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The Self

Focusing On The Brain, Ignoring the Body

Alessandro Colarossi says that Artificial Intelligence is in danger of a dead end.

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) claimed that to understand human awareness we need to focus on the ‘lived body’ and its relationship to the world. In brief, the idea is that rather than encountering the world in the form of ‘raw sensations’, human beings see objects as representations perceived specifically though our bodies as they interact with the world. In this article I will explore Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body specifically with the aim of understanding what it suggests for artificial intelligence – a discipline whose primary focus is on developing computer systems capable of performing tasks that would otherwise require the mental facility of a human being. According to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived body and the mechanisms of perception, artificial intelligence is doomed to failure for two fundamental reasons. First, a simulation cannot have the same type of meaningful interaction with the world that an embodied conscious being can have, and the absence of such interactions amounts to a fundamental absence of intelligence.

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