In his Introduction to Logic, Kant famously asks a troubling and vastly unexplored question: “What is Man?” This three-day seminar seeks to give a new twist to Kant’s question by elaborating that the question concerning the epistemological and metaphysical status of the human has been all along a question concerning machinic processes. Thus, ‘what is the human’ is in reality the question of ‘what is a machine.’
Even though the aforementioned question concerning machines has been on the horizon for a long time—emphasized by numerous works in engineering, science fiction and speculations about the end of humanity ver. 1.0—only recently it has become a subject of serious analysis by philosophy and cognitive sciences.
This seminar promises a new engagement with the question concerning the rise of machines. Over the course of three days, we will suspend our prejudices about who we are and instead approach our cherished characteristics from the perspective of the program of artificial general intelligence and recent developments in cognitive sciences. To this end, we shall examine three features by which we distinguish ourselves: Perception (time, memory and sensibility), Objectivity (inter-subjectivity, language and judgement), and worldmaking.
Throughout the course of this seminar, we will engage with the philosophical and political implications of a species who is more willing to take its task of self-discovery seriously, for it has arrived at the end of its life span.
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Disrobing the Human: Three Lesson in the Pre-history of Machine Intelligence
Mon, Oct 22, 20185:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Oct 23, 20185:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Oct 24, 20185:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Reza Negarestani is a philosopher, who has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies. He has also lectured and taught at numerous international universities, museums, and institutes. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. His latest book, Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2018) is focused on philosophy of mind and the possibility of artificial general intelligence.
Wolfendale, Peter. The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens.
Adams, Sam S., Itamar Arel, Joscha Bach, Robert Coop, Rod Furlan, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, Alexei Samsonovich, Matthias Scheutz, Matthew Schlesinger, Stuart C. Shapiro, and John F. Sowa. Mapping the Landscape of Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence.
