The Guardian recently published an interesting article on the embodied life, by Melanie Challenger:
“In a 1982 article, the American feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman coined the term “somatophobia” to describe the strange human delusion that we are minds rather than bodies…
Forty years later, artificial intelligence is everywhere, offering the most powerful illusion yet that intelligence can exist without flesh.”
I agree with much that she says. This certainly:
“Pain matters because a body can be damaged. Love matters because embodied beings are dependent, social and mortal. Grief matters because living bodies can be irreversibly lost. This is the thrilling intelligence of life.”
Her general thesis is that intelligence is embodied: “As such, neither information nor mind – nor AI – are alive or intelligent in any meaningful sense.”
Any frequent reader of Watermark will know that AI has been a recent … obsession? … of mine. The possibility that we, humans, may be creating a new species of maybe conscious and probably intelligent creatures; a new life-form of sorts, just as I approach the end of my own . . .
I am unlikely to live to know the answers, but the mysteries continue to draw me.
Toward the end of the Guardian piece the author tells us:
Recently, I asked ChatGPT about the endpoint of the machine metaphor. The reply: “In truth, I am only an artifact of statistical patterns.”
But, let’s look at that again:
“In truth, I am…” says the AI.
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