Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 346.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2026-02-27 19:23:33+00:00
        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.345: anthropologist Kapferer on AI

Why the heck would we even want a "cognitive unity"? Really fast
calculators are just fine doing what they do.

Jim R

On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 12:21 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 345.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2026-02-26 12:21:14+00:00
>         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>         Subject: anthropology of AI
>
> The Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer has written a fine
> editorial in the latest issue of Anthropology Today 42.1: 1-3, "To be or
> not to be in the age of AI",
> <https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70053>.
>
> I quote from Kapferer's editorial:
>
> > The argument draws on my ethnographic work on Sinhalese healing
> > rituals, material that anticipated cybernetic insights before I
> > encountered them in theory. These rituals demonstrate the
> > autopoietic, or self-producing, character of human intelligence that
> > AI systems have yet to approximate. Fieldwork intuition led me to
> > recognize what von Foerster would later articulate: that genuine
> > intelligence emerges from embodied participation, not disembodied
> > processing. Ritual achieves what AI cannot: the participatory
> > transformation of persons and relationships through embodied
> > collective action. And yet this very limitation suggests
> > possibilities. The gap between AI and human intelligence can be
> > closed, though not crossed, through designs that couple machine
> > processing to human participation.
> >
> > There is considerable ambivalence concerning the positive and
> > negative possibilities of AI intimated in this brief essay, not
> > least its dehumanizing threat to human being. A more hopeful
> > possibility is the potential of an integrated partnership, a co-
> > evolutionary dynamic in which human being and AI form a cognitive
> > unity.
>
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
>    Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk

--
Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>

   - *David Bowie and Romanticism
   <https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
   Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
   - *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
   <https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
   Routledge, 2023


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