4. ... nous sommes automate autant qu’esprit.
Les preuves ne convainquent que l’esprit, la coutume fait nos
preuves les plus fortes et les plus crues.
Elle incline l’automate qui entraîne l’esprit sans qu’il y pense.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (ca. 1662)
6. Je parlerai de l'homme en mon Monde un peu plus que je ne pensais,
car j'entreprends d'expliquer toutes ses principales fonctions. J'ai déjà
écrit celles qui appartiennent à la vie ....
J'anatomise maintenant les têtes de divers animaux, pour expliquer en
quoi consistent l'imagination, la mémoire, etc.
René Descartes, Lettre à Mersenne (1632)
7.
8. Et véritablement l'on peut fort bien comparer les nerfs de la machine
que je vous décris, aux tuyaux des machines de ces fontaines; ...
... ses esprits animaux, à l'eau qui les remue, dont le cœur est la
source, et les concavités du cerveau sont les regards ...
René Descartes, Traité de l’homme (ca. 1630)
9.
10.
11.
12.
13. ... si par hasard je ne regardais d'une fenêtre des hommes qui passent
dans la rue, à la vue desquels je ne manque pas de dire que je vois
des hommes ...
... et cependant que vois-je de cette fenêtre, sinon des chapeaux et
des manteaux, qui peuvent couvrir des automates?
René Descartes, Seconde méditation (1635)
14. Mais je juge que ce sont de vrais hommes, et ainsi je comprends, par
la seule puissance de juger qui réside en mon esprit, ce que je croyais
voir de mes yeux.
René Descartes, Seconde méditation (1641)
15. L'admiration est une subite surprise de l'âme, qui fait qu'elle se
porte à considérer avec attention les objets qui lui semblent rares
et extraordinaires.
René Descartes, Passions de l’âme (1649)
16. Ainsi elle est causée premièrement par l'impression qu'on a dans le
cerveau, qui représente l'objet comme rare et par conséquent digne
d'être fort considéré ...
... puis ensuite par le mouvement des esprits, qui sont disposés par
cette impression à tendre avec grande force vers l'endroit du cerveau
où elle est, pour l'y fortifier et conserver ...
René Descartes, Passions de l’âme (1649)
17. ... objective effects proceed in the soul according to the formal nature
of its object. This is the same as what the ancients said ... except that
so far as I know they never conceived the soul (as we do here) as
acting according to certain laws, like a spiritual automaton.
Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1661)
(1661)
18. ... when the soul wills something with success, the machine is
inclined and ready to do this spontaneously out of its own natural
motions....
Leibniz, “Doubts or considerations about certain statements
in the Theoria Medica Vera” (1709)
L’opération des automates spirituels, c’est-à-dire des âmes, n’est
point mécanique; mais elle contient éminemment ce qu’il y a beau
dans la mécanique ...
Leibniz, Theodicée (1710), §403
21. The Understanding is not taught to reason ...
... it has a native Faculty to perceive the Coherence, or
Incoherence, of its Ideas, and can range them right ....
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
22. ... reason is nothing but a wonderful and intelligible instinct in our
souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows
them with certain qualities, according to their particular situations
and relations.
David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (1739)
23. ... but can any one give the ultimate reason, why past experience
and observations produces such an effect, any more than why
nature alone shou’d produce it?
David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (1739)
24. We start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions,
passages, ‘tendencies,’ which ... give rise to habits.
Isn’t this the answer to the question ‘what are we?’ We are habits,
nothing but habits – the habit of saying ‘I’.
Gilles Deleuze, preface to the English translation (1989) of
Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume (1953)
25.
26. L’habitude tient donc à l’état des fibres.
La répétition fréquente du même mouvement dans la même fibre
change jusqu’à un certain point l’état primitive de cette fibre.
Les molécules dont elle est composée, se disposent les unes à l’égard
des autres dans un nouvel ordre rélatif au genre & au dégré de
l’impression reçuë.
Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie (1754)
(1754)
27. L’éducation est une seconde naissance, qui imprime au cerveau de
nouvelles déterminations.
Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie (1754)
(1754)
28. Pour expliquer le mécanisme de la mémoire il faut regarder la
substance molle du cerveau comme une masse d’une cire sensible
et vivante, mais susceptible de toutes sortes de formes, n’en
perdant aucune de celles qu’elle a reçues, et en recevant sans
cesse de nouvelles qu’elle garde.
Voilà le livre. Mais où est le lecteur ? Le lecteur c’est le livre même.
Denis Diderot, Elémens de physiologie (1774-80)
(1774-80)
29. Voluntary and semi-voluntary powers of calling up ideas, of exciting
and restraining affections, and of performing or suspending
actions, arise from the mechanism of our natures.
David Hartley, Observations on Man (1749)
30. Indépendamment de toute provocation extérieure, le centre
cérebral peut entrer en action ....
Indépendamment de toute détermination acquise, l’organe de la
pensée tire quelquefois de son propre fonds ....
Maine de Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (1802)
Rien n’est susceptible d’habitude que ce qui est susceptible de
changement.
Félix Ravaisson, De l’habitude (1838)
(1838)
32. ... mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the
changes taking place automatically in the organism.
We are conscious automata ....
Thomas Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874)
33. Consciousness ... is only intense when nerve-processes are few. In
rapid, automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum.
William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
34. If we take the actions of lower animals and the actions of lower
ganglia in higher animals, what strikes us most in them is the
determinateness with which they respond to a given stimulus.
... the most perfected parts of the brain are those whose action
are least determinate. It is this very vagueness which constitutes
their advantage.
William James, “Are We Automata?” (1879)
William James, “Are We Automata?” (1879)
35. If the highest centers were already organized, there could be no
new organizations ....
... all being organized, there would be no possibility for correct
adjustments in new circumstances ....
John Hughlings Jackson, “Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System” (1884)
36. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very
extraordinary degree of plasticity ... ;
... the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of
the organic materials of which their bodies are composed.
William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
37. Routine habits, and habits that possess us instead of our
possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)
38. ... schooling must not model itself upon the automatic
repetitiousness of machines.
John Dewey, “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Economy” (1916)
39. Avec une machine parfaite il n’y a ... jamais de déception, mais
jamais aussi de surprise.
Aucune de ces miracles qui sont, en quelque sort, la signature de la
vie.
Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (1931)
40. ... si la situation ... n’étaient pas nouveaux, il ne s’agirait pas
d’intelligence, mais de processus tout autres: mémoire, habitude,
répétition, en un mot, automatisme.
Edouard Claparède, “La genèse de l’hypothèse: étude expérimentale” (1934)
... la rupture d’équilibre, lorsque des réflexes ou les habitudes ne
sont prêts à intervenir, ne se rétablit automatiquement, et nous
sommes momentanément désadaptés.
C’est alors l’intelligence qu’incombe la tâche de nous réadapter.
Edouard Claparède, “L’invention dirigée” (1938)
41. L’homme est surtout adapté à ce qui n’est pas.
Henri Delacroix, Les grandes formes de la vie mentale (1934)
42. ... let me challenge the notion that automation is in any sense a final
good.
If the human organism had developed on that principle, the reflexes
and the autonomic nervous system would have absorbed all the
functions of the brain, and man would have been left without a thought
in his head.
Organic systems [have]... the margin of choice, the freedom to commit
and correct errors, to explore unfrequented paths, to incorporate
unpredictable accidents ..., to anticipate the unexpected, to plan the
impossible....
Lewis Mumford, “The Automation of Knowledge: Are We becoming Robots?” (1964)
46. Memex System for Information Management
... creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things.
For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945)
48. ... in large computer-centered information and control systems, the
human operators are responsible mainly for functions that it proved
infeasible to automate. Such systems (‘humanly extended machines’)
are not symbiotic systems.
J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960)
49.
50. ... to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions
and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on
predetermined programs.
Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done
to prepare the way for insights and decisions....
Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will
perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone
can perform them.
J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960)
51. ... the human brain is a far more efficient control apparatus than is the
intelligent machine when we come to the higher areas of logic.
[The brain] is a self-organizing system which depends on its capacity
to modify itself into a new machine rather than on ironclad accuracy
and speed in problem-solving.
Norbert Wiener, “Some moral and technical consequences
of automation,” Science (1960)
(1960)
53. The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained
human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology
The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts
computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, informationhandling, and information-display devices.
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
(1962)
54.
55.
56.
57.
58. H–LAM/T System (Human using Language, Artifacts, and Methods in which he is Trained)
59. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cutand-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation,
sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
(1962)
60. If we then ask ourselves where that intelligence is embodied, we are
forced to concede that it is elusively distributed throughout a hierarchy
of functional processes...
If there is any one thing upon which this 'intelligence depends' it would
seem to be organization ...
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
61. When the course of action must respond to new comprehension, new
insights and new intuitive flashes of possible explanations or solutions,
it will not be an orderly process.
... part of the real promise in the automated H-LAM/T systems of
tomorrow is that the human can have the freedom and power of
disorderly processes.
Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
65. As recently as a generation ago, processes of control had to be
thought of as homunculi, because man was the only model of an
executive agent. Today, the stored-program computer has provided us
with an alternative possibility, in the form of the executive routine.[Two
kinds of mental processing = parallel and sequential]
Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (1967)
66. ... novel and surprising stimuli which spontaneously attract attention require a greater effort of processing than do more familiar stimuli. … voluntary attention is an exertion of effort in
activities which are selected by current plans and intentions.
Involuntary attention is an exertion of effort in activities which are selected by more enduring dispositions.Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (1973)
Involuntary attention is an exertion of effort in activities which are selected by more enduring dispositions.Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (1973)
67. The benefit of such a dual system is multitasking: The unconscious
system can execute background tasks, leaving the conscious system
to perform more difficult tasks.
J. Lisman and E. Sternberg, “Habit and Non-habit Systems for Unconscious
and Conscious Behavior: Implications for Multitasking” (2012)
68. This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of ... as a
kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of
the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (2005)
69. The zombie challenge is based on an amazing wealth of findings
in recent cognitive science that demonstrate the surprising ways
in which our everyday behavior is controlled by automatic
processes that unfold in the complete absence of consciousness.
Decomposing the Will (2013), edited by Andy Clark et al.
70.
71. ... if you live in a total stereotypical world where nothing
changes, then for the most part you could be totally
unconscious, because you wouldn’t need consciousness.
Your body could perfectly do all of those routine things.
Christof Koch, interview
Why isn’t the brain just a bunch of specialized zombie
agents? … The unexpected happened and you have to
think before you act.
Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions
of a Romantic Reductionist (2012)
72. It has been proposed that the division of labor between the frontal
lobes and the basal ganglia is along the lines of ‘exploration’
(dealing with novelty) vs. ‘exploitation’ (discharging overlearned
behaviors).
Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain:
Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (2009)
73.
74. System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort
and no sense of voluntary control.
System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that
demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System
2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency,
choice, and concentration.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (2010)
75. When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support
more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of
the moment.The division of labor is highly efficient.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (2010)
