If the opposition between mechanism and organism characterizes a grand debate of modern philosophy, determining the direction of its development, then the debate persists today, when so many of the statements discrediting AI and ChatGPT ass…The “intelligence” found in machines today is a reflective form of operation, as both Gotthard Günther and Gilbert Simondon rightly observed. For Günther, cybernetics is the realization of Hegel’s logic, while for Simondon, it was only in th…[^3]: Hans Blumenberg, “Progress Exposed as Fate,” chap. 3 of part 1, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (MIT Press, 1985).
[^4]: John. R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, n…
Brian Cantwell Smith
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Smith appears in this course as a theorist of computational ontology and the limits of mechanism in understanding intelligence and meaning. The readings invoke him in debates about whether machines can embody genuine intentionality or remain trapped in purely syntactic operations, positioning his work against the assumption that AI systems are merely mechanistic. His intervention matters for distinguishing between reflective operations in cybernetic systems and the kind of semantic understanding that escapes formal computation alone.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Gilbert Simondon 2Gotthard Günther 2Avram Noam Chomsky 1Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling 1Gregory Bateson 1Hans Blumenberg 1Ian Roberts 1Jeff Love 1Jeffrey Watumull 1Johannes Schmidt 1John Rogers Searle 1Robert M. Wallace 1Tiernan Ray 1Yuk Hui 1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1Immanuel Kant 1Yann LeCun 1Alan Turing 1Alonzo Church 1John Searle 1Kurt Gödel 1