The Meaning of Thought. Markus Gabriel
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the ‘education of the human race’.13 In the second half of the nineteenth century, positivism came to prevail, with its doctrine that all relevant human achievements can and should be sought in the sciences of technology and nature. Today, the metaphysics that sets the tone is materialism, where this encompasses both the doctrine that everything that exists consists of matter and the ethical conception that the meaning of human life ultimately consists in the accumulation of goods (cars, houses, sexual partners, smartphones) and their pleasurable annihilation (burning fossil fuels, ostentatious luxury, gourmet restaurants).
From a socio-political perspective, materialism corresponds to the idea that the primary function of a government is to develop and enforce the regulations necessary for material resources to be distributed in such a way that as many citizens as possible can experience the enjoyment of squandering them. This in turn serves to foster the preservation of our materialistic image of the human.
The digital revolution is closely connected with the surveillance apparatuses of modernity. As depicted in the TV series The Americans, it famously emerged on the back of military research projects in the Cold War. The major internet companies of our time are advertising platforms whose existence places traditional media under ever more pressure, forcing them to compete for the attention of the reading public with opinionated coverage and titillating scandal.
Yet my aim here is to provide not so much a sociological description as a philosophical diagnosis of the intellectual mistakes that underlie the materialist ideology of our time. In particular, we will be concerned with our own thinking. An ideology is a kind of intellectual virus circulating through the bloodstream of our thought; at first, it strikes here and there at the foundations of our health, without our so much as noticing, before finally overwhelming us. To take up a formulation of Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947), I’ll be looking to develop a co-immunism – that is, to improve our mental immune system.14 We have to vaccinate ourselves against the false notion that we cannot know the truth and that, in the age of the internet, reality may no longer exist at all.
This means entering (in thought at least) right into the lion’s den: into the age of reality shows and the ever-expanding and encroaching online society. The task will be to reclaim a sense for our own thought, which will protect us from the error of believing that we are on the brink of abolishing humanity and stepping into a paradisiac age of total digitalization.
The first key thesis, as I’ve already said, is that our thought is a sense. Besides the familiar sense modalities – which are hearing, sight, taste, smell and touch, but also the sense of balance and a few more besides – we have a sense of thought. I will expand this thesis into the nooscope thesis: our thought is a sense that we can use to scout out the infinite and then represent it in a variety of different ways – mathematically, for example. Our thinking is thus unlike our other senses: it is not restricted to our proximate environment but can – in the form of quantum mechanics, say – even refer to other universes or grasp the foundational mathematical structure of our own universe in the language of theoretical physics. Our nooscope therefore surpasses corporeal reality and connects us with an infinity of immaterial realities.
This thesis is directed against the currently popular idea that our mental apparatus consists merely of perceptions and cognitions, out of states triggered in us by the external world on the one hand and states that arise from the internal linkage of perceptions on the other. But it’s simply false to believe that an external consciousnessand mind-independent world first tickles our nervous system, triggering chains of internal processes, at the end of which stands an image that has nothing further to do with the external world. Our mental life is no hallucination arising within our skull. Rather, on account of our sense of thought, we are in contact with far more realities than we’d think at first glance.
This book does away with the foundational error of modern epistemology: the subject–object divide. This consists in the false notion that, as thinking subjects, we confront an alien reality, a world into which we don’t really fit. Hence the widespread impression in modernity either that we cannot know reality at all or that we can never know it even approximately as it is in itself. However, as thinking, perceiving creatures we do not face a reality that is somehow separated from us. Subject and object are not opposed parts of an overarching whole. Rather, we are part of reality, and our senses are media that act as contact points between the reality that we are and the reality that we are not. These media do not distort a reality that is fully independent of them. Instead, they themselves belong to the real, as interfaces or points of intersection. And thinking, exactly like all the other senses, is just such an interface.
Interfaces enable communication over various fields of sense. Take our visual experiences, for example. I can currently see a Berlusconi voodoo doll, which I bought in the shop of a Portuguese museum. I see the doll from my standpoint. I couldn’t take up this standpoint if I didn’t possess an intact brain, if I were currently sleeping, or if I no longer recalled the doll. But the fact that I can recognize the doll in the first place is also a component of my standpoint. And the real presence of the voodoo doll is just as essential for my perceptual mental state as my brain.
I perceive in colour. And I have a specific colour palette at my conscious disposal only because I am an animal whose colour receptors were selected over millions of years of evolution. The human sense of sight is an interface enabling communication between physical fields (containing light rays, for example, which can be measured and investigated by physics) and the field of my conscious experience (in which I can purchase and see voodoo dolls). Our visual sense and our subjective standpoint are not one jot less real than the light rays, the voodoo doll, and the elementary particles without which there wouldn’t be any voodoo dolls at all.
As we will see, the same goes for our thought. Thought is a real interface connecting us up with countless immaterial realities – numbers, justice, general elections, truth, facts and much more besides. Yet thought also stands in direct contact with material energetic systems, which is why we are able to think about these too.
In this context, a further thesis is that what we think (i.e. our thoughts) is not material. The view that there is not only a material energetic system, the physical cosmos, is what I call immaterialism. Thinking is the grasping of immaterial thoughts. Thoughts are neither brain states nor any form of information processing that we measure physically. Yet humans cannot have any thoughts without being living creatures who find themselves in certain brain states – or, more generally, in certain physiological states.
Combining these theses, we get to our second key thesis: biological externalism. Biological externalism maintains that the expressions we use to describe and understand our thought processes are essentially related to something biological (see p. 141). With this thesis in place, I’ll argue that there can be no artificial intelligence in the generally accepted sense. Our modern data-processing systems, including of course the omnipresent internet, do not really think, because they lack consciousness. But this doesn’t make them any less dangerous or the debate surrounding digital transformation any less urgent.
We have to regain the sense of thought and defend it against the wild notion that our thinking is a computational process taking place within the cranial vault – a process of which we could, in principle, make an exact re-creation or simulation. Simulations of thoughts are just as much real thoughts as a Michelin map of France is identical with the territory it maps (see pp. 57ff.). Yet what we call AI is utterly real. Only it’s not intelligent – and that’s why it’s dangerous.
One of the underestimated sources of danger in our digital age is that our self-understanding as humans is oriented around a misleading model of thought. For, insofar as we believe that advanced data technology must automatically conquer the realm of human thought, we create a false self-image. In indulging this belief, we attack the very core of being human.
In every epoch that has witnessed technological breakthroughs, the idea has taken hold that our artefacts could someday take control. Animism is the belief that nature as a whole is ensouled. Today