Historical Materialism Cluj, 2024, August 29-31 (original) (raw)

2024, Title of The Presentation: Can ‘Thinking Machines’ Think? A Vygotskyan Response, Chair: Siyaves Azeri

The idea of ‘learning and thinking machines’ reflects a traditional view on thinking implying that machines can possess a human-like conceptual-thinking ability. This view assumes thinking to happen either in the brain or “mind” while considering the ability of machines with an information processing system function as a ‘brain/mind’ that process inputs transforming them into a series of activities with the latter being considered ‘thinking’. Accordingly, like humans, ‘thinking machines’ also try to overcome problems they encounter by carrying out a series of operational processes reminiscent of human reasoning. In this form, the socio-historical determinations of thinking activity, that is, the fact that human thought emerges only in the transformative socio-historical human activity, is ignored. According to Vygotsky (1987), conceptual thinking and meaningful speech emerge when two skills, namely thinking and speaking, coming from different ontogenetic roots, are conjoined and determine each other through human social activity. Thus, human-thinking emerges only as a result of a process in which the ‘external’ becomes ‘internal’ and the ‘social’ transforms into the ‘individual’. However, thinking always exists before the child, because the child is born into a social relationship where ‘thought as a social reality and a social relation’ already exists; that is, ‘the individual thinking of the child occurs in the form of thinking of thoughts that existed before them’ (Azeri, 2021). Thus, thinking is not something that emerges from data processing activity conducted in an abstract realm called ‘mind’ to be projected onto nature, but rather a form of activity that arises within the social relations of social humans. Therefore, thinking is not merely information processing by a machine-like being, but a mode of activity that includes all these processes and emerges towards and through the objective and social world. This particular mode of activity, which appears with the formation of human language, represents a unique and extraordinary process comparable to ‘the leap from inanimate matter to living matter’ (Azeri, 2021) or ‘the transition from inorganic to living matter’ (Luria, 1982). I argue that the idea of the ‘thinking machines’, as presented in the mainstream, seems a fantasy mirroring the present-day social relations where human mind and human-thinking is conceived of after the image of the machine.