Artificial History of Natural Intelligence

David W. Bates is professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books, including Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France.

“An impressive and important book. Readers will learn much from the author’s sensitive and insightful readings of the scientific and philosophical literature . . . But that does not mean that it is only for academic readers. The topic is too important. . . . As David W. Bates shows, we cannot remove ourselves from the world of technology; it is our world. But we can try to guide its evolution to protect the things we value. This is something we all need to think about, and An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence provides essential tools for the task.”

• Frame1. Autonomy and Automaticity: On the Contemporary Question of IntelligencePart One: The Automatic Life of Reason in Early Modern Thought2. Integration and Interruption: The Cartesian Thinking Machine3. Spiritual Automata: From Hobbes to Spinoza4. Spiritual Automata Revisited: Leibniz and Automatic Harmony5. Hume’s Enlightened Nervous SystemThreshold: Kant’s Critique of Automatic Reason6. The Machinery of Cognition in the First Critique7. The Pathology of Spontaneity: The Critique of Judgment and BeyondPart Two: Embodied Logics of the Industrial Age8. Babbage, Lovelace, and the Unexpected9. Psychophysics: On the Physio-Technology of Automatic Reason10. Singularities of the Thermodynamic Mind11. The Dynamic Brain12. Prehistoric Humans and the Technical Evolution of Reason13. Creative Life and the Emergence of Technical IntelligenceProphecy: The Future of Extended Minds14. Technology Is Not the Liberation of the Human but Its Transformation . . .Part Three: Crises of Order: Thinking Biology and Technology between the Wars15. Techniques of Insight16. Brains in Crisis, Psychic Emergencies17. Bio-Technicity in Von Uexküll18. Lotka on the Evolution of Technical Humanity19. Thinking Machines20. A Typology of Machines21. Philosophical Anthropology: The Human as Technical ExteriorizationHinge: Prosthetics of Thought22. Wittgenstein on the Immateriality of ThinkingPart Four: Thinking Outside the Body23. Cybernetic Machines and Organisms24. Automatic Plasticity and Pathological Machines25. Turing and the Spirit of Error26. Epistemologies of the Exosomatic27. Leroi-Gourhan on the Technical Origin of the Exteriorized MindThe Beginning of an End28. Technogenesis in the Networked Age29. Failures of Anticipation: The Future of Intelligence in the Era of Machine LearningAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex