Reengineering Philosophy

DOCUMENT UFD034 Reza Negarestani, Robin Mackay Reengineering Philosophy Reza Negarestani expands upon the major themes of his new book Intelligence and Spirit in this edited and expanded version of his conversation with Robin Mackay at the launch of the book in New York in November 2018 ROBIN MACKAY: Before I invite Reza to discuss some of the themes and ambitions of Intelligence and Philosophy, as a programme of con- Spirit, I’d like to give a short, somewhat personal in- structing an outside view of URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS troduction to the book by relaying my impressions of ourselves, is already a programme Intelligence and Spirit as an editor and as a reader. for artificialization URBANOMIC.COM To first give a very broad outline,Intelligence and Spirit is a painstaking interrogation of the notions of that it does not belong to the individual but always intelligence and artificiality. It begins with the ques- implies a community, a collective mind and, in par- tion: What would it mean to speak, philosophically, ticular, a shared language. And there is a strong of an artificial general intelligence, an AGI, whose emphasis on functionalism, on collectivity, and on capacities would, at least, equal our own? Is the language, although none of these are treated in an human the correct or the only model to start with entirely familiar sense, and with their convergence in trying to conceptualise such an intelligence? And, there emerges and entirely novel philosophical ap- looking at the various proposals and programmes of proach to the intertwined notions of intelligence, ar- research into artificial intelligence, and increasingly tificiality, and the practice of philosophy itself. into the broader notion of artificialgeneral intelligence, are we able to clarify what exactly we mean In order to determine further this conception of a by intelligence? The book then culminates in a vision community of automata, the toy model is further of philosophy itself as a program for the artificializa- specified using concepts drawn from computer sci- tion of intelligence, or a program for artificialization ence, research into artificial speech, and interactive as intelligence. logic, to mention just a few; in short, by selecting those currently available resources best able to sat- The central chapters of the book use a ‘toy mod- isfy the conditions for the emergence, within this el’ to determine the conditions of possibility for the community, of artificial general intelligence. construction of such an intelligence. What would a simple automaton with sensors need to be equipped Answering to the profound and apparently rath- with in order to attain what we would recognise as er diffuse philosophical questions which the book intelligence? This is a kind of Kantian thought-ex- opens up, then, we have this model that is func- periment in transcendental philosophy, but one in- tionally specified, experimented with, with parts flected, crucially, by two of Hegel’s crucial insights. taken from various suppliers added, swapped out, Firstly, that intelligence, or Geist, can only be defined and hacked. Returning from this functionalist stag- functionally—in terms of what it does; and secondly, ing of the problem, the final chapter returns to a 1 philosophical vision in the grandest sense, a vision form of unfathomable machine; uncertainty and of philosophy as a project at once transcendental proliferating doomsday/singularity scenarios; the and functionalist, as having always been a program apparent erosion of any viable concept of human for the construction of artificial intelligence, in the agency; a total dependency on technology paired form of a striving to understand what we are as with a chronic difficulty in upholding any liberato- intelligences, how we can live up to our capacities, ry idea of technology-as-progress; and— perhaps and how we can make ourselves better—because most upsettingly—we seem to also be surrounded intelligence cannot be separated from its tendency by a wilful squandering of what little human intelli- to upgrade itself, which Reza interprets in terms of gence is left…. Not to mention, for those of us who Plato’s concept of the Good. have invested our time in philosophy, the question of whether its resources can possibly address this What’s startling about the use of philosophy here set of apparently ineluctable processes which seem is not just that it is articulated with many other dis- refractory to any sort of philosophical judgment. ciplines, with other practices, but also that, rather than this being a philosophy of artificial intelli- What is extraordinary in Intelligence and Spirit is gence—as if it involved some relation of application Reza’s diligence and conscientiousness in address- to an independent object, it becomes evident that ing these questions, his resolute refusal of both hys- philosophy itself, as a programme of constructing teria and the illusion that we can achieve a sort of an outside view of ourselves, of understanding how instant relief through philosophy. Throughout the changes in our self-conception necessarily lead to book he insists on tracking these unsettling ques- URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS the transformation of our collective modes of acting tions so tenaciously that they are often transformed (intelligence is what it does), is already a programme into something unrecognizable. Sometimes we’re URBANOMIC.COM for artificialization, for artificializing ourselves. And in led, from the ‘big’ questions we want to ask, into particular how Kant, and Hegel, and the program of dauntingly technical expositions of recent fields German Idealism in general, unknowingly furnish the of research. I think there are few people who will functional blueprints for a future artificial intelligence read the book without learning something about some field of which they were previously unaware. This is obviously then not straightforwardly a book Whether it’s Hegelian spirit or nonmonotonic logic, about AI, about the prospects of AI, about its tech- there will be some new encounter here. nical possibilities as seen from the present, in a kind of pop-science mode. Instead it’s using the prob- I see the story arc of the book like this: a set of for- lematic of AI as a way to develop a more general phi- ays out from this ambient amorphous anguish and losophy of intelligence. And this in turn involves us the huge questions it poses, into increasingly deter- in some acute political, ethical, and existential ques- minate and actionable engineering questions, via a tions about ourselves: about the capacity of we hu- series of meticulously plotted navigational paths or mans to merit the name of intelligence, about the zooms between different layers or scales of the same process of allowing ourselves to be invaded by other questions. It becomes a kind of slow-motion scream intelligent processes; about allowing intelligence to in which the acute emotional urgency is attenuated, grow out of us, or, inversely, our ability to make our- and all kinds of unexpected details emerge. One re- selves an AGI. sult of this approach is that it is difficult to separate the book’s methodology from the task it sets out to Part of the importance of this book lies in the way it achieve, because in a sense it is also a book about addresses an amorphous murk of uncertainties, fears methodology, about how—and how not—to do phi- and hopes that we are surrounded by in the present losophy today, how to make something constructive hysterical moment. I’ve always loved Deleuze’s sug- of the scream without betraying it. gestion that every true philosophy begins with a cry of anguish; that this is what it means to need a con- The kind of thought that is going on in this book cept: to have something to scream. And we have marks a decisive departure from the expectations plenty to scream about. The piecemeal absorption of a certain type of philosophy or theory with which of the human, and human sociality, into some other most of us are familiar, and in particular, to say it 2 somewhat schematically, from a certain coupling of the ontological and the political which, in the con- In order to map out the question of text of this ambient political, existential, technolog- intelligence in all of its aspects ical distress, has become something like a salve, a and its multiple scales, we will have philosophical arnica for the afflicted. Because an -on to assemble and articulate different tology—whether it’s mathematical, object-oriented, modes of knowledge new materialist, or whatever…an ontology always allows us to say, firstly,everything is x. This over- extension of a single conceptual articulation affords new advances in multiple fields—or what Reza has us a clear and stabilised field for thought and action called a kind of philosophical Lego, big toy models. so that, from there, we can move forwards within With this approach there begins a long-term labour, the bounds of this unified vision of the world to say, both arduous and playful, the labour of the contin- secondly if only we could do y—that is, the idea that ual conception and transformation of ourselves. Or some great shift in our conception of the structure rather, we are invited to recognise the historical of things could potentially relieve us of the burden of achievements of this labour (the ‘labour of the inhu- a tangled, layered, enmeshed situation now seen to man’ as defined in a previous work), and to explicitly be, ultimately, simple and radically subvertible. address the continuing of this vector forward as a concrete task. Reza even speaks of our responsi- Intelligence and Spirit absolutely departs from these bility as intelligent beings to continue to artificial- cartoonish ontologies whose emancipatory promis- ize ourselves since, deprived of its movement of URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS es are as brittle as their concepts are overextended.

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