#AI #RenéDescartes
"AI is forcing us to reckon with a 400-year-old problem
René Descartes drew a line between humans and machines. AI is blurring it.
(. . .)
Like much modern fantasy, Philip Pullman’s *His Dark Materials* series features magical objects. Each book in the trilogy is named after one; the second is *The Subtle Knife*. This knife looks unremarkable, but when wielded by the right person, it can cut a hole in the world — a portal into an alternate universe. Unfortunately, the portal’s edges also turn out to be a wound in the fabric of reality … and the wound bleeds. Sinister, invisible things leak out, hungry ghosts that prey upon the living. To banish these ghosts, the tear in reality must be closed.
(. . .)
With his 'mechanical philosophy,' French polymath René Descartes (1596–1650) forged the subtle knife that promised to resolve this metaphysical crisis by cutting the sciences free of their spiritual encumbrance, severing bodies from souls. The trick was to deny the existence of the lower two of Aristotle’s three levels of ensoulment: the 'nutritive,' possessed by all life forms including plants, and the 'sensitive,' possessed by animals. Per Descartes, investigable, clockwork-like mechanisms could fully account not only for the inanimate world but also for plant and animal behavior, without any need for a supernatural animating force. This left only human beings, whose 'rational souls' (Aristotle’s highest level) were in keeping with Church doctrine: immortal, immaterial, and indivisible.
At this point, the model that cut so elegantly needed to confront the discontinuity it had created in the world: Our immaterial souls must perceive the world through bodily senses, as well as control the body’s willed actions. But how?
Descartes reasoned that, since the rational soul was indivisible, it must act upon a central, undivided structure in the brain, which he referred to as 'Gland H.' We now know it as the pineal gland — certainly not any special locus of perception or action — but the H might as well have stood for the name of one of the monsters that the Cartesian wound has let slip into our world: homunculus, the 'little man' in our brain pulling our strings, who must have, if we are to explain his ability to perceive and act upon the world, an even smaller homunculus within, a dizzying prospect of infinite regress. Unless, of course, we allow Descartes’ dualism to stand, in which case the mind is immaterial: a ghost in the machine. Or, if we exorcise ghosts and homunculi while acknowledging the possibility that our bodies could continue to give every appearance of intelligent, rational behavior, we are left with the prospect of a philosophical zombie: an entity just like us on the outside, but with no 'me' on the inside, no conscious or subjective experience."
https://bigthink.com/philosophy/healing-the-cartesian-wound/
