TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Sistine Gap - Jessica Riskin
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0001
[artificial life, Sistine gap, animal life, sentience, human cognition, living beings, souls]
This book is about a long tradition of attempts to sound the Sistine gap. It discusses the efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to measure living beings against inanimate mechanisms. A historical approach to artificial life is also presented. The chapter then contributes to the current conventions regarding the nature of animal life, sentience, and human cognition. Moreover, the book is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores the efforts to connect intellect with matter, souls with mechanisms, magic with engineering. Part 2 emphasizes the importance of interactions within living beings, among the distributed parts of the complex systems that comprise them. Part 3 concentrates on the exchanges between creatures and the outside world, and on attempts to understand life in terms of these exchanges. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given. (pages 1 - 32)
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ONE Connections
The Imitation of Life in Ancient Greek Philosophy - Sylvia Berryman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0002
[soul, Aristotle, locomotion, perception, desire, animals, humans, self-motion, hydraulic devices]
This chapter explores some ancient automata representing certain principal functions of soul as described by Aristotle: the nutritive capacity, common to plants, animals, and people; the capacities for locomotion, perception, and desire, shared by animals and humans; and, finally, the capacity for thought, specific to humans. Aristotle summarily dismisses the idea that artifacts could do what animals do, drawing a programmatic distinction between natural and artificial. He also compares the capacities of animals to the operation of devices, “automatic puppets.” Self-motion is one of the cases where Aristotle explicitly compares animals to devices. Hydraulic devices seem to have a particular appeal as models for the internal mechanisms governing animal action. There is not much evidence that the technology of the ancient world inspired ancient natural philosophers to investigate the natural world in the ways that seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers did. (pages 35 - 45)
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The Devil as Automaton: Giovanni Fontana and the Meanings of a Fifteenth-Century Machine - Anthony Grafton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0003
[soul, spirit, Giovanni Fontana, automaton, devils, magical traditions, fire-farting birds]
This chapter addresses the harmonious coexistence of mechanism and mechanisms with ideas about soul and spirit. Giovanni Fontana was largely disdainful of traditional magic and used his automaton devils to deflate stories told by magicians and theologians. No engineer of the fifteenth century thought harder about automata or devised more ingenious specimens of the genus than him. Fontana made clear that he could produce a figure that moved and spat fire—a figure exactly like the devils that beat and spat fire at Santa Francesca Romana in the fifteenth-century frescoes of her miracles that line the upper chamber of the Tor de' Specchi convent in Rome. The devilish appearance of his automata is as revealing as their mechanical interiors, and he took a serious interest in magical as well as mechanical contrivances. Fontana treated magical traditions with scathing disdain, and lavished ingenuity on his devils and fire-farting birds. (pages 46 - 62)
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Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare - Scott Maisao
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0004
[René Descartes, William Shakespeare, artificial life, machines, passions of soul, bodily passions, Treatise on Man, automata, Winter's Tale]
This chapter draws a line from René Descartes back to William Shakespeare, who was already a psychophysical dualist. It tries to explain that the distance separating twenty-first-century theories of artificial life from seventeenth-century thinking about the relationship of bodies to machines begins with Descartes contemplating the possibility of resurrecting a dead loved one, and a dead woman at that. The “passions of the soul,” which can accompany both real and fictional tragedies, depend on the bodily passions as their impetus. In the Treatise on Man, where Descartes “supposes” the “body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth,” he refers specifically to automata that had been in existence in Shakespeare's lifetime. Throughout The Winter's Tale, characters find themselves in situations where an automaton is required, situations where the proto-Cartesian logic becomes inescapable. (pages 63 - 84)
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Abstracting from the Soul: The Mechanics of Locomotion - Dennis des Chene
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0005
[animal soul, Giovanni Borelli, Charles Perrault, René Descartes, machine, intelligibility, De motu animalium, locomotion, Mécanique des animaux]
This chapter demonstrates how mechanist physiologists such as Giovanni Borelli and Charles Perrault, who followed René Descartes in taking the machine as the model of intelligibility, nevertheless assumed the existence of an animal soul to supply to the bodily machine its motive force. Borelli and Perrault placed the nature of this animal soul beyond the bounds of their science. Borelli's De motu animalium, which was published posthumously in 1680 and 1681, is devoted to locomotion on earth and in water and air. Perrault's Mécanique des animaux begins by disclaiming the implication of its ambiguous title. Descartes succeeded in introducing mechanism into the study of living things, or rather the new mechanism and the new mechanics put forward by Galileo, Descartes himself, and others in the first half of the seventeenth century. (pages 85 - 95)
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The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective - Joan B. Landes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0006
[creatures, machinery, écorchés, anatomical wax models, Garden of Automata, Jacques Vaucanson, Man with Mandible]
This chapter reviews the equation between creatures and machinery in reverse to arrive at a resulting “anatomical view of the machine.” Its subject is eighteenth-century anatomical wax models and écorchés, models made from preserved cadavers, which is considered alongside automata in “The Anatomy of Artificial Life.” Écorchés figures were typically beautifully proportioned and usually shown in action, one leg before the other, one arm raised over the head. Jacques Vaucanson's mechanical experiments borrowed directly from the materials, methods, and display techniques of the plastic and anatomical arts. Man with a Mandible provides a solution to the problem within vitalist philosophy of how to represent the dead body. The pastoral theme of the early modern Garden of Automata deserves exploration in its own right. (pages 96 - 116)
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TWO Emergence
The Homunculus and the Mandrake: Art Aiding Nature versus Art Faking Nature - William R. Newman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0007
[alchemists, visual arts, painting, sculpture, homunculus, Paracelsus von Hohenheim, mandrake, Alraun]
This chapter explores a tradition of chemical rather than mechanical attempts to create life artificially. It determines a more general objection on the part of alchemists to the procedures of visual artists, which, the alchemists claimed, imposed merely external, accidental changes on matter rather than shaping it from within. The chapter argues that the aspersions that alchemists cast on the visual arts in comparing their genuine but artificial gold with the superficial changes wrought by painting and sculpture play out in different form when alchemical writers come to discuss the homunculus, or artificial test-tube baby. Paracelsus von Hohenheim argues that the mandrake incorrectly described by necromancers and philosophers is really a homunculus, which they have misidentified. The Paracelsian alchemist can produce a genuine mandrake or Alraun in the form of the homunculus, by sealing up human semen for a proper period of time with the requisite application of heat. (pages 119 - 130)
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Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology - Elliott Sober
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0008
[sex ratio theory, Charles Darwin, living creatures, artificial devices, natural life, John Arbuthnot, Nicolas Bernoulli]
This chapter demonstrates how Charles Darwin's theory inaugurated a steady progression toward an ever-sharper distinction between living creatures and artificial devices, and describes how natural life became nonartificial. Artificial life contrasts with life found in nature. Sex ratio provides an interesting case study of the problem of whether one should regard living things as artifacts or as the result of mindless natural processes. John Arbuthnot believes that a benevolent deity would seek to insure an even sex ratio at the age of marriage. Nicolas Bernoulli concludes that Arbuthnot's data provide no argument at all for Divine Providence. The problem with Arbuthnot's argument is that he does not keep the tasks of proximate and ultimate explanation separate. Modern sex ratio theory makes testable predictions about the sex ratios observed. The Even foundress has been more successful in producing grandoffspring. (pages 131 - 162)
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The Gender of Automata in Victorian Britain - M. Norton Wise
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0009
[sex ratios, female automata, Darwinian evolution, Victorian ideas, women, physiology, brain, Britain, Charles Babbage]
This chapter looks at a problem regarding sex ratios, those involving automata, and explores the implications of Darwinian evolution for Victorian ideas about women, as instantiated in the proliferation of female automata. It starts with machinery in the factory economy and proceeds through evolutionary interpretation to the physiology of the brain. Women's work in Britain was connected with repetitive mechanism and men's with productive engines and oversight. Charles Babbage's division of machines into engines and mechanisms found parallel expression in his vertical division of labor in a factory and in his distinction between his calculating engines and a typical automaton, always carrying with it the masculine and feminine qualities of progressive action versus repetition. The location of the emotions had consequences for the place of women in relation to men in the progression of the nervous system. (pages 163 - 195)
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Techno-Humanism: Requiem for the Cyborg - Timothy Lenoir
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0010
[techno-humanism, artificial intelligence, evolutionary robotics, cyborgs, cybernetics, Beast, Wikipedia, OhmyNews]
This chapter, which investigates how “the digital and the real” have been fused in recent developments in artificial intelligence, presents an example in the field of evolutionary robotics, in which researchers apply models of biological evolution to the development of technical systems. Cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. Cybernetics was envisioned by scientists and engineers as a way to maximize human potential in a chaotic and unpredictable postwar world. The computer-driven alternate reality The Beast produced was make-believe, but every aspect of the player's experience was, phenomenologically speaking, real. The examples of The Beast, Wikipedia, and OhmyNews provide hopeful signs for the development of what is called “techno-humanism.” The cyborg has performed yeoman's service for science studies. (pages 196 - 220)
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Nanobots and Nanotubes: Two Alternative Biomimetic Paradigms of Nanotechnology - Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0011
[nanotechnology, artificial life, biomimetics, Eric Drexler, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Smalley, nanomaterials]
This chapter argues that materials scientists working in the hot, new area of nanotechnology exhibit an approach to the project of artificial life that contrasts sharply with the traditional approach of computer scientists. Nanotechnology is being publicized with revolutionary claims of “shaping the world atom by atom.” Biomimetics is the cement that holds together various groups exploring the potentials of the nanoscale. The chapter then uses the popular works of Eric Drexler and Ray Kurzweil to demonstrate the mechanistic approach, and the writings of Richard Smalley and a few other chemists to represent the organicist model. The propagandists of nanotechnology have both near-term and long-term expectations for their research. The design of nanomaterials appears to rely on a specific, underlying view of matter that revives a number of antimechanistic notions such as emergence; spontaneity, or dunamis; and, above all, complexity. (pages 221 - 236)
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Creating Insight: Gestalt Theory and the Early Computer - David Bates
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0012
[automata theory, Artificial Intelligence, brain, digital computer, Gestalt psychology, cybernetics, John von Neumann, nervous system]
This chapter questions the underlying assumptions of both classic Artificial Intelligence, founded in the analogy between the brain and the digital computer, and the newer tradition that construes the mind as an emergent property of interacting, distributed, parallel processes. It specifically explores Gestalt psychology and its brief engagement with cybernetics to suggest that was perhaps a missed opportunitt, and additionally examines John von Neumann's influential automata theory. The structure of insight helped explain the complex, nonmechanical behavior of living, acting organisms. For von Neumann, the creative plasticity of the nervous system served only to highlight the rather simplistic, and inferior, mechanical structure of the early computers, something he was of course well positioned to notice. His terse conclusion was that the logical structures involved in nervous system activity must “differ considerably” from the ones that are familiar in logic and mathematics. (pages 237 - 260)
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THREE Interactions
Perpetual Devotion: A Sixteenth-Century Machine That Prays - Elizabeth King
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0013
[Perpetual Devotion, Diego de Alcalá, cross, rosary, automaton monk, faith]
This chapter portrays the power of an artificial being to provoke a response in “Perpetual Devotion.” A portrait of Diego de Alcalá is reported. It is believed that Diego's saintly attributes are precisely the small cross and rosary. The automaton monk may be small and portable, but to consider it a toy presents an awkward dilemma for the interpretation of its performance. Artists have long understood the dangers of an overdetermined verisimilitude, for too much realism (or too visible an effort to achieve it) can halt the imaginative motion of the viewer. Size is always a matter of weight and material: the nature of a thing is often a consequence of pure conditional imperative. The story of San Diego, even if no more than contemporary to the monk, helps us to see how invested this machine is with the burden of faith. (pages 263 - 292)
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Motions and Passions - Adelheid Voskuhl
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0014
[female musician-automata, android automata, keyboard, Jean Paul, satire, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, David Roentgen, Pierre Kinzing]
This chapter, which deals with the relations between physical and emotional dynamics, also explores the cultural and social resonances of female musician-automata. It specifically examines the context of two eighteenth-century android automata that both represent women playing a keyboard instrument. Moreover, the chapter presents a few aspects of Jean Paul's work in the context of late eighteenth-century literary Germany and then undertakes a close reading of his satire. Jean Paul took up the theme of piano-playing women in a short, satirical text entitled “Humans Are Machines of the Angels.” The works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, and Jean Paul showed remarkable and diverse juxtapositions and confusions, intentional and unintentional, of human and technical music-making bodies. The automata by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and by David Roentgen and Pierre Kinzing, as well as the early satires by Jean Paul, document the rich and productive technical and textual work on automata. (pages 293 - 320)
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An Archaeology of Artificial Life, Underwater - Stefan Helmreich
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0015
[artificial creatures, Artificial Life, floating, Jurassic Technology, empiricity]
This chapter discusses how current designers of artificial creatures place their creations in a medium in order to make them seem lifelike, and provides a commentary on the practice of finding genealogies for Artificial Life. Floating shows how the effect of empiricity can be sustained through the medium of interpretation itself. Artificial Life has been no stranger to epistemological debates about the relation between the world and the agent that knows it. Like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an institution that reproduces, repurposes, parodies, and confuses the very notion of a museum by archiving and displaying knowledge and artifacts that may or may not be part of actual human history, Artificial Life simulations may be “a setting of and for confabulation where hermeneutics is suspended.” (pages 321 - 333)
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Booting Up Baby - Evelyn Fox Keller
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0016
[robots, Rodney Brooks, Cynthia Breazeal, Brian Scassellati, cog, human development, learning]
This chapter examines the implications of a generation of robots whose builders, including Rodney Brooks, Cynthia Breazeal, and Brian Scassellati, have made the reactions their robots elicit from human viewers their paramount consideration. Cog might be able to develop a theory of mind. Kismet has engaged the interest and “motivational system” of a human other, one who is intent on attributing to it human qualities and is eager to instruct. Leonardo is a robot that builds on Kismet. In general, machines that mimic the processes of human development and learning are offered. It is suggested that, relative to the recent efforts of Brooks and his colleagues, Frank Rosenblatt was hampered by at least three deficits. The incentive to find alternatives to the intensive human care that is now required could hardly be more glaring. (pages 334 - 345)
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Body Language - Justine Cassell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226720838.003.0017
[embodied conversational agents, humanness, aliveness, virtual humans, human behavior, mechanical automata]
This chapter, which describes the embodied conversational agents (ECAs) as mechanisms that make people attribute humanness and aliveness to them, conducts experiments on the essence of humanness and aliveness by exploring the interactions between actual and virtual humans. It also discusses the life that ECAs have acquired when they leave the lab—the uses to which companies and research labs have put them. ECAs are cartoonlike, often life-size, depictions of virtual humans that are projected on a screen. Building them has forced researchers in human behavior to attend to the integration of modalities and behaviors in a way that merges approaches from fields that usually do not speak to one another. The development of ECAs from a scientific instrument that simulates human behavior to an attractive interface bears interesting parallels to the history of mechanical automata. (pages 346 - 374)
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Index
