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

Bates, David W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226849147 ISBN 13: 9780226849140

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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

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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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The historical evolution and development of artificial intelligence (AI) has long been tied to the consolidation of cognitive science and the neurosciences. There has been, from the start of the digital age, a complex and mutually constitutive mirroring of the brain, the mind, and the computer. If to be a thinking person in the contemporary moment is to be a “brain,” it is also true that the brain is, in the dominant paradigms of current neuroscientific practice, essentially a computer, a processor of information. Or, just as easily, the computer itself can become a brain, as the development of neuromorphic chip designs and the emergence of “cognitive computing” aligns with the deep learning era of AI, where neural networks interpret and predict the world on the basis of vast quantities of data. These disciplines and technologies align as well with a dominant strand of evolutionary theory that explains the emergence of human intelligence as the production of various neural functions and apparatuses. 

In a way, this is a strange moment, when two powerful philosophies of the human coexist despite their radical divergence. For in the world of social science theory, science and technology studies, and the critical humanities, the dominant framework of analysis has emphasized the historicity and cultural plurality of the “human,” and has, over the past few decades, moved more and more to a consensus that humans are just one part of distributed, historically structured networks and systems that subject individuals to various forms of control and development. We are, that is, functions in systems (political, economic, social, moral, environmental, etc.) that seem so familiar and almost natural but can be relentlessly critiqued and historicized. 

On the other hand, we have a conceptual and disciplinary line that has increasingly understood human beings as essentially driven by unconscious and automatic neural processes that can be modeled in terms of information processing of various kinds, and the brain is the most complex network mediating these various processes. The result, to borrow the title from a cognitive science paper, is a new condition, namely, “the unbearable automaticity of being.” For the cognitive scientist, the human will is demonstrably an illusion, appearing milliseconds after the brain has already decided in controlled experimental conditions. Consciousness, while still a philosophical problem, is understood as just another evolutionary function, linked now to attention mechanisms that can prompt responses from the unconscious space of operations. Whether we are thinking “fast” or “slow,” to use Daniel Kahneman’s terms, the system of human cognition as a whole is encompassed by the brain as the automatic—and autonomous—technology of thinking. What else could thought be in the contemporary scientific moment? As one psychologist observed a while ago, “Any scientific theory of the mind has to treat it as an automaton.” If the mind “works” at all, it has to work on known principles, which means, essentially, the principles of a materially embodied process of neural processing. Steven Pinker, whom humanists love to hate (often for good reason), has put it bluntly: “Beliefs are a kind of information, thinking a kind of computation, and emotions, motives, and desires are a kind of feedback mechanism.” However crude the formulation, the overarching principle at work here is important. Cognitive science and neuroscience, along with myriad AI and robotic models related to these disciplines, cannot introduce what might be called a spiritual or transcendental element into their conceptualizations. Even consciousness, however troubling it may be, can be effectively displaced, marked as something that will eventually be understood as a result of physiological organization but that in the meantime can be studied like any other aspect of the mind. As the philosopher Andy Clark claims, a key contemporary philosophical issue is automaticity: “The zombie challenge is based on an amazing wealth of findings in recent cognitive science that demonstrate the surprising ways in which our everyday behavior is controlled by automatic processes that unfold in the complete absence of consciousness.” 

Much as we may not want to admit it, Yuval Harari, of Sapiens fame, is probably right about the current moment, in at least one crucial way. As he says, “we” (cognitive scientists, that is) have now “hacked” humans, have found out why they behave the way they do, and have replicated (and in the process vastly improved) these cognitive behaviors in various artificial technologies. 

In the last few decades research in areas such as neuroscience and behavioural economics allowed scientists to hack humans, and in particular to gain a much better understanding of how humans make decisions. It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.” 

While we (rightly) rail against the substitution of human decision making, in judicial, financial, or other contexts, by algorithms, according to the new sciences of decision, there is nothing more going on in the human brain, and to be fair, it isn’t like humans were not exemplifying bias before the age of AI. As we know, the development of algorithmic sentencing, for example, was motivated by the desire to avoid the subjectivity and variability of human judgments. 

In any case, we have to recognize that Harari is channeling the mainstream of science and technology on the question of the human: since we are, so to speak, “no more than biochemical algorithms, there is no reason why computers cannot decipher these algorithms—and do so far better than any Homo sapiens.” Hence the appearance of recent books with such horrifying titles as Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, which helpfully introduces readers to concepts from computing that can improve their day-to-day lives, and Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, which advises us humans to imitate the process of clear, algorithmic objectivity. But my main point is that Harari reveals the contemporary crisis very clearly: it is a crisis of decision. “Computer algorithms,” unlike human neural ones, “have not been shaped by natural selection, and they have neither emotions nor gut instincts. Hence in moments of crisis they could follow ethical guidelines much better than humans—provided we find a way to code ethics in precise numbers and statistics.” Computers will make better and more consistent decisions because they are not decisions in crisis but applications of the rule to the situation, objectively considered. 

The backlash against this vision of AI, however well intentioned, has often been driven by just the kind of platitudes about the “human” that humanists and social science scholars have been dismantling for decades (if not centuries). New centers for moral or ethical or human-compatible AI and robotics assert a natural “human” meaning or capacity that the technology must serve—usually couched in the new language of “inclusion,” “equity,” and “fairness,” as if those concepts have not emerged in historically specific ways or have not been contested in deadly conflicts (in civil wars, for example). As the home page for Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered Computing proclaims, “Artificial...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226849147
• ISBN 13: 9780226849140
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 404
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland