Video Archives - Lunchtime Talk with Laura Ephraim (February 2011)

12-18-2014

Tuesday, February 1, 2011: Lunchtime Talk

Participants: Laura Ephraim, a 2010-2011 Post-doctoral fellow at the HAC and a 2011-2012 Associate Fellow at the HAC. She is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College.

In February of 2011, Laura Ephraim gave a brief Lunchtime Talk in which she presented an Arendtian critique of Ray Kurzweil’s writings on ‘the Singularity.’ Kurzweil himself spoke at Bard that winter, elaborating on his theory of the Singularity, which states in short that human technological progress has advanced, historically, on an increasing curve of complexity such that in the near future, it can be expected that the intelligence of machines will surpass the biological intelligence of the human brain. At that point, ‘Version 1.0’ of humanity—purely biological in form—will be supplanted by a humanity augmented by and in symbiosis with technology.

[caption id="attachment_15034" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ray Kurzweil (Source: Wall Street Journal)[/caption]

By his own account, Kurzweil is making a predictive historical claim about the future. But Ephraim is not entirely on board. Even so, she does not set out to argue over particular data points on Kurzweil’s infamous upward-arcing graph of human progress. “Rather than interrogating the correctness of Kurzweil’s story… I want to examine the kind of judgment he’s calling for in telling his story,” explains Ephraim. As a political thinker, Ephraim wants to understand the political implications of Kurzweil’s scientism. It is in thinking about the politics of the Singularity that Ephraim most takes exception to Kurzweil. His mode of judgment, she says, represents “an assault on the faculty of common sense,” that faculty which to Arendt is both the source of our political reality and a necessary faculty for political judgment. Though ostensibly predicated on human abilities, Emphraim points out that Kurzweil’s story actually characterizes humans as disabled when compared with humans of the future. He goes on to insist that the fundamental commonality or likeness between humans in the present and future will be completely broken by the event of the Singularity. Thus, in the dialogues he writes, a ‘2004-version’ of a person cannot relate with a ‘future-version’ self in conversation.

Ephraim notes that for Arendt, scientific utilization of technology has already altered human experience, beginning with Galileo and his telescope. When Galileo gave reality to the heliocentric universe, he defeated the “realness” of the world that had already been disclosed through our natural senses and unleashed new “supermundane” powers—that is, telescopically-enhanced sight. In the process, he communicated to the world that the modern scientific condition is one in which reality can no longer be accepted as received but rather must be pursued through technological applications. With this in mind, Arendt reads Descartes, a pivotal figure in both modern science and philosophy, as reacting to this loss of a common reality and characterizes his solipsism as a further retreat from common sense of the world.

[caption id="attachment_15038" align="aligncenter" width="551"] Galileo and his telescope (Source: Heritage History)[/caption]

Reading "Arendt against Arendt,” the way in which Galileo and Descartes create an appeal to common sense against science marks their modernity. Both seek a common reality even as their discoveries trouble the sensus communis. They are scientists who produce a new reality through their investigations, but they do not set out necessarily to undermine the old reality. Their discoveries merely have that effect.

But Kurzweil is different. He appeals to our incapacity to judge what he asserts will take place in the future, thereby intentionally seeking to erode the current paradigm of reality. The theory of the Singularity, to Ephraim, thus represents a break in scientific progress. She sees Kurzweil as being out of step with major scientific thinkers of the past. His attack on common sense seems to jump the gun. More importantly, he seems to have an interest in subverting common sense for its own sake. Where Galileo and Descartes tread cautiously, Kurzweil surges forward recklessly.

[caption id="attachment_15039" align="alignright" width="300"] Laocoon and His Sons, Rhodes Sculptors: 1st Century (Source: Smart Art)[/caption]

Arendt writes about the political aspect of common sense in a few places. In her essay “The Crisis in Culture,” which is published in the collection Between Past and Future, she elaborates on the connection between culture, art, and politics. To do this, she first draws a distinction between art and culture based on the Greco-Roman genealogy of the two concepts. For the Greeks, while culture and cultural taste were political, separating the polis from the barbarians, art—the fabrication of beautiful things—was not. In fact, the polis often expressed contempt for artists while simultaneously praising their work. By Arendt’s telling, the great danger of the artist in Greek politics was his inability to see things beyond the end of his own work. The artist was regarded as a natural utilitarian in the sense that he could not think of things beyond their function. The artist was tasked with producing a beautiful work of art—a private act—and not with appreciating its beauty with others in public. Here “the conflict between art and politics arises, and this conflict cannot and must not be solved.” After all, the meeting place of art and politics is itself a vital part of human life to the extent that “they are both phenomena of the public world. What mediates the conflict between the artist and the man of action [the statesman or politician] is the cultura animi” or the cultured spirit.

Culture therefore is the realm between art and politics, and its mode of action is judgment of beauty and value. “Common sense—which the French so suggestively call ‘the good sense,’ le bon sens—discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world,” she states.

Through her talk and the Arendt Center’s past engagement with the work of Kurzweil, we are able to approach the issue of the interrelation between art/technology and politics—an ancient matter that was important to Arendt—through a conversation that has contemporary currency. Ephraim’s critique of Kurzweil pursues the politics, or really anti-politics, implicit in the celebration of his prophecy. It is a small part of a much larger conversation, but it offers a point of access into a discourse about artistic and political judgment which began in antiquity. For anyone interested in the place of the humanities in the climate of today’s popular technophilia, Ephraim’s talk is well worth watching.

By Dan Perlman

(Featured Image: The Singularity - Ray Kurzweil; Source: Futurebuff)

You can watch the entirety of Ephraim's talk below:

Lunchtime Discussion: Laura Ephraim from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.