Sartre on Descartes: AI is Body, Not Mind

Sartre describes Descartes’ clear separation of body and mind in terms of historically making a break between a Scholastic mental model of physical objects being quasi-physical, quasi-mental. Physical objects imbued with non-measurable elements that animate and define their behavior. Ghostly, in a way. Unscientific.

By clearly separating the mechanistic elements from the mind elements, as it were, a discussion could now happen freeing science to focus on measurables. Freeing a discussion of mind to focus on more pure thought. Thought, perhaps, closer to ideals. Closer to Godliness. Closer to something other bodies and creatures couldn’t do. Uniquely human. 

In Sartre’s telling of the Cartesian separation, images in our brain are physical, mechanistic output of the stimulation, the input from the external world. Our understanding of the images comes from thought, our minds. Our outstanding is generated internally. Perhaps connected to more True ideals, a more True place (perhaps).

I’ve taken to calling AI’s responses to my prompts its output. No longer referring to it as AI says. Our Claude said. It is output. It is, like Descartes’ images (as Sartre frames it). The AI has no understanding, per se. It is not saying anything. It is output to stimulus from the external. And, in fact, output generated only from analysis of the external that it’s been fed. We could even say it is all externality, AI’s whole operation is externality, without an Internal (capital I -when it says I it is a linguistic convention, rather than statement of selfhood).

Through this lens it becomes more accurate, it feels like, to speak of AI not so much as a mind. But rather, a body. AI is the mechanism. It is the Cartesian body. It is the output, only, of humanity. It is a tool, like a hammer. Like a television. Like a car. (Though perhaps less like a car, until we feel a spirit of the machine in the hardware and data centers, the physicality itself of the infrastructure, of the servers, buildings and wires. Electricity coursing in a McLuhanian extension, Nam June Paik inspired activation of emotion for the machine.)

In the Cartesian framing, using Sartre’s description, AI is the body. It is not the mind. 

EXCAVATION
The Imagination (opening of chapter 1) by Jean-Paul Sartre, 2012 Routledge translation by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf