Malabou, Morphing Intelligence, second selection

Group’s Questions:

How is CM not reproducing a conception of intelligence as a kind of empirico-transcendental object of study? 

Is the argument that “natural intelligence” and “artificial intelligence” are similar at the level of “architecture” (86, 92, 113)?

What is the best concept for the relation between natural and artificial intelligence?  Is it a model, a simulation, an explanation, an identity?  (It is not an ‘analogy’; cf. 87).

Is the text committing the homunculus fallacy (explaining a thing, such as intelligence, by making use of the concept that is being explained)?

If we consider the apparatuses that are linked to the operations/conceptions of intelligence, such as the U.S. military, how does impact CM’s analysis of the discourse of intelligence?

 

Group’s Discussions:

A key idea for this chapter, if not the key idea, is an epigenetic understanding of intelligence (this is the second metamorphosis, p. 14).

The epigenetic shift in natural intelligence is represented/expressed by Piaget.  CM builds on Piaget to describe a conception of intelligence as assimilation-accommodation.  This is a notion of intelligence as a process.

[Where does this leave us with respect to the classical conception of intelligence in Terman, Binet, et. al.?]

The epigenetic shift in artificial intelligence describes a similar process of assimilation-accommodation.

But this does not apply to something like a “thermostat” because it does not rewrite its own code.  The thermostat, we might presume, is not sufficiently reflexive.

                Where is Turing in all of this?

The claim is that the neuro-synaptic process “is a synapse” (p. 83), not that it functions or imitates a synapse.  The claim is that the plasticity that belongs to the brain also belongs to the synaptic chip.