Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes
As discussed last time, Descartes sought to alleviate the existential anxiety of the time by bringing mathematical thinking to the core of meaning making, attempting to achieve propositional certainty by relying only on the individual mind in the spirit of cogito ergo sum. Hobbes, in turn, proposed artificial intelligence as a natural result of treating all reasoning as computational.
Somewhat surprisingly, Descartes argues against Hobbes’ AI, asserting that reasoning is a purposeful act of truth seeking (a normative standard), and the truth in turn depends on meaning. Since the scientific revolution has characterized matter as inert and purposeless, he argued, how is it possible to derive reasoning from matter? Any symbols produced by a computational system are inherently meaningless without a mind to interpret them. In other words, rationality is more than simply the logical manipulation of propositions.
Reality can be described in terms of primary (objective, measurable) properties and secondary (subjective) qualities. The subjective qualities are called qualia, and they are considered central to consciousness. Since there is no way to generate qualia from matter in the absence of mind, the AI system as proposed by Hobbes could not possess consciousness.
How could we know if we’ve actually succeeded in Hobbes’ project of artificial intelligence? Any system we propose needs to have met the definition of strong AI (term of John Serle) or AGI, which means being a true instance of mind — an entity that is able to address all of Descartes’ objections about the impossibility of extracting reasoning and rationality from pure matter.
We also bear a cost for Descartes’ project of radical certainty. Let us first distinguish between logical certainty and psychological certainty, where the latter is simply the inability to doubt something despite there being a logically sound possibility that it is false. Cogito ergo sum is the outcome of extending psychological certainty to logical certainty, resulting in a pervasive doubt in everything outside of the mind meeting itself — our own consciousness.
Within the dualistic Cartesian framework, it is only in the mind where purpose and meaning can occur, yet the mind is immaterial. Thus, we may wonder, if mind and matter share no properties, how can they causally interact, as we experience in the form of will and sensation? In practice, our culture has had an inconsistent approach to the mind-body problem, resulting in an unstable grammar of realness, oscillating between positivism and romanticism.
Pascal used the term spirit of geometry to describe our mathematical and propositional knowledge, and spirit of finesse to describe our other ways of knowing (procedural, perspectival, participatory knowledge). It seems we have lost the latter, and along with it the grammar of personal transformation and meaning making. In its stead is an atomic self adrift in infinite space, an existential vacuum that makes way for the rise of destructive pseudo-religious ideologies.