Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 47.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong (245)
[2] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong) (62)
[3] From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong (210)
[4] From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong) (19)
[5] From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong) (113)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-10 01:55:01+00:00
From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
Just a point related to this if I understand it right:
"As long as there is no serious recognition of the assumption, that the
Humanities pose questions, for which the concrete technologies we have
are insufficient, not because the technology does not exist, but because
the abstract models on which such technologies are founded do not fit
the material available to Humanists, there is no progress on this”
One of the main issues with digital humanities is a naive approach
to/assumptions about it, that you might find in someone who is new to it, or who
has a science, engineering background etc. Many of the tools we use arise from
that background - information technology is assumed to be a ’science’ and maths,
though as symbol manipulation it is as much about language and meaning. As a
metaphor, the writer of the first software was both the child of a romantic
poet, and a gifted mathematician. Her first thoughts on the implications of what
had begun related to both solving maths problems and philosophical speculations
on the nature of mind. Anyway, the point is that people tend to assume that
Digital Humanities is the application of scientific or mathematical methods to
humanities. Eg: do statistics on words. Get loads of data ‘observations’ on a
humanities topic, and run correlations, test hypotheses etc. We can and do do
that, and it’s useful, and provides insights that would not have been possible
without it, but that is not the main point. The point is we aren’t limited to
that in the same way that humanities is not limited to science. Science can only
study repeatable phenomena - eg: you must make repeated observations, ceteris
parabis, and record the data, otherwise it’s not valid science; a scientific
experiment must be repeatable by another to test it, otherwise it’s not science
- this is a factor in the epistemology and ontology of science. In humanities we
can study those, such as the history of Pacific fisheries by counting how many
ships from which countries caught how many fish - that’s a repetition of
something, but we just as often, or more often study things which are multi-
factor and highly historically contingent and relative unique. Did Brutus kill
Caesar? Why? We can’t count how many time Brutus killed Caesar, to do science,
but it is still a question we can make truth claims about, and which is
important to our understanding of politics, literature, the human condition, etc
etc.
So when we really get into DH, and this applies to most people I know who have
been involved in DH, we see it as an adaption of those tools, which are grounded
in scientistic epistemology and ontology, to humanities different needs. It’s
bricolage - taking these tools and turning them to our own purpose, which has
some fundamental differences to the purposes those tools were built for. To do
humanities with these tools and methods, we need to hack them, reassemble them,
and augment them with new APIs and user interfaces, etc. The
political/social/ethical reasons we choose projects - why this data, why this
this data structure and not another, and how and what we represent, are also
crucial factors important, and sometimes the most important thing, in relation
to which an algorithm or statistical method used is trivial. A simple example -
I’m doing colonial history. I use computers to find ‘repeated observations’ in
vast amounts of text. These are events on a certain topic. I do the same to find
information on another topic, perhaps in another corpus. The statistics on this
are useful and interesting and part of the contextual story. But in addition,
this data allows me to navigate from point to point across datasets to piece
together a story. Here is data on sheep imports and data on profits, plus data
on events, plus data on squatters runs, plus data on conflict events. By putting
all this together there is a broad context of a massive influx of sheep in a
short time period, and demand for pasture, driven by global demand. Within this
is the personal story - these 6 events involved this squatter, who owned a run
in this location, while these other datapoints represents the movements of a
resistance fighter, which intersects with these other resistance fighters, which
intersect with this event on that squatters run. And I also have the UI tools to
read what the squatter wrote about it, and a 3D map to get some sense of the
places these things happened in which have ethical and emotional implications.
Also importantly, this has made me reconceptualise the way I understand both
stories and data, in a hybrid literary and IT way, I have data on people, places
and times, I create a data structure for an ‘event’ object, which must have a
unique location, and time, and may have multiple people. A ‘plot’ can be
‘plotted’ by connecting events along some common attribute, such as the
biographical plot of all occurrences of this one person across multiple
datasets, including ‘event’ data. This is analogous to simple notion that a
story has a character setting and a plot. This is a more structuralist
perspective. There are countless plots in the data. A person with the UI can
explore them as they wish. The network of intersecting plots: de-centred,
asynchronous, non-canonical, choose-your-own adventure, narratives is a post-
structuralist perspective. It is also classical. It is analogous to the ‘weave’
of the fates in Greek myth, and how there are recurring characters crossing over
on different story lines. It’s analogous to the intersection of songlines.
To get back to the original question though, this is an aside because this is
not about what people in DH don’t see, it’s more about what people not in DH
superficially assume DH is, without seeing the depth of what it really is.
BTW, there was always a question about what it should be called - the main shift
was from ‘Computational Humanities’ to ‘Digital Humanities’, but none of them
seemed to fit quite right, but were something we'd settle for, so we could stop
choosing the band name and get on with making the music. These don’t translate
well into a title either ‘Computational Humanist’ and ‘Digital Humanist’ have
alternate meanings that are not intended. We’re not necessarily ‘humanists’ and
I’m not digital, I’m corporeal. I’m leaning toward ‘Humanities technologist’ as
a more general and applicable term - it means knowing how to do things in
Humanities. It’s not necessarily limited to computers, but it is about the shift
in focus to ‘know how’, technology. Shift from what? Knowledge production and
storage? Logocentrism? Theory and critique? The point is we still do all those
things, but the focus is on ‘how’ we do them, because while publishing
technology and infrastructure remained relatively static as the principle
technology of academia, the radical change in Information Technology has called
this ‘how’ into question. This might be the main shift in humanities over the
last few decades at the scale of ‘romanticism’, ‘positivism’, ’structuralism’,
‘post-structuralism’, etc.
Bill Pascoe
Get Outlook for Mac<https://aka.ms/GetOutlookForMac>
From: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Date: Monday, 8 June 2026 at 4:27 pm
To: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 42.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
http://www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2026-06-03 09:18:17+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.29: what's wrong
Dear Willard, Dear all,
I think your clarification here most important:
> So, I'd say, ironically, our field of study is
> limited insofar as we fail to study the limits computing in the
> humanities encounters whenever pressed to the limits of what the machine
> can do at any one moment.
In my opinion, the core of the problem is, that there are extremely few
people who have a systematic interest in the question of how to apply
computation on an abstract level to "the Humanities". Or even to
"History". I observe that more than 99 % of the practitioners of "DH"
are interested in questions like: what is the best way to use the tools
that are available to answer this very specific question I have.
When you have been sitting in any funding committee you will invariably
have encountered the argument: "This is an interesting problem, but
there is no Humanities theme which profits from it within the project.
Its just those computer science people who will profit. So we should
not fund it."
As long as there is no serious recognition of the assumption, that the
Humanities pose questions, for which the concrete technologies we have
are insufficient, not because the technology does not exist, but because
the abstract models on which such technologies are founded do not fit
the material available to Humanists, there is no progress on this.
If you are willing to suffer from the cynicism of a grumpy
septuagenarian, part of what I mean is illustrated in
https://www.academia.edu/165759154/Manfred_Thaller_On_the_Extraction_and_Communi
cation_of_Historical_Knowledge_A_Pipedream
> By ignoring them, instead of taking them as
> characteristics of a different intelligence than our own, we fog the
> mind with chatter about the next release.
I totally agree with the "chatter about the next release". But I find it
very hard to swallow the "characteristics of a different intelligence
than our own". I see no intelligence there, just data structures and
algorithms. These are different enough for me.
Kind regards,
Manfred
Am 30.05.26 um 08:45 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 29.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> http://www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2026-05-30 06:30:50+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.26: what's wrong
>
> Jim Rovira asks why I think digital humanities is limited. I'd say,
> because we are, as finite creatures, along with all that we do. Digital
> humanities goes back to a finite-state machine, which in its application
> to the artefacts we study runs into what Stevan Harnad called "The
> symbol grounding problem" (1990)*, or what happens in "modeling the mind"
> (Harnad 1990). Not only does this problem remain unsolved (Harnad 2010)**,
> but it is the origin of all that's truly interesting in digital
> humanities itself. So, I'd say, ironically, our field of study is
> limited insofar as we fail to study the limits computing in the
> humanities encounters whenever pressed to the limits of what the machine
> can do at any one moment. By ignoring them, instead of taking them as
> characteristics of a different intelligence than our own, we fog the
> mind with chatter about the next release.
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
> -----
> *Stevan Harnad, "The symbol grounding problem". Physica D 42 (1990) 335-346.
> **Stevan Harnad, "Symbol Grounding Problem: Turing-‐Scale Solution Needed".
> IEEE AMD Newsletter 7(1).
>
> On 28/05/2026 07:03, Humanist wrote:
>> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 26.
>> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>> Hosted by DH-Cologne
>> http://www.dhhumanist.org
>> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: 2026-05-27 23:10:17+00:00
>> From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.18: what's wrong
>>
>> I'm curious why you think there are intellectual limitations? Why do you
>> think DH needs to be liberated?
>>
>> The mind is always free.
>>
>> Server space, physical space, faculty lines are never free.
>>
>> Jim R
>>
>>
>>>> For digital humanities as a field of research, what is the most serious
>>>> intellectual limitation? Is there one overriding problem holding everyone
>>>> back--even if they don't realise what it is? Is there a fundamental
>>>> impediment that if removed, circumvented or better understood would
>>>> liberate research across the disciplines which computing engages
>>>> with?
>
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
> Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
> (http://tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH); Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
> Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
> (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp);
> http://www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-08 13:36:54+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong)
If we can't define a term, perhaps we should solve that problem first and
THEN apply definitions to different objects?
I think it's safer and more intelligent to assume a categorical distinction
between computers and the human brain since one is organic and the other is
not.
And also since the human brain thinks in words, feelings, images, sounds,
and the combination of all of these in memory, all at once, while computers
"think" only in high and low voltage states. Words literally do not exist
for a computer. LLMs reduce word groups to numbers, calculate the most
likely words that follow, and then output words on a screen as a display
option. Words, sounds, and images for computers are all display options for
a processing unit that handles them all fundamentally the same way: 1s and
0s.
These differences are categorical unless we have some kind of definition of
"intelligence" that meaningfully applies to both, emphasize "meaningfully."
Jim R
On Mon, Jun 8, 2026 at 2:36 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> My good and close friend Manfred has said in response to my "what's
> wrong?" that,
>
> > I find it very hard to swallow the "characteristics of a different
> intelligence
> > than our own". I see no intelligence there, just data structures and
> > algorithms. These are different enough for me.
>
> I would find none too--if I assumed that 'intelliigence' is an attribute
> we can securely define. But I don't. I think it's not only safer but
> also more intelligent to assume difference, however great, rather than a
> categorial distinction. This frees one to watch out for those pesky and
> perhaps relevatory anomalies. Did not 'intelligent' life emerge somehow
> from once molten inorganic matter?
>
> Ha!
>
> WM
>
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
> Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
> (tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH); Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
> Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
> (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp/);
> 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
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-08 12:13:02+00:00
From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
Dear Willard and Manfred,
Let me add to what you both are talking about by recalling what went on at UVA
after the epochal founding of IATH.
For me, two people were crucial. First, Dino Buzzetti, second, Johanna Drucker.
Dino and I published together but most of all we kept pressing a conversation
about the problem of a “Nonsense Ontology”, ie, an ontology based in the crucial
axial premise — ifor us it applies to all Science and all Humanities — that "A
equals A if and only if A does not equal A”. Since we both have written about
this fairly often I won’t belabor our view of its relevance here.
Johanna. It’s important that Manfred endorses Johanna Drucker’s “claim that the
humanities have no data at all”, just capta. When she and I worked together at
UV A for 5 years this understanding was fundamental, and marked my move from
IATH to the founding of ARP (Applied Research In Patacriticism) by myself,
Johanna, and Bethany Nowviskie. Everything that came out of ARP was either
purely exploratory (the IVANHOE game), narrowly focused (the Juxta collation
tool), or abandoned (“Time Modeling”). But many important endeavors have been
“abandoned” for other important things. ARP provoked important things not least
of all Johana’s astonishing work after she left UVA.
For myself, the “industrialization” of TEI and relational base machine models
for DH was dispiriting, so “after” IATH and ARP I returned to exploring what made
“traditional” scholarly machines, especially paper-based machines, so much more
powerful than digital machines for humanistic inquiry. The move eventually led
me back to DH, via the investigation of graph databasing, and the attempt to
design a machine model for Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories archive. We
needed — I was working with Mike Fox — $150k to build the working model, but
our NEH application was turned down (2022) — not entirely unreasonably, though I
am certain that if we were given the support money we would have worked through
the inevitable uncertainties in the model by the action of trying to construct
it.
The Old Time Stories was our target because it forced the model to allow the
machine to handle ("try to Understand” [thank you, Manfred] and keep on trying")
simultaneously text, image, and audial materials so that the machine could help
clarify and refine the human investigations and transmissions of those (and all)
historical, historiated, materials.
I am too old now to undertake the project, and had we been funded I would have
had to hand over the work to others after helping to set it going. But I remain
convinced that DH would do well to break out of the machines it invented in the
late 1980s and start designing and building graph and hypergraph databases for
the humanities.
That’s all I think I might add here, except this. I’m not doing any DH work
anymore. Shortly U. of Chicago press will publish my print edition
(“traditional" but still, like all scholarly editions, experimental, whether or
not they are aware of it) of the Old Time Stories, as well as some works —
they’re related — of “Nonsense” poetry and prosepoetry. One was published in
2025, transubstantiations, and the other, What Language for Prophets and/or
Loss, will be published this coming July, next month — both from Station Hill
Press). The second is “illuminated” with the remarkable collages of Arthur
Kennickell. Sometime soon, probably in 2027, Chax Press will publish a third
work in this series, a trilogy of pataparodies titled Praise Against the Dying
of the Light.
Take this as a salute to you both,
Jerry
From: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Date: Monday, June 8, 2026 at 2:27 AM
To: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
Subject: [Humanist] 40.42: what's wrong
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 42.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org<http://www.dhhumanist.org>
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2026-06-03 09:18:17+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.29: what's wrong
Dear Willard, Dear all,
I think your clarification here most important:
> So, I'd say, ironically, our field of study is
> limited insofar as we fail to study the limits computing in the
> humanities encounters whenever pressed to the limits of what the machine
> can do at any one moment.
In my opinion, the core of the problem is, that there are extremely few
people who have a systematic interest in the question of how to apply
computation on an abstract level to "the Humanities". Or even to
"History". I observe that more than 99 % of the practitioners of "DH"
are interested in questions like: what is the best way to use the tools
that are available to answer this very specific question I have.
When you have been sitting in any funding committee you will invariably
have encountered the argument: "This is an interesting problem, but
there is no Humanities theme which profits from it within the project.
Its just those computer science people who will profit. So we should
not fund it."
As long as there is no serious recognition of the assumption, that the
Humanities pose questions, for which the concrete technologies we have
are insufficient, not because the technology does not exist, but because
the abstract models on which such technologies are founded do not fit
the material available to Humanists, there is no progress on this.
If you are willing to suffer from the cynicism of a grumpy
septuagenarian, part of what I mean is illustrated in
https://www.academia.edu/165759154/Manfred_Thaller_On_the_Extraction_and_Communi
cation_of_Historical_Knowledge_A_Pipedream
> By ignoring them, instead of taking them as
> characteristics of a different intelligence than our own, we fog the
> mind with chatter about the next release.
I totally agree with the "chatter about the next release". But I find it
very hard to swallow the "characteristics of a different intelligence
than our own". I see no intelligence there, just data structures and
algorithms. These are different enough for me.
Kind regards,
Manfred
Am 30.05.26 um 08:45 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 29.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org<http://www.dhhumanist.org>
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2026-05-30 06:30:50+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.26: what's wrong
>
> Jim Rovira asks why I think digital humanities is limited. I'd say,
> because we are, as finite creatures, along with all that we do. Digital
> humanities goes back to a finite-state machine, which in its application
> to the artefacts we study runs into what Stevan Harnad called "The
> symbol grounding problem" (1990)*, or what happens in "modeling the mind"
> (Harnad 1990). Not only does this problem remain unsolved (Harnad 2010)**,
> but it is the origin of all that's truly interesting in digital
> humanities itself. So, I'd say, ironically, our field of study is
> limited insofar as we fail to study the limits computing in the
> humanities encounters whenever pressed to the limits of what the machine
> can do at any one moment. By ignoring them, instead of taking them as
> characteristics of a different intelligence than our own, we fog the
> mind with chatter about the next release.
>
> Comments?
>
> WM
> -----
> *Stevan Harnad, "The symbol grounding problem". Physica D 42 (1990) 335-346.
> **Stevan Harnad, "Symbol Grounding Problem: Turing-‐Scale Solution Needed".
> IEEE AMD Newsletter 7(1).
>
> On 28/05/2026 07:03, Humanist wrote:
>> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 26.
>> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>> Hosted by DH-Cologne
>> www.dhhumanist.org<http://www.dhhumanist.org>
>> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: 2026-05-27 23:10:17+00:00
>> From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.18: what's wrong
>>
>> I'm curious why you think there are intellectual limitations? Why do you
>> think DH needs to be liberated?
>>
>> The mind is always free.
>>
>> Server space, physical space, faculty lines are never free.
>>
>> Jim R
>>
>>
>>>> For digital humanities as a field of research, what is the most serious
>>>> intellectual limitation? Is there one overriding problem holding everyone
>>>> back--even if they don't realise what it is? Is there a fundamental
>>>> impediment that if removed, circumvented or better understood would
>>>> liberate research across the disciplines which computing engages
>>>> with?
>
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
> Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
> (tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH); Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
> Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
> (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp/<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp/>);
> www.mccarty.org.uk<http://www.mccarty.org.uk>
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-08 12:05:11+00:00
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong)
Dear Willard,
It is with consternation and regret that I have begun to wonder whether there is
intelligent life on this planet. Though I will admit that dogs continue to give
me hope.
Someone once said that the greatest sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the
universe is that they have not bothered to contact us.
Ken
> On 8 Jun 2026, at 08:34, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
> Did not 'intelligent' life emerge somehow
> from once molten inorganic matter?
>
> Ha!
>
> WM
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2026-06-08 10:02:52+00:00
From: Manfred Thaller <manfred.thaller@uni-koeln.de>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 40.44: no intelligence? (what's wrong)
Dear Willard,/
A touch, a touch, I do confess 't/.
(This is no endorsement of Laertes' character, nor an adoption of any
parallels to the context.)
Where I most certainly acknowledge an error of mine is, that you could
interpret my statement as saying, that "intelligence" is a binary
property. I always insist, that computational methods have to change
into a direction, where they are built to emphasize reasoning with
non-binary truth values, before they become directly applicable to
inherent support for Humanities conclusions, rather than finding an
appropriate book in the library. Any implication, that intelligence is a
binary property, being either there or not at all, is certainly not
intended.
But my scepticism about conceptualizing current IT systems as
representing another intelligence, is for me not a contradiction to the
conceptual possibility of a non-protein-based cognitive agent, but a
doubt, that the claim as such helps much to cope with the technology.
Particularly, as the current results of AI possibly most of all show,
how shacky some vary popular concepts are. It may be, that I remember
too many cases, where the so called "creative industries" basked in the
glory of an immaterial superiority. It always struck me, how it comes,
that abundantly creative artists manage to produce objects which are so
similar, that it is quite easy for a student of the subject to identify
in which decade this act of creativeness was performed. Lets face it: an
extremely large percentage of "creativity" consists of copying slightly
modifyingly trending objects. That this can be copied by a
non-protein-based agent in my opinion does not show that we encounter
another intelligence, but simply, that we overestimated or misunderstood
our own, shrouding and mystifying it in a vague adoration of the "genius".
The strongest indication of creativity I see at this moment of
generative AI, is the ability to hallucinate. There are phenomena
related to it, which in the protein case are clearly related to
neurological malfunctions, synaesthesia comes to mind. On the other
hand, religious visions are by many people assumed to be another
category, though some of the stories about them read strikingly similar
to synaesthesia. So: Is a non-protein-based cognitive agent that
hallucinates doing so because it is a valid (but different) type of
intelligence, therefore also able of (different) religious revelations,
or is it just an indication of malfunctions? Or, is the ability to
develop conspiracy theories, unbothered by factual evidence, the
ultimate triumph of protein-based intelligence, which of course also
leaves a digital record, to be copied and imitated by non-protein based
agents? (That the later have difficulties to distinguish between those
digital records from the ones relating to factual evidence does not
devalue them; many of the protein-based cognitive agents share the
inability.)
My problem is simply, that I have the feeling, very much strengthened by
the recent AI developments, that we stand in the way of our own
understanding of the world by a tendency to shroud the working of our
intelligence by withdrawing into semi-metaphysical concepts.
So my proposal would be, not to understand non-protein-based cognitive
agents as another realization of "Intelligence", but take inspiration
from it, to look more soberly on the data structures and algorithms
employed by protein based ones.
As ever,
Manfred
Am 08.06.26 um 08:36 schrieb Humanist:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 44.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to:humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2026-06-08 06:24:44+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty<willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: no intelligence?
>
> My good and close friend Manfred has said in response to my "what's
> wrong?" that,
>
>> I find it very hard to swallow the "characteristics of a different
> intelligence
>> than our own". I see no intelligence there, just data structures and
>> algorithms. These are different enough for me.
> I would find none too--if I assumed that 'intelliigence' is an attribute
> we can securely define. But I don't. I think it's not only safer but
> also more intelligent to assume difference, however great, rather than a
> categorial distinction. This frees one to watch out for those pesky and
> perhaps relevatory anomalies. Did not 'intelligent' life emerge somehow
> from once molten inorganic matter?
>
> Ha!
>
> WM
>
> --
> Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
> Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities
> (tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH); Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
> Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
> (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/sfsp/);
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--
Prof.em.Dr. Manfred Thaller
formerly University at Cologne /
zuletzt Universität zu Köln
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