Something new in our embodied mind

The history of scientific discovery reveals the human mind’s journey through knowledge of self and the world.

Each new milestone in thought and creativity raises new questions about how we got there and how we should deal with the new things we have learned to do.

Lorenzo Magnani, a philosopher of science and director of the Computational Philosophy Laboratory at the University of Pavia, talked with us about intelligence that spans multiple fields.

Regarding the dialogue between human and artificial intelligence, he cautioned,
“We must safeguard our ingenuity through political and moral choices.”

Giulia Pozzobon: Human intelligence advances as it acquires new capabilities. We could say that there are many different eras of human intelligence. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing collective intelligence today is understanding how it compares to artificial intelligence and how the two can coexist effectively without trading places. So, starting with the basics, what constitutes non-artificial intelligence?

Lorenzo Magnani: To begin with, we can observe that human intelligence is the foundation of artificial intelligence, so artificial intelligence is a result of human intelligence. From the moment humans first drew on the walls of caves, they have relied on external representations and tools. Galileo employed a telescope. Today, physicists utilize particle accelerators, and scientists harness artificial intelligence tools to support their scientific reasoning and groundbreaking discoveries.

From this perspective, we can categorize human intelligence as that which has created artificial intelligence, whereas, to date, artificial intelligence has not yet created any human intelligence.

And when I think of intelligence, I envision the ability to create something new with our minds. Of course, intelligence can also be defined as a behavior, such as performing calculations or executing a sequence of mechanical actions. But I don’t believe there’s anything distinctive about that, that we can contribute as human beings. In this sense, it’s intriguing that the human mind always reasons based on a limited amount of information, whereas artificial intelligence — particularly deep and machine learning — has to deal with vast amounts of data, known as big data. And that is a big difference. Naturally, this capability allows deep and machine learning to achieve astonishing results. Yet, these applications always remain confined to a very specific domain. This may sound paradoxical, but it isn’t. Consider, for example, AlphaGo/AlphaZero, a program that excels at playing Go because it has “witnessed” millions of games played according to well-established rules. However, it relies on closed reasoning strategies that are restricted to data derived from an unchanging foundation of finite elements that remain static. In contrast, humans utilize open strategies; during creative reasoning, they seek and incorporate elements from various domains.

So is our creativity — it seems to me that this is the capacity you see as most representative of intelligence — undermined by artificial intelligence?

Creativity and intelligence are safeguarded by moral and political choices. A few years ago I watched Roberto Rossellini’s movie on Cosimo de’ Medici. There is an exchange between Giovan Battista Alberti and Lorenzo the Magnificent that goes something like, “In a society where there is a profound respect for ingenuity and hence for intelligence, it thrives, and blooms on its own.” The commitment, the moral commitment to ingenuity and intelligence, is what allows it to flourish and claim its rightful space. That is why I put The Urgent Need for an Ecology of Human Creativity in the title of one of my recent books. We need situations that I call eco-cognitive, where “eco” refers to the energy that originates from the environment a person inhabits. This environment must foster the possibility of discovery, of harnessing one’s creative intelligence. There must be spaces that are not entirely commercialized, not privatized, open spaces that are inspired by the idea of the common good. In medical research, for instance, this is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

In short, without an ethical underpinning, pure intelligence has limited scope. Returning to the concept of creativity, there’s a process that is characteristic of the human mind, one that you have been so fascinated by in your research: the concept of abduction. Could you explain what this means?

Well, I’ll go through the various ways we reason. According to Aristotle, the human capacity for knowledge can unfold in two directions: to have initial sensory knowledge of the particular and from there to move back to the universal by generalizing (the induction path), or to pursue the opposite path, that is, to start from the universal and go to the particular (the deduction path).
But then Aristotle adds a third approach, which is abduction, a less certain way of reasoning that enables us to greatly enhance our potential for acquiring new knowledge. If I state, as a premise, that everyone with pneumonia has elevated white blood cell counts and then state that John has an elevated white blood cell count and conclude that John has pneumonia, I could certainly be mistaken, but I am making an abduction that could lead to getting it right. So, this process can be incredibly creative and enables us to make progress in our discovery journey of the world, in our discoverability. I have been drawn to this since the onset of my research work, dealing with the history and philosophy of geometry.

What role does the body play in the exercise of our intelligence? Again, this is about us and not about artificial intelligence.

The role of the body in cognition is fundamental. Indeed, the latest cognitive science studies point to the concepts of “embedded, embodied, enacted, extended mind.” This means that cognition is situated: it is no longer independent of the ecological context because it is rooted in an organism and immersed in the environment.

Consider the example of an athlete. Athletes can perform in ways that are cognitively very complex and often don’t even realize it much because they have become “embodied.” And then there are the environment and external elements that become supports for human intelligence, an intelligence that is therefore also distributed outside the mind and body: whether it is a chalkboard for doing geometric calculations, a hydraulic tool, or even an artificial intelligence that performs tasks, the principle is the same.

The connections between neuroscience and quantum physics are becoming apparent. It seems there may be a relationship between how our minds work and how the universe operates in some way. What do you think about these intersections?

They are all very interesting models, and they encourage people to look for explanations other than the ones already used. Neuroscientists tend to explain everything from the inside of the brain. For example, you can use a metaphor borrowed from physics to study the brain and think of it as a dissipative structure. Now, the brain is indeed a dissipative structure, whereas computers or machines are not. What does dissipative mean? It is a structure that consumes energy to maintain itself. From a thermodynamic point of view, it is an open system that continuously exchanges matter, energy, and information with the external environment. By the way, the human brain, unlike the computer, never shuts down. This sounds trivial, but it represents an important truth: it never turns off, even when we sleep, while we turn off our computers. And artificial intelligence tools and Facebook’s massive servers can also be turned off. As long as we can turn these machines off, we can control them. As for ourselves, in dealing with the processes set in motion by the new machines and artificial intelligence, I think we must still and always choose to be in control of our destiny, reconnecting with the famous principle of Italian humanism: homo faber fortunae suae.