If the metaphysical foundations of our society tell us we have no soul, how on earth are we going to imbue soul into AI? Four hundred years after Descartes and Hobbs, our scientific methods and cultural stories are still heavily influenced by their ideas.

He began a process that would move past merely separating mind and matter, and toward a worldview that saw only matter as real. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, went further and suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical processes happening in the brain. In doing so, Vervaeke points out, he was laying the ground for artificial intelligence:…what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul! And of course that’s going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism, because if we no longer have souls, then finding our uniqueness and our true self, the self that we’re going to be true to, becomes extremely paradoxical and problematic. If you don’t have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self? And what is it that makes you utterly unique and special from the rest of the purposeless, meaningless cosmos?

The idea that analysis must precede synthesis is old, of course. Galileo Galilei and René Descartes already thought it was necessary to distinguish between an analytic and a synthetic step in dealing with any problem.

In fact,Descartes argued that the only sure indication that another body possesses ahuman mind, that it is not a mere automaton, is its ability to use language inthe normal way;

Descartesalso arrived, quite early in his investigations, at the conclusion that the studyof mind faces us with a problem of quality of complexity, not merely degreeof complexity. He felt that he had demonstrated that understanding and will,the two fundamental properties of the human mind, involved capacities andprinciples that are not realizable by even the most complex of automata.

Mechanical and vitalist systems existed concurrently, and although it might seem easy to distinguish them,when we come to look at most specific characters and their thought, the distinctions appear blurred

we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body

in the old view of enlightenment reason emotion got in the way of reason and motion was the 00:08:34 enemy of reason reason was what you know sort of like mr. Spock on Star Trek you know who is you know super reason no emotion or whatever not true suppose 00:08:49 that you had a stroke or a brain injury that wouldn't allow you to feel emotion and there are such strokes and brain injuries rep Antonio Damasio and his 00:09:01 wife Hana figured out some years ago and published in a book called des cartes error is that you can't reason without emotion emotion is necessary and it's 00:09:14 easy to see why if you cannot feel emotion then like and not like mean nothing to you and you do not know what to want think about it 00:09:27 if you couldn't feel anything if you wouldn't know what it meant to like or not like something or if somebody else or you couldn't tell if someone else would like or not like what you were doing you wouldn't know what to want you couldn't set a goal and this is what 00:09:41 happens to people with such brain injuries they act randomly they don't know how to plan they don't know how to structure their lives or set rational 00:09:53 goals because rationality requires emotion very very deep finding

many of you were brought up with the 00:03:57 idea of Enlightenment reason critical thinking an Enlightenment reason had a number of properties and it turns out that most of them are not true 00:04:10 Enlightenment reason is useful in many situations we'll talk about why it's useful and why it's been popular and so on but it's inadequate grossly inadequate for understanding what hew 00:04:22 means for human beings to understand the world and to think so what we're going to do is talk about real reason which is coming out of the neural and sciences and what the properties are so 00:04:36 there's a certain myth that comes out of enlightenment reason it says you know I think therefore I am says Descartes reason is conscious you know what you think it's just not true for most of 00:04:50 your thought it's unconscious mainly about 98% consciousness is a tip of the iceberg you know how do you get 98% there are two ways one if you look at 00:05:03 what you're conscious of versus what your brain is doing the roll is about fifty to one your brain is doing 50 times as much as you're conscious of and there's another way to look at it if you 00:05:15 take a sentence and you say what can the next sentence be in a paragraph and what do you have to fill in to understand all the possible next sentences the answer is that you need to fill in 50 times as 00:05:29 much as it's in that sentence roughly so it's about 98% unconscious you're not even aware that you're filling this in but you're not moreover consciousness could not in 00:05:42 principle in principle be you know you you couldn't have reason being conscious because most of your reason is done in parallel circuitry but consciousness is 00:05:55 linear so you have massively parallel circuitry but you're tracing out a linear path through it and that is means you can only be aware of a tiny portion of what you're thinking now

This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.

with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour

Astcll recommended Rene Descartes

Nothing in a dream can be true

If “humans”refers to phenomena, not independent entities with inherent propertiesbut rather beings in their differential becoming, particular material(re)configurings of the world with shifting boundaries and properties thatstabilize and destabilize along with specific material changes in what itmeans to be human

we discuss our doubt together, therefore we are.