Thoughts from French Psychoanalysis on the Absence of Corporeality in the Unconscious of Emerging Complex Cognitive System

Abstract

In this text we answer at the same time to two recent interesting works of Giancarlo Minati and Luca Possati in which they both called to work on the development, one from the part of the computer side, and the other of the humanities one of an IA unconscious in complex cognitive systems as an experiment to come to more anthropomorphic machines, performance added by the unconscious will not be addressed in this paper. We gathered many sources in psychoanalysis to help us understand what could be the barriers dressed against us. In the light of Lacan, Anzieu, Leclaire and Winnicott amongst others we tried to explain how having a body, in the biological sense, makes a difference with recreating—this is a typical human preoccupation—an unconscious in IA. Of course, from a French psychoanalytic standpoint there are many conservative objections, while some can be easily overcome, the matter of innate desire and body seems an understandable concern. It is also important to consider the interesting conjecture of Possati (i.e., a computer can be a projective identification object); while we only may say that it is a transitional object in the sense of Winnicott. Also, we can study further within psychotherapy the behaviour of the patient and therapist, with an algorithm we developed. In the end we address the objection of French postructruralist psychology objections to the creation of a human-like unconscious and advise the experimenting of Possati’s theory with our device.