The Mind’s I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self & SoulI’ve been reading a fabulous book by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter – The Mind’s I At the moment the authors have been examining the standard objections to the question – Can Machines (or will they ever) Think? The scenario that is posed is one in which a person interrogates _something_ in another room via type-written questions & answers. The aim of the person interrogating the _something_ in the adjacent space is to accurately discern whether it is a person or a machine. Meanwhile, the objective of the _something_ being questioned is to show that it is a person by how it answers the questions.
The idea being, if during a conversation a person were unable to differentiate whether or not the _something_ in the other room is another person, or a machine, then it does not matter which of the two it is – the perfect approximation to the behaviors we associate with thinking is enough to make the original question irrelevant. If it is indeed a machine “next door”, its behavior will seem so much like thinking that in all but the most technical respects it can be treated as a thinking thing.
Dennett and Hofstadter claim in this century we will routinely interact with machines that appear to think. As I said above, the book tries to address some of the most standard objections to the proposition that one day machines too will think. Most of the objections given seem to spring from a perceived threat to humanity. The idea of a self-conscious machine is something we flesh and bones creatures usually find repellent, blasphemous, or metaphysically impossible – consciousness being the property associated with souls, and not with wiring or software.
One of the many (many, really) objections listed is given in roughly this format: that even if a machine seems to think, it can never do anything truly new. That is, that the machines can only aspire to do what they are programmed to do. Even if they can re-write their programs, that is not the same kind of thing that happens in a person when something truly new comes to mind. In essence, that they are doomed to lack the “creative spark”.
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is PresentAs I read the objection it struck me how deeply embedded is the human tendency to “seek something new”. Everywhere we turn there is a seemingly insatiable thirst for novelty. In the sciences in particular the precise quality of the novelty sought after is not merely something new, but something new about our reality we did not know about before (a perfectly reasonable and rational aim for those disciplines).
In the arts the same principle of novelty seeking is seen not only in the way that artists relentlessly pursue new forms of media, but also in the way the art world anoints new ideas about what art is and how it can further describe the human experience. For an example of both these ideas take Marina Abramović’s: The Artist Is Present, performed at the MoMA.
Before I go on I would like to stop for a moment and state my positions with regard to my last claim. While I believe in rewarding profound expansions in our understanding and exchange with what we know of as the Arts, I feel that often the pursuit of novelty for the sake of novelty is given greater play than the more subtle and important pursuits of authentic human engagement and description. I’m not going to take the easy route and tell you how I feel about The Artist is Present. I hope that in not doing so you will make up your own mind about the performance.
The thoughts about novelty and the Arts led me to scrutinize my position to my work with Roxanne, to ask myself, “is novelty important in what we are doing? Why?”
The answer that flowed immediately and reflexively into my internal dialogue was, “No.”
What we are trying to express is not something new, not something that has never been known or experienced before, but rather to give a view of that thing more lucidly, more directly, with more totality than we have ever seen before. The constant pursuit of our photographs is authenticity: to who we are and how we perceive each other over the changes brought about through time and space.
It is as though our photographs are breadcrumbs set out against the untamable forces of change, the ones Heraclitus’s spoke of , “No man ever steps in the same river twice”. Against the moving background and shifting foreground of life, we hold each other, and love, as the two most stable truths. It is the continuity of those parts against the cosmic flotsam of life that is our photographic subject. It is there, in some ways more real and solid than the objects we see around us, it is Us.