PERSON
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The French phenomenologist (1908–1961) whose Phenomenology of Perception made the living body—not the disembodied mind—the ground of consciousness, and whose demolition of Cartesian dualism is the deepest available philosophical instrument for understanding what AI can and cannot be.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his philosophical career dismantling the picture that makes artificial intelligence seem possible in principle. René Descartes divided reality into thinking substance and extended substance—pilot and cockpit—and from that division it followed that the pilot could, in principle, inhabit any cockpit. Swap the biological hardware for silicon. Intelligence is substrate-independent. Merleau-Ponty's counter-argument, developed across thirty years of phenomenological investigation and crystallized in
Phenomenology of Perception (1945), was that Descartes was wrong about the location of consciousness: wrong about its relationship to the body, and therefore wrong about every conclusion that followed from the separation. “The body is our general medium for having a world,” he wrote—not a vehicle, not an instrument, but the
medium. Remove the medium and consciousness is not purer; it is absent. This is not a minor philosophical quibble about the AI enterprise. It strikes at the root of what AI claims to be. The
body-subject,
body schema,
motor intentionality