“L’homme est né libre” mais partout on le voit soumis à des mécanismes, des mécanismes mentaux ou sociaux. Les sciences de l’homme ont toujours pris au sérieux cette métaphore de la machine humaine ou sociale : le système auto-régulé de A. Smith, le structuralisme, les sciences cognitives. Aujourd’hui, la robotique, le génie génétique, les nanotechnologies pourraient transformer en réalité ce qui n’est encore que du domaine de la théorie ou de la spéculation. Les automates qui nous remplaceront seront débarrassés de cet appendice encombrant, la conscience. Le tragique aura définitivement disparu de leur existence.
La mécanisation de l’esprit a donc beaucoup de progrès à faire ; elle s’y emploiera tant est forte la tentation de fuir le tragique de la condition humaine dans le dépassement de l’homme par la machine.
Avions-nous oublié le mal ?
par Jean-Pierre Dupuy
http://www.hprevot.fr/Forum-Confiance/notes-de-lecture/oublimal.html
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Les savants croient-ils en leurs théories ?
Une lecture philosophique de l’histoire des sciences cognitives
par Jean-Pierre Dupuy
On the Origins of Cognitive Science
The Mechanization of the Mind
by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists.
Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.