You, too, can be modeled as an A.I. neo-animal
gary e. davis
When Heidegger gave his lecture course on thinking in the mid-‘50s, the Analytical School of philosophy was in its ascendance, in the wake of Logical Positivism. A fair capsulation of the Analytical sense of thinking might be that thinking is mental activity at best favoring formal-logical scientificity. Heidegger would have none of that, of course.
So, here we are well into another century. The Oxford Handbook of the Self, 2011, includes a chapter titled “On What We Are” by Sidney Shoemaker, which I turned to, as part of my interest in others’ senses of human being or being human. The result caused my first paragraph above, as I realized that I had unwittingly happened onto an old Analytical mind.
After nearly 20 pages of causal analysis relative to categories associable with being a person (in the lineage of Analytical discourse on “personal identity”), he concludes:
“…there is a legitimate sense of ‘animal’ such that we are animals…that…can think [such that] the thoughts they realize occur in the persons that constitute rather than in the biological animals themselves” (p. 370).Profound. In other words, thinking is about constituting mental states, and surprise: non-human animal mental states are not comparable to ours. That’s a 1980s anticipation of behaviorist neurophilosophy, but in this century.
Any consideration of why we “have” (are) minds is missing with Analytical analysis of “personhood.” What do persons fundamentally want? Why think?
A hallmark of contemporary philosophy’s interest in action is that interest of oneself orients there being phenomenality, which applies to interpersonal interest (linguistic or semiotic) as well as self-interest (manifoldly phenomenal). Focusing on intentionality was radical in the 1920s (in the ascendance of behavioral psychology). Heidegger’s focus on characteristics of Dasein unwittingly anticipated philosophy of action decades before that arose in professional philosophy. His orientation of Dasein (personhood, I would argue) by holism (in short) beyond Husserlian formal-logical intentionality was far ahead of the times in Anglo-American philosophy. But issues of existence—about being a life—had to use terminology from the 19th century to articulate issues of human (person-al) interest, for a sense of 'human' which is not biologistic or metaphysicalist.
But nowadays, advances in conceptual terminology may provide usefulness for Heidegger’s thinking beyond, yet in congruence with, his terms (relative to an audience worried about “being”).
Immanently, though (not yet at Heidegger’s scale), we want such that we act. But why we, as persons, want to act—making a good life—is systematically concealed by scientism, philosophically expressed by formal-logical analysis, be that Anglo-American Analytical philosophy or Husserlian longing for formally transcendental logic of intentionality.
Heidegger’s critique of logicism (all in all, from Husserl through intimations of cybernetics) was radical in the early 20th century. It’s no longer a radical theme. But the relevance of the theme is more vivid than ever in our century: Though some of us are well-versed in critique of logicism (and scientism), its fans are thriving in tendencies of thinking in A.I. modeling.
The distance from neo-animalizing “thinking” by algorithm-ing it to a level of global data farms was implicitly foretold in mid-century cybernetics (birth of information science). Heidegger was alarmed by an incipient planetary scale of such technological “thinking”—the machination of information science—years before dreams of person-level A.I. became prominent in the late 1960s by Marvin Minsky, at MIT, who predicted that person-level competence in A.I. (General Artificial Intelligence: G.A.I) would be reached in 50 years. That was 1967. So: 2017 was 50 years from then.
Now, 5 years later, venture capital is eager to claim that GAI is soon to emerge, but claiming so by tending to opportunistically conceal the difference between Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.), i.e., feasible grand scale information processing as all-purpose functional "reasoning") and person-level GAI.
Lots of controversy about the difference between AGI and GAI is happening in the AI industry, but the trend is to posture feasible prospects for AGI as approaching, in the near term, machine-based person-level thinking.
Hubert Dreyfus, a leading voice in critique of A.I. dreaming, was at MIT with Marvin Minsky in the 1960s. He left MIT, and made a very useful career on “what computers can’t do.” He focused on what is more relevant to technical systems: expertise with objects and instrumental reasoning (“coping”), not the kind of interaction among persons via social media which has become so controversial. Interaction among persons was integral for Heidegger's focus on personal life (existential lifeworlds) through linguistic phenomena that we share.
Though Dreyfus won the Husserlian battle against scientism for proper appreciation of lifeworld backgrounds, inasmuch as his critique of technology has been popular, he didn’t focus on the Heideggerian interest in rapport among persons at a philosophical level. Dreyfus didn’t focus on being together genuinely. Dreyfus’s phenomenology remained pre-Heideggerian. Heidegger was oriented by prospects for thinking together for the sake of advancing our shared potential for being, especially through re-thinking ordinary terms of shared language.
A generation of “Heidegger” scholars would become Husserlian “Heidegger”ians, masters of critique of scientism and clarity about understanding Dasein (person-ality) as fundamentally not like understanding objectivation, focusing on senses of how human (person-al) being is not like the being of things, but concealing self-implicative issues of being an invested person sustaining and advancing a life as conceptual inquiry into being as “It gives” at a planetary scale. Heidegger’s “truth of being” was far beyond “transcendental” thinking, which was originally conceived relative to analyses of material life. Truth of being involves life span aspirations of self-actualization through investments of belonging together in caring for and about the “heartfulness” of our “nature,” which includes caring for and about the future of Our humanity practically and at planetary scale.
All "Heidegger"ians share that value of Our humanity! So, how may thinking open ways to better advancing our person-al humanity at planetary scale? That is the question of being in Our times.