Of thinking machines and the centred self

Abstract

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) like most other fields, has its votaries and its critics. Within these terms, one also finds an ongoing debate over approaches to AI, that between human-centred and machine-centred approaches. The votaries seem to have found their enterprise on the idea of a thinking machine, a machine imitative of the human mind. The critics, who challenge the project of AI reject the reduction of the human person to its "intelligent" functions. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), for instance, seek to widen the ambit of what constitutes the human to include such non-cognitive qualities as institution, judgement, emotion, etc. They seem to be thus confronting the cognitivist closures of the AI thrust, highlighted thereby its exclusions and opening up of what they consider to be the realm of the "human". It is not as though the field of AI has been a mute witness to those challenges. Indeed there have been efforts within AI to develop programs that "have the elements of a theory of heuristic (as contrasted with algorithmic) problem solving". This theory can be used "both to understand human heuristic processes and to stimulate such processes with digital computers. Intuition, insight and learning are no longer exclusive possessions of humans: any large high-speed computer can be programmed to exhibit them also" (Simon and Nowell in Vivek, 1992) 1. This almost ready made co-option of the terms of the radical critique represented in Dreyfus is due, primarily, I should think, to the ambiguity in their concept and ontological substantiating of the realm of the non-cognitive. Importantly, it illustrated that the radical critique of AI inhabits the very ground that it arraigns against. The questions: how is the non-cognitive to be postulated and constructed? These seem to be beyond the frames of Dreyfus' s critique. Even as the critics challenge the reduction of the human within the project of AI, they do not seem to explore the contents facilitating, indeed necessitating, this reduction. In this paper, I shall explore the intellectual context of facilitating this idea, as also the critique, of the thinking machine. I will argue, that this self is a self transported from the notion of the modern man.