Capital artificial
| January 24th, 2019(…)
It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins.
It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today’s discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps – one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition – they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today’s neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.
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The opposition between the possibility of a thinking machine and the actuality of the human agent should be exposed as a false dichotomy that can only be precariously maintained within the bounds of an essentialist interpretation of the mind as necessarily attached to a particular local or contingent transcendental structure. To put it more tersely, the source of this false dichotomy lies precisely in mistaking the local and contingent aspects of experience for universal and necessary acts of cognition, the particular conditions of the former for the general conditions of the latter. To reject and break away from this false dichotomy in all its manifestations, it is necessary to fully distinguish and unbind reason (the labour of conception) from subjectivist experience. This is not to dispense with the significance of experience in favour of a contentless abstract account of reason. It is rather the condition necessary for reassessing the extant categories — the general concepts by virtue of which we can have experience in the first place, the structures which render the world and our experience of it intelligible. The unbinding of reason from experience is a required step in order to expand and reshape our experience beyond what is manifestly essential or supposedly given to us.
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What begins as a systematic theoretical inquiry in to the limits and regulative regimes of the transcendental structures of the constituted subject evolves into an applied system for the transformation of the subject and the maximization of agency. Thus understood, the critique of transcendental structures is the compass of self-conception and self-transformation.
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For the most part, the problem with today’s research on artificial general intelligence is that it is content with ephemeral smart answers to ill-posed questions. Tied up in its local achievements and complying with the demands of the market, the field of artificial intelligence has neither the time nor the ambition to think about what it means to pose the right kinds of questions regarding the nature of mind and the realization of cognitive acts.
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De Reza Negarestani, en Intelligence and Spirit.