Events

Past Event

David Bates - An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age

March 6, 2024
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
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Buell Hall (East Gallery), Columbia University, 515 West 116th Street, New York

Event Description

We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, David Bates discusses his new book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, which offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.

Event Speaker

David Bates, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage. Please email [email protected] with any questions.