ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Hans Blumenberg on the 1966 “Artificial Intelligence”. Towards Intermittent Mathematics?

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 2

English Abstract

I would like to discuss the analysis of the German historian of ideas Hans Blumenberg of one of the earlier versions “artificial intelligence”, particularly through his examination of 1966 Weizenbaum’s ELIZA. In his analysis, Blumenberg criticizes the dream that reality’s complexity can be definitively captured through increasingly sophisticated formal systems. Blumenberg demands that any intelligence – artificial or not – should be “intermittent”, being one’s ability to interrupt itself and reflect. This reading of how ELIZA ‘behaves’ (or should behave) represents precisely what formal systems cannot replicate. With this I would like to propose another historical reading of what this episode (i.e. ELIZA) may show us, also concerning the current developments in mathematics. If one examines automatic proof assistants (e.g. Lean), then while such assistants can manipulate symbols according to rules, they cannot engage in the genuine self-reflection that mathematical practices require. I claim therefore that contemporary efforts at mathematical formalization thus remain blind not only to the rhetorical and intermittent nature of meaning that Blumenberg’s analysis of ELIZA revealed, but also to the practice of mathematics itself.

Author

• Michael Friedman, Bonn University