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Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas Its and Intelligence Augmented Your Mind: of Alleys (Ed.) Pasquinelli Matteo INTELLIGENCE

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Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas Its and Intelligence Augmented Your Mind: of Alleys (Ed.) Pasquinelli Matteo INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTED Matteo Pasquinelli (Ed.) INTELLIGENCE Alleys of Mind: Your Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas TRAUMAS PASQUINELLI Alleys of Your Mind Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas edited by Matteo Pasquinelli Bibliographical Information of the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche ­National­bibliografie­(German­National­Bibliography);­detailed­ bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Published by meson press, Hybrid Publishing Lab, Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg www.meson-press.com Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Cover image: Michael Deistler Copy-editing: Jacob Watson The print edition of this book is printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. ISBN­(Print):­­978-3-95796-065-8 ISBN­(PDF):­ 978-3-95796-066-5 ISBN­(EPUB):­ 978-3-95796-067-2 DOI:­10.14619/014 The digital editions of this publication can be downloaded freely at: www.meson-press.com Funded­by­the­EU­major­project­Innovation­Incubator­Lüneburg This­Publication­is­licensed­under­the­CC-BY-SA­4.0­(Creative­­Commons­ Attribution­ShareAlike­4.0­Unported)­license.­To­view­a­copy­of­this­license,­ visit: ­http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Please note that the pictures used in the text by Orit Halpern are not cov- ered­by­this­license:­p.­45,­Serious Games I–IV­©­2009–2010­Harun­Farocki;­ p.­57,­Aspen­Movie­Map,­©­1978–1979­MIT;­p.­60,­The Architecture Machine, ©­1970­MIT­Press;­p.­62,­Software­exhibition­catalogue,­©­1970­Jewish­ Museum,­New­York. Contents Introduction 7 Matteo Pasquinelli PART­I:­FROM­CYBERTRAUMA­TO­SINGULARITY [ 1 ] The Pigeon in the Machine: The Concept of Control in Behaviorism and Cybernetics 23 Ana Teixeira Pinto [ 2 ] Error Correction: Chilean Cybernetics and Chicago’s Economists 37 Adrian Lahoud [ 3 ] The Trauma Machine: Demos, Immersive Technologies and the Politics of Simulation 53 Orit Halpern [ 4 ] Outing Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning with Turing Tests 69 Benjamin Bratton PART­II:­COGNITION­BETWEEN­AUGMENTATION­AND­ AUTOMATION [ 5 ] Thinking Beyond the Brain: Educating and Building from the Standpoint of Extended Cognition 85 Michael Wheeler [ 6 ] Late Capitalism and the Scientific Image of Man: Technology, Cognition, and Culture 107 Jon Lindblom [ 7 ] Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable 125 Luciana Parisi [ 8 ] Revolution Backwards: Functional Realization and Computational Implementation 139 Reza Negarestani [ 9 ] Loops of Augmentation: Bootstrapping, Time Travel, and Consequent Futures 157 Ben Woodard PART­III:­THE­MATERIALISM­OF­THE­SOCIAL­BRAIN [ 1 0 ] Brain Theory Between Utopia and Dystopia: Neuronormativity Meets the Social Brain 173 Charles T. Wolfe [ 1 1 ] Post-Trauma: Towards a New Definition? 187 Catherine Malabou APPENDIX Keyword:­Augmented­Intelligence­ 203 Matteo Pasquinelli Authors­ 211 Introduction Matteo Pasquinelli Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. — Land and Plant (1994) The Reason of Trauma One day, it will not be arbitrary to reframe twentieth century thought and its intelligent machines as a quest for­the­positive­definition­of­error,­abnormal- ity, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of concepts that need to be understood in their cognitive, technological and political composition. It may be surpris- ing­for­some­to­find­out­that­Foucault’s­history­of­biopower­and­technologies­ of the self share common roots with cybernetics and its early error-friendly universal machines. Or to learn that the desiring machines, which “continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly”­(Deleuze­and­Guattari­1983,­8),­were­in­fact­echoing­research­on­war­ traumas­and­brain­plasticity­from­the­First­World­War.­Across­the­history­of­ computation­(from­early­cybernetics­to­artificial­intelligence­and­current­algo- rithmic­capitalism)­both­mainstream­technology­and­critical­responses­to­it­ have shared a common belief in the determinism and positivism of the instru- mental or technological rationality, to­use­the­formulations­of­the­Frankfurt­ School­(Horkheimer­1947;­Marcuse­1964). Conversely, the aim of this anthology is to rediscover the role of error, trauma and catastrophe in the design of intel- ligent machines and the theory of augmented cognition. These are timely and urgent­issues:­the­media­hype­of­singularity­occurring­for­artificial­intelligence­ appears­just­to­fodder­a­pedestrian­catastrophism­without­providing­a­basic­ epistemic­model­to­frame­such­an­“intelligence­explosion”­(Chalmers­2010). The­definition­of­error­had­a­fundamental­role­in­the­genesis­of­the­Enlight- enment­as­well.­According­to­Bates­(2002)­both­critics,­such­as­the­Frankfurt­ School, and defenders, like liberals and socialist revolutionaries, wrongly believed­that­the­Enlightenment­was­just­driven­by­plain­confidence­in­reason.­ Instead,­Bates­stresses­that­the­Age­of­Reason­was­obsessed­with­the­consti- tution of error and considered human knowledge to be basically an aberration. Since­the­method­of­“truth­is­really­parasitic­on­its­supposed­negation,”­Bates­ (2002,­viii)­suggests­then­that­the Enlightenment­in­fact­laid­the­groundwork­ for­a­modern­epistemology­of­error.­Therefore,­critical­theory’s­approach­ should be redirected toward its own postulates in order to inquire if the whole 8 Alleys of Your Mind history­of­instrumental­reason—from­the­Age­of­Reason­to­the­Age­of­Intel- ligent Machines—has actually concealed a deep and structural errancy. These older concerns of the relation between technology and reason re- emerge today as concerns of the relation between computation and cognition. The­current­philosophical­debate­appears­to­be­polarized­between­the­posi- tions of neomaterialism and neorationalism, that is between novel interpreta- tions of Whitehead and Sellars, for instance, between those who side with the agency­of­technical­objects,­matter­and­affects­and­those­who­address­the­ primacy­of­reason­and­its­potential­forms­of­autonomization.1 The anthology cuts across these binaries by proposing, more modestly, that a distinction should be made between those philosophies that acknowledge a positive and constituent role for error, abnormality, pathology, trauma, and catastrophe on the one hand, and those who support a flat ontology without dynamic, self- organizing­and­constitutive­ruptures­on­the­other. No paradigm of cognition and­computation­(neomaterialist­or­neorationalist)­can­be­assessed­with- out the recognition of the epistemic abnormal and the role of noetic failure. Departing from the lesson of the trauma of reason­instructed­by­the­Frankfurt­ School, the reason of trauma must be rediscovered as the actual inner logic of the age of intelligent machines. The Pathology of Machines With much akin to the turbulent underground that contributed to the com- puter­revolution­in­the­California­of­the­1970s,­cybernetics­was­born­out­of­a­ practice-based,­error-friendly­and­social-friendly­milieu,­as­Pickering­(2010)­ recounts in his seminal book The Cybernetic Brain. Cybernetics is often per- ceived as an evolution of information theory and its predictable communica- tion­channels,­but­many­cyberneticians­of­the­first­generation­were­actually­ trained­in­psychology­and­psychiatry.­As­Pickering­reminds­us,­the­idea­of­the­ cybernetic machine was shaped after the adaptive theory of the brain, accord- ing to which the function of the brain organ is not the representation of but the adaptation to the external environment. The canonical image of the organism struggling to adapt to its own Umwelt belongs of course to the history of evolu- tionary theory and beforehand, famously, to German Naturphilosophie. This historical note is not attached here to evoke a biomorphic substrate of infor- mation technologies in a vitalist fashion, but on the contrary to exhume the role of abstraction in the philosophies of life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, any machine is always a machine of cognition, a product of the human intellect and a component of the gears of extended cognition.2 1 ­ For­a­general­overview­of­this­debate­see­Bryant­et­al.­2011.­A­main­neorationalist­refer- ence­is­Brassier­2007.­For­a­recent­neomaterialist­response­see­Shaviro­2014. 2 ­ The­concepts­of­organism,­structure­and­system­had­a­very­promiscuous­family­life­ throughout the twentieth century. In this anthology they are considered symbolic and Introduction 9 French­philosophers­and­American­cyberneticians­did­not­welcome­the­paral- lelism between organisms and machines with the same enthusiasm. In his influential­lecture­“Machine­and­Organism”­Canguilhem­stated­that­a­machine,­ unlike an organism, cannot display pathological behaviors as it is not adap- tive.­An­organism­becomes­mentally­ill­as­it­has­the­ability­to­self-organize­and­ repair itself, whereas the­machine’s­components­have­fixed­goals­that­cannot­ be repurposed.3 There is no machine pathology as such, also on the basis that “a­machine­cannot­replace­another­machine,”­concluded­Canguilhem­(1947,­ 109).­Nonetheless­Bates­has­noted­that­the­early­“cyberneticists­were­intensely­ interested in pathological break-downs [and] Wiener claimed that certain psychological­instabilities­had­rather­precise­technical­analogues”­(Bates­2014,­ 33).­The­adaptive­response­of­the­machine­was­often­discussed­by­early­cyber- neticians­in­terms­of­error,­shock­and­catastrophe.­Even­the­central­notion­ of homeostasis was originally
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