1. Robots and Dolls
Intelligence is not know-how, I'm not talking about that which can be determined by a competency test. But rather, intelligence is that inexplicable human or creative component, liveliness, insight, and so forth. My basic argument, or assumption perhaps, is that intelligence is never communicable, by which I mean, that one can never verify that intelligence exists at a particular place. We are never sure, really, the nature of intelligence: does have a coherent moment, like insight, or like problem solving? Is it an elaborate plan, like evil? Or does it take the form of dusty glimmers, like the liveliness of conversation? From the tremendous difficulties that artificial intelligence is having with even the most basic aspects of behavior, we realize that intelligence seems to be scattered throughout the most minor aspects of our lives. But a further point should be made -- even if we could fairly easily detect whether we are speaking to or chatting with a human or a machine, that does not diminish the feelings of creepiness that we can get from talking to a machine. That is, even in talking to a machine, we get the feeling of an intelligence like dust, or like a brooding evil, or various other forms -- what did it mean by that? Was that programmed into it, or was it an accident? Even if a computer may be unable at present to model human behavior, it can certainly frighten us and unsettle us, it seems to have an uncanny life, evil, disrespectful, and so on. This is the same way in which the face of a doll may strike us with terror, because we can easily sense these glimmers of intelligence.
What we call intelligence in humans (besides having a large memory, besides memory association) most likely has more to do with recognition than with competence -- in conversation, that which differentiates a human from a machine is the ability to recognize (and perhaps even to capitalize on) these little things like intentions, puns, inflections, and so on -- these things less than meaning and grammar. It is a kind of sensitivity. But this intelligence is always entirely disconnected, it is never communication, which explains the creepiness we experience around robots or dolls. We can assert that someone is brilliant even if we have no real understanding of what he's saying. We can pick up on intentions, and introduce them into the conversation, even if one never intended to go there. In fact, we are foreign to our "own" intentions, so that when we embarrass ourselves, it's not at all the case that we had unwittingly made a "slip of honesty", but rather that we had, after the fact, picked up on the intention of our own gesture and thus become embarrassed.
In other words, there are no Freudian slips, only rhetoric, or only the play of the signifier at the level below meaning.
2. Men and Women
I mean, let me start off by saying that I'm opposed to the notion of manliness, I think it's idiotic, or I make the argument that manliness is precisely a kind of spiteful hatred, negation, or destruction rather than competence or skillfulness. It's fine to be competent, but can't be who you are. In any case, the traditional gender distinction goes, that men are primarily competent while women are expressive. This all has to do with one's relationship to the 'play of the signifier'.
3. Art
In art, we are thinking about a holistic thing, which is weird
Post a Comment