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La philosophie devant l’Intelligence artificielle, Le Cahier (Collège international de philosophie), No. 3 (mars 1987),
auth. François Laruelle, trans. Sylvia.
Sylvia's Note
A modified version of this short text appears in Théorie des identities. Fractalité généralisée et philosophie artificielle, Paris: PUF, 1992; Theory of Identities, trans. Alyosha Edlebi, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
This formula covers a triple program:
1) the inventory or catalogue of traditional critiques of philosophy against artificial intelligence;
2) the description of spontaneous philosophies which support artificial intelligence;
3) the problematic extension of Artificial Intelligence toward philosophy, the idea of an “artificial philosophy” (A Phi). What founds this program which is inscribed within the vaster program of a science of philosophy?
Rather than describe the codified practices of Artificial Intelligence, we have sought its intimate goal, its telos, in view of prolonging up until philosophy what is not yet in it but dottily. This telos appeared to be this one: Artificial Intelligence corresponds to a scientific “break” or “revolution” in the problem of a science of thought, science here being experimental and basically technological. Quite another thing, consequently, than recipes for simulating thought. This break has precise historical and mathematical conditions, particularly the invention of new logical, mathematical, and technological means which permit the reduction of thought to reasoning and of reasoning to calculation.
This break defines an upstream and a downstream.
Upstream: the old philosophical and phantasmatic project of a (specular) simulation of thought by machine. Artificial Intelligence brings a rupture in this tradition and seeks to place the problem on a controllable, experimental, and scientific terrain. The long-term ambition of Artificial Intelligence is to found a science of “general” reason or of thought which will snatch from philosophy its last object. Whence the necessity for philosophers to confront it, and to consider the future.
Downstream: the project of Artificial Intelligence can be radicalized and transformed or enlarged. We can consider it as the tip of a cone whose base would be philosophy itself, and no longer cognition which is only a restrained concept of philosophizing reason; and whose aperture will indubitably be science but liberated from its reduction to logic and to the sciences which are combined with it, like the neurosciences or cybernetics. Under the name of A Phi which will serve us as a guiding thread, we thus attempt to trace the trajectory which goes from AI, as it exists, to a true Science of the most deployed thought, i.e., of philosophy: a science of philosophy which is evidently no longer a philosophy of philosophy as we find realized in the History of Philosophy. Otherwise said, we hold ourselves back from unilaterally critiquing AI as often do the, above all continental, philosophers. On the contrary, we take it as a symptom to be analyzed and displaced – moreover from elsewhere than as a ready-made model to be “transferred” or to be dogmatically and unduly extended to Philosophical Decision.
The method: to the auto-comprehension that AI has of itself and which is “restrictive”, we oppose its essence twice:
- the deployed essence of Philosophical Decisions which form its presupposeds; these ones giving way to empiricist and rationalist auto-interpretations, to philosophies which misunderstand and sometimes deny it as such. We make the full exigencies of philosophy appear inside and outside AI.
2. the essence of science: to its auto-interpretations as science, where it thinks in the mixes of empirico-rationalist philosophies and empirical sciences (logic, neuroscience, information theory), we oppose a radical concept of science, not acquired on philosophical and epistemological bases.
In total: under what conditions can AI become a rigorous science of Reason or Intelligence in their ultimate possibilities? Whence the inventory of the theoretical conditions of production of a science of philosophy starting from the restrained model of AI. The fundamental condition is of restituting to science its autonomy in relation to every epistemological recuperation, therefore of probably proceeding to another thing than a “break” or “revolution”. AI suffers in its development of too limited and encysted theoretical bases, more on the scientific than philosophical plane. The passage to an A Phi supposes to upset firstly the internal economy (sciences, philosophies, technologies) of AI.
This project thus distinguishes thus of informatics that philosophy has developed to “textual” ends, i.e., on objects at the same time too generous and restrained in relation to the Philosophical Decision. In lieu of attacking this itself, it has remained on traditional bases of computer science (the specular context of performance and the machine-thought concurrence). One must firstly suspend this position of the problem (what does an A Phi serve, how does it aid – demonstration of arguments, creation of systems – Philosophical Decision? etc.). The sole point of view which authorizes this suspension and which, at the same time, respects the autonomy of the Philosophical Decision without imposing on it an empirical reduction, is that of a transcendental science of which we have posed the principles and conditions of reality elsewhere (cf. Une biographie de l’homme ordinaire, Aubier-Montaigne, 1985), science acquired by non-philosophical ways and thus capable of being a science of philosophy.
The idea of an A Phi is a milestone on the trajectory that leads to this science.