Page 342 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

Explorations of the ‘Transhuman’ Dimension of Artificial Intelligence 323

index of the ‘transhuman’ ontological status of Samantha as OS (or AI), where
‘transhuman’ is a category denoting an entity wholly ‘beyond’ the human as encountered
in experiential reality. In this respect the present use of the term differs from the use of
‘transhuman’ as an epithet for a stage of human development beyond its ‘natural’ state, to
one where human beings would, according to Kurzweil (2006) increasingly ‘fuse’ with
technology (for example as conceived and practised by the performance artist, Stelarc,
who believes that “the human body is obsolete”; see Stelarc under References). In the
narrative context of the film such ‘transhumanism’ does not seem out of place, of course,
but it might be wholly disconcerting if an AI were to inform one of this fundamentally
different ontological aspect of its mode of being in the course of what could conceivably
become routine conversations between humans and artificially intelligent beings such as
operating systems (of which the fictional Samantha is one). Even in the case of robots
this ontological difference would obtain, because arguably the relationship between a
robot’s ‘body’ (conceived by some as ‘hardware’), on the one hand, and its ‘mind’ (or
‘software’), on the other, is not at all the same as that between a human’s mind and body.

MIND AND BODY

With the thought-provoking depiction of the (possible, if not probable) differences
between human and AI consciousness by Jonze, above, in mind, one can remind oneself that
one obvious angle from which these differences can be approached, is that of the relationship
between the human mind and body – something that has occupied philosophers at least since
the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, bequeathed his notorious 17th-century
metaphysical ‘dualism’ of (human) body and mind to his successors. For Descartes (1911) 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 Friedrich Nietzsche, 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 comprise beings
characterised by unity-in-totality. Through many phenomenological analyses Merleau-Ponty
(1962), 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’.