The artificial intelligence project, as Turing saw it, was about reproduction, about reproducing the human in the machine, making autonomous brains or whole beings in a new way. He understood that interest in food, sex, and sports couldn’t be easily reproduced in such a machine, and he understood that sensation and locomotion played a role that might make the enterprise extremely difficult. Turing pursued embryology for a time, and, in 1952, he proposed a mathematical model for the growing embryo, one that continues to be debated among people in the field.274 Turing was keenly aware of the nature of models, and he knew he had stepped outside his field of expertise by creating one for biology. “This model,” he wrote, “will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge.”275 Heisenberg once said, “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”276 A model, whether mathematical or otherwise, is useful to frame a question about the world, but that does not mean the model is the world.
In science there are ways of testing models. Some work and others don’t. Some models, such as string theory in physics, may be proven at a future date but at present remain purely theoretical. Mind as information-processing machine has passionate advocates and opponents. In a textbook titled From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience (2002), William Lytton explains the benefits of models. Like McCulloch and Pitts, von Neumann, and Turing, Lytton argues for simplification. Lytton’s book rests on the unquestioned assumption that the mind is a computer, a hypothesis that over the course of half a century has atrophied into a truth he knows will not be questioned by his computational peers. Again, isn’t this what Goethe worried about? Notice how different Lytton’s tone is from that of all the earlier scientists mentioned above, who were quick to say they knew actual brain processes were far more complex than their models. Notice, too, the cutting, paring metaphor Lytton uses to describe the process.
We show how concept neurons differ from real neurons. Although a recitation of these differences makes it look like these are lousy models, they are not. The concept neurons are attempts to get to the essence of neural processing by ignoring irrelevant detail and focusing only on what is needed to do a computational task. The complexities of the neuron must be aggressively pared in order to cut through the biological subtleties and really understand what is going on277 (my italics).
Significantly, this book is not called From Brain to Computer. Lytton argues in exactly the opposite direction from Peter beim Graben and James Wright, whose plaintive statement is worth quoting again: “Sadly, we do not know which physical properties are truly essential.” How does one know that the neuronal “complexities,” which are being so “aggressively pared” away, aren’t important? Much remains to be understood about the brain. Why must biological subtleties be “cut through”? Who is the judge of “irrelevant detail” and how does one know that an “essence” is revealed and not a convenient fiction forced into a now classical computational box? An example from genetics may be valuable. Many people have heard of “junk DNA,” DNA that was faithfully copied over generations but had no apparent purpose, hence the derogatory name. Geneticists now know that it does in fact have a purpose. It is not “junk” at all.278
Flesh-and-blood human beings are wet, not dry creatures. It seems clear to me that Richard Dawkins’s “throbbing gels and oozes” are meant to stand in for a wet, living embryo or for a whole biological, material body. Dawkins’s phrase eschews wetness and the immense complexity of embryology, which he plainly states he would rather not “contemplate.” Computational theory of mind, with its concept neurons and its notion of the “mental” as an information-processing machine that may be considered independently of brain function, mechanizes and “dries” the mind into comprehensible algorithms. I am using the word “wet” to signal not just the watery human brain or the moistness of corporeal reality but also as a guiding metaphor that may take us further toward the fears and wishes that hide beneath CTM.
We human animals ingest the world in many ways, when we eat and chew and breathe. We take in the world with our eyes, ears, and noses, and we taste it with our tongues and experience its textures on our skin. We urinate and defecate and vomit and cry tears, and we spit and sweat and menstruate, make milk and sperm, leak vaginal fluids and snot. Our skin forms a boundary around each of us, but that too is porous and can be punctured. We kiss and penetrate one another in various erotic ways, and we copulate, and some forms of corporeal entanglements produce children. And when a woman gives birth, she pushes the infant out of her body. The newborn baby arrives in the world covered in blood and fluids. The placenta, the afterbirth, oozes out of the mother’s vagina. And we die. Our organic bodies putrefy and disintegrate, and we disappear from the world. Are these natural processes separable from our thoughts and our words? That is the question. Turing wanted to include development in his idea of making a machine mind. Embryology fascinated him, and he proposed the infant mind as a machine to be trained and shaped, but “wetness” was never part of the equation. Wasn’t Turing right in saying that this model left out sex and food and sport and much that we value in our lives? Isn’t this a problem?
Biological realities of human development play no role in computational theory of mind except as an inferior gelatinous substrate or annoying complexities to be cut through so a conceptual essence can be revealed. The leaky, moist, material body is not part of its model of mind. The embryo, the growing or the grown-up body that throbs and oozes, has nothing to do with intelligence or the mind advocates of GOFAI hoped to build—a smart, clean, man machine. The computer has inputs and outputs, a restricted entryway and exit. The fantasy of the Replicant or Replicator is clearly alive in David Deutsch’s idea of “Analytical Enginekind,” an alternative being, which may be made of other stuff, but to suppose any inferiority in such a “kind” amounts to “racism.”
Doesn’t this theory harbor a wish for a beautiful, dry, thinking machine, a new race that will not grow in or be born from the organic maternal body or from organic materials at all: no wimpy dependent genes, no mother’s egg, no father’s sperm, no embryo, no placenta, no uterine environment, no birth by pushing one person out of another, but rather a new kind of person made from cogs and wheels or digital ones and zeros? All matter, all gels and oozes, will be avoided. Jonathan Swift’s satirical poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” springs to mind with its immortal line, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” The same poem contains this couplet: “Should I the Queen of Love refuse / Because she rose from stinking ooze?”279 The new race will be born straight out of scientists’ computational minds or discovered somewhere else in the universe. The story of wet, organic, mammalian development is suppressed. There is no beginning and no end, no birth and no death because the new race will be immortal.
A leap back to the seventeenth century is in order. When Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) was confronted with Descartes’s idea of the animal as machine, he had a witty rejoinder: “Do you say that Beasts are Machines just as Watches are? Put a Male Dog Machine and a Bitch Machine side by side, and eventually a third little Machine will be the result, whereas two Watches will lie side by side all their lives without ever producing a third Watch.”280 Watches still can’t propagate. Kismet will never grow up and choose to or accidentally become a parent.
What is going on here? Why are the complexities of actual biological neurons regarded as so much irrelevant detail? Even if, let us say, information (defined in one way or another) trumps biology, wouldn’t actual neurons still be crucial to understanding how the whole business works? Are these cells inferior because they die? Is this a rejection of the mortal body for a better model? In the Western tradition, hasn’t woman always been understood as more body and less reflection than man? Isn’t this still the case? Doesn’t the young, beautiful, voluptuous woman who reveals herself to be a formidable intellectual continue to create surprise and amazement? Do people harbor the same prejudices when the young, beautiful intellectual is a man? In his essay on medieval misogyny, R. Howard Bloch notes the same division I discussed in relation to Aristotle in Saint Augustine’s thought: “Herein lies one possibility of reading misogyny: if man enjoys existence (substance), being, unity, form, and soul, woman is associated with accident, becoming (temporality), difference, body, and matter . . . That is, man is form or mind, and woman, degraded image of his second nature, is relegated to the realm of matter.”281 Information is the pattern, the immaterial essence, which can be beamed here and there. It is the computing mind of Descartes. It is pure and untouched by sordid matter, those natural gels and oozes that threaten it with contamination and the forces of time.
I have returned to Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, written by the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, over and over since I first read the book as a graduate student. In her introduction, Douglas writes, “Reflection on dirt involves the reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death.”282 Douglas’s argument is that pollution appears when the boundaries of any structure, form, or body are threatened—in the murky not-one-not-the-other places. Therefore all transitional blurry states are risky, including the stuff that leaks across corporeal boundaries.
Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily pairings [sic], skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.283
As Douglas points out, pollutants vary depending on culture. In some cultures, menstrual blood is toxic; in others, excreta or saliva are to be shunned. Rituals surrounding reproduction and birth in every society are significant because one body enters another in heterosexual intercourse, an embryo is created, and one body emerges from the body of another in birth. All mingling bodies are potentially impure and dangerous. If, however, a man can be disembodied, translated, and reproduced as information, all pollution concerns are eliminated. The man literally dematerializes.
One evening over dinner, I was describing this concept of information to my sister, the scholar and writer Asti Hustvedt. She looked at me and said, “It’s the soul.” Indeed, it is—the soul for a new age. The ancient belief in the soul with its attendant fears of the pollutions of the body, the senses, and desire, which influenced Pauline Christianity and were reconfigured in Cartesian philosophy, remain with us. After the body has withered, the immortal, rational, computational soul remains.