Hegel, Information, Artificial Intelli

The development of high-speed computers, artificial neural networks, miniaturized sensors, mobile phones, and Big Data has created the conditions for the transformation of artificial intelligence.  These changes are not only transforming the world but are also recasting long-standing distinctions like nature/culture, natural/artificial, body/mind, complexity/ simplicity, and organism/machine that have shaped human thought and life for centuries.  This refiguring of opposites as irreducibly interrelated was anticipated by Kant’s notion of self-organization and developed systematically by Hegel. 

This course will approach current forms of artificial intelligence through Kant’s interpretation of self-organization and Hegel’s dialectical logic and will reread Hegel’s system through “natural” and “artificial” neural networks, complex systems, and information theory. If nature and culture are inextricably interrelated, then is “artificial” intelligence really artificial, and is “nature” every merely natural?  What are the implications of these developments for the understanding of human “nature” that has shaped the Anthropocene since the time of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes?