An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age...

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David W. Bates

An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence

Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age

David W. Bates

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English

University of Chicago Press
31 May 2024

Philosophy of mind; Ethical & social aspects of computing

A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.

We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body's automaticity worked alongside the mind's autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.

By: David W. Bates
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 36mm
Weight: 708g
ISBN: 9780226832104
ISBN 10: 0226832104
Pages: 408
Publication Date: 31 May 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Frame 1. Autonomy and Automaticity: On the Contemporary Question of Intelligence Part One: The Automatic Life of Reason in Early Modern Thought 2. Integration and Interruption: The Cartesian Thinking Machine 3. Spiritual Automata: From Hobbes to Spinoza 4. Spiritual Automata Revisited: Leibniz and Automatic Harmony 5. Hume’s Enlightened Nervous System Threshold: Kant’s Critique of Automatic Reason 6. The Machinery of Cognition in the First Critique 7. The Pathology of Spontaneity: The Critique of Judgment and Beyond Part Two: Embodied Logics of the Industrial Age 8. Babbage, Lovelace, and the Unexpected 9. Psychophysics: On the Physio-Technology of Automatic Reason 10. Singularities of the Thermodynamic Mind 11. The Dynamic Brain 12. Prehistoric Humans and the Technical Evolution of Reason 13. Creative Life and the Emergence of Technical Intelligence Prophecy: The Future of Extended Minds 14. Technology Is Not the Liberation of the Human but Its Transformation . . . Part Three: Crises of Order: Thinking Biology and Technology between the Wars 15. Techniques of Insight 16. Brains in Crisis, Psychic Emergencies 17. Bio-Technicity in Von Uexküll 18. Lotka on the Evolution of Technical Humanity 19. Thinking Machines 20. A Typology of Machines 21. Philosophical Anthropology: The Human as Technical Exteriorization Hinge: Prosthetics of Thought 22. Wittgenstein on the Immateriality of Thinking Part Four: Thinking Outside the Body 23. Cybernetic Machines and Organisms 24. Automatic Plasticity and Pathological Machines 25. Turing and the Spirit of Error 26. Epistemologies of the Exosomatic 27. Leroi-Gourhan on the Technical Origin of the Exteriorized Mind The Beginning of an End 28. Technogenesis in the Networked Age 29. Failures of Anticipation: The Future of Intelligence in the Era of Machine Learning Acknowledgments Notes Index

David W. Bates is professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books, including Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France.

Reviews for An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age

“Historically astute and philosophically brilliant, this is the most ambitious, original, and important book on human-machine relations in thirty years. Bates surveys the entirety of the modern tradition since Descartes to demonstrate that there has never been a ‘natural intelligence’ to contrast with artificial intelligence and offers one convincing interpretation after another to force the reader to rework basic assumptions about technology, philosophy, and humanity. This is a tremendous achievement—intellectual history at its best.” -- Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University “As new forms of artificial intelligence throw us into turmoil, Bates invites us to think through the ever-evolving relations between human and humanish. Deftly weaving together cognitive science, intellectual history, and philosophy, he shows that we have for centuries measured ourselves against our self-simulating machines and reasserted our existence in the gap between the natural world (which constitutes us) and the artificial (which we constitute). It is the perfect moment for this book.” -- Jessica Riskin, Stanford University