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Introduction
Chat GPT was asked to write a 1000 word essay on Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence and the answers provided help us to understand at least how the programmers think and reason about the phenomenon they have created. The conclusion Chat arrived at was:
“The intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence encompasses a vast array of profound questions that challenge our understanding of the mind, consciousness, ethics, knowledge, and human existence. As AI continues to advance, it becomes increasingly important to engage in philosophical reflections that guide the responsible development and deployment of this powerful technology. By exploring these philosophical dimensions, we can forge a more profound appreciation of human intelligence and its relationship with the rapidly evolving world of AI. Together, philosophy and artificial intelligence offer a unique perspective that can illuminate the path to a future where both human minds and machines coexist in harmony and understanding”.(20th July 2023)
The key words in the opening sentence are “challenge our understanding of the mind, consciousness, ethics, knowledge and human existence.” It is clear that Chat is taking an explorative, cautious approach to this question, and other questions we asked later, indicate that Chat does not quite engage with the arguments Philosophers have provided against using some of the language used above, e.g. understanding, intelligence, etc.. It almost seems as if it is the question of the peaceful coexistence of man and computer that primarily occupied the programmers and they are at pains not to take a definite defendable position on many of the issues that are raised about AI.
Chat was also asked to write a 1000 word essay on the topic of “Know Thyself” and two features of its answer stood out. Firstly, no connection was made between this topic and the topic of the importance of knowing what it is we do not know. Socrates is mentioned but not the fact that his entire philosophical adventure may have been sponsored by the statement of the Oracle that he was the wisest man in Athens because he knew what it is that he did not know. Secondly it is remarkable that Chat speaks about “our” personal “introspective” journey as if it regarded itself as part of the community of minds that form our human communities. It is clear here that the programmers are not programming chat in accordance with a clear conception of the “identity” of the machine (what it is in itself), but are rather importing their own identities into the equation. This may cause confusion in the future and gives rise to the Philosophical demand that the programmers form a clear picture of the machines powers and potentialities and programme the machine accordingly.
Joseph Weizenbaum, in his work “Computer Power and Human Reason”( London, Penguin, 1976) tells us about his experience of what he calls the artificial intelligentsia” in unflattering terms, calling them compulsive mad scientists. If these characters are our programmers we can certainly wonder whether they know what they don’t know. We shall offer a review of Weizenbaum’s work, subtitled “From Judgement to Calculation” in a later chapter.
Introspection was a topic covered in volume one of my work (The World Explored, the World Suffered….”). In this volume there is a chapter on Plotinus, an ancient thinker who belonged to the Platonic school of Philosophy, but he subscribed to a theory of the soul (psuché) that would reject confusing arte-facts with “forms of life”. When Plotinus discusses the senses and sensation there is no confusion of, for example, biologically-based visual images, with the automated digital visual images (ADVI’s), that are so commonly encountered in the world of artificial intelligence. There is, that is, a clear recognition of the difference in distinction between techné and epistemé. This is part of the knowledge the Oracle and the everyday Greek took for granted, seeing in the former the need for a calculative form of reasoning that does not follow the principles of theoretical reasoning involved in epistemological claims.
Plotinus claims that we humans use sensation to discriminate between experiences and this is certainly not the case with computers that cannot in any sense “feel” anything, since they do not possess the appropriate biological nervous-system. The soul, for Plotinus, belongs to a realm of Thought and Being and is likened unto a musician playing a physical harp that belongs to another realm of Being (that relates to external objects). He points in the spirit of Aristotle to the melody emanating from a harp as the “principle”(arché) of the activity. The type of knowledge operative in this situation is obviously a non-observational type of knowledge and is, therefore, more practical and related to various practical aesthetic concerns that we human beings possess.
Kant’s third Critique discusses both aesthetic judgement and teleological judgment and themes relating to psuché, remind us of the hylomorphic approach to such themes. The most elementary power of psuche is the power of sensation that, for Kant, carries with it more than the power of discriminating one thing from another in experience. “Knowledge” in the form of an apriori intuitive awareness of space and time flows from the human body composed of a complex set of organs orchestrating a configuration of limbs which, according to O Shaughnessy, generate a body-image that is “known” non-observationally and that “inhabits” space and time rather than merely occurring in a space time continuum in the way a grain of sand in a desert or a machine does.
Given the fact that a computer or Turing machine has a fundamental relation to mathematics that relies on a sequence of functions being arrayed in time, either simultaneously, or linearly, one after another, it is not particularly surprising to discover that the “alphabet” composing the so-called “information-strings” is composed of 0’s and 1’s. This is the “language” of the machine although one must hasten to add that the use of the term “language” to describe what is occurring here is attenuated to say the very least. The 0’s and 1’s may not refer to a space in the machine but to whether a particular process is operating or not. The principle operating here is an energy regulation principle that is not entirely dissimilar to that energy regulating principle operating in the brain with the caveat that the machine is constituted of inorganic matter moved by electrical currents and the brain is an organic system moved by both chemistry and electrical activity, with the emphasis on the former when it is a question of transmitting impulses over the system. This difference alone might rule out the possibility of any form of self-awareness occurring in the machine, and this in turn may be the crucial element necessary for agency, i.e. for an act of will to occur.
This difference may also account for an act of knowing to occur based on sensation and the feeling of the sensation. The difference I am drawing attention to here is similar to the difference between a perceptual image of a castle and a digitally generated image of a castle, whether we are talking about images in motion such as those generated by film or television cameras, or “still-life” images that may be painted or drawn. The latter are in the true tradition of Plato simulated images of reality that are like the shadows projected upon the wall of the prisoners cave: they are arte-factual. Such images cannot form the basis for generating either an act of knowledge (episteme, justified true belief) or an action directed toward the good in the external world (arête, virtuous act).
Yet Stanley Cavell in an interesting book on the Ontology of film, entitled, “The World viewed”, made the following claim:
“…an immediate fact about the medium of the photograph..is that it is not painting..A photograph does not present us with “likenesses” of things: it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves”(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971, P.17)
But Cavell immediately backtracks from this and claims that because the photo of the earthquake is not the earthquake itself we may feel uncomfortable with the above claim as we might feel uncomfortable with showing a picture of a famous person and saying “that is not X”. He compounds the mystery surrounding the ontological structure of such images by claiming:
“So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world…” P.21
Cavell asks himself the question of how photography managed to escape subjectivism and he gives himself the answer that it succeeds in doing this by the process of automation, a process that removes the human being completely from the artistic equation. This is an interesting discussion in the light of the questions we have been raising about artificial intelligence. Is not the human being here too, removed from the equation? There are, we know programmers behind what is happening on our screens as there are directors responsible for the films we view but the question we need to ask here is the question Weizenbaum raises: Have the programmers become like their machines, automatons, robotic presences who need their food brought to them?
Cavell in the introduction to his work invokes the spectre of Plato and asks whether the relation of the image to what it is an image of is not a relation of “participation?” The images in motion we encounter then, somehow announce the presence of the thing itself:
“…. A fundamental fact of film’s photographic basis: that objects participate in the photographic presence of themselves on film: they are essential in the making of their appearances. Objects projected on a screen are inherently reflexive, they occur as self-referential, reflecting upon their physical origins.”(P. XVI)
The question I am raising with this discussion is whether we are not dealing with shadows on a cave wall but rather with the many objects in the world participating in the one idea of them, an idea that gives them their reality. Insofar as the images we encounter on the screens of our computers are moving, and have a basis in photography, they must in a sense escape the argument that attempts to characterise them as subjective imaginings that have little contact with reality.
One of the messages of “The World Explored, the World Suffered” is the destructiveness of the objective subjective distinction in metaphysical discussions (discussions about first principles). Sometimes the distinction is being used to neutralise first principle arguments, and sometimes we refuse its application in contexts where the issue is one of defending different forms of (logical?) solipsism. Perhaps the solution to this problem is to abandon this distinction altogether in favour of Aristotelian, Kantian frameworks which situate the human being in a framework well expressed by Heidegger’s term, “Being-in-the-world”.
The important fact to remember in the context of this discussion is that phenomena in the world get their explanations from 3 different forms of science, theoretical, practical and productive. Techné, has its roots in the productive sciences that situate themselves not in the faculties of the understanding but in relation to Judgment. Technological instrumental equipment such as AI robots and computers are not worthy ends in themselves for humanity, and are therefore not something we can speak with a “universal voice”. There is, at best, an appeal to instrumental practical reasoning that sets its sights on the means to ends rather than on the ends themselves
The form of reasoning we encounter in such contexts is the form of an instrumental hypothetical imperative that select means to ends. Insofar as humans are concerned it is a measure of human intelligence, according to William James in his “Principles of Psychology”, that if we find our path to an end blocked, we can then choose an alternative means to the end. This kind of freedom of choice, however, is not available to computers and their programs in situ. So, there is no human element directly involved in this process and this is why we have raised the issue of automation in relation to the images in motion in film. AI is not entitled to the term “Intelligent” on James’ reasoning, because however real the cause-effect relations involved in the relation between the lines of the program and the operation of the computer, the effects are automated effects and not products of free human choices. Moreover James further claims that:
“The pursuance of future ends, and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon” (Principles of Psychology, James, W., Dover Publications, New York, 1890, P.8)
This is in line with both Aristotelian and Kantian thinking, and James continues to contrast the criteria of mentality to automatic or machine-like deterministic activity, where there is both no possibility for choice or any relation to desire. James argues that there are reflex responses in living beings that appear to be in accordance with pure mechanical causation, but it is important to note that this admission is also to be acknowledged in the light of the above, that is the reflex system can be both monitored by the mentality of a human organism and qualified by an immediate mental response which might, for example, explain that the reflex was not intended.
James was writing during the “times of troubles” for Psychology, during the divorce proceedings between Philosophy and Scientific Psychology that had begun under the banner of the definition of Psychology as “The Science of Consciousness”. The Definition William James coined was “ The Science of Mental Life, its phenomena and conditions”, and this was an attempt to summarise both the Philosophy of mind of his time, and the scientific research from all over the world (James was competent in both German and French). He was writing in a time of transition in Philosophy that he helped to initiate with his eventual creation of the school of “Pragmatism”. A transition that Brian O’Shaughnessy would echo and modify in his two volume work on “The Will: A dual-aspect theory”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980):
“it is because we think of mans mind as vital and animal, and tied in its very essence to a sustaining world, that we lay great emphasis at the present moment on this familiar phenomenon. All else in the mind, Including consciousness itself, is from such a point of view of merely secondary significance.”(P.XIV)
This excursion into the domain of Philosophical Psychology has consequences for any inquiry into the nature of Artificial Intelligence, which appears to have by-passed the Socratic stage of the investigation that always begins with the question “Ask of everything what it is in its nature”. The inquiry also seems to have overlooked the Aristotelian definition of human psuché, namely, “rational animal capable of discourse”. By no stretch of the imagination is it possible to categorise mechanical devices as “alive” or “animal”, Furthermore, since the elements of the definition are integrated together, it also suggests that mechanical devices may not be capable of authentic discourse or rationality.
Later in this work we will draw attention to the failure of Chat GPT to understand the meaning of the statement “Promises ought to be kept”. Also missing in this situation is what O’ Shaughnessy termed “self-consciousness” (part of the “essential dynamic character of consciousness”). An epistemological contact with reality is part of this process and O’Shaughnessy contrasts the normal function of self-consciousness with dreaming, which is what happens to mind when the normal controls of the mind are relaxed (inactivity of the motor system and senses). Action (initiated by the motor system), however, invades the domain of epistemology and this is evident in the way in which the practical world is stamped on all visual experience: the visual impression of the castle is a place to visit by climbing the steep hill.
O Shaughnessy does not miss the Socratic and Aristotelian steps in his investigation as is evidenced by the claim:
“..what one is determines how and indeed what one knows”(P. XLVII)
Freud is invoked in this discussion:
“One sees the landscape with a cool objective intelligent eye that endows it with colour and shape and depth and content, and at the very same time with an unconscious and deeply interested gaze that sees in it some primal entity concerning which one cares….According to Freud, the ego phenomenon of sense perception depends on and reverberates with the undercurrent of phenomena in the other great instinctual half of the mind….Epistemology is not the isolated psychic function one might at first think. Thus sight is a more total embrace than the model of the camera suggests: depending on sensation, and so body, but also on past experience, on present beliefs, on concepts, memory, indeed upon sanity and reason; and according to Freudian theory, ones very instincts”.(P. XLVIII)
This also raises the question of whether the category of desire is relevant to the description of the activities of the AI machine. Indeed the fallacy we refer to later in the work, that namely, of anthropomorphising the machine, may lie in the very structure of our perceptual contact with the world. We “see”, for example, the arms and legs of a chair and this is reflected in language in extending the use of linguistic terms metaphorically. Anthropomorphising a chair in everyday language is, of course, a different matter to the issue of the validity of the claims made by science and natural science which has tended toward cleansing its theories of all such tendencies, referring to them as “subjective”. But there is a deeper issue here, especially when we are discussing the so-called life sciences.
Kant, in his Third Critique, partly acknowledged this deeper issue on his discussion of the role of analogy in relation to the power of Judgement:
“The concept of a thing as intrinsically a physical end is, therefore, not a constitutive conception either of understanding or of reason, but yet it may be used by reflective judgement as a regulative conception for guiding our investigation of objects of this kind by a remote analogy with our own causality according to ends generally…..Organisms are, therefore, the only beings in nature that, considered in their separate existence, and apart from any relation to other things, cannot be thought possible, except as ends of nature. It is they, then, that first afford objective reality to the conception of an end that is an end of nature and not a practical end. Thus they supply natural science with the basis for a teleology, or, in other words, a mode of estimating its Objects on a special principle that it would otherwise be absolutely unjustifiable to introduce into that science—seeing that we are quite unable to perceive a priori the possibility of such a kind of causality.”(Critique of Judgement, Kant, I, Trans by Meredith, J., C., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1952) Part two. P 24
Teleological judgement will, of course also be relevant to the claims we make about arte-facts such as computers in the name of the Productive sciences (as conceived of by Aristotle), but here the principles of techné will be more relevant to our judgements than the principles of practical or theoretical reason. Kant follows up on this essentially Aristotelian position with the following reflection on final ends, art and machines:
“Thus a house is certainly a cause of the money that is received as rent, but yet conversely, the representation of this possible income was the cause of the building of the house. A causal nexus of this kind is termed that of final causes. The former might, perhaps, more appropriately be called the nexus of real, and the latter the nexus of ideal causes, because with the use of terms it would be understood at once that there cannot be more than these two kinds of causality. Now the first requisite of a thing considered as a physical end is that its parts, both as to their existence and form, are only possible by their relation to the whole. For the thing is itself an end, and is, therefore, comprehended under a conception or idea that must determine a priori all that is to be contained in it. But so far as the possibility of a thing is only thought in this way, it is simply a work of art…..But if a thing is a product of nature….every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole, that is, as an instrument, or organ…the part must be an organ producing the other parts…In a watch one part is the instrument by which the movement of the others is effected, but one wheel is not the efficient cause of the production of the other. One part is certainly present for the sake of another, but it does not owe its presence to the agency of the other….still less does one watch produce other watches…nor does it repair its own casual disorders…For a machine has merely motive power, whereas an organised being possesses inherent formative power…” (PP 20-22)
Descartes, we know, claimed to overthrow Aristotelian thinking in this area, partly with the absurd claim that animals are merely machines, thus creating category-confusion that has persisted to the present day. Kant’s description of the watch above is the template that ought to be used for the description of AI machines or robots. These machines were all designed for an “artificial” purpose and belong to the category of what Heidegger defined as “instrumentalities” that are “ready-to-hand”. Their form of Being-there (Dasein) is not the form of human-being. This, then, ought to be sufficient justification to insist that the description of these machines and the explanation of their functions do not belong in the sphere of the theoretical or practical (moral) sciences.
This raises the issue of whether an arte-fact which is, seemingly, autonomously active can be said to want or desire anything. O Shaughnessy is categorical on this issue:
“the desire-force acts entirely within the psychological domain” (P LI)
He continues to reason that the desire force does not apply to phenomena in the mind or to the mid itself but only to the man, the human being, that possesses the mind in question. Furthermore, it is argued this force-desire is responsive to intention and therefore also to the agents judgment, reason, and values (P.LIV) O Shaughnessy sketches for us also the ontological divisions of the world, beginning with physical inorganic entities, continuing with living entities, which then possess psychological and mental powers: a sketch entirely consistent with Aristotelian and Kantian assumptions. Intention is located in both the psychological and mental domains, because it introduces both significance and control into action scenarios (LXII). Whether anything can have meaning for a machine, or be subject to autonomous control of the machine (independent of the designers and programmers of any software), is a burning question, which will be raised later in the work in different forms.
O Shaughnessy (OS) is critical of the metaphysical tradition and its treatment of the issue of the will, especially the tendencies to reduce this real phenomenon to something material, but also the tendency to locate it in a dualist metaphysics of the kind we find in Descartes his continental followers. In the light of materialistic and dualistic fallacies OS proposes instead, a dual-aspect theory which reminds one of the Philosophical Psychology of Hylomorphism , Kantian Critical Theory, and Late-Wittgensteinian “perspicuous representation”. This theory of the will also allows us to categorically state that a machine cannot be said to act intentionally because as OS claims:
“All actions have a psychological origin”(P.11)
So, when we describe the activity of the computer it will take the form of third person observation reports such as “The screen went dark” or “Writing and some images appeared on the screen”. No agency can be logically present in such descriptions. This is to be compared to the difference between the reports, “I moved my finger” and “My finger moved!”. In the former case agency and intention is assumed and in the latter it is assumed that a part of the agent has been moved by some mechanical cause. OS investigates the logical criteria and markers of an intentional moving of the fingers, and notes that we need the presence of not just the elements of the “powers” of desire, intention and will, but also the “power of a physical mechanism or what he calls a “Power-line”, if we are to attempt to provide ourselves with the constitutive conditions of a willed action which will help explain the differences between a movement and a purposeful movement. This power-line must obviously connected to an “I” or an agent. OS claims:
“I do not oppose the efficacy of an agent and of the physical means he employs. On the contrary, I suppose them to be one.”(P.113)
Wittgenstein’s comment on the absence of surprise that accompanies all voluntary action is also invoked here and this connects up to his remark that the order to move ones fingers are not addressed to the muscles of the finger, but could only be addressed to the agent of the action. Yet the muscles, nerves, blood supply etc., are a part of the so-called power-line. If we were solely dealing with the physical movement of the fingers, an account of the physical conditions would suffice to give a complete account of the event in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. When, however, we are dealing with an agent moving his fingers, we are dealing with a set of psycho-physical conditions which include a connection of the power-line to the motor section of the brain. It is this combination of types of conditions that is the central foundation of OS’s dual aspect account of this phenomenon. Involved in such an account is what OS refers to as the “experience” of agency, which, because a machine is not capable of experience, cannot be attributed to the machine. This unique experience extends to action and involves a consciousness of ones agency or acting. This consciousness does not imply that in such a conscious experience that I have an image of my fingers moving. Yet, since we are dealing with the concept of an action, there must be a unity of purpose in the first person description of “I moved my fingers” and a third person report of “Your fingers moved!”
This discussion of a power-line might encourage a questioning of whether a purely electrical power line could suffice to bring about a movement similar to the intentional movement of the fingers. Imagine the case where I lose my hand and an artificial hand replaces my loss. Imagine further that my lost hand is replaced by a hand, without bones, a blood supply, or “nerves”, in the normal meanings of these terms. Instead there are electrical circuits and plastic and metal components. If someone then orders me to move my hand, what is the difference between the movement of the normal fingers, and the movement of the artificial fingers? There is even a sense in which one might agree to the description that, “I felt my fingers move!”. This feeling, though, is a secondary phenomenon, due to pressure on the other living parts of my arm. No sensations from my fingers are arriving at the sensory-motor region of the brain. This region is partly responsible for my body-image, which is an important part of my experience of my movements and my actions. In fact it is this body-image, this non-observational knowledge of the position of my body and limbs, that is an important part of my self conscious awareness of what I am doing, have done, and will do. Not all parts of the body are connected to this body-image: the feeling of the presence of internal organs are not part of this body-image. The body-image on the Kantian schema would be a part of our power of Sensibility: an awareness which is non-conceptual. It is this sensible body-image which is the immediate target of willing. The “data” of this body image, OS claims, are inherently spatial, which if true would connect up well with the Kantian account. It is not the case, moreover, that I “remember” where my body and limbs are, rather these are given “immediately” as is the case with all Kantian intuitions. OS calls this form of non-observational knowledge, practical knowledge and he characterises it as follows:
“the immediate epistemological “given” was not sensations in three-dimensional space, but sensations in three-dimensional space at points on limbs that were themselves given immediately as points in thee-dimensional space…..so that the immediate sensuous “given” was , sensation –at- a -point –in- body-relative space.” (P.238-9)
This is of course a different form of awareness of space to that given in our visual impressions which, however, may also be part of what Sartre called our hodological maps (our awareness of the space and environment we live in as essentially related to our projects and actions). OS, however, argues for a sense-data thesis that seemingly, disconnects our epistemological relation to space from this hodological map. Those favouring the hodological map thesis might claim, for example that when we see the castle in the distance on the hill that presents itself as a “steep climb”, what we see carries an awareness of the motor requirements for the tasks of climbing the hill and perhaps also walking around the grounds of the caste and exploring its interior. The three dimensions we experience, that is, are a consequence of some kind of projection of what can be or what needs to be done in relation to the material objects we see. OS does not frame his account in these terms. He acknowledges firstly, that the psychological experience of space is that of seeing objects closer and further away. He claims in his work “The Will: a dual aspect theory”:
“concepts play a causal role in the genesis of visual depth experience”(Vol 1: P.171)
These concepts are, concepts of the physical non-psychological cause of the two-dimensional data presented on the surface of our retinas. OS continues his reasoning:
“For if the entry of depth into a visual field is the entry of an array of visual sensations all of which have non-psychological causes, and if it is also true that concepts play a part in the genesis of the experience of depth in the visual impression, it is certain that those sensations cannot, in themselves make visible the depth that they bring forward for visual consciousness”.(P.171)
This is an interesting discussion, placing material objects (the non-psychological cause) at the centre of the reasoning. Kant, we know claimed that knowledge requires the interaction of both concepts and intuitions (space and time) and a judgemental structure of something being said or thought about something. The something being talked or thought about can we know in language be characterised by a definite description, e.g. “the steep hill”, “the interesting castle”, which might or might not carry motor implications but which as Russell pointed out imply the x ( “there is an x such that…”), which is the non-psychological external cause OS is referring to. The point of this digression is that the image on the computer screen is a two-dimensional array, and the impression of three dimensions has to be given by someone moving through the landscape, e.g. climbing the hill, or circum-ambulating the castle. The computer has no body-image upon which to project the beginnings of an intended movement project, and it does not (therefore?) have a conscious awareness of the space outside: a “hodological?” space? Machines do not relate to time in the way in which living conscious, language-using beings do. A moving “movie-camera” can, of course, give the “impression” of the switching of “attention” from one part of the scene to another but the impression is simulated. Attention requires consciousness, and only life forms can be conscious.
The above account of Spatial awareness recalls Kantian reflections on the intimate relation there is between space and time which is, of course required in the identification and description of movement of any kind, but Kant does not explore the relations of our epistemological awareness to the practical relations we have to space, time and material objects in the way in which phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty do. In my previous work “The World Explored, the World Suffered, I noted that the new men (metaphorically) wish to invert the world and our values and turn “the world upside down”. Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to an experiment in which the world literally appears to be inverted:
“If a subject is made to wear glasses which correct the retinal images, the whole landscape at first appears unreal and upside down; on the second day of the experiment normal perception begins to reassert itself, except that the subject has the feeling that his own body is upside down.” The Phenomenology of Perception, trans.,Smith, C., London Routledge, 1952 (P.285)
The experiment referred to is that conducted by Stratton published in the Psychological Review in 1896. Merleau-Ponty reaffirms a commitment to the hodological map theory of perception when he later claims:
“The perceptual field corrects itself and at the conclusion of the experiment I identify it without any concept because I live in it, because I am borne wholly into the new spectacle and, so to speak, transfer my centre of gravity into it.”(P.293)
Merleau-Ponty goes onto describe the influence of mescalin upon the spatial perception of subjects: approaching objects becoming smaller and the walls of the room appear to be 150 metres apart. This is, of course, a testament to the essential role of chemical transactions in the construction of our experiences. Pouring mescalin onto the hard drive of a computer would not result in altered experiences, quite simply because the hard drive is merely a “storage place” for data. Would the machine begin to hallucinate? There is a whole range of psychological descriptions, which are completely inappropriate when applied to machines.
The “Spirit of the Age” is difficult to capture during eras of transition, in particular when one is in the middle of a revolution, be it an industrial or a technological revolution. Of course, it is an open question as to whether such revolutions are “peacetime” bloodless revolutions. My research into the History of Psychology charted in the 4 volume work “The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action”, attempted to argue for a thesis that the age we live in is indeed an “Age of Discontent”, and only a finger on the pulse of the Age will tell us what is happening: scientific observation alone, appears not to suffice for a diagnosis of our “modern” malady (or the malady of the Modern). The knowledge we need to make a diagnosis is located in the various streams of historical processes and events, but sometimes these streams have been forced “underground” and flow in the dark, until the terrain becomes more favourable and the sun can shine on the waters once more.
The “Project” of the Delphic Oracle” to “know oneself” was certainly easier to launch than to find its destination, but Ancient Greece was one significant, beginning of a journey that appeared to lose its way, at least twice ( first,during the Dark ages where religions suppressed the philosophical spirit, and second, during “Modern Times” when an anti-rational attitude sought to “forget” or “avoid” earlier more cognitive approaches to the aporetic questions thrown up for the Being “for whom his Being is in question”(Heidegger)).
Heidegger himself, of course, suffered from the pathological condition he sought to avoid, a condition that has been diagnosed by three different Philosophical movements begun by Aristotle, continued by Kant, and then by the later work of Wittgenstein.
We begin at the beginning, and with the first cultural conflict, namely that between the Ancient Philosophical Greeks, and the more “Modern” Romans engaged on a military project of globalisation (perhaps initiated by Alexander the Great). The Romans were more like the Spartans than the Athenians, but were also “pragmatic” engineers”. This, according to Heidegger, was reflected in their language, which failed to capture the complex spirit of certain Greek terms, such as aletheia, psuché, arête, diké, arché, epistemé. These terms formed the reflective framework the Greeks used for their philosophical “explorations”. Mistranslations of key terms such as aletheia, by the powerful Romans produced significant consequences for Philosophy and we ought to recall that Philosophical schools were ordered to be closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian. The spirit of the Dark Ages did not favour the kind of open critical thinking initiated by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s work was not completely translated from the Greek until the 13th century, but even then this occurred against the background of a religious cultural domination that exerted considerable influence in the transmission of “pagan” ideas. According to Heidegger, we lost our way in relation to the aporetic questions raised by the Greeks relating to the nature of Being and Being-in-the-world. Heidegger, however, did not see in Kant the revival of the Greek spirit and sought to promote the power of Imagination over the powers of Understanding and Reason proposed by Kant. This “movement” was aided and abetted by the “new men”, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the pragmatists, logical atomists, logical positivists, materialists and dualists of all shapes and sizes.
The emblem of the Romans was Janus, the God of war, whose two faces were oriented in different directions. Now one can, in a spirit of charity, interpret this figure sympathetically as I did in volume I of “The world explored, the World Suffered”, or one can interpret this symbol in terms of the Roman mentality that re-directed the course of History in a military and technical direction. Descartes we know was a military man, and very interested in war-machines, and he even regarded animals as “machines”, thus raising the idea of techné above the previously valued Greek ideas of arête, dike, epistemé, arché , psuché and aletheia. It is this spirit in many different forms, (including the “spirit” of those scientists that worked on the atomic bomb which would kill hundreds and thousands of non-combatant civilians), that caused me to nominate “the Age of Discontentment” as the name for the times we have lived in since Descartes.
The Period of the Enlightenment in the form of Kant, brought to life once again the spirit of Ancient Greece but this was soon to be stifled by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Art, too, turned its back on our Greek heritage with the advent of “Modern Art” at the beginning of the 20th century. (There is a certain irony in the form the first of the instrumentalist ready-made objects took (Duchamp’s “Fountain”))
It may seem paradoxical that we should place the origin of Age of Discontentment in the Renaissance period (Descartes, Hobbes), but the period also contained figures like Machiavell,i whose political reflections on The Prince certainly turned the Greek ideas of arête and diké upside down in favour of an immoral instrumentalism that in Socrates’ words, attempted to make “the worse argument seem the better”. With such “new” re-interpretations of the Humanism that began in the Renaissance with figures like Shakespeare Giorgione, and Michelangelo and ended with invasions of Italy, we were returned back to the symbol of Janus and the Roman beginnings and evolution of the “Age of Discontentment”.
It is claimed by Adrian Stokes, the art critic, that Renaissance humanism manifested an intensification of all forms of cultural activity including science (Copernicus, Galileo) and a revival of the Ancient Greek “Spirit” and there are certainly good grounds for such a judgement if one excludes Descartes, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. Philosophy, especially Political Philosophy, was not one of Stokes’ major concerns although he was very interested in Freudian Psychoanalysis, and in particular Melanie Klein’s interpretation of Freud’s theories. In an Essay entitled Greek Culture and the Ego, Stokes quotes form Bowra’s work “The Greek Experience” where the complex relation between pleasure and reason is discussed in relation to the ideas of balance and harmony. The focus of Stokes, however, is upon the Ego and its “good objects” and the arguments presented presuppose a complex view of psuche that requires an acceptance of death against the background of virtue, which includes courage, temperance and wisdom.
The “ready-mades” of “Modern Art, then, challenge the ideas of the Great artists, especially the idea of a work which expresses a long apprenticeship in the medium of carving stone or painting with the intention of expressing ones feelings about a tempestuous world. The “ready-mades” are at best artefacts inserted into a field of expectation, which they are specifically designed to shatter. They are “products” for a “Market” guided by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, which knows nothing of the virtues and the value of beautiful objects. By the beginning of the 1900’s the new men had succeeded in dismantling much of the structure created by Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment. Political parties, as Hannah Arendt had reported, were disappearing and being replaced by “mass movements”, which would require mass media for the communication of political and important social issues. These were all viewed as technical challenges and not as humanistic problems, requiring a commitment to the principles of the various sciences. Two World-Wars occurred, in relatively close proximity to one another, and added to the “technical” problems the world had to face. Turing appeared on the scene during the second world-war, in the name of science working for the military, and the task of communication with the masses appeared to be reduced from a knowledge issue to the technical problem of deciphering/communicating information: episteme, arête, arché, dike, psuché and aletheia were no longer relevant in the context of exploration which relied on instrumental reasoning relating to the most appropriate means to ends defined in the language of techné.
Freud writing in 1929 about this state of affairs made his famous remark that perhaps the work of building our Civilisations have not been worth the effort, and he raised the issue of a death-instinct intent upon destroying what we have created. It would not be long before his books were being burned by SS order, and he and his family had to flee to London to escape the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”. We are, of course, all familiar with the technical precision with which the Germans approached this task of mass extinction, using lies and deception, and even unjust “laws” to facilitate the completion of their Project. Similar forms of technical knowledge, lies, and deception, were also used by Stalin in his projects of mass-murder. Freud identified the psychological mechanisms involved in leading the masses to accept what was being done in their name: identification with the aggressor, projection, displacement, denial, all played their part in successfully creating a mass-delusion. At the same time, born from the ashes of these conflagrations was the United Nations, an organisation suggested by Kant over two hundred years earlier as part of his one hundred thousand year vision of the journey toward the kingdom of ends and the peaceful/harmonious coexistence of nations. Universities too, attempted, in various ways, to contribute to this Cosmopolitan Humanistic vision. Science was, of course, a part of this vision: not the science of Turing or Oppenheimer but rather the Philosophical view of the Sciences (Theoretical, Practical, and Productive), presented in the writings of both Aristotle and Kant. Freud’s writings too, presented a theory crossing the borders of all three sciences: a theory grounded in a clear picture of the role of the brain in understanding the human form of psuché.
What, then, are the dangers of AI? The fears that mankind will become extinct as a consequence of its introduction are great exaggerations that underestimate the understanding we have of what kind of thing an arte-fact and machine is. Although we have to add here that one should not underestimate the power of language to confuse us. Calling a machine “artificial intelligence” for example, is misleading and deceptive, and can cause mischief of many different kinds. If intelligence is as William James defines it, namely the capacity to choose a different means to and end when that end is blocked, then the machine is not intelligent, and must await action from its master, the programmer, in the form of changing the program before the correct means can be found. The term “artificial” then becomes redundant unless of course one wants to refer to the intelligence of the programmer and uses the term “engineered”.
If we do manage to destroy our civilisations it will not be because of an arte-fact we have created, but rather because we no longer believe our civilisation-building activities are worth the work we put into them: when the flame of Eros begins to wane, the flame of Thanatos burns bright. What scenario is possible if this state of affairs actualises?
Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy”(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979), looks at the problem of our identification of another human being and its logical conditions through the eyes of a skeptic. He dismisses the Kantian solution on the grounds of dogmatism and proceeds to solve the skeptical problem, not at the level of principles, but rather at the level of a phenomenological/dialectical account of a kind of description that provides us with “essences”. He asks us to imagine a human being with all the organs and limbs constituted chemically and biologically in accordance with Aristotelian hylomorphic theory. This science fiction creation of the scientist has a computer chip in the middle of his brain performing all the normal functions a human is capable of. Cavell claims that there is in principle no difference in the behaviour we can observe performed by this human robot and that we therefore have no right to believe in the existence of other minds, partly because the others body always comes between me and my knowledge that he possesses a soul/mind. Two objections immediately spring to mind in relation to this. Firstly, were we not taught by Aristotle that the soul means psuché, which in turn means form of life, and for each form of life there is a mountain of evidence that they are alive: evidence which suffices for an essence-specifying definition of all animal species. In the human case there is a system of organs (including a brain), a configuration of limbs and the behaviour of “living” that exhibits all the human powers that have been documented by Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein. Secondly, Wittgenstein has taught us that the grammar of our language gives us access to essences, for example, that I can know that other people think:
“I can know what someone else is thinking , mot what I am thinking. It is correct to say “I know what you are thinking”, and wrong to say “I know what I am thinking.” ( A whole cloud of Philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar)”
Philosophical Investigations Basil Blackwell Oxford, 1972) 222e
“
My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” 178e
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (178e)
“ “ I noticed that he was out of humour.” Is this a report about his behaviour or his state of mind? (“The Sky looks threatening”: is this about the present or the future?) Both; not side-by-side, however but about the one via the other.” 179e
These quotes eliminate the kind possibility of the kind of sceptical recital we find in Cavell, and although Aristotle and Kant do not situate their inquiries at the level of Language, the conclusions we find above, are both in accordance with Aristotelian and Kantian principles We should also recall here that it is Wittgenstein the would-be aeronautical engineer, that specifically in the work above stated that a machine cannot think (PI 359-360).
Cavell does not in this work engage with any of the above quotes but he does offer us an acute analysis of a civilisation that as he puts the matter is “soul-blind”:
“then I might put the question “Is there such a thing as soul-blindness?” in the following way: Is this new form of civilisation being replaced by another? In particular is it being replaced by one in which nothing that happens any longer strikes us as the objectification of subjectivity, as the act of an answerable agent, as the expression and satisfaction of human freedom, of human intention and desire?….Then nothing would (any longer)give them the idea that living beings, could feel. So, they would not (any longer) be human.” (Claim of Reason P.468)
Do machines have the idea that living beings can feel? Descartes certainly had difficulty with this idea, believing that animals were mainly machines and also operating upon them without anaesthetics. So, even if he had the idea that humans could feel, he was certainly confused about other forms of life. Chat GPT says the following in relation to the question “Can machines feel anything, if not, how can they possibly know that living beings feel?” :
“As of my last update in September 2021, machines, including artificial intelligence models like myself, do not possess feelings or consciousness. Machines are programmed to process and analyze data, perform tasks, and generate responses based on patterns in the data they’ve been trained on. While advanced AI models like GPT-3 can mimic human-like responses and engage in natural language interactions, it’s essential to understand that these responses are generated based on patterns learned from vast amounts of text data and not from experiencing emotions or having subjective experiences.
The ability to feel emotions is a complex trait found in living beings, particularly in animals with nervous systems and higher cognitive abilities. Emotions are the result of biological processes and evolved mechanisms that allow organisms to respond to their environment in adaptive ways.
Machines can’t “know” in the same way living beings do because they lack subjective experiences. Knowledge for machines is simply stored information that can be accessed and processed when required. In contrast, living beings possess consciousness and subjective awareness that enables them to have experiences and emotions.
It is crucial to distinguish between artificial intelligence, which is a set of algorithms and data processing mechanisms, and biological consciousness found in living beings. While AI can perform complex tasks and simulate human-like interactions to some extent, it does not inherently possess emotions, self-awareness, or consciousness as living beings do.
So, machines do not “know” that we can feel something about something or, indeed, think something about something, although this would appear to be an important aspect of knowing what a human being is. Cavell’s description of a society in which the inhabitants behave like machines is, however, very relevant in this discussion occurring as it does in an Age of Discontentment. He conducts a discussion of the role of automation in our viewing and appreciation of film which may also be an insightful contribution to our discussion.
The argument begins with the a poretic question “What becomes of reality when it is projected onto a screen?” The image we see is automatically reproduced ( P.23) and no human agent is involved as is the case with the painted representation. This, Cavell argues, gives the viewer the impression that we are viewing events that have already happened in the past (P.23). The characters appearing on the film take the form, not of historical individuals, however, but rather of character-types. When films were in black and white, Cavell argues, reality was presented in dramatic form, perhaps partly because of the dramatic times we had lived through, and perhaps partly because of the nature of the medium. If what we are witnessing on cinema screens are “remembered” events, the black and white may be a testament to the attenuated character of some memories. Cavell characterises this form of attenuated memory in the following way:
“That it is reality we have to deal with, or some mode of depicting it, finds surprising confirmation in the way movies are remembered, and misremembered. It is tempting to suppose that movies are hard to remember the way dreams are, and that is not a bad analogy. As with dreams, you do sometimes find yourself remembering moments in a film, and a procedure in trying to remember s to find your way back to a characteristic mood the thing has left you with. But, unlike dreams, other people can help you remember, indeed are often indispensable to the enterprise of remembering. Movies are hard to remember, the way the actual events of yesterday are…. It is as if you had to remember what happened before you slept. Which suggests that film awakens as much as it enfolds you…”(P.17)
This in turn gives the impression of something magical or mysterious. The absence of the human agent from the process of representation is obviously surprising. This suggests that some being has a view of the world as it is in itself that is presented, magically, and in dream-like fashion. There is no doubt that this phenomenon is very interesting, given the need that there is for an analysis of the mentality (form of life) of the “new” inhabitants of the Age of Discontentment. Cavell elaborates upon this aspect of his account in the following way:
“To say that we wish to view the world itself is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our way of establishing our contact with the world: through viewing it or having views of it. Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self. It s our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no linger hope that anyone might share them…”(P.102)
So the medium of film is a very elaborate form of a wish-fulfilment. Whilst this kind of work of art is not quite a pathological form of wish-fulfilment, it nevertheless, might be a particular form of the Wish of the artist to provide their audience with a realistic view of the world. The above also carries a suggestion of how a divine being might feel in relation to the world that it/he/she has a relation to—seeing the world as it is in itself without being identified and seen.
The medium of film is an expression of artistic power, yet at the same time is the result of a mechanical process and this might be the reason Cavell claimed in Chapter one of “The World Viewed”, that it came as a surprise/shock to him to learn that films had directors who took responsibility for part of the content of the final product. That the world-view of art needed to be automated is a phenomenon that needs explaining. Was it because art could no longer find an audience? If so, what was the reason? A remark of Wittgenstein in a letter to David Pinsent , reported by Rush Rhees (1984), provides another perspective:
“Music came to a full stop with Brahms. And even in Brahms one can begin to hear the sound of machinery.”
This remark suggests the presence of some kind of pathological infection affecting the technical arts such as music, perhaps what we are witnessing here is a phenomenon more connected with anxiety than wish-fulfilment. Cavell also elaborates upon his view of “Modernism” in relation to Philosophy, and other practical “enterprises”, in the foreword to the collection of essays entitled: “Must We mean What We Say?”:
“The essential fact of “what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic.”(P.XIX Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969)
Cavell goes on to say in this section of his work that science does not have an audience and that is the reason why it can be “popularised”, and art cannot. There is also a mysterious remark about Philosophy being harmful unless it is useful, and Socrates is mentioned in this context but not specifically the fact that his attempts to engage with an audience proved dangerous and fatal. Socrates was, of course, challenging the status quo in the attempt to create a better Polis, but he was not a skeptic nor a dogmatist, not a dualist nor a materialist. Socrates pointed us in the right direction, and he also provided us with the tools for the journey ahead, namely a method and the result of the method, (elenchus and general definitions (of justice diké, for example: getting what one deserves, of arête: it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong)).
Kant took up this problem of scepticism and dogmatism and indicated that there was also a growing problem (during the Enlightenment!) of what he called indifferentism. In his Preface to the first edition of the “Critique or Pure Reason Kant has the following to say:
“..the prevailing mood is that of weariness and complete indifferentism—the mother, in all sciences of chaos and night…Indeed these pretended indifferentists, however they may try to disguise themselves by substituting a popular tone for the language of the Schools, inevitably fall back in so far as they think at all, into those very metaphysical assertions which they profess so greatly to despise.”(Trans Kemp Smith, N., London, Macmillan 1963) P. 8)
Kant’s answer to this state of affairs was the publication of the works constituting his Critical Philosophy: a landmark on the road pointed out by Socrates that navigated between the alternatives of dogmatism, scepticism, materialism and dualism.
Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics opened his essay with the words that all activities aim at the good, and he named both the arts and the sciences. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle also claimed that all men desire to know. Aiming at the Good, which for Aristotle had many meanings ranging over his 10 categories of existence ((1) substance; (2) quantity; (3) quality; (4) relatives; (5) somewhere; (6) sometime; (7) being in a position; (8) having; (9) acting; and (10) being acted upon). These categories were perhaps superseded by his later Hylomorphic theory and its theory of change which appeals to 4 kinds of change, 3 principles of change, 4 “causes (aitia) of change occurring in three media of change (space, time, and matter) The framework of this theory is embedded in conceptual structure of areté (doing the right thing at the right time in the right way), diké (justice) arché (founding principles) psuché (forms of life) and eudaimonia (good spirited flourishing life). These kinds, principles, causes and categories are also encountered in not just the theoretical sciences but also in the productive and practical sciences.
The above formed the background to Aristotle’s writings on Art which are a part of his canon of productive sciences, and the most important work is the “Poetics”. Aristotle argues here that tragedy and epic works are modes of imitation by which we learn things of importance and experience a related pleasure. Action is the key term, because both of these linguistic forms are about the deeds of man that are actually located in the space-time-matter continuum, and identified by the linguistic markers, categories and reasons for performance of these deeds. In learning about these actions/deeds we gather the meaning of what we are seeing/contemplating, i.e. we search for the principles and explanations/justifications for what we are experiencing.
A tragedy is defined as an imitation of an action of significance with serious meaning and having a completeness of dramatic form that results in the catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear. The category of quality of character (of the agent) and the quality of the agents thought, are important elements of the drama, and it is through these qualities that we attribute qualities to the action or the deeds of the spectacle that either succeed or fail. The six parts of the drama are character, diction, thought, plot, spectacle and melody. The drama also ought to manifest a universal intent or what Aristotle calls a general truth, which would be the justification for speaking with a Kantian “universal voice” about what are witnessing or have witnessed. The standard by which we measure the drama is that of whether what happens is plausible and probable and whether a catharsis of pity and fear occur. The idea of the good object is of importance in all artistic activity, and is related to both its intellectual and emotional aspects.
The scholar Bernays J.,(Articles on Aristotle 4: Psychology and Aesthetics, London Duckworth, 2003) distinguishes two possible meanings of the term “catharsis”, firstly a transformation of what he calls the passions into virtues, and secondly, a transformation of pain into pleasure. He believes that Aristotle is more concerned with the latter than with the former but his argument seems to rest on a parallel with music which is discussed in the “Politics”, and a distinction is made between the more educational ethical mode in which the catharsis of passions into virtues may well be the goal, and more “popular” music in which the audience are whipped into a mystic frenzy which Aristotle argues “relaxes” them. Bernays argues that Aristotle ought to be interpreted more liberally here because he would have acknowledged both of these forms of catharsis. In its popular “Mode” after the “storm” of the frenzy, comes the calm of a more contemplative state, it is argued which would appear to be a prime example of the transformation of the passions into the virtues, especially if one considers arête in its wider meaning which includes temperance and the control of ones appetites. Bernays points out the close proximity of the concept of “iatreia” to “catharisis”: iatreia is a medical healing process and the fear and pity is in this process transformed into a contemplative form of pleasure.
This digression into the sphere of intellectual and popular entertainment is necessary if we are to understand the history of public entertainment and its purposes. Such an account clearly shows the importance of drama to alleviate public boredom and anxiety. In modern times our popular music and cinematic productions have taken over the task of “entertainment”, which still appears to serve both intellectual and more basic emotional purposes. The question which we wish to focus on at this point, is whether machine-originated entertainment in the “Age of Discontentment”, is a symptom of a more pathological state of mind that requires a more comprehensive form of iatreia (therapy).
The first observation to make is that cinematic productions are firmly embedded in an instrumental financial web which make one wonder whether the Socratic concerns about the doctor having the responsibility to heal patients who have no means to pay him are especially relevant here. Socrates complained that doctors refusing to treat their patients were allowing the secondary concerns of “oikonomos” to displace the primary concern of care for the patient. Care, we should note in this context was one of the primary existential characteristics of Heidegger’s “Dasein” and its Being-in-the-world. The question we need to pose at this juncture of the argument is whether the Artificial Intelligence of machines devoted to the purposes of entertainment in the Age of Discontentment is playing the “healing” cathartic role it ought to. What does the audience experience, and is it a Good experience that takes us further on the journey to the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia) sought by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle? Cinematic productions are a technical art. Let us turn to the writings of an Art critic from the last century for a diagnosis of our times.
Adrian Stokes in an essay entitled “The Invitation in Art”(“The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol. 3 (London, Thames and Hudson, 1978) claims the following:
“We know that in Renoir’s opinion the ugliness of buildings towards the end of the nineteenth century and the vulgarity of design in articles in common use were of far greater danger than wars”.(P.278)
He then quotes Renoir:
“We get too accustomed to these things and to such a point that we do not realise how ugly they are. And if the day ever comes when we become entirely accustomed to them, it will be the end of a civilisation which gave us the Parthenon and the cathedral or Rouen. Then men will commit suicide from boredom, or else kill each other off, just for the pleasure of it”(Renoir 1962) P.278
What we are witnessing, Stokes argues, is an aesthetic tragedy embedded in a process of a more general decline of a civilisation. The good aesthetic object and the good ethical action share an attitude toward tragedy and a cultural commitment to Care that, once it attenuates, threatens the progress of a civilisation. Stokes points out that in his opinion the artistic movement of Impressionism:
“ was a response to the aesthetic poverty of the streets of our cities and the desire in art to shock its audience, thereafter stems, he argues from a response to a disjointed chaotic environment.”( The World Explored, the World Suffered, Vol. 1. P.105)
Stokes also provides us with a psychoanalytical explanation of the above state of affairs that uses the “trans-scientific” discipline of psychoanalysis. In an essay entitled “Greek Culture and the Ego”, he wishes to consider the roles of the Freudian concepts of “projection” and “introjection” in relation to the Kleinian concepts of “part-object” and “whole object”. “Good” and “bad” objects in relation to aggression are also an important part of his discussion. A healthy integrated Ego, it is argued, is self sufficient (in the Aristotelian sense) and has the best chance of leading the good spirited flourishing life so important to Greek Culture.
M. Bowra’s work “The Greek Experience” (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1957) reminds us of the details of Greek life (psuché):
“The peculiar nature of man determined the Greek notion of pleasure. They had no ascetic or puritanical hostility to it; in some respects they regarded it as a supreme good. But at the same time they felt that it must be kept in its place and not allowed to upset the harmony either of the individual or the city. They felt too that the strongest pleasures are suitable mainly for the young, and that in due course a man passes beyond them to others, which are less exciting. This distinction follows the general distinction, in which the Greeks made between men and the gods. If the gods enjoy power and freedom, men have responsibility, and through their use of it attain their own dignity, which is different from anything available to the gods. The advantage of this system is that it combines a natural taste for enjoyment with a real respect for proved capacities in action and in thought. Paradoxically, it may mean that in what seems to be his more human side, man is closer to the gods than in what wins honour and respect But it also means that goodness and happiness are brought together in a balanced harmony.”
The Aristotelian pursuit of the Golden Mean and the bringing together of the ideas of the Good and the Beautiful are also mentioned by Stokes (P.81) as important to the achievement of a healthy integrated Ego. Bowra’s account above draws attention to a theme of Plato’s Republic where Socrates insists that justice in the soul and justice in the city are closely related purposes sharing the same psuché-like structure. On this theme Bowra has the following to say:
“The truest wisdom lay in a properly balanced personality, in which neither side triumphed at the expense of the other. What this meant can be seen from the place given to eros, which means in the first place passionate love, but extends its meaning far beyond physical desire to many forms of intellectual and spiritual passion. For Parmenides it is the child of necessity and the force which makes men live and thrive; for Democritus, it is the desire for beautiful things; for Euripides it is the inspiring spirit of the arts; for Pericles it is what devoted citizens feel for their city; for Socrates it is the pursuit of noble ends in thought and action…”
The image of a bare-footed Eros padding about the city bearing the characteristics of parents who were resourceful and poor add another dimension to this picture, and point to the important role of the demiurge and the fates in the imagination of many Greeks of the time. Ananke and Thanatos were also a part of the Greek “picture” of the difficulty of leading a good spirited flourishing life. This may be a picture of the Kleinian “depressive position which requires the defence mechanism of “sublimation” to survive the loss of valued good objects. Sublimation was defined by Freud as the non-sexual form of substitute satisfaction that might aid the task of healthy ego integration. Sublimation was the defence-mechanism used extensively by artists, in the course of their artistic activities.
Eros was not a God as became clear from the speech of Socrates in the Symposium. This would have exposed Eros to the reality of his mortality, and one of his tasks would have been to accept his death as gracefully as Socrates. The work of Eros is obviously related to the work of civilisation, which Freud questioned was worth the effort. Art, Freud argues in “The Future of and Illusion”, reconciles man to the sacrifices he needs to make for the sake of the maintenance and advance of his civilisation. We should recall here the Freudian tasks of the Ego: to love and to work. We should also realise how difficult these tasks can be. It is evident, then, that both Psychoanalysis and Greek Philosophy share a view of the world that leads naturally to discontentment.
Cinematic production are a condition of the possibility of computer games, which have large followings, and insofar as they are violent, promote the pleasure of killing living beings vicariously for pleasure. Programmers have accepted this demand to alleviate the boredom of the masses, perhaps without full cognisance of what they are doing. The machines that enable large numbers of people to engage in such aggressive activities cannot argue that any catharsis is occurring here. Given that we are dealing with machines that imitate reality, and given that we take such pleasure in these kinds of imitations, the possible outcome over a long period of time, would appear to be dangerous. This acceptance of violent content is, of course, not limited to computer games but is in fact an important part of the American formula for action and thriller films. In psychoanalytic terms, what is being presented are bad part-objects that emphasise attack and splitting rather than reparation and creativity. In Greek terms this cultural extremism is a sign that all is not well with the polis and catharsis is not possible in relation to such traumatic content, which has become neutralised and blunted because of our boredom and aggressive tendencies (elements that cannot be in harmony).
Machines, whether they be called Turing machines, or AI machines are not therefore agents of harmony and balance, and it is of course important what we call these machines, how we categorise them. Calling them “Intelligent” is to say the least paradoxical, whether we use James’s definition of practical intelligence or whether we use the Greek “nous”. This leaves us with the dilemma of how we ought to characterise the world of Turing machines, AI, Chat robots, game-boxes, servers and computers. The best substitute for the word “artificial” would be techné, and the best English translation for that would be “technical”.
In this context it is worthwhile pointing out that when the Greek automaton was translated (meaning “of ones own will”) it’s meaning changed to self-operating machine. This suggests that we use the word automaton with its contemporary meaning to designate the phenomena we are today characterising as AI. If one wishes to retain the word “intelligence”, it should be placed in quotation marks, and prefaced with the word “technical”(TI). Alternatively, including the word “automaton” would give us the phrase “Technically intelligent automaton”(TIA).