Eaon Pritchard writes up his books of the year - including an old favorite from Antonio Damasio. Which I had been thinking about shortly before reading Eaon’s post.
I had been thinking about Damasio because I had been listening to Missy Elliott that morning while walking the dog. Elliott is a very corporeal performer. She has a body. And not one of those sculpted, perfected pop star bodies.
Pop that, pop that, jiggle that fat
Don't stop, get it 'til your clothes get wet
And she fucks. Not fantastical, fictionalised pornsex that will soon be mass produced by some ChaturbateGPT AI engine but fun, messy, human intercourse between consenting adults. Bed springs bouncing to Timbaland’s bionic beats.
Obviously there’s more to Missy that just the up and down but she is sensual, physical performer. And when I hear her music, the idea that we think without our bodies, with just our heads, feels obviously absurd.
And yet that is still primarily how we think about thinking. The error of Descartes that Damasio wants to highlight is not Descartes’ ultimately fatal decision to go to work for Queen Christina of Sweden. No, rather Descartes’ booboo was to separate mind and body.
In his Meditations, Descartes decides to explore the nature of Man and God from first principles. To use the jargon of our day, he “does his own research”. Although rather than finding YouTube videos that claim vaccines are an alien plot, Descartes starts to radically doubt his own existence. He starts with his body
The first such belief was that I had a face, hands, arms and the whole structure of bodily parts that corpses also have – I call it the body.
But for Descartes that is not enough. What if he is being tricked by an evil demon?
everything relating to the nature of body – including imagination – could be mere dreams
The only thing that Descartes truly knows is his mind. As his flashiest slogan states: I think therefore I am. Thinking comes first.
In his last Meditation, Rene Descartes says:
[T]here is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible
The mind and the body are separate and the mind is superior to the body. They are the domains of different fields of study (physiology vs psychology). Different fields of work (blue collar vs white collar). Never the twain shall meet*.
Damasio doesn’t believe a word of it.
There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.
We think with our bodies. We feel with our minds. And to pretend otherwise means that we fall for Descartes’ demon’s double bluff. We cannot separate flesh, feeling and thought. They are woven tight in the fabric of ourselves.
So when we try to create artificial intelligences they will naturally be nothing like us because they do not have bodies. Because brains in vats don’t actually exist, we have decided to make them up.
This has downsides, our machines will always be ghosts unless we or they build bodies for them. But it also has upsides. As radically alien, our machines will have the opportunity to make new mistakes that we cannot make - and thus learn new things.
They may never know how hard we had to work it.
*Lets leave Descartes’ Hannibal Lecter-like obsession with the pineal gland out of this for now.
I love Descarte' Error. It's woven as the underlying problem with creating AGI in my novel. His book couple with The Happiness Hypothesis are critical reading.
Apparently GPTZero says there’s 0% chance this was written by an AI.