it’s
a human frame or a computational gadget, intelligence ceases to be. This in a sense is the ultimate
extrapolation of Brandomian pragmatism: once we
conceive correctly of the nature of our intelligence,
this conception immediately presents us with a concrete task of self-transformation, failing which, we
consign ourselves to admitting that we are fundamentally disinterested in thinking at all.
consultant Ventakesh Rao: ‘Systems engineering
is the art of turning moral crises into architectural
opportunities.’
all things considered. Throughout the course of the
book, then, we see that this problem cannot be coherently answered if we take the paradigm of mindedness as something stable, if we regard the list of
faculties and transcendental structures as immutable. So philosophy of intelligence not only renegotiates the very concept of mind, but also investigates
the prospects of what can be done—theoretically
and practically—with a concept of mind not as a
thing but as an ongoing project. To this extent, intelligence is what engineers its reality by enriching
the very reality of which it is a part. It becomes a
concrete movement that graduates like a child from
the transcendentally passive paradigm of settling on
what the mind is, what reality is, and how they are
related to one another, to the domain of transcendental proactivity where new forms of intuitions are
put forward, the given list of faculties is renegotiated, and the limits of theoretical and practical cognitions are revised by refashioning how the mind and
its correlative reality appear to us.
Intelligence and Spirit demands that we revise our
conception of time, placing ourselves within a historical sequence that far surpasses our individual
lifespan, but in which we are nevertheless agents.
It examines the problem of intelligence with the
cheerful pragmatism of an engineer who, unable to
simply pop the hood of his own braincase to peep
inside, gets out his Lego and begins to build a model.
*
robin mackay: Unless you have any response to my
mischaracterizations, Reza…
reza negarestani: No, at this point I’m sure you’re
more well-versed in Intelligence and Spirit than I am!
Philosophy of mind, of course, is one of the most
ancient strains of philosophy. It begins explicitly
with Parmenides and Plato, going through various
metamorphoses throughout the Middle Ages, then
Descartes, then Hume, then Kant, Hegel and so on
and so forth. I think we should also talk a bit about
German Idealism at this point, precisely because
the book purports to hijack certain resources from
German Idealism without necessarily strictly abiding
by its theses.
Philosophy of intelligence investigates
the prospects of what can be done—
theoretically and practically—with a
concept of mind not as a thing but as
an ongoing project
I think that, within the history of philosophy, German
Idealism can be said to be a form of critical project
built at the intersection between philosophy of action, philosophy of knowledge, and philosophy of
mind. As a program, it can be defined in terms of
how the relations between mind, knowledge and action can be elaborated into a global or comprehensive system within which these interconnections be
methodologically investigated using different tools,
but also modified so that the system as a whole can
evolve. So when I say the book is about German
Idealism, I mean it is a work that strives to elaborate
various interconnections between knowledge, action
and mind. And from this perspective, philosophy of
intelligence is about how to modify these links rather
than regarding them as set or permanent; how to
imagine a different course of evolution for a system
RN: Intelligence as philosophically understood is a
higher-order domain than the mind. We have intelligent behaviours (which are prevalent in nature),
then mind (the organ or dimension of structure, or a
set of faculties necessary for structuring the world
or rendering it intelligible) and then intelligence.
Intelligence is in the business of determining what
to think and what to do with the capacities of the
mind, using the faculties of mind to constantly renegotiate its place in the world (all possible sectors
of the intelligible). So in a sense, philosophy of intelligence takes as its premise the mind as the organ of structure, in the vein of the transcendental
turn. Yet what philosophy of intelligence arrives at
is the question of what can be done with the mind,
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RM: …then perhaps we should begin with the basic
terms in which the book is framed. Now, philosophy
of mind is a recognised specialism within philosophy,
and we could cite various philosophical projects that
propose a theory of knowledge or of reason. But is
there something more specific that you understand
by ‘philosophy of intelligence’?
that primarily addresses the perennial questions of
philosophy: What to think and what to do (with all
the epistemological and methodological intricacies
that naturally come with those big questions).
values with regard to ourselves in the world. What
might strike some as controversial here is that this
paradigm of mindedness in terms of the question
of structure is qualitative, not quantitative. Mere
accumulation of formal learning algorithms cannot
yield something like epistemic and objective criteria,
systematic modes of appraisal and revision. It is how
these natural or quantitative processes are qualitatively integrated that is important, not the simple
fact that we are just a bundle of such processes.
And then on the next level, philosophy of intelligence
takes the question of the intelligible and, correspondingly, philosophy of mind one step further by asking
what can be done with the intelligible and toward
what ends—turning the intelligible into a concrete
labour in which the historical illusions of totalized
and completed ideas of the mind and the world are
dissolved, in favour of reworking the boundaries and
enriching reality.
RM: In the book your reappropriation of the history of philosophy is enmeshed with the thoroughly
contemporary question of artificial intelligence. So
can AI research really learn something by going back
to the transcendental turn, to German Idealism, or
even to Plato? What do the various projects of AI
have to gain from going back to what would appear
to be centuries-old, perhaps even obsolete, philosophical conceptions of mind?
And then we have philosophy of mind. Philosophy
of mind is introduced in terms of the transcendental turn, in terms of how critical philosophy emerged
from precritical philosophy. You can think of precritical philosophy as a philosophy in which nature, or
a supposed reality, gives us a structure. It reveals
its own secrets to us spontaneously like a tell-tale
heart. But with the transcendental turn in philosophy, the situation switches to a different paradigm.
In the previous paradigm, the precritical one, the
mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and the world
was data. With the transcendental turn, the mind
becomes the structuring factor or the data, and the
world becomes the blank slate.
RN: I think, to answer this question, it would perhaps be beneficial to say a little bit about the original
ambitions of AI (the artificial realization of the mind)
and how it later turned into hard AI (task specific
algorithms) and how, in response to the abandonment of the original ambitions, AGI research was
proposed.
AI started to emerge in the early twentieth century,
and became quite evident as a field in the mid-twentieth century. When we read the unpublished essay
by Alan Turing, ‘Intelligent Machinery’, where he introduces the idea of a child AI, even within his own
classical Church-Turing paradigm of computation,
he is already thinking not about specific algorithms—
task-orientated, problem-solving algorithms, or what
you might call intelligent behaviours—but about the
paradigm of mindedness. He actually thinks of AI as
a philosophical problem—and yes, I absolutely do
So philosophy of mind is essentially what you might
call a philosophy that deals with the broadly understood conditions of possibility of structure, with the
understanding that structure can also be understood as synonymous with intelligibility in the broadest possible sense: the intelligibility of the world, but
also the intelligibility of our thoughts, practices, and
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Now let me a take a step back and unpack your
question, ‘Why should we talk about philosophy of
intelligence as a contrast to philosophy of mind?’ I
think, at least in the book, there is a hierarchy of
what you might call philosophical ‘systems’, with corresponding methodologies at each level. At first we
are in the domain of intelligent behaviours: problem
solving, task-orientated attention systems, and so
on. Today, cognitive sciences—but also computer
science—have shown us that many things that we
thought were unique to us can in fact be captured
by certain kinds of algorithms, which you might call
‘artificial realisations’ of certain processes—pattern
recognitive processes—that are prevalent in nature.
To appropriate Nick Szabo’s claim, the real competition might be between the qualitative picture of
the mind and the view that every aspect of mindedness can be realized algorithm-by-algorithm. The
argument laid out in Intelligence and Spirit is that
intelligence is not to be equated with these intelligent behaviours. They form the bottom level of the
hierarchy.
think that AI is a philosophical field, ultimately—but
the thing is that, here, a problem arises after this
initial ambition in the sense that, just like philosophy,
just like any field, when we have some sort of ideal,
when we have some sort of general theme, the concretisation of this idea is beholden to the available
methodologies and models. And of course, throughout the next few decades, the kinds of models of
mindedness that were proposed all failed to satisfy
this initial idea of AI, which is absolutely the idea of
AGI: a human-level AI, an intelligence capable of doing anything we can do, if not more.
existing structure and facts of human experience as
the benchmark for what is human or what is AGI
only attests to how badly we as humans have failed
to reimagine ourselves as humans. Conservative
ideas and tests for AGI are nothing but conformist
counterparts of the parochial concepts of the human. AGI and the human become almost undistinguishable in their task to overcome such instances
of givenness and parochialism.
Why on earth would an AGI want to
make a coffee that tastes good to the
established transcendental structure
of human experience?
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Nevertheless, over the past few decades, there
has been a divergence between what you might
call ‘narrow AI’ and AGI, narrow AI being the idea
of task-orientated and mere problem-solving algorithms like navigation in a maze, or even making a
coffee that tastes really good to us humans. But
why on earth would an AGI want to make a coffee
that tastes good to the established transcendental
structure of human experience? That’s just design
from the point of view of human experiential biases.
It’s as if AI hasn’t even reached the realm of the philosophical controversies between Descartes, Hume,
and Kant. It has not yet exited the kingdom of precritical medieval hubris.
However, AGI is the grandchild of the initial idea
of artificial intelligence qua mindedness, making
an agent or a multi-agent system where the agent
goes through various stages of development, infant,
child, etc. The agent becomes capable not just of
navigating its immediate world, but also of postulating a different and far more expansive world by
arriving at ‘new facts of experience’—a task which,
as Boltzmann remarked in his lectures on gas theory, requires a thoroughgoing critique of ourselves
as observers and agents that tend to cherish their
entrenched biases and evolutionarily given methods.
To entertain the possibility of new forms of experience through which the scope of intelligible reality
can be expanded—this is the task by which both
the human and AGI are defined. Settling on the
RM: But does that justify the notion of ‘mindedness’? How can you justify positing it without it being a kind of spiritual supplement, an extra magical
ingredient which goes into the mix alongside the algorithmic reproductions of a whole raft of intelligent
behaviours?
RN: The problem that arises here is that that no single specialized algorithm can actually do the job of
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So yes, why should computer science or, for that
matter, research in AI, go back to these antiquated
(so-called antiquated) philosophies? Because asking What is mind? is already a philosophical question, and it is a badly framed one, precisely because
the idea of mind is as vague as the idea of body
in the Cartesian system. We just don’t know what
this question is about! I think that, starting with
Descartes, even though he endorses a metaphysical dualism between mind and body, philosophy begins to address a series of questions which put us in
a better or more coherent orientation that enables
us to answer this question in a more refined way.
With Kant, it becomes even more refined, in that,
for Kant, ‘mind’ is no longer a thing but a system, a
multi-level system. At each level, we are dealing with
different kinds of constraints, different kinds of rules.
It is not a unified thing—it is, simply, not a thing. It is
a functional hierarchy whose different levels need to
be approached by different models, methods, and
descriptive vocabularies. This multi-level picture is
far more in keeping with the new research on AGI
and even the concept of computation in theoretical
computer science than with classical forms of research in AI which in one way or another take the
mind as a flattened thing or structure: If you come
up with that master key, you will surely unlock the
powers of the mind. There has never been, never is,
and never will be a master key. Mind is the domain of
many gates, each requiring different keys.
conceptualisation, be it in the context of the ordinary
natural language or in the domain of scientific theory construction. In fact, when an AI researcher talks
about mindedness or intelligent behaviour, he or she
is modelling that intelligent behaviour, the function
of that intelligent behaviour, however implicitly, analogically with respect to the human mind, how we
reason theoretically and practically, and with regard
to the conceptual activities that we do, but which
sometimes we are unaware of doing.
To frame these questions about AI and
to respond to them, we have to once
again get back to the works of critical philosophy, that is, to understand
problems before trying to solve them
connections, as in the rudimentary example of the
judgement ‘This is blue.’ And what is followed by
and what follows from asserting X?
Of course, the idea that we speak in terms of analogy with our own conceptual behaviour raises a
further question: If every behaviour we recognize in
the world is recognized in analogy to our own paradigms of theoretical and practical reasoning, then
does this mean that we are infinitely projecting our
image into the universe—particularly if the way in
which we reason is tethered to the particular transcendental structures of our experience (neurological diversity, language, culture, etc)? This is a sceptical question that should be sufficiently investigated.
And yes, I think this sceptical question is what is
missing in the current AGI research. To frame these
questions about AI and to respond to them, we have
to once again get back to the works of critical philosophy, that is, to understand problems before trying to solve them.
RM: In what sense are human conceptual behaviours ‘holistic’?
RN: In the sense that, when we talk about conceptual activities, we’re talking about the content of our
inferences and judgements; and so we are already
presupposing—even though we might not be fully
conscious of this fact—that every judgement we
make about X is inferentially linked with judgements
about not-X. To say this is blue means that this is
coloured—another judgement—but also that this
is not red, this is not white, this is not black, this is
not an intrinsic property of a metal element. So, you
see, we are working in a holistic network, a web of
conceptualisation and inferences. This web requires
something more than the task of a specific task-oriented algorithm. Whatever we do is always implicated in this web, whether we are conscious of it or not.
The critical task is to become conscious of what we
say when we say X, what premises or presuppositions and what consequences or implications does it
hold? To assert X is in this sense we must determine
two things: what X is not in the web of inferential
RM: In the model proposed by Kant’s critical works,
we have a first example of what the movement from
the relative simplicity of precritical metaphysics to
what even the most admiring of Kant scholars would
admit is a more messy model. The question being:
given that we have this kind of apparently consistent experience, what conditions must have to be in
place in order for this to be the case? In asking that
question, he develops an incredibly circuitous, complex, multilevel model, which in some respects looks
far less satisfying than the metaphysics it replaces.
In that sense, he is the first to treat mind as a system, a system which, in a certain sense, he seeks to
reverse-engineer. How does this approach help us
avoid simplistic or overextended concepts of mindedness that we might otherwise be tempted to use?
I’ve already referred to the fact that in this book you
have finally outed yourself as an engineer in philosopher’s clothing….
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Philosophy of mind, or cognitive science in general,
tries to make these conceptual activities explicit so as
to show that, when we are talking about any kind of
index of intelligence in the world, we are actually talking about it in analogy with human conceptual behaviours which are holistic. Of course, the methodological problem of artificially realizing these conceptual
behaviours is still an open question. Can we capture
them statistically, computationally? My answer would
be yes, but that requires different levels of statistical
description, different models of computation in tandem with the idea that when we are talking about
mind, we are actually talking about a range of complex behaviours which are generated by a large number of very different processes and mechanisms.
RN: Basically, even though my background is actually engineering, this whole relevance of engineering with regard to philosophy only came extremely
late to me—I was already thinking about it, but in
quite a naive sense. It came to me by way of the
late work of Rudolf Carnap—who is, by the way, a
hidden figure throughout the entire book. Carnap
began as a logical empiricist. He was a positivist—
his 1928 book The Logical Structure of the World is
a monumental work of logical positivism. However,
by 1934, Carnap had fundamentally betrayed the
original theses of the Vienna Circle and its vision of
positivism. He had moved towards a fundamentally different vision which he continued to refine towards the end of his life. Essentially, Carnap’s main
idea, what bothers him—what you called ‘ontological cartoons’—is that philosophy, in the traditional
sense of big ontological and metaphysical questions,
is always, as he puts it, ‘the opiate of the educated’.
So we say: What is life? What is intelligence? What
is mind? What is justice? What is the good? Big
questions that don’t just excite graduate students,
but also humans in general! And then, under the
auspices of such questions, we come up with such
tantalising answers: If we could only do this, we
will have answered all of our questions! Big ideas
beget practical illusions of grandeur. But Carnap
instead thinks about what he calls ‘conceptual engineering’. Carnap’s ‘conceptual engineering’ is the
idea that these overarching upper concepts are all
vague concepts—what he calls explicandum, in the
sense that these concepts mean different things
in different contexts for different language-using
agents. In fact, many incommensurable questions
can be posed under the apparently unifying facade
of these concepts. So he proposes a process, or an
ideal of an engineering process, that he calls explication, and which would turn these vague concepts
into more refined concepts which are called the
explicata.
RM: This is something that is covered in detail in the
book, where language plays an important role—indeed, it is hailed as the Dasein of Geist!— but where
you anticipate artificial languages that could outstrip
natural language both syntactically and semantically:
the domain of artificial general language.
RM: Yet Carnap thinks that there are, even so, real
philosophical problems, correct? This is not the
same programme as Wittgenstein’s dissolution of
‘pseudo-problems’ by treating them as mere problems of language.
RN: Yes, language generally understood—i.e. beyond the existing scope of the ordinary natural languages—is the dimension of structure, and structure is a matter of worldbuilding. We can only expand
our representations by expanding the structure, our
RN: The Vienna Circle Carnap comes from a
Wittgensteinian position, but after The Logical
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Syntax of Language, after a fever that leads him to
sever his last links with the Wittgensteinian strings,
Carnap turns against both his earlier logical empiricist commitments and his Wittgensteinian influences. Why? In a sense, for both thinkers, the question
of language is the question of structure. And if one
posits something outside of the dimension of structure, one ends up peddling those pseudo-problematic nasties about immediate knowledge of the
world that are the hallmarks of precritical philosophy. In fact, even logical empiricism, Carnap’s earlier
position, is fundamentally against the kind of naive
empiricism that Sellars admonishes as an instance
of the myth of the categorial given. But then why is
the later Carnap the epitome of anti-Wittgensteinianism? The answer lies in how they understand language. For Wittgenstein, the limits of language are
the limits of the world and existence. For Carnap,
after attending the Gödel seminars, language is
the ocean of meta-languages and meta-logics, the
unbound ocean of possibilities. To see the limits of
language, one does not step into the extra-linguistic, but must adopt a new meta-logical position with
regard to language, inhabit a new more expansive
language. Even though Wittgenstein is apparently
anti-Kantian, he endorses the main thesis of Kant
regarding the subordination of language to the intuitive, especially in his picturing theory of language.
Carnap unshackles the vision of language from this
Kantian metaphysical cage. For Carnap, language
is not about the world, or anything extra-linguistic.
Anyone who says otherwise will have to pay a metaphysical high price. One can say that Carnap in fact
breaks away from the metaphysical dualities of mind
or language and the world by reinventing their classical problems on the level of theory as a system of
object constitution.
RN: Yes: for instance, Erwin Schrödinger asks, in
his celebrated book, What is Life? But what does
that mean? Life means different things at different
scales and contexts, just as the concept of hardness for an engineer means different things at different scales of a metal beam. At the level of macroscopic elasticity, at the level of the crystallographic
structure of the metal, at the level of the nanometric scale-length, there are many different concepts
of hardness, which are not commensurable with
each other. So an engineer always wants to know
the exact context and scale of the question that is
being posed. When you’re talking about mind, it is
not—as Kant would have said, I’m sure—it is not
about a thing, about a unified thing, a uniform thing
to which we have full access. No, in fact, we just
don’t know what this question means, unless and
until we try to refine the concept at different scales,
each according to its own constraints. May each
explanation and description of the mechanisms and
functions find its own scale—that’s what the late
Putnam endorsed as a sort of recipe against both
greedy reductionist and anti-reductionist approaches, prevalent in analytic and continental philosophy
respectively.
RM: This multilevel view involves leaving behind
what you call the ‘flat picture’ of intelligence for a
more nuanced view of the complex task ahead. And
this risks bringing into play more psychological reflexes: anyone who proposes such an approach is
fated to be regarded as a philosophical spoilsport by
those for whom the ‘bigness’ of those concepts is
precisely what is compelling and bracing, perhaps
satisfying an emotional rather than a cognitive need.
We usually think of Carnap as that positivistic or radical conventionalist guy, someone who thinks rules
alone are sufficient. But no, to the extent that he
thinks rules alone are not sufficient, he is not conventionalist; and to the extent that he revises his
thoughts about how elementary experiences relate
to linguistic sentences (of a broader linguistic-logical domain), he is not that logical empiricist guy. In
any case, the late Carnap is against Wittgenstein.
His position is something between Hegel’s vision
of language as the Dasein of Geist, Poincare’s idea
that new structures make new experiences just as
Riemannian geometry opens up new spaces for the
observer, and Helmholtz’s emphasis on perception
and sensory processing, without ever eliding the
distinctions between such views or expanding the
conclusions reached by one insight to another.
RN: Yes. There is a historical lesson to be learned
here. In a recent essay on Carnap, André Carus
makes a distinction between what he calls ‘drifters’
and ‘engineers’. Given this idea that we should always refine concepts at different scales, then when
it comes to questions like What is mind? What is
life? What is justice? What is good?, do we really
have any chance of convergence? Can we actually
ask ‘What is life?’ without drifting toward an ever
greater fragmentation where the concept of life at
this or that scale becomes fundamentally incompatible with the question as we pose it in the ordinary sense? Does this mean that we can never get
any fundamental answer and in fact there are no
RM: So, for Carnap, the refining of ‘big’ philosophical questions into engineering problems is quite different to a dismissal of them as ‘pseudo-problems’.
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resources for world-representation are indebted to
our resources of world-building, toying around with
the possibilities of structure, diversifying it and enriching it. Of course, this raises the question of how
such free play can be related back to our rudimentary experiences so as to avert the danger of naïve
idealism or logicism in the vein of Aufbau. This is
the question of the so-called ‘protocol sentences’
and the possibilities of a true physicalistic scientific
language which I don’t have time to elaborate here.
Essentially, the mature Carnap thinks like Poincare:
How can we stop being the ‘victims of our particular habituations’? How can we diverge from our
so-called habituated facts of experience by constructing new experience-constituting languages or
paradigms such that we can habituate our experiences to new objective ways? This is the revival of
the Enlightenment question. Carnap admitted that
the Enlightenment paradigm has been corrupted, it
has become a recipe for conformity to the order of
is. But the real ambition of the Enlightenment as he
understood it is to move from the order of is to the
order of what should be or what might be. The principle of tolerance and the idea of diversifying the
formal artificial languages are instances of moving
from what is the case (in the order of appearances)
to what might actually be the case.
the back-and-forth movement between the drifter
and the engineer, fragmentation and integration, local navigations and global orientations.
But there is also another thing about engineering
and how it is connected with philosophy, in fact the
most important thing. Think of science as a discourse about the order of is—What is the case?
Essentially, we are in the realm of theoretical intelligibilities. Whereas the question of rationality, as early as Hume, is about the difference between is and
ought, fact and value. he question of engineering
goes further: it is the difference between the order of is and the question of what might be, namely,
the space of possibilities. Essentially, this is the very
vision of an engineer, which comes with some sort
of balance between the messiness of reality, the
constraints of reality, and the space, or the unbound
ocean, of possibilities. And for the history of philosophy, particularly for Carnap, that is the expression
of human autonomy: No matter how the order of is
appears to us, we must gamble in favour of possibilities, because only the latter category can actually
lead us out of the status quo, i.e. reality shackled to
the established actuality. Only to the extent that we
can imagine new worlds, possible and counterfactual, can we understand the logic of our current actual
world. And only to the extent that we can imagine
and actualize what might be in contrast to what is
the case, are we endowed with autonomy.
Of course, Carnap’s engineering ideal is usually taken to be an ideal of the scientific enlightenment. But
as many commentators have argued—for example,
Carus, Haslanger and Novaes—these ambitions
can be expanded into the realm of social change
and in fact can be reconciled with the ambitions of
the Frankfurt School.
RM: Along with the drifter/engineer distinction, we
might consider another distinction you make very
early in the book, between Dionysian and Apollonian
modes of philosophizing. Part of what I was hoping
to get across in my introduction was the fact that
there’s a fascinating and sometimes infuriating mix
of the two in this book. That is to say, you really do
play the Carnapian philosophical spoilsport at various points…
Only to the extent that we can
imagine new worlds, possible and
counterfactual, can we understand
the logic of our current actual world.
And only to the extent that we can
imagine and actualize what might be
in contrast to what is the case, are we
endowed with autonomy
RN: Yes, definitely, and I’m proud of it!
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fundamental questions? Is it just going to be fragmentation all the way down, so that the whole ideal
of the global concept shatters into pieces? This is
the drifter paradigm: going all the way down, drifting into nowhere. But engineers are not just drifters. Engineers always have a global concept as well
as these local ramifications at multiple scales and
contexts. The drift paradigm is espoused only as a
methodological way of working around and refining
global or universal concepts. A good example of this
in the history of science is the concept of gravitation,
which has changed and completely fragmented with
regard to local theoretical frameworks after Newton.
But then we also see there is a global Copernican
paradigm here that allows us to, at some point, reintegrate these back without just drifting into ever
more fragmentation. Everything that we do with the
concept of gravitation should respond to the stringencies set by Newton’s theory as a special case.
Einstein’s theory of gravitation is an expansion on
Newton’s but also arises in response to the constraints established by Newton’s theory. The real
universal or global concept can only be extracted by
a historical analysis of how these two theories are
connected. Another allegory would be the idea of a
machine code as a metaphor for the global concept.
Machine code is what you might call the unificatory paradigm. However, when we are working with a
computer we always use interfaces and apps. We
don’t know what is actually happening at the level
of the machine code—but if we knew what was
happening at the level of the machine language we
could change the paradigm of how to redesign these
interfaces, these fragmentations, glue them back
together, refine them, more fragmentation, reintegration, more fragmentation, so that we can come
up with entirely new interfaces. And this is the idea
of refinement that Carnap associates with the ideal
of engineering as the very ideal of Enlightenment:
RM: …but there are also movement of grand philosophical ascent and huge creative ambition, which
you refer to as the Dionysian mode. How do you see
your position in relation to those two?
RM: That’s what they’re saying!
RN: Yes, I know!
RM: To paraphrase Foucault, Hegel is like Michael
Myers in Halloween: whenever you think you’ve
killed him, he’s always just waiting in a bedroom closet waiting to jump out at you.
RN: Every philosopher, unfortunately, whether she
admits it or not, works in the context of the history
of philosophy. I really do agree with Brandom that
philosophy is that which has a history, rather than
just a nature or a mere past. Philosophy has a movement, a historical movement, a positive sequence of
conceptions and transformations.
So what does it mean to engage with the history of
philosophy; to do philosophy? Well, there are two
ways of doing this. One is what you might call this
Dionysian adventurism. I would say the scarecrow
of Hegel is a good example of it, where he says that
‘philosophy is thought apprehended in its own time’.
We can think of this slogan quite heretically. When I
write about Hegel, I don’t care about his theological
vision, his teleological vision. I just try to, heretically,
extract some of the critical aspects of Hegel, mutate them, reengineer them in my own contemporary context, without being faithful to the canon of
Hegel as a sacred text. Philosophy is an organ of
judging the ancestors, not a medium of being impeded by the tradition and the canon. But to judge
the ancestors, the previous judges, we have to recognize them, even though recognition of the past
should not be equated with being hindered by the
past. In this sense, modernism is yet to be understood as the meaning of philosophical thought, insurrection against all manifestations of experience
as established or given to us in advance. It is only
the time of thought that can rebel against the temporality of experience, whether it be that of the human or of something else.
Usually, continental philosophers think that
Apollonian ones are basically just scholars who
are philosopher-wannabes, whereas Apollonians
think that Continental philosophers, Dionysian adventurists, are just trying to find some sort of facade of novelty. But I think that these are, in fact,
pathologies and something quite recent. Analytic
and Continental are brands, and philosophy should
never buy into brands. If we look at the beginning
of the twentieth century with Carnap—he came
from a line of inquiry opened up by Cassirer, who
never abided by such distinctions and Frege’s revolt against psychologism—these distinctions never
held. My friend Adam Berg said, it’s like Lamborghini
and Ferrari. Who actually drives Lamborghinis and
RM: To pick up on the Hegel question, because I
have to ask you about the unforgivable sin of bringing back Hegel again: you don’t think it’s your duty,
in building on his work, to explicitly distance yourself
from all of the other, possibly objectionable elements
of Hegel’s thought?
RN: Yes, definitely, but even more so I would say
that, for me, the important thing is not just that I
don’t want to hear, ‘Oh, Reza just became Hegelian,
theological….’
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RN: But the whole point is that the task of philosophy is to reinvent thought according to the contemporary moment. But to go back to the two ways:
philosophy is not all about Dionysian adventurism
and full exploration, it is also about putting a halt to
this adventure so that you can look back into the
deep history of philosophy, compare it not just with
the Hegelian canon but also Kant, Descartes, Hume
and so on and so forth. This is the Apollonian side of
philosophy, digging through what the tradition has
left us…. The Dionysian is one way to do it, and of
course it has a price. But for either of these two
ways, there is a price to be paid. Sorry to say this,
but to me a philosopher is a great hedge-funder between the Dionysian and Apollonian approaches, not
because one of these paradigms might actually pay
off at the end of the day but because we are just
premature when it comes to seeing the history of
philosophy as the unfolding of intelligence. We either
want to hold to the tradition or become absolute
insurgents against it. To me these tactics by themselves are not sufficiently equipped to understand
what the history of philosophy is; they are just bipolar reactions which distort the task of philosophy,
what it is and what it can become.
that, for him, the idea of an ‘agent’ is not only confused but also, as Hegel would have said, ‘parochial’.
Not only parochial with regard to the constitution
of rational agenthood, but also in terms of how this
rational agent renegotiates its position within a reality in which neither the rational self nor the world of
which it is a part can be taken for granted.
RM: But before we talk about how you then get
from Hegel to Plato, I think it’s an interesting point
at which to talk about another malign influence: it’s
notable that there is a parallelism, up to a certain crucial juncture, between what is coupled together in
Intelligence and Spirit as a philosophy of intelligence
and its pragmatic consequences, and the central
trope in Nick Land’s work, right from his earliest
writings, where the trope of Kantian philosophy as
a program for artificial intelligence is already present,
the idea of a transcendental reverse-engineering. For
Land, Kantian critique is a philosophical diagram of
the dismantling and artificializing processes characteristic of modernity, and the uneasy and unstable
compromise between this unleashing of exploratory
intelligence and the attempt to rein it back in to the
subject, the nation state, and so on. It’s on this basis
that Land can speak of ‘being on the side of intelligence’, being on the side of this critical process of
disassembly and artificialization operated from the
future—and as we know this process that is assembling intelligence out of the human is ultimately piloted by, or even synonymous with, the ‘templexical’
processes of capitalism. And arguably, a normative
choice is then proposed as to whether we act so
as to promote our absorption, our being harnessed
by this process of intelligence or hopelessly react
against it.
For Hegel, the idea of the enrichment of the rational
self or agent goes hand-in-hand with the enrichment
of reality, and that’s the Hegelian odyssey, whereas
in Kant you have a sort of transcendental passivity.
This question arises as early as the transcendental
aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which
the forms of space and time, as forms of organising
for intuitions, are pre-established—and that’s it. All
we get is this kind of sterile phenomenalism which
gives us some sort of distorted lens onto a yet more
distorted reality, and we can only refine them up to a
point, but what if this is just a vicious circle? What if
the phenomenal reality we use and refine in order to
gain further access to what you might call the Real,
is just simply a projection of certain kinds of agential
biases onto the world, like Dorian Gray’s picture—
What if the world in all its infinity is just an infinitely
distorted, ugly picture of our own selves?
I was once an adamant Kantian, but at this point
the poison of rational scepticism has crept under
my skin. While I see no way of undoing the transcendental turn without resurrecting precritical philosophy, I also don’t see how exactly we can adopt
orthodox Kantian methods without sounding like we
are dabbling in scholastic amusements with regard
to sensory processes, logic, language, etc.
What happens when you bring Hegel back into this?
It seems that the scenario is similar, but the future
intelligence that is harnessing us becomes one that
operates through language, through sociality, and
through norms, rather than, precisely, against all of
those: they become enabling conditions of intelligence rather than drag factors.
So to answer your question, Hegel adopts a certain
kind of scepticism. I think he is a sceptical thinker,
but not in a passive Pyrrhonic sense. It is in fact
the project of Hegel to reactivate the organon of
a scepticism, namely the labour of investigation
(skeptikos) within the order of reason; to question
the givenness of those experience-constituting categories which, for Kant, are just there and are never
questioned with regard to the agent.
RN: There are many different reasons for the introduction of Hegel. I think one of the reasons—and
we might disagree on this—is that, although Kant
initiated the transcendental turn, at the end of the
day he is in fact a conservative thinker, to the extent
I was once an adamant Kantian, but at
this point the poison of rational scepticism has crept under my skin
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Ferraris in Italy?! These are just brands. Philosophers
should never buy into brands. Luxury brands prevent us from understanding what people actually
drive. They pigeonhole us into not seeing all those
innovations and detailed works that have gone into
the production of a generic automobile. Sorry, I’m
getting extra mileage from this metaphor.
So that is one of the reasons for introducing Hegel;
but there are many, many other reasons, one of
which is the question of history. Intelligence is essentially a self-conceiving agent —a self-conceiving
agent that has a history precisely because it has a
conception of itself, according to which it conceptually transforms itself. Of course, everything can
go wrong and pathological at this point. Your conception of yourself or what you appear to yourself
can widely diverge from what you really are. But
nevertheless this is what, for Hegel, constitutes the
history of Geist, this correlation between conception and transformation. What I take myself to be is
a ground for how I ought to transform myself, and
how I transform myself is, again, the ground for a
new conception of myself.
These are all reasons why I introduced Hegel, not
just as a corrective to Kant’s project but as something more; something that Kant couldn’t imagine.
For Kant, the idea of philosophy is what you might
call a passive understanding of the world, whereas
for Hegel it is not just a passive understanding of
the world but also involves intervening and enriching
the reality of the world. Hegel, like Plato, is an unrepentant Promethean and of course an arch-idealist,
but without falling in the traps of naive idealism. To
enrich the reality of the world one has to be sceptical of the broad structure of agential understanding.
To push through the facade of what appears to us,
to break that supposedly neat link between categories of understanding and the intuited items in the
world. Hegel’s idea of Reason not as faculty of general understanding but as the organon of critique is
precisely what initiates the critique of Kant without
reversing the basic gesture of transcendental turn,
which must be upheld.
In disconnecting the concept of intelligence from
rational agenthood, we run the risk of rationalizing
nature as intelligence, or even as an intelligent design. I mean, if Land truly believes that capitalism as
intelligence is non-agentic and is also a natural teleological drive toward complexification of intelligence,
then why does it matter that there are some troublemaking Muslims, that there is no neoreactionary
island, etc? Surely Capitalism can take care of itself with or without adversarial and/or favourable
agents? Then ultimately, why do we even need to
talk about a neoreactionary future which is entirely
based on agents’ contribution to the accelerating
paradigm of capitalism? Why do we need to define
intelligence as adversarial competition or through
the slogan ‘war is god’? If acceleration is real, then
there is no need for any sort of agent-based society
RM: That was a good way of sidestepping the question of the influence of Land, but I will persevere because your simultaneous fidelity and betrayal (has
Nick been aufheben?!) interests me: If one thing is
clear it’s that you share with his brand of ‘accelerationism’ the idea of being ‘on the side of intelligence’
as opposed to being committed to salvaging any
particular image of the human. But for you, what
does it mean to be on the side of intelligence?
RN: To be on the side of intelligence is to be on
the side of thinking or, broadly, cognitions, with the
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understanding that the consequences of thinking
might diverge vastly from psychological or opinion-based premises. Here of course, the difference
with Land can be highlighted in the sense that intelligence is always beholden to at least three forms
of intelligibility—theoretical, practical, and axiological—and there is no way to flatten the difference
between them without falling back on some sort
of the myth of the given (theoretical, practical, or
axiological givens). Each requires its specific norms
of inquiry. No matter how much intelligence accumulates facts about the world, it wouldn’t be able
to function without a fact-value distinction, which
requires a sense of self-conception (its revisable position with regard to the world in which neither the
self nor the world are treated as pre-established).
Self-conception as the hallmark of intelligence is all
about agenthood (the axiological gap between the
self of which there is a conception and the possibility
to transform it in accordance with a concept of the
world which is expandable). Nick mistakes rational agenthood with a perspectival phenomenal self
(much like eliminativists) that can be explained away
by some physical law, but the minded self is a-perspectival. It is only an agent by virtue of a deprivatized space (geist) which enables it in the first place
not only to be multi-perspectival (virtually adopting
a collective perspective) but also to be a-perspectival, to see the force of concept as a revisable entity
of thinking that is not determined by any particular
agent, whether an individual experiencing subject or
a particular historical agent or judge.
whole book tries to show that there are different
grades of consciousness and thus we cannot posit
a single notion of the unconscious for them.
RM: Now I want to ask you a somewhat related question that asked myself over and over while reading
Intelligence and Spirit—and maybe this is also coming from the part of me that wants to stubbornly resist the philosophical spoilsport. Cyclonopedia was
obviously indebted to a delirious tradition of philosophy which engaged with psychoanalysis, myth, fiction, and the unconscious. And it repeatedly struck
me, contemplating this idea that intelligence is tied
to collectivity, and therefore is tied to language and
to social norms—even though intelligence operates so as to revise and update social norms continually: What happened to the unconscious? What
happened to that part of ‘mindedness’ that always
acts obliquely to the social program and to collective
norms, that acts underneath language, the thing
that programs us from elsewhere? Where is the unconscious in this? Or else, this collective notion of
intelligence, of the essentially deprivatized mind, is
that itself the unconscious, since it implies that your
mind was never ‘yours’ to begin with?
So, in that first sense of ‘unconscious’ I would say
that yes, the question is already in fact answered in
the book, in terms of the computational infrastructure of thinking. But if we mean by unconsciousness
something more like the later Freud’s theory, as a
kind of reality that works against consciousness,
and which we cannot really access directly because
it only manifests itself in the incongruities of our
actions and beliefs, like hysteria, if this is what we
mean, then how can we in fact talk about the unconscious without resorting to the resources of the
consciousness? But we assumed that the latter is
subsumed by the former. So then a vicious circle
of diagnosis comes to the foreground: How can we
coherently talk about that which potentially commandeers the criteria of our conscious coherency?
Isn’t this like Kant’s idea of the phenomenon as a
gateway to the noumenon as that which cannot be
known but can be thought? But Kant, in opposition
to his dictum that we should never confound an ‘as
if’ judgement with a constitutive judgement, goes
on to treat the noumenon as a postulate of thought
as something that actually conditions thinking. This
is too incoherent. How can we think X about Y if
Y has subsumed X? We can see a similar example
of this metaphysical totality in the real subsumption thesis, where Capitalism has hijacked not just
all substantive social relations but also formal social
practices which enable us to actually coherently talk
about Capitalism.
RN: If I had talked about the unconscious, you’d
have to add five hundred more pages…! Coming
back to the overarching concepts which I oppose,
the very question of the unconscious, even in the
tradition of psychoanalysis, is quite vague. It is what
you might call an excessively big concept…
RM: It’s an explicandum?
RN: Yes, exactly. Essentially, what do we mean by
the unconscious? Do we mean what neuroscience
calls the mechanisms and computational processes that act beneath the threshold of an attentional
system or global workspace? What you might call
‘consciousness’ is the idea of the theatre that is carried out onstage, and the unconscious is all the plots,
the props that are being carried away backstage,
and you never see them…. So, is this what we mean
by the unconscious? Or do we mean something that
is more insidious? In the later theory of Freud, the
unconscious is something like in Nietzsche or Marx,
a kind of reality that is suspected of having hijacked
the entire edifice of consciousness. Again, the idea
of consciousness is, of course, a big thing, and the
There is another thing: I think that we have talked
about this in terms of the difference between
Sándor Ferenczi and Freud himself. For Ferenczi,
and also for Otto Rank, the unconscious is not a
reality that is inaccessible, because if we say that it
is a reality, it’s like the noumenon for Kant, but it also
hijacks the phenomena, then we have no access to
it, so then why are we talking about it and why are
we talking about psychoanalysis? But for Ferenczi it
is a different thing. It is a duty of consciousness, of
self-consciousness…
[Loud and intense sirens]
RM: They heard us talking about Nick Land….
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(neoreactionary or Marxist), and if it is not real, then
agents will bring about the acceleration of capital
toward its telos. These are pure contradictions.
RN: It’s the Epistemology Police!
Grow up! We are positing our own
ignorance in the form of vague
demands upon the machine
RN: I think that the frame of this question is wrong.
It’s a kind of pseudo-problem. It’s not really the task
of AI to talk about this. It is the first task of AI to determine, exactly like Kant, a non-arbitrary or critical list
of conditions of possibility. But, of course, to create
an actual AI means that, from a set of abstract problems, which are theoretical, undergirding our project,
we have to move towards the concrete. And that’s
not something that we can just talk about—‘Oh, well,
it requires a sexuality, it requires emotion’, and so on
and so forth. Such questions need to go in conjunction and in parallel with the maturation of our science and human self-consciousness, and that’s why
AGI is not something out there, that we could make
these kinds of statements about. It’s just what you
might call an encapsulation of how we axiologically,
theoretically and practically think about ourselves.
The pathologies of AGI are the pathologies of the
human mind, of how we think about ourselves. How
can we demand that this relatively young research
program incorporate problems of emotion and sexuality when these concepts are still so vague to us
humans? It’s like faulting AGI from the perspective
of human ignorance. First of all, who said that an
AGI cannot have such concepts just because it is realized by computational and statistical processes? I
just think we are projecting our poverty of concepts
such as emotion and sexuality to machines. My answer is: Grow up! How do you expect a machine to
show emotion if you don’t know what the emotion
consists of. This is just reactionary humanism. We
are positing our own ignorance in the form of vague
demands upon the machine.
RM: There is another way of asking this question: In
the toy model, you start with an automaton with rudimentary sensory capacities, and then you have to
give it the ability to orient itself in space, the ability
to communicate with its fellow automata, the ability to orient itself in time…. But you also speak about
a nisus or a striving, defining intelligence in terms of
its striving to create something better than itself. So
for you this is a striving for the Good—in a Platonic
sense which you elaborate on in the final chapter. For
others, of course, it is the desiring machine of capitalism that provides a nisus that assembles intelligence.
And I’ve certainly read some people writing on AI who
say, for example, you would never be able to produce an environment where real intelligence would
emerge without endowing its agents with sexuality,
or some similar ‘irrational drive’. Or, we could also ask,
would such an intelligence need to dream in order to
be intelligent? Or would it dream because it’s intelligent? In other words, is the thirst for the Good or for
self-cultivation enough of a driver to define and to
bring about intelligence in a full enough sense?
Now with regard to the question of emotion, again,
like the unconscious, it’s a cluttered concept. When
we talk about our emotions, are we talking about
cognitive or experiential mental episodes, like hopings and wishings (cognitive) or the feeling of sadness, the experience of being cozy (the experiential)?
If we are talking about the latter, are we regarding
them as implicit inferential knowledge or some sort
of immediate and private knowledge, the non-inferential knowledge of an episode? If the answer to the
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…so, for Ferenczi, the idea of the unconscious is not
the idea of a noumenon, of a given reality, or a real
subsumption of capital, but it is a duty of self-consciousness to posit as a postulate, as a hypothesis,
the reality of the unconscious, because thought’s
duty is to always to mark its own constraints. Here,
the idea of the unconscious does not become a
contradiction or an opposition to the idea of intelligence or consciousness or those epistemological
requirements that the book talks about, but in fact
becomes the maturation of a thought that is already armed with the epistemological instruments
to highlight its constraints, because it finds itself in a
confrontation with a reality or nature that does not
share its ambitions. When consciousness becomes
mature, in order for it to increase its maturation, it
has to mark its own limitations by showing that it
might, as a matter of fact, be under the influence of
external causal factors. But such influence can never be taken as wholesale (a metaphysical totality)
because it will fundamentally undermine whatever
we can say either in defence of consciousness or
in recognition of unconsciousness as a real factor.
Every claim we make might be justified in an arbitrary manner.
latter is positive, then how can we thwart the threat
of the myth of given? As early as the Stoics, emotions are considered to have belief-contents, albeit
implicit ones. To actually know what an emotion is,
one has to step into the domain of the inferential
and justification of the content.
RN: Yes, and this comes back again to Freud’s idea
of the unconscious. The idea is that, okay, the unconscious, whether it is a Freudian unconscious,
whether it is a noumenal reality in a Landian sense,
or any other kind of stuff…. First of all, we should say
whether actions can actually be explained by such
indexes of reality or not, by these causal factors.
And if they can be explained, then according to what
scientific methods? What kind of robust methods?
It wouldn’t be a free association or a free, exegetical hermeneutics! That would be just like saying a
demon possessed this witch, and because she has
these symptoms, we should burn her and burn the
demon with her; when it comes to the idea of free
association of symptom with cause, we are dealing
with pure occultism.
RM: Let’s finally come back to a high-level view of
Intelligence and Spirit. If the book essentially stands
against both nihilistic resignation and the idea of a
magical revolutionary emancipation, and configures
the task of emancipation as one that extends way
beyond our individual life spans, then what part can
any of us hope to play in that? And what part do
you see yourself, as a philosopher, playing in that
emancipation of intelligence from its cage, and
from the shortcomings of actually existing human
intelligence?
RN: This is a very difficult question, and not only because it is something that inevitably leads to vague
answers, but precisely because you are asking an
individual—me—this question. Any individual who
thinks he or she can answer this question is a psychopath rather than someone who is truly faithful to
the multifaceted aspects of the question itself. So I
can only talk about myself, as someone who thinks I
am a philosopher—I might not be, but nevertheless
let’s pretend that I am. And to that extent, I would
say that, for me, the question becomes extremely
important.
RM: In order to be intelligent, an agent has to have
this nisus or striving, a striving to be a better version
of itself. But what we know about ourselves is that
our intelligence developed from very different, blind
strivings.
RN: Yes, absolutely, but the whole point is that being conditioned by natural processes doesn’t mean
being constituted or piloted by them. We in fact see
the blind processes to the extent that we are in the
possession of theories, concepts and inferences.
Why is it that we have arrived at this particular historical moment in which theoretical and practical
cognitions—the augmentation of our cognitions,
the augmentation of intelligence with the understanding that intelligence is also collective through
and through—is now, instead of being promoted,
being debased, by both the Left and the Right? This
is something to think about.
RM: So this is where we come back to taking the
functional rather than the genetic point of view on
intelligence.
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Surely, from an evolutionary perspective, emotions
have been useful heuristic tools, ones which have
conditioned our ordinary sense of reasoning to be
this way rather than another way. Many discoveries
have been achieved by the use of emotional apparatus. But really that does not actually explain what
emotions are, nor does it justify that the emotional ways of discovery are epistemologically justified.
To use emotions or affects to explain or justify their
epistemological rights is hardly anything more than
petitio principii. It is only in tandem with the maturation of the scientific rational method that we
can recognize the import of these emotional ways
of discovery, but also recognize that emotions by
themselves cannot gives us anything with regard
to epistemological claims about the objective realm.
And therefore, we must not only use conceptual
reasoning to distinguish and determine the contents
of such tools and their respective discoveries, but
also to change what is given to us by evolution. To
devise new emotions and affective ways of navigation is to go beyond what is evolutionarily given to
us, to rise into the domain of conceptual rationality
where not only the content of emotions can be distinguished, justified or modified, but new emotions
can be put forward. This, I’m afraid, is the Stoic lesson 101 which we have long forgotten.
What does it mean to live in the age
of general intelligence where we are
merely particular forms of intelligence,
special cases so to speak? What does
it mean to live in the prehistory
of intelligence?
We get overexcited by our revolutionary paradigms,
by what we have achieved, but then we see, two
days later, twenty years later, that we are back in to
square one, if not worse. Education is absolutely, for
me, the most concrete contribution I can make. And
the idea of education, right now, not only in Western
countries but across the globe, is fundamentally
pathological. Why are the so-called revolutionaries
not talking about education anymore, as something
that is deeply, fundamentally tied to the history of
intelligence and to concrete political change?
Now, it is not just a Western pathology that education is market-driven. Education is market-driven
everywhere today. But here we see something far
more insidious than the marketization of education.
I talk about this a little bit in the book, but not directly in relation to education. We are witnessing a
kind of historical bipolarisation as to what education
consists of, between the Left and the Right. On the
left, we see education as being about the virtues
of intersubjectivity, with minimal regard to the purview of scientific facts. But when you go too deep
into your subjectivity without the scientific facts,
it becomes something akin to methodological individualism where different individual preferences
and choices—even though they might be purely
psychological—are taken as facts. Whereas on the
right we see a different kind of pathology: the minimisation of intersubjectivity and the hyperinflation of
facts. But as early as Hume, and in fact even from
Plato, there is such a thing as a fact-value distinction. You just cannot conflate them with one another.
You always need to triangulate them with regard to
one another, and that is a labour of intelligibility. You
cannot just have intersubjectivity without scientific
facts, nor can you think you can simply derive social values, political values, political paradigms, from
mere scientific fact accumulation. These are both
pathological.
I don’t want to sound as if I am endorsing practical
resignation. There are in fact certain kinds of contributions that we can make. For me, as a former
engineer, I don’t in fact want to think about these
super-revolutionary ambitions; I want to be fundamentally practically modest, even boringly so. And
for me as a philosopher, the most important thing
is the idea of education. Education is always and all
the time connected to the philosophy of intelligence
and the philosophy of mind. And by that I do not
mean higher education, I mean the broad spectrum
of education, from nurturing to developmental psychology, and so on. If we don’t take this idea of education seriously as the basis of what we can do
here and now, then any kind of future anticipation
is going to fail.
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Intelligence is nothing but that which makes a world
and a history for itself, but the thing is that—exactly
like the scenario that we have gone through—we
claimed autonomy from the clutches of our parents,
for better or worse. We recognise them, we commemorate them, but that commemoration does not
mean that we allow our parents to impede what we
can become. The same thing applies for future intelligence, whatever or whoever it might be. This is
a kind of a general paradigm: What does it mean to
live in the age of general intelligence where we are
merely particular forms of intelligence, special cases
so to speak? What does it mean to live in the prehistory of intelligence? That is the ultimate question
any agent that considers itself intelligent should entertain. Absent that, we fall into the trap of thinking
ourselves as fundaments, as centres of the universe
and as completed totalities beyond which nothing
can be imagined. I see both posthumanism and conservative humanism as unwilling to methodologically
deal with this question. If the human is this fixed
X, then let’s just abide by its vision, for everything
else is just a supernatural vagary (conservative humanism). Or if the human is this established X and
we want to get beyond its narrow scope, then let’s
talk about all kinds of fanciful stuff like sentient lava
lamps, intelligent spuds or unbounded intelligences, and maybe even god as the register of absolute
contingency (the posthuman flight of fancy). These
are both parasitic upon a notion of a fixed idea of
the human, they both feed on a notion of humanity
that is precritical and prescientific.
For me, all of this is just a first step, and I’m just
trying to actually work on the details of what would
be a system of education, an education in which we
can determine the good life of an intelligence which
has not yet fully determined what it is, where it is
in the world and what it should do; an intelligence
which is still in the process of developing its methods of inquiry with regard to its position in the world,
so as to cultivate itself by enriching the universe it
inhabits.
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