A Thought Disincarnate – What Does it Mean to Think?
Beginning with a brief historical excursus on the relation between philosophical and scientific modernity, I seek to lay out the fundamentals for a functionalist conception of intelligence and subjective agency. Following Wilfrid Sellars, I defend a neo-Kantian view about rationality that is non-metaphysical in scope. In doing so, I seek to specify what characterizes sapient thinking proper apart from other forms of sentient consciousness and artificial intelligence. I propose that the recognition of the autonomy of the space of reasons with respect to the space of causes (nature) remains the critical condition for distinguishing between the procedural dimension of thought from its material substratum; or between the ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ of a cognitive system. The separation between reasons and causes allows us to disambiguate between the formal dimension of computationalism and AGI, understood as a program of engineering abstraction that captures the general dynamics of cognitive processes, and the ‘hard’ material dynamics of artificial systems, along with their causal instantiations (the level of ‘implementation’, in Marr’s classical terminology). Thought’s specifiable disincarnate, functional status allows us to track how rational behavior can sprawl across different material media, without thereby attaining a transcendent metaphysical reality. Reason and cognition pierce through the ends of its material support, well beyond the categories of our manifest self-understanding, to unravel a rational navigational space that remains indifferent to and depurated from all teleological and humanist palliatives.
Daniel Sacilotto is a fourth-year comparative literature PhD student at UCLA. His research focuses on the reconciliation of rationalism with materialism, and the pursuit of a revisionary naturalism through the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, and Ray Brassier. He is currently finishing a full-length monograph tentatively titled Saving the Noumenon, in which he develops the idea that a materialist metaphysics requires the rehabilitation of a new transcendental epistemology, which depurates the traditional Kantian account from its metaphysical envelopment.