Hamid Ekbia

We relate the Mind-Technology Problem to contemporary AI in the spirit of Descartes’ meditations, where the original Mind-Body Problem was born. We seek the essence of the M-T Problem in the phenomenon of language, which can be apprehended along three dimensions – ordinary, mathematical, and sacred. We argue that although 17th century philosophers seemed to separate science from theology and focused attention on the mathematical dimension of language, the sacred dimension remained active behind the scenes. In a rather ironic way, the rise of LLMs has brought this dimension out of the shadows into daily discourse. The process of scientific proselytization of the mathematical dimension of language has given rise to the conception of language as technology. At the same time, the suppressed sacred dimension instigates the perception of technology as language through which a transcendent perfect intelligence may speak. This reciprocal confusion of language and technology leads to contemporary quasi-religious debates surrounding AI and transhumanism. Taking the performative potential of the sacred dimension of language into account, we argue for the treatment of the M-T Problem as a ‘Language-Language’ Problem, where the particular meanings of the terms ‘mind’ and ‘technology’ are determined through a variety of meta-language games.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are increasingly employed for military purposes. They are extolled for improving operational endurance and targeting precision on the one hand and keeping drone crew from harm on the other. In the midst of such praise, what falls by the wayside is an entangled set of concerns about the ways in which the relationship between the pilots and their operational environment is being reconfigured. This paper traces the various manifestations of this reconfiguration and goes on to situate our being-with drones in a broader set of sociotechnical practices that shape our understanding of visual technologies. Our inquiry is grounded in technical reports of performance, media coverage of accidents, as well as a detailed first-person account of a former drone pilot. Our analysis suggests that being-with drones is disciplining our perception in subtle ways that remain underexplored. We conclude that when it comes to appraising technologies that interface with the human sensorium, functionalist claims of enhancement are inadequate to the task and propose that phenomenology’s commitment to the phenomena themselves can serve as a useful corrective.