Intelligence in the Mind not the body
“CHARLES BABBAGE, Esq., M.A.," as he calls himself, is an ambitious reformer who sought to rethink human nature in the name of a reconstructed scientific and social order; also known to be the author of the Calculating Machine, one of the most complicated and ingenious contrivances of human invention for lightening the burdens of the memory and the intellect.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) began work on a mechanical computer that he dubbed the Analytical Engine in the mid-1830s. The machine was to constitute a dramatic improvement on his earlier Difference Engine, which he had originally conceived primarily as a way of automating the process of computing and printing accurate mathematical tables. Almost from the beginning, however, people around Babbage described his inventions in ways that suggest they believed the machines to be endowed with, or at least to closely model, authentic mental powers. Even today, one regularly sees the Analytical Engine cited as an early attempt at computational cognitive science. Babbage himself, however, seems to have steadfastly refrained from making public claims regarding the putative mentality of his machines. Despite his own reluctance to publicly endorse the idea that he had developed a "mechanical mind," he does not seem to have prevented, or even discouraged, those who worked with him from mooting the idea in their own publications on the topic. The Analytical Engine was indeed the focus of a covert research program orchestrated by Babbage into the mechanism of mentality.
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) began work on a mechanical computer that he dubbed the Analytical Engine in the mid-1830s. The machine was to constitute a dramatic improvement on his earlier Difference Engine, which he had originally conceived primarily as a way of automating the process of computing and printing accurate mathematical tables. Almost from the beginning, however, people around Babbage described his inventions in ways that suggest they believed the machines to be endowed with, or at least to closely model, authentic mental powers. Even today, one regularly sees the Analytical Engine cited as an early attempt at computational cognitive science. Babbage himself, however, seems to have steadfastly refrained from making public claims regarding the putative mentality of his machines. Despite his own reluctance to publicly endorse the idea that he had developed a "mechanical mind," he does not seem to have prevented, or even discouraged, those who worked with him from mooting the idea in their own publications on the topic. The Analytical Engine was indeed the focus of a covert research program orchestrated by Babbage into the mechanism of mentality.
With reference to the article by Simon Schaffer –
In early nineteenth-century Britain the word intelligence simultaneously embodied the growing system of social surveillance and the emerging mechanisation of natural philosophies of mind. To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.
Babbage confessed that
'in substituting mechanism for the performance of operations hitherto executed by intellectual labour,... the analogy between these acts and the operations of the mind almost forced upon me the figurative employment of the same terms'.He was committed to phrases such as 'the engine knows' to describe its predetermined move from one calculation to the next.
Babbage reckoned that automatic systems should yield specific truths about the relation among intelligence, work, and mechanism. These truths were by no means self-evident or uncontroversial, especially during the machine-breaking protests which raged during the struggle for Reform. He explained his view of the property of skill involved in the calculating engines:
'my right to dispose, as I will, of such inventions cannot be contested; it is more sacred in its nature than any hereditary or acquired property, for they are the absolute creations of my own mind'.
The factory guides emphasised that inside the automatic system tourists would see those 'admirable adaptations of human skill and intelligence' by which 'we are giving to the present age its peculiar and wonderful characteristic, namely, the triumph of mind over matter'. This triumph was at once a claim about the machine tool system, and thus the control of matter by human intelligence, and a claim about labour discipline, and thus the control of the work force by its masters.
'There is a tendency in the use of machinery to materialize the thoughts'. But in drawing a picture of the balance between the necessary division of labour and the combination of tasks required within the factory system, he insisted that 'such combination requires no small exercise of mind and no conceivable adaptation of wood and iron will produce a machine that can think'.
The aim was to make the identity of intelligence and capitalist machine management self-evident. Socialist, radical, and plebeian critics sought, in contrast, to make it nonsensical or disastrous.
The processes of automation and coordination which had spawned the factory system had made the problem of the place of intelligence urgent. Proponents of machinofacture reckoned that the factory system was evidently a consequence of intelligent reason and thus providential and virtuous. They situated this intelligence in the complex relation between the fixed capital of the steam-driven engines and the mental capital of the mill owners. The work force itself was only judged a producer of value to the extent that it matched precisely the capacities of the machines. The qualities attributed to this intelligence were just those required from this form of superintendence-anticipation and meticulous scrutiny. This was the definition of intelligence which Babbage embodied in his machines and the sense of intelligence which he reckoned those machines displayed. He even claimed that these were the virtues of divinity.
With reference to the article by Andrew Zimmerman –
Babbage suggested that
even supposed miracles are not "deviations from the laws assigned by the Almighty for the government of matter and of mind" but rather are "the exact fulfillment of much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist".
Babbage's high estimation of the potential intelligence of machines rested on his view of a mechanistic universe, of presenting the universe as a machine that humans can construct and control using their minds.
The human as self-interested calculating agent disappears from political economy and reappears as the more or less recalcitrant laborer who must be disciplined and integrated into an assemblage of machines.
Educational programs proposed at this time aimed towards keeping or making the knowledge of the ruled (body) "passive" and the knowledge of the rulers (mind) "active".
“It [labour] replaces labour by machines- but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines".
MANEKA
BT09B009
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