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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as 'fake news' to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do and they can do it much faster, what's so special about human thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very nature of human thought. He conceives of human thinking as a 'sixth sense', a kind of sense organ that is closely tied our biological reality as human beings. Our thinking is not a form of data processing but rather the linking together of images and imaginary ideas which we process in different sensory modalities. Our time frame expands far beyond the present moment, as our ideas and beliefs stretch far beyond the here and now. We are living beings and the whole of evolution is built into our life story. In contrast to some of the exaggerated claims made by proponents of AI, Gabriel argues that our thinking is a complex structure and organic process that is not easily replicated and very far from being superseded by computers. With his usual wit and intellectual verve, Gabriel combines philosophical insight with pop culture to set out a bold defence of the human and a plea for an enlightened humanism for the 21st century. This timely book will be of great value to anyone interested in the nature of human thought and the relations between human beings and machines in an age of rapid technological change.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Notes
Preface
Notes
Introduction
Notes
1 The Truth about Thought
Complexity without end
What is thinking?
Humans are not the only thinkers
The scope of the universe
Aristotle’s senses
Common sense made sensible
The meaning of ‘sense’, or: the many ways of being wrong
The loneliness of cosmic exile
Not all objects are things
Are there (really) any red bottle caps?
Thinking is not an irritation of the nervous system
Nothing but the truth
The world as a wish list
Frege’s thoughts
Information and fake news
Our sixth sense
Notes
2 Thought Engineering
The map and the territory
Can computers speak Chinese?
Photos don’t remember Crete
An ant is crawling on a patch of sand, and why this has nothing to do with Winston Churchill
The god of the internet
Civilization and its discontents
Emotional intelligence and hidden values in the digital labyrinth
A religion called ‘functionalism’
Thought is not a vending machine …
… and the soul is not a pile of beer cans
Pacemakers for the brain?
The idea of technology, or: how do I build a house?
Total mobilization
Society is not a video game
The Achilles heel of functionalism
Notes
3 The Digital Transformation of Society
It’s perfectly logical, isn’t it?
Some set-theoretical ping-pong
Everything crashes eventually
Do computers really know anything?
Heidegger’s murmurings
One miracle too many
In the age of ‘complete orderability’
Trapped in The Circle?
A fleeting visit to Winden – society as nuclear power plant
One consciousness to go, please!
Who has a problem here?
Notes
4 Why Only Animals Think
The nooscope
On souls and index card boxes
‘And now come, thou well-worn broom’
Illuminated brains
Consciousness first – Tononi meets Husserl
Inside, outside or nowhere
A slimy and intricate piece of reality
Notes
5 Reality and Simulation
Mental cinema meets smartphone
The unavoidable Matrix
In memoriam: Jean Baudrillard
Horror and hunger (games)
Beautiful new world – welcome to The Sims
Are you awake or trapped in your dreams?
Do you know Holland?
Matter and ignorance
What is reality?
A hybrid reality
Fish, fish, fish
The shimmering spectrum of reality
Caesar’s hairs, India’s manhole covers and Germany
Frege’s elegant theory of facts
On the limits of our knowledge
Do thoughts lurk within the skull?
The difference between cauliflower, cognac and the thought of thought
Human AI
The end of humanity – tragedy or comedy?
Notes
The End of the Book – a Pathos-Laden Final Remark
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
The End of the Book – a Pathos-Laden Final Remark
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Leona Maya
The Meaning of Thought
Markus Gabriel
Translated by Alex Englander and Markus Gabriel
polity
Originally published in German as Der Sinn des Denkens © Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2018 by Ullstein Verlag
This English edition © 2020 by Polity Press
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association)
Excerpt from: Durs Grünbein, Zündkerzen. Gedichte. © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2017.
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3837-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Technology, the little titanic mistake, isNothing that saves humanity from itself
Durs Grünbein
Acknowledgements
This book was made possible through the support of a number of people and institutions, to all of which I owe a debt of gratitude. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I completed the manuscript while I was guest professor at the Sorbonne, which was enabled by a Feodor Lynen fellowship for experienced researchers. The research project that led to The Meaning of Thought is concerned with fictional objects – that is, with the question of the extent to which those objects that we imagine and tell stories about really exist. Answering this question means further elaborating the framework of New Realism, in which, as I’ve made clear elsewhere, fictional objects are quite welcome, just like unicorns. I would also like to thank my own university, the University of Bonn, for granting me a generous period of leave so that I could take up the research grant in Paris.
In this connection, thanks are due to the CNRS, to the president of the University of Paris 1, Professor Georges Haddad, and to the rector of the University of Bonn, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Hoch for their support in founding a new research centre on New Realism (Centre de Recherches sur les Nouveaux Réalismes, CRNR), funded by the CNRS and partner universities. A key focus of this centre is the prospects for a realist philosophy of perception, a topic I have had the pleasure of being able to pursue with the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Quentin Meillassoux. Considerable thanks are due to Jocelyn Benoist in particular, to whom I owe the inspiration for trying to overcome the subject–object split already at the level of perception, so as to arrive at a realist understanding of the sensible. Benoist’s own recent work constitutes one of the most important contributions to this goal.
I would also like to thank the senate of the Republic of Chile for the invitation to their Congresso Futuro. It was at this event that I had the opportunity to get to know Giulio Tononi, whose non-reductionist, realist theory of consciousness gets us beyond the subject–object dichotomy on the terrain of neuroscientific research. Unfortunately, I had completed the manuscript of the book before I was able to visit Tononi’s lab in Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2018, which meant that the fruits of our conversations did not find their way into the book.
Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the Center for Science and Thought (CST) at the University of Bonn and at the International Center for Philosophy NRW for many days of conversation about the topics of the book. Ulf-G. Meissner, Michael N. Forster and Jens Rometsch deserve particular mention: for many months, I have had the pleasure of discussing with them which form should be taken by a realist theory of perception and thought. In addition, I had the opportunity to run an immensely stimulating seminar in Bonn together with Jocelyn Benoist and Charles Travis on the manuscript of Charles’s new work on Frege, in which he defends the existence of an ‘invisible realm’ against the error of a linguistic reading of the reality of thought. One day, I might reveal to Charles that behind Frege stands the good old project of an ‘invisible church’,1 which is called German idealism.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the team working at my chair: Walid Faizzada, Marin Geier, Mariya Halvadzhieva, Jens Pier, Jens Rometsch and Jan Voosholz, for their comments on an earlier version of the book and for their help in putting together and preparing the final manuscript.
Notes
1.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘Hegel an Schelling [End of January 1795]’, in Johannes Hoffmeister (ed.),
Briefe von und an Hegel
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1969), pp. 15–18, here p. 18.
Preface
The present book is the concluding part of a trilogy that began with Why the World Does Not Exist and continued with I am Not a Brain. Yet I have written it so that it can be understood without any acquaintance with its two predecessors. All three books have the same intended audience: anyone who likes to engage in philosophical thinking. And it is precisely this phenomenon, thinking, that is my topic in this book. Over the course of the following pages I will develop a theory of (human) thought that anyone should be able to understand.
Thought is perhaps the central concept of philosophy. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been understood as a science that thinks about thinking. Thinking about thinking is the origin of logic. Logic, in turn, is one of the foundations of our digital civilization, as, were it not for advances in philosophical logic in the nineteenth century, computer science would never have developed. In this regard, George Boole (1815–1864) and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) were especially influential. Both were mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, and both set out a theory of thought which they used as the basis for developing the first systems of symbolic logic, the systems which underlie contemporary computer science. They thus did much to prepare the way for the digital revolution of our own day.
You are about to read a philosophical book free from opaque technical jargon. To follow the central arguments, there is no need to have worked your way through the technical aspects of logic. The main thesis I am going to advance is that human thought is a sense organ. Thinking is aesthetic (in the best case, something pleasurable) and not an exercise of force, discipline, punishment or blind, creativity-stifling rule-following. On the contrary: philosophical thought is a creative process, which is why philosophers such as the Romantics or Friedrich Nietzsche even went so far as to (try to) push it into the same camp as poetry.
Yet philosophy is ultimately neither quite like mathematics nor quite like poetry (or indeed any other art form). It borders on both domains, forming a point of intersection between the two.
Philosophy is the most general way of thinking about our thinking. It is more general still than mathematics, which is itself a form of language and thought that serves as a foundation for the natural sciences and technology. However, while not utterly unrelated to them, mathematics doesn’t give us the foundation of poetry, painting, religion, music or philosophy. What unites all of these highly sophisticated human phenomena is our sense of thought, and the structure and nature of this sense are the object (and subject) of philosophy. For philosophy is thought thinking itself.
At the same time, philosophy is much closer to the concrete phenomena of our everyday lives than many believe. It wants to get to the bottom of our experience and perception. It is not just in the business of building models that help us better predict and steer the anonymous course of nature or the behaviour of living beings such as ourselves; rather, it aims at wisdom. And, ultimately, the love of wisdom requires a more precise knowledge of all those fields of reality that we don’t (yet) know about. This is why Socrates understood philosophy as knowledge of our ignorance, without which wisdom is unattainable.
Thought is the interface between natural and psychological reality. To this extent, it ties together the topics of the previous two books of this trilogy: the world (which doesn’t really exist) and the self (which is not identical with the brain). In part, thinking means establishing and recognizing connections. In thought, we link together widely disparate realities and manufacture new ones.
Thinking is not some ethereal process floating far above reality, finding its home solely in the ivory tower. This is why philosophy shouldn’t be reduced to an academic parlour game, in which professional philosophers take competing positions on intimidatingly technical arguments with the aid of high-spec analytic tools. In the logic lectures he gave at the University of Königsberg, no less a thinker than Immanuel Kant distinguished between a ‘scholastic concept’ and a ‘worldly concept’ of philosophy.1 The scholastic concept is systematic theory construction, the craft practised and handed down in philosophy departments, institutes and seminars. It addresses the architecture of those fundamental concepts without which we could not grasp our own rationality. Kant gave this process the same name as his famous book: he called it a Critique of Pure Reason.
By contrast, the worldly concept is concerned with the ‘final ends of human reason’,2 which ultimately includes the question of what or who the human being is. And it therefore also has to ask what exactly our human capacity for thinking consists in. Are we merely an insignificant part of nature? Perhaps an especially clever animal? Perhaps even an animal blinded by its own intelligence? Or is the human being a privileged witness to a non-sensory, immaterial reality?
This high concept gives philosophy dignity, i.e. an absolute worth. And actually it is philosophy, too, which alone has only inner worth, and which first gives a worth to all other cognitions.3
All of the great philosophers – to name a few at random: Laozi, Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Stein and Judith Butler – have inscribed themselves in our cultural memory through their contributions to the worldly concept of philosophy. We do not possess a single academic treatise by Plato. Yet, in his surviving dialogues, we find some of the deepest philosophical thoughts ever to be articulated, all in the simple language of everyday conversations.
In recent decades, Germany (not to mention other places that are yet to develop a public philosophical culture) has unfortunately witnessed a partial deterioration in its culture of public philosophical debate. One of the theses I want to advance here is that naturalism bears the chief responsibility for this decline. Naturalism is the view that all genuine knowledge and progress can be reduced to a combination of natural science and technological mastery of the survival conditions of human beings. Yet this is a fundamental error, a dangerous delusion, which haunts us in the form of various ideological crises: in the return of religion (which frankly never really went away) as an explanatory model in the grand style; in the demagogic seductions of so-called populists, who invoke lost national identities (which never actually existed); and in the crises of the public sphere that have arisen through the defining medium of the internet. Naturalism is incapable of addressing these urgent topics: starting from a misguided conception of the human mind, it cannot even understand the appeal of religion or the power of human rhetoric. Without new efforts of philosophical thought, our intellectual negotiation of all these crises will come up short. Without ethical reflection, advances in natural science and technology do not lead automatically to the improvement of human life. Rather, unbridled progress is currently destroying our planet, and this ought to be an impetus to reflection and a change of course. We should not forget that, over the last two hundred years, philosophically uninformed naturalism and its unjustified belief in pure scientific and technological progress have led to weapons of mass destruction as well as to actual mass destruction.
Today, as in all ages in which our species has graced the Earth, the human being itself is at stake, and, with it – due to the sheer technological power it wields – the continued existence of life on our planet. Philosophy can only face up to this challenge by developing new tools and thought models, with the help of which we can come to a greater knowledge of reality. Today, philosophy is a form of resistance against the lie of a ‘post-truth’ age. For philosophy is opposed to the senseless assertion of alternative facts, to conspiracy theories and ungrounded apocalyptic scenarios, lest all these get out of control and the not too distant future does in fact witness the end of humanity.
I will therefore be arguing in what follows for a contemporary, enlightened humanism – a humanism that defends the intellectual and ethical capacities of the human being against our post- and trans-humanist despisers.
A chief aim of this trilogy is to introduce the fundamental theoretical commitments of New Realism to an audience beyond the walls of the academy. New Realism is my proposal for overcoming the basic intellectual errors to which we continue to succumb, much to the harm of our society and our own humanity. A particularly insidious member of this set is the rampant ‘fear of truth’, to quote Hegel, that characterizes our age, or the ‘fear of knowledge’ that the American philosopher Paul Boghossian (b. 1957) diagnosed in his own critique of the errors underlying postmodernity. Among these are the conceits that there is no truth, no objective facts or objective reality.4
As I said, I will not be presupposing any knowledge of the previous two books of the trilogy. Each of these can be read as a more or less stand-alone work. In the few places where it might be necessary, though, I will repeat some of the ideas introduced in the previous books so that the reader has a fully adequate picture of the overall intellectual terrain being covered.
The principal function of philosophical books is to provoke the reader to think for herself. What we can learn from philosophy is how to get in view and then reflect upon our prejudices and unspoken assumptions concerning the essential questions of humanity, such as What or who are we as human beings really? What distinguishes us from other animals? Or: Can computers think?
At the end of the day, it isn’t so important whether I can convince you of my own positions. What matters is nothing but the truth. And since it’s not so easy to ascertain the truth purely through the self-exploration of human thought, there will always be differences of philosophical opinion. Believing that we could somehow answer our questions once and for all would therefore amount to a fundamental error. Instead, the crucial thing is to set our thinking in motion, so that we can open up new forms and fields of thought.
As we’ll see in due course, I take it to be a decisive criterion of reality that we can get it wrong. And because thought itself is something real, we’re not somehow immune from error when we tackle the question of what exactly it is. Thinking about thinking is no easier or less likely to lead to mistakes than thinking about any other part of reality. Though, needless to say, I’m fairly convinced that my own answer is correct, else I would hardly bother to set it out here.
To unravel the meaning of thought, I will introduce you to the notion that there is an actual sense of thought. The key thesis of the book says that our thought is a sense, just like sight, taste, hearing, feeling or touch. Through thinking, we touch a reality accessible only to thought, just as colours are usually accessible only to sight and sounds to hearing. At the same time, I argue the case for giving our thought a new meaning, in the sense of a new direction. I want to provide orientation in an age in which – as in all ages before it – we find our thinking thrown into confusion by a multitude of ideological currents and their propagandists. Just think of the thoughts you’ve recently had about Donald Trump! Was it really sensible to have had all of these? Isn’t it precisely one of the traps laid by Trump’s savvy media strategy that we spend so much time talking about the ever-swelling tide of scandals that engulf him?
As inhabitants of the infosphere – our digital environment – we are exposed to a relentless flood of information. This presents philosophy with new challenges. This book represents an attempt at sustained reflection on what thought really is, so that we might regain some form of control over the terrain currently occupied by the dubious magicians of Silicon Valley and their technophile adepts, who ostentatiously insist that they have created genuine artificial intelligence. We need to demystify and disenchant our gadgets and do away with the belief in their omnipotence. Otherwise, we condemn ourselves to a future as mere victims of digital transformation, hopeless info-junkies or brain-dead techno-zombies.
Notes
1.
Immanuel Kant,
Lectures on Logic
, ed. and trans. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 537 (9:23).
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid.
4.
G. W. F. Hegel,
The Phenomenology of Spirit
, trans. Terry P. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 50 (§74); Paul Artin Boghossian,
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
Introduction
The human being is the animal that doesn’t want to be one. This is because, at some point or other, it began to wonder who or what it really is. Insofar as we have an implicit or explicit image of ourselves as human beings, we also make claims about the nature of the good life. Ethics* is the discipline that asks what a good life looks like. It is therefore based upon anthropology, the discipline tasked with figuring out what precisely distinguishes the human both from other animals and from the lifeless expanses of the inanimate universe.1
Our image of the human being is closely intertwined with our values. A moral value is a yardstick for human behaviour. It distinguishes between actions that ought to be performed – the good ones – and those that ought not to be carried out – the bad, morally deficient ones. Every value system should also have room for actions that, at least in most cases, are neither good nor bad (driving on the left-hand side of the road rather than the right-hand side, twiddling your thumbs, taking a deep breath, buttering bread, and so on), as well as for actions that are utterly unacceptable – that is, evil (torturing of children, for example, or poison gas attacks on civilian populations).
Not every morally wrong action is automatically evil, because not all morally wrong action causes far-reaching harm to the value system itself – think of those occasional white lies told to protect a friend or of cheating at a board game. Evil, by contrast, completely undermines the value system in which it arises. Thus, the prototypical sadistic totalitarian dictator, of which the previous century has provided us with all too many examples, subverts his own value system. Unable to trust anyone or anything, he has to create a total surveillance apparatus.
For as long as we remain mired in deep uncertainty as to who or what we are as human beings, we will not be able to calibrate our value systems properly. If the very nature of the human is in question, ethics too is at stake. This doesn’t mean, I hasten to point out, that other living beings (including plants) or even lifeless, inanimate matter are morally irrelevant – far from it. But, in order to determine what we owe both to ourselves and to the rest of the reality we affect, we have to ask ourselves the question of who we really are and, in the light of the truth of who we are, who we want to be in the future.2
Unfortunately, it is very difficult, impossible even, to determine who the human being is from a neutral standpoint. For it is necessarily a matter of self-determination to attempt to determine what the human actually is. This self-determination cannot simply consist in naming natural facts, because the human is a specifically minded animal, where human mindedness (or Geist, as we say in my neck of the woods) is the capacity to lead a life in the light of a representation of who the human being is. More concretely, this capacity finds expression whenever and wherever we develop stories and images of our lives and of the conditions under which we deem them a success. We thereby aim to be happy, but without being able to give anything like a universally valid account of what happiness is.
From a philosophical point of view, happiness designates nothing other than a successful life. There are no universally valid standards for this; neither is there a set of principles of which we might somehow draw up a definitive catalogue. At best, we can state the framework conditions that are valid for any successful pursuit of happiness – namely, human rights. Yet this does not mean that philosophy or any other discipline could come up with a recipe for happiness.
Today, however, the concept of the human being hangs in the balance. The digital age has already brought about a world in which what was previously the privilege of humans – that is, solving problems in an intelligent fashion – is now carried out, in a range of situations at least, with far greater speed and efficiency by the machines that we have built in order to make our life and survival less burdensome.
Ever since the initial flourishing of philosophical thought in Athens, where it developed simultaneously with the first democracy, one of its central tasks has been to point out confusions circulating in the marketplace of ideas. Today’s marketplace of ideas is the internet, the central medium of the digital age. The slogan of this book is: think first, digitalize second. This is just a version of Kant’s famous Enlightenment motto: ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’, but tailored to our own times. This is an urgent necessity in an age in which global digital propaganda systems, with their continual bombardments of newsflashes and posts, hurl our thinking into turmoil and confusion.
The first key thesis of this book states that thought is a sense, just like our sense of hearing, touch and taste, our sense of balance, and everything else that we nowadays count as belonging to the human sensory system. This thesis runs counter to the now widespread idea that thinking is basically a matter of information processing and therefore a procedure which can essentially be re-created in silicon or some other non-living material. In short: computers ultimately think just as little as do the good old ring binders familiar from our analogue bureaucracy. Programs are simply systems of data management, which we can use to solve problems far quicker than we ever could without their help: booking flights, solving equations, translating foreign languages (more or less adequately), writing books or sending emails.
At the same time, I want to argue that our human intelligence is itself a case of artificial intelligence – indeed, the only real one we happen to be acquainted with. Human thought is not a natural process governed by the laws of nature, like the dynamics we find in the sun or in sandstorms. Unlike the moon’s orbiting of the Earth or the expansion of the solar system, we cannot understand our thinking if we abandon mentalistic vocabulary – i.e. language designed to articulate the meaning of thought – which typically includes words such as intelligence, thought, belief, hope, desire, intention and the rest.
The human being is the creature who is conscious of this very fact. And, accordingly, it orients its life around its ability to make targeted interventions into the conditions of its own life and survival. This is why humans elaborate sophisticated technologies in the form of systems for improving and simplifying their survival conditions. The human is thus networked with technology in its very self-understanding. In my view, the deep root of this interconnection lies in the various ways in which we are the producers of our own intelligence. The ways in which we think are formed by socio-economic framework conditions that human civilizations have been developing and transforming over millennia. This is how our artificial intelligence comes into being: by way of the self-determination of our human mindedness.3
Our mindedness, our self-determination as human beings, was first set down in written form many millennia ago. Before the development of writing, our ancestors passed on various possibilities for self-determination in other media (such as oral traditions, artworks and rituals). These traditions continue to shape us, because they confront us with the question of who we want to be in the future.
Over the millennia, human life has revolved around the question of who or what the human being really is. One of the oldest known answers is that the human being is a rational animal. It is to Aristotle that we owe the corresponding designation of the human as zoon logon echon, the animal that – depending on translation and interpretation – possesses language, thought or reason.
Yet it is precisely this (supposedly) distinguishing characteristic and privilege of us human beings which the digital age brings into question. The Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi (b. 1964) goes so far as to see contemporary developments in AI research as a deep affront to our sense of our humanity, comparable to such seismic revolutions in our self-image as the heliocentric worldview, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious.4
Of course, it has long been the case that the computers we carry about with us pretty much all the time – such as smartphones, smart watches and tablets – can outsmart most human beings in simulated situations. Programs can play chess better than humans, beat us at Go and at good old Atari games. They are better travel agents, can search the entire internet at lightning speed, immediately report the temperature in every corner of the globe, and find patterns in gigantic data sets which would take humans an age even to notice. As if that weren’t enough, they also carry out mathematical proofs that even the very best mathematicians can understand only with considerable effort.
In the light of these advances, scientists, futurologists, philosophers and politicians like to engage in speculation about how long it will be before the infosphere, as Floridi calls our digital environment, attains a kind of planetary consciousness and liberates itself from its dependence on us humans. Some fear that a digital worstcase scenario, known as the singularity or superintelligence, will occur in the not too distant future. This position has found a prominent salesman in Raymond Kurzweil (b. 1948), himself inheriting ideas from pioneers of AI research such as Marvin Minsky (1927–2016). Even such famous personalities as Bill Gates (b. 1955) and Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) have warned of a fast approaching intelligence explosion, in which intelligent machines will take control and potentially exterminate humanity.
Others think all of this is only so much humbug, believing that the infosphere is no more intelligent than our shoes. One of the pioneers of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the American philosopher John Rogers Searle (b. 1932), has long been arguing that the computers manufactured by humans cannot really think and that the likelihood of their ever attaining consciousness has not increased a bit over the last decades, that it continues to lie at exactly 0 per cent.
The truth certainly lies somewhere in the middle. The infosphere and the digital revolution aren’t leading us towards a dystopian future, such as the world depicted in the Terminator films or in novels such as Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island; nor does the latest leap forward in technological progress lead towards the solution to all of humanity’s problems, contrary to the hopes that the German tech entrepreneur Frank Thelen (b. 1975) expressed in a dialogue between the two of us in the German Philosophie Magazin.5 We will not solve the impending crises of food and water shortages through better algorithms and faster computers. Thinking we will is really to get things back to front: it is technological advancement in the digital industries – i.e. attaining higher computing power through more efficient hardware – which contributes to resource scarcity and world hunger – and not only because of the alacrity with which we bin our ‘old’ smartphones and tablets so that we can buy the latest versions with their ever higher processing power. Computers do not solve our moral problems; they aggravate them. We mine the earth in poorer parts of the world to extract rare metals for our smartphones, use plastics for our hardware, and waste untold quantities of energy in order to keep digital reality running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Every click and every email uses energy. We tend to notice this only indirectly, but that doesn’t make things any better.
To be sure, technological progress can mean rapid improvements in medical science and living conditions in industrialized countries. But, at the same time, we are currently experiencing the collateral damage wrought by the digital transformation of our infrastructure, in the form of cyber-warfare, fake news, large-scale cyber-attacks and the rest. And that’s not to mention the varieties of social alienation caused by social media’s erosion of the distinctions between public and private, between times when we’re available and times when we’re not. Then there are the obviously very real phenomena of phone-tapping scandals (in the Obama era); Twitter propaganda (in the Trump era); bots that undermine democracy; terror attacks hatched online; a terrifyingly extensive surveillance apparatus in the People’s Republic of China, which monitors and sanctions the population’s online behaviour; and so on and so on.
In order to untangle the conceptual knot, I will be working in what follows with two anthropological principles, both of which will come up time and again. I mentioned the first anthropological principle at the outset: the human being is the animal that doesn’t want to be one. This principle explains the presently widespread confusions that go by the names of post-humanism and transhumanism. Both movements are built on bidding farewell to the human being and welcoming the cyborg, a hybrid combining both animal-human and technological components.
Post- and transhumanism, both especially rampant in California, propagate the view that the human being can be overcome, surpassed. The place of the human is to be occupied by the infamous Übermensch, first conjured up by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In a society in which an ever-expanding collection of superheroes has become a staple of popular culture, in which Hollywood propagates the fantasy that we might shake off the earthly shackles that tie down us normal mortals and propel ourselves into a superior future, it is no accident that technology and scientific research find themselves in thrall to the Nietzschean fantasy of the Übermensch.
In this connection, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) reminds us of the notorious rumour that Walt Disney tried to have himself cryogenically frozen, hoping to be awakened one day in order to witness the technological wonders of the future.6 One of the main problems animals have to face is that they are mortal. Everything mortals do revolves around life and death, whereby we find life for the most part good and death for the most part bad. For a long time now, technology has been bound up with the fantasy of overcoming death on Earth. Today, this (pathological) wish finally to discard our animality and to become an inforg, a cyborg consisting purely of digital information, affects every level of society.
If we can dissolve ourselves into information, it is seemingly possible to install our minds onto some superior hardware, to upload consciousness and our personality onto digital devices. This idea is brilliantly explored in the American TV series Westworld. The series is set in a futuristic theme park called Westworld, in which visitors encounter robots indistinguishable from humans. The humans can use them entirely for their own pleasure. In the second series (spoiler alert …) it transpires that the firm operating the theme park extracts behavioural data from the visitors, which they then use to perfect the robots. Behind the entire enterprise is the mind of Westworld’s creator, which has been uploaded onto a server and plans to co-opt one of the perfected robot bodies, thus merging inforg and cyborg. But this whole fantasy could never in fact be realized. Let’s not forget that the TV series Westworld does not show us a single robot. What we actually see are human actors playing robots who at some point begin to play humans! This is the reality displayed by Westworld: the human wish to become a robot who becomes human.
To combat this flight from reality, I make the case for an enlightened humanism. Enlightened humanism is based on an image of the human that, from the very outset, allows no room for doubt that everyone, whether foreigner, native, friend, neighbour, woman, child, man, coma patient or transsexual, counts as human in the full sense. This is important to emphasize, because the classical humanist positions developed since the Renaissance have usually, implicitly or even explicitly, taken white, European, adult, politically significant and well-to-do men as the standard of being human. Even Kant’s writings are unfortunately filled with racist and misogynistic assumptions, which is why in practice he denies people who were deeply foreign to him, such as the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, their humanity, explaining for example how ‘humid warmth is beneficial to the robust growth of animals in general and, in short, this results in the Negro.’7 Yet Kant is by no means just a racist. He is above all a theorist of the universal dignity of human beings, which raises the question of how he could combine both sets of views in a single personality. The good news is that we enlightened humanists of the twenty-first century need not follow him, as we are the heirs of moral progress and of insights into the disastrous shortcomings of the first-wave enlightenment project – a project that was deeply implicated in other pathologies of modernity (such as colonialism). However, none of this entails that moral universalism is flawed, as one of the verdicts of universalism is precisely that colonialism, violent Eurocentrism, racism, and so on, are morally unacceptable forms of radical evil.
The second anthropological principle says that the human is a free, specifically minded animal (freies geistiges Lebewesen). This means that we humans can change ourselves by changing our image of what it means to be human. The specific freedom of the human mind lies in how our human life form is self-determining. We define our being human, and on the basis of our self-definitions we discover the moral values around which to orient our actions. Other animals have only a dim understanding of morality, and they certainly do not participate of their own accord in the enlightenment project of moral progress. There is absolutely no gender equality in most animal societies, and there is not even a hint of the notion that they should cooperate in order to help foster other species. Cooperation in the animal kingdom is typically a matter of symbiosis and not of rule-governed moral thought designed to enhance the living conditions of everyone. Lions do not consider becoming vegetarians, and we do not blame them for their culinary preferences, because we know that they lack a sufficiently explicit grasp of the standing possibility of moral insight and perfectibility.
This is not to say that humans always act as their values dictate, or even that there is a high probability that they will. Freedom means precisely being able to act in this way or that way – morally or immorally. Yet our freedom also means that we cannot do anything at all without regulating and directing our behaviour. In modernity, therefore, the ultimate horizon of our self-determination, the highest value, is given through our conception of the human. We no longer seek the highest value beyond the human being, in a divine sphere, but we look within ourselves. This does not mean that we are steered around by the voice of conscience; rather, it means that we can steer and control ourselves, by recognizing that we are all united in being human. In this way, modernity is oriented around humanity as the bearer of reason and, if it is to be consistent, naturally has to recognize the value of non-human life too. Enlightened humanism therefore also demands the recognition of animal rights and the careful cultivation of the environment, to sustain the conditions of human and animal life quite generally on our planet.
Nothing less than this already lies in the expression Homo sapiens, which was introduced by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–1778) in his Systema naturae. In Linnaeus’s classification, the human differs from all other life forms in being the creature subject to the Delphic oracle’s demand: ‘Nosce te ipsum, know thyself’.8 Wisdom (sapientia) is the capacity to determine oneself. The problem is that wisdom does not automatically entail that one does the right thing. This is why the Delphic oracle, whose dictum is quoted by Linnaeus, designated Socrates as the wisest of all men.9 For Socrates understood the structure of the oracle’s invocation: to the question of what the human being is, the answer is not fixed by pointing to any norm set by God, the gods or the cosmos; rather, it is determined solely by how we determine ourselves. We are condemned to be free, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) put it, somewhat misleadingly.10
This book is an act of self-determination. Human self-determination occurs at two levels: at one level, what matters is that humans – whether we like it or not – are animals of a certain kind. It is only thanks to our being the animals we are that we are in a position to know reality in the first place. Cognition is not a process that takes place in some ethereal realm; it is one that is tied to ineliminable biological parameters. We are neither gods, nor angels, nor computer programs run on wetware, the slimy matter of our nervous systems. At another level, though, we are not just animals of a certain species. Unlike the ‘last pre-human mammals of evolution’, as the German poet Durs Grünbein (b. 1962) puts it, we are not ‘creatures halfway between humanity and the rest of the zoo’.11 As minded beings who, thanks to language and reflection, have a particularly developed sense of thought, we humans are in contact with infinitely many immaterial realities.
As the American philosopher Saul Aaron Kripke (b. 1940) rightly notes, reality shouldn’t be confused with the ‘enormous scattered object that surrounds us’.12 Reality as we know it is just not identical with the material-energetic system of the universe. The real is what we can be wrong about and what – for that very reason – we can grasp as it truly is. Our thinking belongs to reality. It is itself something real – just like our feelings, unicorns (in films such as The Last Unicorn), witches (in Goethe’s Faust), stomach aches, Napoleon, toilet bowls, Microsoft and the future. This was the idea I set out and defended at length in my book Why the World Does Not Exist.
Because of the globalization of commodity production and the digital interconnectedness of our news services, we are currently experiencing a dangerous ideological shift. By an ideology, I understand a distorted conception of the human that fulfils a socio-economic function, usually the implicit justification of an ultimately unjust distribution of resources. These days we are continually encouraged to believe that reality could be entirely different from how we believe it to be. And this notion is only nourished further by political sloganizing about a ‘post-factual age’, fake news and alternative facts, right through to ‘post-truth’.
We have thus arrived in an age of a new metaphysics. By metaphysics, I here understand a theory of reality as a whole, which distinguishes between a real world (being) and the appearance and deception that supposedly has us humans caught in its snares. Our age is metaphysical through and through. It builds on the illusion that, in its most important facets, our entire life is an illusion, one we can see through only with great difficulty, if at all.
Yet the illusion that reality is an illusion is ultimately a distraction from what’s really going on: the digital revolution of the past decade is a consequence of the modern knowledge-based society. In the age of first-wave enlightenment, the combination of all forms of knowledge was still the priority, the aim being the ‘education of the human race’.13 In the second half of the nineteenth century, positivism came to prevail, with its doctrine that all relevant human achievements can and should be sought in the sciences of technology and nature. Today, the metaphysics that sets the tone is materialism, where this encompasses both the doctrine that everything that exists consists of matter and the ethical conception that the meaning of human life ultimately consists in the accumulation of goods (cars, houses, sexual partners, smartphones) and their pleasurable annihilation (burning fossil fuels, ostentatious luxury, gourmet restaurants).
From a socio-political perspective, materialism corresponds to the idea that the primary function of a government is to develop and enforce the regulations necessary for material resources to be distributed in such a way that as many citizens as possible can experience the enjoyment of squandering them. This in turn serves to foster the preservation of our materialistic image of the human.
The digital revolution is closely connected with the surveillance apparatuses of modernity. As depicted in the TV series The Americans, it famously emerged on the back of military research projects in the Cold War. The major internet companies of our time are advertising platforms whose existence places traditional media under ever more pressure, forcing them to compete for the attention of the reading public with opinionated coverage and titillating scandal.
Yet my aim here is to provide not so much a sociological description as a philosophical diagnosis of the intellectual mistakes that underlie the materialist ideology of our time. In particular, we will be concerned with our own thinking. An ideology is a kind of intellectual virus circulating through the bloodstream of our thought; at first, it strikes here and there at the foundations of our health, without our so much as noticing, before finally overwhelming us. To take up a formulation of Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947), I’ll be looking to develop a co-immunism – that is, to improve our mental immune system.14 We have to vaccinate ourselves against the false notion that we cannot know the truth and that, in the age of the internet, reality may no longer exist at all.
This means entering (in thought at least) right into the lion’s den: into the age of reality shows and the ever-expanding and encroaching online society. The task will be to reclaim a sense for our own thought, which will protect us from the error of believing that we are on the brink of abolishing humanity and stepping into a paradisiac age of total digitalization.
The first key thesis, as I’ve already said, is that our thought is a sense. Besides the familiar sense modalities – which are hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch, but also the sense of balance and a few more besides – we have a sense of thought. I will expand this thesis into the nooscope thesis: our thought is a sense that we can use to scout out the infinite and then represent it in a variety of different ways – mathematically, for example. Our thinking is thus unlike our other senses: it is not restricted to our proximate environment but can – in the form of quantum mechanics, say – even refer to other universes or grasp the foundational mathematical structure of our own universe in the language of theoretical physics. Our nooscope therefore surpasses corporeal reality and connects us with an infinity of immaterial realities.
This thesis is directed against the currently popular idea that our mental apparatus consists merely of perceptions and cognitions, out of states triggered in us by the external world on the one hand and states that arise from the internal linkage of perceptions on the other. But it’s simply false to believe that an external consciousnessand mind-independent world first tickles our nervous system, triggering chains of internal processes, at the end of which stands an image that has nothing further to do with the external world. Our mental life is no hallucination arising within our skull. Rather, on account of our sense of thought, we are in contact with far more realities than we’d think at first glance.
This book does away with the foundational error of modern epistemology: the subject–object divide. This consists in the false notion that, as thinking subjects, we confront an alien reality, a world into which we don’t really fit. Hence the widespread impression in modernity either that we cannot know reality at all or that we can never know it even approximately as it is in itself. However, as thinking, perceiving creatures we do not face a reality that is somehow separated from us. Subject and object are not opposed parts of an overarching whole. Rather, we are part of reality, and our senses are media that act as contact points between the reality that we are and the reality that we are not. These media do not distort a reality that is fully independent of them. Instead, they themselves belong to the real, as interfaces or points of intersection. And thinking, exactly like all the other senses, is just such an interface.
Interfaces enable communication over various fields of sense. Take our visual experiences, for example. I can currently see a Berlusconi voodoo doll, which I bought in the shop of a Portuguese museum. I see the doll from my standpoint. I couldn’t take up this standpoint if I didn’t possess an intact brain, if I were currently sleeping, or if I no longer recalled the doll. But the fact that I can recognize the doll in the first place is also a component of my standpoint. And the real presence of the voodoo doll is just as essential for my perceptual mental state as my brain.
I perceive in colour. And I have a specific colour palette at my conscious disposal only because I am an animal whose colour receptors were selected over millions of years of evolution. The human sense of sight is an interface enabling communication between physical fields (containing light rays, for example, which can be measured and investigated by physics) and the field of my conscious experience (in which I can purchase and see voodoo dolls). Our visual sense and our subjective standpoint are not one jot less real than the light rays, the voodoo doll, and the elementary particles without which there wouldn’t be any voodoo dolls at all.
As we will see, the same goes for our thought. Thought is a real interface connecting us up with countless immaterial realities – numbers, justice, general elections, truth, facts and much more besides. Yet thought also stands in direct contact with material energetic systems, which is why we are able to think about these too.
In this context, a further thesis is that what we think (i.e. our thoughts) is not material. The view that there is not only a material energetic system, the physical cosmos, is what I call immaterialism. Thinking is the grasping of immaterial thoughts. Thoughts are neither brain states nor any form of information processing that we measure physically. Yet humans cannot have any thoughts without being living creatures who find themselves in certain brain states – or, more generally, in certain physiological states.
Combining these theses, we get to our second key thesis: biological externalism. Biological externalism maintains that the expressions we use to describe and understand our thought processes are essentially related to something biological (see p. 141). With this thesis in place, I’ll argue that there can be no artificial intelligence in the generally accepted sense. Our modern data-processing systems, including of course the omnipresent internet, do not really think, because they lack consciousness. But this doesn’t make them any less dangerous or the debate surrounding digital transformation any less urgent.
We have to regain the sense of thought and defend it against the wild notion that our thinking is a computational process taking place within the cranial vault – a process of which we could, in principle, make an exact re-creation or simulation. Simulations of thoughts are just as much real thoughts as a Michelin map of France is identical with the territory it maps (see pp. 57ff.). Yet what we call AI is utterly real. Only it’s not intelligent – and that’s why it’s dangerous.
One of the underestimated sources of danger in our digital age is that our self-understanding as humans is oriented around a misleading model of thought. For, insofar as we believe that advanced data technology must automatically conquer the realm of human thought, we create a false self-image. In indulging this belief, we attack the very core of being human.
In every epoch that has witnessed technological breakthroughs, the idea has taken hold that our artefacts could someday take control. Animism is the belief that nature as a whole is ensouled. Today this belief is also called panpsychism. AI research, however, is an internal rather than an external attack on the human being: for it’s not just that our artefacts might attack us; instead, by propagating a false, essentially animistic picture of them, we attack ourselves.
Since time immemorial, the human has regarded its thought as something that comes to it from outside, be it from the gods, from the one God, or possibly from extra-terrestrials, as in films such as Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or, more clumsily, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), which unambiguously depicts aliens as our creators. Thanks to layer upon layer of our culturalhistorical practices, we therefore find it easy to image that our own thought processes might also be found in non-living systems. But this is an unwarranted superstition and we need to overcome it. Many people today would be more willing to ascribe intelligence to a smartphone than to an octopus or a pigeon. But that is a mistake with fatal moral consequences – for humans, for our fellow creatures, and for the environment. It is therefore high time that we let ourselves be guided by realism rather than misguided by science fiction and that we re-establish contact with our human, all-too-human sense of thought. The first step is to recognize it as such.
Notes
*
Words appearing in bold type appear in the Glossary at the end of the book.
1.
In the main body of the text, I define bold expressions as precisely as possible. The definitions are also collected in a glossary at the end of the book to provide a clear overview of the most important concepts I’m working with.
2.
The questions of what we owe ourselves and one another, and of what in general is truly significant, are central to two of the most important positions in current philosophical ethics: that of Thomas M. Scanlon (b. 1944) and that of Derek Parfit (1942–2017). See Thomas M. Scanlon,
What We Owe to Each Other
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Derek Parfit,
On What Matters
, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–16).
3.
For a more detailed account, see Markus Gabriel,
Neo-Existentialism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2018) and
I am Not a Brain
(Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
4.
Luciano Floridi,
The Philosophy of Information
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011).
5.
Markus Gabriel and Frank Thelen, ‘Schöne neue Welt?’,
Philosophie Magazin
02 (2018), pp. 58–65.
6.
Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation
, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
7.
Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Different Races of Human Beings’, in Kant,
History, Anthropology and Education
