Gelernter: A dissenting voice in the field of artificial intelligence

The relationship between the human mind and body is something that has occupied philosophers at least since the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, bequeathed his notorious "dualism" to his successors. For Descartes the mind was a different "substance" compared to the body – the former was a "thinking substance" and the latter an "extended substance", and he resolved the problem of the manner in which these mutually exclusive substances "interacted" by postulating the so-called "animal spirits" – a hybrid concept, denoting something between mind and body – as mediating between them in the pineal gland at the base of the human brain. Increasingly, from the late 19th-century onwards, thinkers started questioning the validity of such dualistic thinking; in various ways philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Francois Lyotard argued that humans cannot be broken down into mutually exclusive parts, but that they comprised beings characterised by a unity-in-totality. Through many phenomenological analyses Merleau-Ponty, for example, demonstrated that, although – in the event of an injury to your leg, for example – one is able to distance oneself from your body, as if it is something alien to yourself, referring to "the pain in your leg", and so on, it is undeniable that, at a different level of awareness, "you" are in pain, and not just your leg. In short: we don't just have bodies; we "ARE our bodies". This line of thinking, which has far-reaching implications for current thinking about the differences – or the presumed similarities – between humans and artificial intelligence (AI), has been resurrected, perhaps surprisingly, by one of the most brilliant computer-scientists in the world, namely David Gelernter of Yale University in the United States – the subject of a recent article by David Von Drehle (Encounters with the Archgenius; TIME, March 7, 2016, pp.