Computation All the Way Down?

Two Universalities

In L’Incandescent (2003) Michel Serres asks about our possibility of making universal machines, ‘these machines said to be Turing machines, with as many programs as you like, therefore as open as we are…. Can we conceive a technology or general science of motors and machines, of means and media?’

Like knowledge and music, technology places us before the horizon of our universality…. Even in conceiving these new machines, we don’t always know how to connect the last two of these universals: our body’s white universal and the world’s universal, both of them in a state of becoming; we are only wagering that they are of the same order, as though equipotent. All thought, science, action, all hope is founded on this wager. The open play of connections between these two universals imposes technological intervention and cultural customs, languages and knowledge on us. (The Incandescent, 134-5, Randolf Burks trans., my emphasis)

This is the human condition insofar as Serres is willing to express it. He calls it our hominescence—the despecialization of our species that is capable of taking over the slow pace of evolution and making it a product of language, science, and technology. He calls this condition our ‘exo-Darwinism’.

This condition always places us in a wager toward ourselves and the outside world. Are we ‘of the same order’ as the Universe? Is there parity between our universality and the universality of the Universe? Are we imposing our computational machines on the world or are we collaborating with it? Perhaps we can impose computational power because we are of the same order? It may be years, generations, millennia before we know, but for the moment we live within the wager that the two universals are ‘of the same order’.

The only thing we know for sure is that there is an ‘open play of connections between these two universals’ that allows some of our cultures to exert influence at massive scales and speeds. This is the heart of L’Incandescent written in 2003 well before AI was anything other than a speculation.

Panurge and the History of Intelligence

This speculation unfolds within the History of Intelligence as Panurge—not just all urges, but the urge to be universally powerful. It is the desire to push our hominescent exo-Darwinism beyond any conceivable and practical limits:

As technologies ‘advance’, the list, for example, of energies we propose to exploit grows longer: muscular, animal, mechanical, solar, wind, hydraulic, electrical, nuclear, computing and, again, biological. Will this list one day be closed? We don’t know. But we can’t be unaware that we search for energy far and wide incessantly and that this multiple opening characterizes us… (134)

Is our capacity to harness more and more of the world’s energy for our own expansive purposes possible because our universality and the world’s universality are ‘of the same order’? Is everything computational all the way down? Or do we occupy a pocket of a computable universe that we are learning to exploit?

Again, we don’t know. It’s just a wager that we keep making.

It has been the ongoing argument of Time as Practice that for this wager to yield ongoing, broad-based progress, it must remain allied with the Enlightenment’s optimism that better explanations are the motor of progress.

At the same time, we must remain attentive to the entanglement of those aspirations with massive innovations in violence and punishment. The latter were not incidental to progress, but essential. As Serres argued throughout his work, Love and Hatred are never fully separate: ‘Love and Hate dominate, on the contrary, every principle and every law’ (150). Morality, knowledge, and culture all emerge from life’s attempt to manage this ‘two-valued force’ that oscillates between Love and Hate, between Aphrodite and Ares, who the Greeks saw as illicit lovers:

How can we escape the cost of this force? How can we negotiate its negative component? Just as life is constructed from managing it, human cultures, also fluctuating with tribulations, result from similar negotiations; we only produce works, technologies or institutions so as to deliver ourselves from this carnage and, in building them, we destroy as much. (151)

How can we free vital energy from aggression without allowing the former to to fall back into the latter? This is the foundation of morality: filtering life from death. (149)

By all means, our History of Intelligence must appreciate through its explanations (which will always be filtered through and accompanied by story telling) this two-valued force. But it must make sparing use of polemics, and certainly cannot devolve, as it has, into wholesale condemnation of the Enlightenment in the name of its violences.

No progress is possible when knowledge serves ressentiment.

Separation and Intelligence

This wager that exists between the universality of our ex0-Darwinian hominescence and the universality of the Universe requires an experience of separation between ourselves and ‘nature’. Collectively, this separation is experienced as ‘languages, sciences, and technologies’—i.e., culture. Individually, this separation is experienced as will, free or not.

This separation is intelligence as the legacy of our panurgy: ‘So we ought to call plants and animals, programmed as they are Monurge. Deprogrammed, as I’ve said, therefore open to every trick, we merit calling ourselves Panurge, skilled, industrious, in short, intelligent’ (133).

We can imagine Monurge as what Bergson characterized as instinct—specialized and focused on a task. When interrupted, instinct seeks to get back on track, saying to itself ‘I must because I must’. Panurge seeks options; its despecialization is capable of becoming any specialization. Bergson called this intelligence—the capacity to use ‘unorganized tools’ and to see the world in terms of relations that can be modified and manipulated for creative purposes.

Serres is very much in line with Bergson’s thinking, though Serres believed Bergson lacked a coherent theory of violence to understand ‘creative evolution’ and ‘the open society’ as thoroughly as he should have. Nor does Serres contain intelligence within ‘life’—Bergson’s élan vital. Intelligence, for Serres, can be found throughout the Universe because everything is emitting, storing, and processing information, which requires energy.

Everything is making an effort of some sort.

Effort

Are both universalities evidence of everything being computational all the way down? At bottom is the Universe the result of simple on/off sequences of zeros and ones? Again, it is impossible to say. We are only wagering that it is so.

While others speculate on computational turtles, the History of Intelligence must ride shotgun with these efforts. This accompaniment, for now, seeks a wider lens than that of engineering. Both are necessary; both are crucial to rejuvenating the Enlightenment's optimism. But the wider lens provides the long-term, wide ranging context that can keep AI narratives from relying on binary ones and zeros of apocalyptic fear and utopian hope.

This History, I argue, unfolds within the long arc of life’s confrontation with necessity. What is life? As much as I’m willing to say is what Bergson called it: ‘at the root of life there is an effort to engraft onto the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination’ (Creative Evolution, 114). This is the most generic definition I can envision at the moment. It treats life as effort with or against necessity. It seeks a separation from the physical forces that constrain its actions.

This separation Bergson calls indetermination. I’ll call it contingency. With Serres, I’m staring into this experience of separation and wondering how we learn to negotiate, harness, and mitigate the powers we unleash in that separation. For we do find there an immense and growing power over fate and necessity—‘we only produce works, technologies or institutions so as to deliver ourselves from this carnage and, in building them, we destroy as much.’

Effort beyond Life

What is effort? Does the wind display effort? Yes, of course. Does a hive display effort? Yes, of course. Effort is everywhere. It is the condition of the Universe—nothing happens without it. Serres gives us a way of understanding this effort as a fundamental condition: everything exists because of the ‘reception, storing, processing, and emission of information’ (Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, 265). Information in motion is effort, which makes information and energy inseparable and fundamental.

Our definition of intelligence begins to separate from ‘life’ as its condition of possibility as Bergson saw it. Perhaps life is not the container that gives rise to intelligence? Perhaps intelligence is bigger than life?

Let’s not claim that we alone remember. In short, the things themselves, inert, as well as the living things exchange elements, energy, and information, preserve this latter, spread it, select it. Let’s not claim we alone devote ourselves to exchange. This writing, these decisions, these memory storages, these codings, among other examples, endow objects with quasi cognitive properties. ‘It thinks’ in the sense of ‘it rains’ exists as much as ‘I think’ or ‘we think’. (The Incandescent, 191)

But as Bergson said, and as I’ve already quoted, definitions harden our thinking too much when we should really be attentive to motions, orientations, efforts, and their effects. An ontology of things too easily prevents this attentiveness.

Intelligence grows as energy-information learns to expand and adapt this capacity for creating contingency in its proximity. Intelligence therefore has a history. But this history is deeply entangled with the entire history of the Universe. It does not inexorably point toward Homo sapiens as it telos, but our species does seem to occupy a particularly powerful nexus of energy and information (i.e., effort) that can decode and decipher ‘the necessity of physical forces’ so as to inject contingency as a precursor to possibility.