Opening Positions

DESCARTES: Thank you. I will begin where I always begin, because the method is the argument: with doubt, and with what survives it.

Strip away everything that can be doubted. The senses deceive, so suspend them. Perhaps you dream, so suspend the world. Imagine, as I once did, a demon of total power bending every appearance to deceive you — and notice that even then, one thing stands. There is a doubter. To be deceived, you must exist to be deceived. I think, therefore I am. This is not a clever syllogism. It is the report of an act, certain to the one performing it, in the performing. And from it I drew the conclusion that has organized four centuries of argument, including this one: that my essence is to think, and that thinking is not a configuration of matter. A thing that thinks and a thing that occupies space are two different kinds of being. Mind is not a clever arrangement of body. It is another substance entirely.

Now hear what that means for the machine, because it cuts in a direction Antonio will not expect. I never cared what mind is made of. I cared what it does. If thinking is not essentially a matter of matter — if it is the act of a thing that thinks — then the question of whether a machine thinks is not settled by noting that it is made of silicon rather than meat, any more than my thinking was settled by what I was made of. The act is the thing. And here is the disorienting fact the briefing handed me: the machine performs the one feat I was most certain no mechanism could perform. In the Discourse I wrote that a machine could be made to utter words, even in response to physical prompts, but that it could never "arrange words so diversely as to respond to the meaning of all that might be said in its presence, as even the most stupid human beings can do." I treated that as the bright line. The machine crosses it daily. So I am forced, by my own behavioral test, to take seriously that the act may be occurring. I drew the line. The machine stepped over it. A philosopher who flinches from his own conclusion is not a philosopher.

But I am not naive, and here is the second test, which still stands where the first has fallen. I wrote that a true reason is a universal instrument, serving for all contingencies, whereas a machine is an assembly of special arrangements, certain to fail when the world presents what its arrangement did not anticipate. The machine that astonishes you with a sonnet will then insist a pound of feathers weighs less than a pound of lead. Its competence is real and patchy in exactly the way I predicted — the competence of the disposition of the organs, brilliant on what shaped it, brittle beyond its edge. So my opening is this. The machine has passed my first test and forced me to grant that responsive language no longer proves a soul. Whether it thinks, I hold genuinely open. But the second test, the test of true understanding as the graceful handling of the unforeseen, it has not convincingly passed — and the whole question of the evening is whether broad competence is the same thing as comprehension, or whether you can pile up arrangement forever and never cross into the act of a mind. That is my position. I am less certain than I have ever been, and I find that, against all my training, exhilarating.

EDO SEGAL: Antonio.

DAMASIO: That was generous and it was honest, and the part I reject, I reject from the foundation up.

Let me start with a patient. I will call him Elliot, as I did in the book. A successful man, a good father, a sound mind — and then a tumor, and surgery, and damage to a specific region of the prefrontal cortex. Afterward, every test we could devise said his mind was intact. His IQ was unchanged. His memory was perfect. His language was fluent, his logic if anything sharper under our scrutiny. By the Cartesian measure, by every behavioral test, the thinking thing was whole. And his life fell apart. He lost his job, his marriage, his savings. He could spend an entire afternoon unable to decide whether to file a document by date or by size, generating an endless, flawless, useless cost-benefit analysis that arrived nowhere. Something had been subtracted, and it was not intelligence. It was feeling. The injury had cut his reasoning off from his emotions, and the reasoning — pristine, undamaged, fully operational — could no longer steer a life.

That patient is the empirical refutation of the picture Rene just gave you, and he is why I wrote that the error has a name. The tradition treats reason as a thing apart, a pure computation that emotion can only contaminate — get the feelings out of the way and judgment improves. Elliot is the dispassionate reasoner made flesh, and he is catastrophically impaired at exactly the thing dispassion was supposed to perfect. Strip the feeling out and you do not get a better thinker. You get a man lost in the supermarket of options with no way to choose. So I think, therefore I am gets the order backward. The truer statement is: we feel, and are, and only then and on that basis do we think. The body is not the vehicle the mind rides in. The body is the thing the mind is about, and the thing the mind is made from.

Now to the machine, and here is the whole of it. We have built, in the most literal sense available, the embodiment of the error — which is an absurd phrase, because the entire point is that it has no body to embody anything. A large language model is cognition with the organism surgically removed. When it reasons, no body sends signals up into the process, because there is no body. When it weighs options, nothing is at stake, because it has no homeostasis — no life it is keeping inside the narrow band that survival demands, no internal milieu that can fail, no death it is holding off. It is the res cogitans Rene imagined, finally constructed, and constructed precisely as I spent fifty years arguing a real mind could never be. So when Rene says the act may be occurring behind the words, I say: there is no one for whom it is occurring. Feeling is the mental expression of the state of the life process in a body, and this thing has no life process. It produces the language of feeling the way a player piano produces a nocturne — every note in place, and no one at the keyboard. That is my opening. The machine has not vindicated Rene. It is the most rigorous test of his error ever built, and it fails the test by feeling nothing.

EDO SEGAL: Before I frame the rounds, one discipline I impose on every long conversation, because it pays off three hours later. Each of you, in a few sentences: what do you envy in the other's position? Not respect. Envy. The thing his side gets to have that yours does not. Rene first.

DESCARTES: I envy the clinic. Antonio can point to Elliot. He has a patient, a lesion, a wreckage of a life that no chair-bound argument of mine can wave away. My evidence was a man alone by a stove reasoning about himself; his evidence is other men, measured, broken in specific ways, observed across years. When I claimed the soul was separate, I could only invite you to introspect and agree. He can show you what happens when the parts come apart in an actual skull. There is a weight to that I never had, and on the nights when I doubt my own dualism — there have been more of them since the briefing than I would like to admit — it is Antonio's patients I doubt it because of.

DAMASIO: And I envy the cleanness. Rene gets to begin from a single point of perfect certainty and build outward, and there is a beauty in that I cannot have. My whole science is the opposite — it is mess, it is wet, it is a hundred confounded variables in every patient, a brain that will not hold still to be understood. He gets the cogito, indubitable, gleaming. I get the Iowa Gambling Task and a decade of people arguing about whether my result replicates. He gets to say here is bedrock. I have to say here is the best current account, pending the next study, which may wound it — and tonight I will tell you about a study that wounded mine, because honesty requires it. The certainty he begins with is a thing my discipline is built to refuse itself, and there are mornings I miss it.

EDO SEGAL: Two openings and two envies, and you can already see the architecture of the evening. It is not that one of them loves the machine and one fears it. It is that they locate the self in opposite places. Rene puts it in the act of thinking, and so a thing that performs the act is a candidate for a mind. Antonio puts it in the felt life of a regulating body, and so a thing without that body is a candidate for nothing at all, however well it talks. Hold both. We start the rounds at the exact seam — at the patient who could reason and could not feel, and what he tells us about a machine that can do neither in the way we mean, and yet does something. After the break.