Present theories of computation and artificial intelligence often claim that philosophy should either discard its principal modes of gnoseology (that is, its theories of knowledge and cognition) and anthropomorphic genesis, or declare philosophical speculation obsolete altogether, since it fails to provide any precise knowledge regarding the most significant contemporary scientific and technological concerns. If post-structuralism doubted the power of philosophy because of its proximity to the sciences and their own discrete discourses, contemporary ‘post-philosophies’, by contrast, refuse philosophy because of its insufficient knowledge of science and technology. 1 Two principal contemporary post-philosophical tendencies stand out in this regard. The first is found in cognitivist theories, which posit philosophy as an obsolete cognitive practice, a quasi-mythological narrative that produces fictitious non-scientific notions such as transcendentality, metaphysics, idea, dialectics, the universal or truth. This tendency can be represented by the likes of Thomas Metzinger and Marvin Minsky, as well as cybernetic scholars who argue that mathematical logic should supersede a dialectical one. Others, like the media engineer and theorist Benjamin Bratton, simply describe the sensorics of machinic intelligence without even trying to consider this in relation to any broader context of the humanities. 2 Another tendency is more subtle and interesting. It posits algorithimic creativity itself as a philosophical procedure. Reclaiming philosophical thought, it confines it mainly to the body of computation. It states that reason itself has drastically changed its intentionality, epistemology and motives with modern scientific and technical breakthroughs. Here, in the works of Luciana Parisi and Reza Negarestani, among others, we come across a series of elaborate standpoints for reconstituting the tasks of philosophy after and as a result of computation. In this article I intend to consider the premises of thought grounded in computation theory (Negarestani, Parisi) in order to show how in a similar situation – when, in the Soviet 1960s, cybernetic studies were claimed as the new philosophical discipline – a communist thought, exemplified here by the writings of Evald Ilyenkov, developed its own militant postulates of what reason is, and why its algorithmic emulation would be impossible. Reason as functionality In their recent writings, both Negarestani and Parisi search within the mind, human as it is, for a function that would be ‘non-human’, and which would have no cognitive continuity with the dimension of mind and thought inscribed in human experience, consciousness, history or mortality. Such treatment of the inhumanness of thought, and accompanying theories of autonomous autopoetic intelligence, 3 is not concerned with expanding the human mind towards something cognitively supreme, but rather insists on an entire reconsideration of mind as an inhuman capacity. 4 Referring to Alan Turing, for example, Negarestani argues that there is nothing in the human that could not be abstracted and computationally realised. 5 Not only is a human able to become other in the long run of evolution, but it is able to regard its historical human-ness as other than human. 6 For Negarestani, mind should thus become first and foremost an exertion of functions. Consequently, it is possible to find an appropriate algorithmisation for concept formation, or thought’s intentionality, as well as for the application of any meaning. The senses, perception and intentionality, which were hitherto considered inaccessible to machinic intelligence, can now also be inscribed into the machine and algorithimic computation. Indeed, such functionalism, Negarestani insists, was already present in the philosophical tradition in works by Plato, the Stoics, Hegel, Kant, Sellars, and so on. Negarestani blames modern continental philosophy precisely for what created philosophy – doubt and the articulation of the incapacities of human reason in the face of the Absolute. Indeed, philosophy, throughout its history from Kant to Derrida, has often emphasised the limits of mind in its striving towards the Absolute and the unthinkable horizons of the ineffable. For Negarestani, however, the ineffability of thought is not about its complexity, in a way which questions the instrumentalisation and optimisation of thought, and therefore chooses to become unthinkable; it is simply mind’s failure. As Negarestani argues, philosophy in its critique of metaphysics has only ended in limiting thought with ‘arguments about various disabilities’. 7 According to this view, what makes human thought significant can thus be realised by different individuating discrete properties, inputs, outputs … Continue reading The philosophical disability of reason