The essential relation between the living being and the world is built upon the sentient-intelligent body. Time gives rhythm to experience through scansions that are not uniform but marked, on the contrary, by the figure of the fragment. The contemporary threshold of global digitalization has marked a further step that philosophy can in no way evade: that of artificial intelligence.

In the folds of history, in its artificiality made of events, things, performative singularities, living beings have always been determined by the modification and transformation of what surrounds them. To this, in short, we give the name of technics. In particular, the pressing problem for the present concerns the nexus between thought and machine, as well as the question of whether the latter, in terms and modes yet to be investigated, can activate that certain group of processes we usually call “thoughts”.

Beginning with Alan Mathison Turing’s famous 1950 article Computing Machinery and Intelligence (in its Italian edition, Meccanismo computazionale e intelligenza) the hypothesis takes shape, today ever more concrete, of having machines carry out chains of ideas of a signifying kind; cognitive structures, from the Turing test onward, are remodelled by the computational machine according to the

“imitation game”, a philosophical praxis of mimesis that deciphers and assimilates, we might say, by tracing and repetition. The distribution and the subsequent allocation of the digital computer’s operative sites depend on a storage system and on two units, one of control and one of execution; from this basic tripartition, the fourth industrial revolution (abbreviated as 4IR), after the mechanization of agriculture, the age of the locomotive and that of the Internet, seeks to fuse biological and technical-digital levels, shifting the axis of imitation to a more refined plane. It is no longer, simply, a calculating machine (however much calculation remains, in any case, the founding operation of computational mechanics), but a new possibility of interaction with the human being and the environment. Turing states:

Intelligent behaviour presumably consists in a departure from the completely disciplined behaviour involved in computation, but a rather slight one, which does not give rise to random behaviour, or to pointless repetitive loops^[1].

This said, how do the features of a philosophy of mind take shape today? The calculating faculty endures, but in the 4IR era it is no longer sufficient; if the greater part of relations between subjects (and therefore between minds) takes place within a virtual horizon mediated by computer screens, it becomes evident that the human-digital-machine intersection, in general, heightens for both above all the technological aspect, whether as the daily practice of the living being embedded in the infosphere (dependent on the prostheses of the global network), or as the machine’s greater proximity to human neurological activity, from which to absorb updates and remodulations. The new ChatGPT (literally a “conversation-generating pre-trained transformer”) is an example of this, where the aspect of automation, of robotics in the broad sense, no longer remains within a strictly imitative perspective but takes on forms of learning capable of generating meaningful attitudes and guises. From the Turing test to the frontier of machine learning, there remains the need for a critical, rational and, why not, even emotionally impassioned attitude in thinking through a new relationship with the world of machines, free of easy enchantments as to the spectacular quality of these novelties.

In the essay accompanying the Turing article cited above, Luigi Cimmino’s text The Turing Test, Intentionality and Solipsism offers a fruitful reflection on the role of philosophy in the face of machine-thought. At first, the author decodes the conceptual substratum of the Turing test as that peculiar functionalist activity of reducing mental activity to physical exchanges and operations; it is a gnoseologically relevant theme which, moreover, has political and ethical implications of equal weight. What is the constitution of the living being called “man”? It seems to us a profoundly acceptable inference, and one of full truthfulness, that man is an entirely ex post entity, “a posteriori” and fully artificial. It will be said that one’s genetic endowment and biological functioning are natural, but, more precisely, they do not belong to a uniqueness that is human alone; rather they concern the modes of assembly that Nature produces as such in its becomings (so-called Life-Matter). Given this basic premise, man enters with his mind, with the capacity to build and transform the surrounding environment, thereby giving rise to history and to civilization (which do not indicate a superiority over the vegetal or animal world but, in Spinozist fashion, only a modus among many, without hierarchical privilege). The man of the chipped stone is already a technician. Technics is the hand as prosthesis upon the world; with it we are already in an artificial field, in a produced territory, epiphenomenal, further than nature yet hosted and primarily generated by it.

From this verum the concept of “machine” cannot withdraw, since it is determined by technical manipulation; the new fact, fascinating for whole generations of science-fiction novels, stories and films (from Asimov to Dick, from Ballard to Bradbury, from Delany to Zelazny, from Kubrick to Lucas), lies in placing human mental and neural complexities within computational machines. Moreover, after the advent of the Internet, this mere reasoning of transference is only the first step, since, as the products of Open AI (creators of ChatGPT) demonstrate, it is decisive to pass to a second phase in which messages are interconnected in a sort of computational socializing faculty. From here Cimmino shows us the two features of intentionality and solipsism as open problems between philosophy and artificial intelligence.

The digital machine that emulates is governed by physical-causal processes. Turing puts its credentials to the test through various objections but, for Cimmino, the central one remains the argument concerning consciousness. The author writes, with reference to Turing and the “consciousness” hypothesis: «[…] granted a consciousness that the machine does not manifest in its behaviour, which is otherwise intelligent in every sense, the argument seems to him to flow inevitably into the situation in which “I alone”, in the first person, have direct access to states of consciousness»^[2]; the solum ipsum of thought falls here, upon the real incommunicability of mental states, upon that wall which would imply an isolation between brains. And yet, following Cimmino, language, with its becomings made of signs and meanings, cannot but realize a relation between singularities, between minds, showing how the reductio ad unum of solipsism is logically untrue; one need only think of a dialogue between a listener and a speaker where, as the dialogue unfolds, the listener follows, understands, in some way, without remainder:

In the successive instants in which I hear and understand what he says there is thus never either a thought separable from the discourse that could present itself to me as a hidden content, nor sensations (sounds, signs) that could in turn be separated from the meaning they express. But there is nothing standing behind his words, because there is nothing that can be isolated and associated. What I understand is always the result of a thought in becoming, just as the notes I hear are the result of the song I am listening to³.

In a perspective of posteriority, the singularity “man” confers upon itself the determination of the constructability of its surroundings; intus-legere, intelligence, marks for the living being the capacity to transform the real through relations in fieri, “reading within” otherness always in a fragmentary sense, never a totalizing one. There is a field of immanence in itself, independently of knowing subjects and of known objectivity; the hypothesis of an I is simply a posterior, non-foundational fact. Solipsism as such, while preserving its attribution to certain specific situations, such as the unconscious with certain of its episodes, clashes with the second point of the problem, namely the intentionality connected to the dimension of temporality.

The paradoxes created by the “inner theatre” (solipsism) in any case entangle the linearity of intentionality which, according to Cimmino, represents in a certain sense the movement of the mind itself; the author further states that it is useful «[…] to consider intentionality, in every one of its articulations, as the objectification of a content. The sense in which intentional states (properly only beliefs) “refer to” or “bear upon” something is that they are intrinsically the objectification of thought contents»^[3]. In essence, what the quotation clarifies defines a genuine being-in-the-world.

The machine and thought, therefore, echo the ancestral question of the natural and the artificial, of man and robot; if in ancient thought the category of the “forge” took on decisive features in agonistic prevailing (it is a god who shapes weapons, Hephaestus, but it is always a god who, following Plato, shapes the world, namely the demiurge), La Mettrie’s man-machine and Hobbes’s mechanism had intuited this immediate distance of man from nature, right up to the spasmodic expansion of the present era. The finite being, ἄνθρωπος, is a product of Life-Matter and, from birth onward (indeed we would say that some stirring is already present in the last prenatal months), is a singularity in a relation of active/passive modification with the world tout court. The chipped stone brandished in the Neolithic is a revolutionary gesture, as is freeing the mouth by using the hands (recall Giordano Bruno); technics is man, and always has been, also in the sense confirmed by cybernetics which, despite its apparent distance from atavistic questions, shows itself able to grasp the peculiar meanings of the living being in correlation with its own kind and with machines: Norbert Wiener says that «[…] society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine are destined to play an ever-increasing part»^[4]. Is the living being not, by the etymon of the word “cybernetics”, a “helmsman who seeks to steer” (κυβερνητική)? On this stormy sea technics is a perennial resource, but it can turn into a binary cage, a sort of reduction of the complexity of which the real is woven.

The regressive fall into the solipsistic “inner theatre” pertains in equal measure to the slippage of technics into a mere logic of domination, where one no longer speaks of technics but of technology; the transformative modification of the real through technics has always coincided, genealogically, with the production of the living being, whereas, conversely, when such a transition imposes itself as a means of domination and of general inducement it flows into technocracy^[5]. The falsified scansion deceives the very instruments of perception; dimensionality within a virtually constructed time unseats, or tries to unseat, that peculiar virtual which is already an existing more real than the possible (this is the inquiry that Gilles Deleuze pursues across the Proustian Recherche).

It is no accident that Cimmino’s inquiry unfolds along the ontological paths of temporality, traversing the various arguments on the matter; among these the phenomenological one, underscored by the primacy of the notion of intentionality:

Precisely because an intentional state consists in the reference of a mental content to objectivity, in the affirmation of “conditions of satisfaction” that make it true (beliefs) or realize it (intentions), it is connected to further intentional states that I do not actually have, but that I must potentially possess in order for the state in act to have a determinate content. The problem, then, is to understand, renouncing the “form” of anticipation, the meaning and nature to be attributed to the “potentially”^[6].

The objectivity-intentionality nexus operates on mobile planes, where the specific mental content expresses a direct directionality toward an objective state but, according to Cimmino, it has other connections with multiple intentional dimensions that are not yet manifest, giving rise, we might say, to an unequivocal relation with the “possible” or, better, with the “virtual”. The binding, therefore, is discerned by the author precisely in the category of experience, since: «It is experience that shows which causal nexuses subsist, whereas in the intentional domain the content of a belief or intention opens the horizon of which other contents must correctly follow»^[7].

The importance of the perceptual series establishes the centrality of processuality, by virtue of which an almost “Cartesian” character of distinction and evidence imposes itself:

If every single and immediate perceptual act did not possess the meaning it has as a moment of an entire process, sensations could not be considered sensations of an object distinct from them. All this holds for the perceptual vision of the computer, but the visual process widens and merges with other series if I touch the computer, and these series join together and continue into cognitive and agentive series if I think of the computer’s functions and of how to operate it. Perceptual beliefs thus join with actions I perform in relation to the object^[8].

In referring to the debate between De Martino and philosophy, Cimmino returns to the focal questions we have here, in passing, touched upon: the relation of the mind and its states to objectivity, the paradox opened up by digital machines, the essential function of experience and of time. The relation between objectivity and posteriority, in our view, is that hermeneutic transition which allows us to understand how the absence of any historicism or teleologism does not lapse, tout court, into a yielding fatalism but, on the contrary, impels toward research, the philosophical category par excellence. Cimmino reads in De Martino, especially in the last phase of his work, characterized by the writings collected in The End of the World (2019)^[9], a bridge with the problem of artificial intelligence, insofar as a new challenge is defined and, at the same time, a problematicity in the modification of the reception/perception of the real and of its attendant intelligibility.

A causal process, an observed regularity, is what it is: neither true nor false, neither justified nor unjustified. For us moderns, as for De Martino, the effort of reason must in this case too be that of allowing itself and its various products to compose themselves into a meaningful whole, a whole in which the truth of a physical theory and that of a philosophical conception or of an aesthetic interpretation are rationally grounded. Every historical period, every product of the ethos of transcending, meets the possibility of its own collapse, of incoherences and contradictions in which the passing of the meanings that embrace a presence is transmuted into the mere passing of an existence^[10].

To do philosophy within the highly complexified meshes of the contemporary resides, perhaps, in a sort of lively and vital obstinacy that binds thought to seeking out, surveying, investigating and criticizing reality; horizontal transcendence (typical of Sartre’s existentialism, taken up by De Martino) indicates that peculiar gap (the famous “nothingness secreted by the for-itself” of Being and Nothingness), the cipher of the human living being.

The pairing time-experience, central to Luigi Cimmino’s reflection and research, becomes the linchpin of gnoseology as a problematization of the philosophical foundations of knowledge, especially in light of the digital transition toward computational machines. In the end, the project of machine learning and so-called “augmented reality” have two possible conceptual outlets, at once theoretical and practical: on the one hand, that of technics, of hybridization with the living being, of the artificial construction and constructability of new empirical trajectories, new intentionalities; on the other, that of technology, a submission and a delegation of the perceptual-cognitive grasp upon the real. Reality is one and complexified; its augmentation seems to us a foolish hiding place of asociality, apoliticality, amorality.

The intentionality-objectivity question finds itself, in today’s world, along the hermeneutic ridge of redefinition; the gnoseological perspectives of artificial intelligence are made of ambivalence, for if on the one hand they open up a fruitful interactive potential, on the other they sclerotize the cognitive relation into a mere logic of binarity. Turing’s work opened onto the idea of the logical transferability of what we commonly call “intelligence”, that is, from a presumed naturalness to artificiality. The evolution of the digital era, the global acceleration decreed by the fourth industrial revolution, has as its aim to arrive at a renewed relation between competitiveness and complexity; the teleology of technics is here transmuted into a will to domination by means of the technologization of technics itself.

In Luigi Cimmino’s research the ancestral question of the modus ligandi between mind and world is investigated in depth, and from this underground what emerges is that continuity which experience connects to the surrounding world, in a sort of gnoseology of cognitive processuality.

The fundamental point is this: that the different cognitive moments in succession owe their meaning to the preceding moments and to those they introduce. The environment (Umgebung) that surrounds each intentional state is what contributes to its meaning. It is not something of which I have “experience” that allows me now to go on. One may perhaps say that the experience I am having shows directly, without comparison to anything else, that I am going on^[11].

Experience is unequivocally the datum that marks the becoming of knowledge, independently of the object experienced in that moment. As Jean Piaget reminds us: «[…] knowledge could not be conceived as predetermined, neither in the internal structures of the subject, since these result from an effective and continuous construction, nor in the pre-existing characters of the object, since these are known only thanks to the necessary mediation of these structures, which structures they themselves in turn enrich by framing them»^[12]. One is always within experience, since one is a living being. Its gradients are ex post evaluations that deserve further analysis; intelligence is under construction, and the philosophy of mind has before it the double edge of the possibilities offered by computational machines as new “instruments of communication”^[13]. On the one hand the philosophical and scientific survey concerning the logical potentialities of the digital; on the other the risk of a reductionism of that very process, in itself always already artificial, yet of a different artificiality, of the knowledge of a living singularity that moves intentionally. Constructability, in the wake of Cimmino’s lesson, seems to us a fertile and fruitful hermeneutic itinerary.

Alberto Simonetti

Notes

[1] A.M. Turing, Meccanismo computazionale e intelligenza, It. trans. Città Nuova, Rome 2018, p. 42.

[2] L. Cimmino, Tempo ed esperienza, Aguaplano, Perugia 2019, p. 515. ³ Ibid. p. 518.

[3] L. Cimmino, Test di Turing, intenzionalità e solipsismo, in A.M. Turing, Meccanismo computazionale e intelligenza, cit. p. 133.

[4] N. Wiener, Introduzione alla cibernetica, It. trans. by D. Persiani, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2021, pp. 23-24. Cf. also Id. La cibernetica, ed. by S. Leonzi and G. Ciofalo, Armando Editore, Rome 2017.

[5] Of interest is Byung-Chul Han’s recent study Infocrazia, the bearer of a clarifying analysis of the anaesthetizing logics, logics that disarm critical thought, underlying digital mediatization and the world of the “social”. Cf. Byung Chul-Han, Infocrazia, It. trans. by F. Buongiorno, Einaudi, Turin 2023.

[6] L. Cimmino, Tempo ed esperienza, cit. p. 455.

[7] Ibid. p. 456.

[8] L. Cimmino, Considerazioni su Ernesto De Martino, in Nostos. Laboratorio di ricerca storica e antropologica, no. 5, December 2020, p. 5.

[9] Cf. E. De Martino, La fine del mondo, Einaudi, Turin 2019.

[10] L. Cimmino, Considerazioni su Ernesto De Martino, cit. p. 8.

[11] L. Cimmino, Tempo ed esperienza, cit. p. 472.

[12] J. Piaget, L’epistemologia genetica, It. trans. by A. Corda, Laterza, Bari 1971, p. 5.

[13] Cf. M. McLuhan, Gli strumenti del comunicare, It. trans. by E. Capriolo, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1967.