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Historian of ideas; coauthor (with Marcello Simonetta), Napoleon and the Rebel: A Story of Brotherhood, Passion, and Power
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The history of humanity and the history of technology are conjoined. We have always used our cognitive capacities to create the objects we needed to survive, from weapons to garments and shelters. The evolution of the human mind is instantiated in the evolution of technology. We’ve developed a capacity for metarepresentation—awareness of having, and the ability to analyze, our own minds—which is a function of higher-order consciousness. And in order to look at ourselves in the mirror, we’ve always used technological analogies—compared our minds to the technologies we create. To each era, its machine—from hydraulic pumps to computers.
We have by now created technologies that no single person is able to master. Our creations are starting to escape our own minds. No wonder, then, that we so easily imagine the creations becoming creatures in their own right, endowed with minds as agile as ours, or more agile perhaps. Science fiction imagines perfect robots, indistinguishable from ourselves, embodied, speaking, seemingly feeling, which can fool and even perhaps attack us.
But in thinking conceptually about our own minds, we tend to remain Cartesian dualists. Thinking seems so disembodied an activity that we forget we’re not brains in vats, that no amount of microtechnology will re-create the complexities of biology thanks to which our brains function, replete with neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormones. We are our bodies; we have emotions that are embodied and that deeply inform our thinking processes. Machines are developing task-driven cognitive capacities, but their perfect processing is very different indeed from the imperfect, inconstant, subtle thinking of persons endowed with a sense of self, proprioception, a sense of centeredness, the qualia that distinguish us from “zombies.”
Computers excel at processes most of us fumble with, and we increasingly access the world of facts via machines. Much of our memory is assigned to Google, and there’s no doubt that our minds are extending more and more beyond our bodies—that we exist within a growing network of disembodied minds and data. Thinking is in part a social capacity; to think is to participate in a collective enterprise, and the complexity of this enterprise is as much a characteristic of the human condition as our embodiment. Machines don’t have social lives, anymore than they’re embodied in a complex, evolved set of biological tissues. They’re good at tasks, and we’ve become good at using them for our purposes. But until we replicate the embodied emotional being—a feat I don’t believe we can achieve—our machines will continue to serve as occasional analogies for thought and to evolve according to our needs.
