Symbolic Systems Forum - Jessica Riskin, History Department

Jessica Riskin, History Department, "Mind Out of Matter"

ABSTRACT:

The talk will describe my book-in-progress, which is about the genesis and early history of artificial life. The book will examine attempts to simulate the behaviors and bodily functions of living creatures from the first appearance of these attempts as thought-experiments in the mid-seventeenth century, through their transformation into actual experiments in the early eighteenth century, and ending with the widespread rejection, in the early nineteenth century, of the possibility of simulating life in mechanism. My central interest in telling this story is in the continual re-definition of life and mind, on the one hand, and of machinery, on the other, resulting from these measurements of each against the other. The terms in which nineteenth-century philosophers and engineers rejected the possibility of mechanical simulations of life implied a new understanding of life's (and machinery's) defining features. Some key elements of this new understanding would later, I believe, inform the return of artificial life in cybernetics.

SPEAKER:

Jessica Riskin is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture, and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history. She is currently writing a book on the history of artificial life since the seventeenth century, as inseparably connected with the history of notions of consciousness and selfhood. The book's working title is Mind Out of Matter: A History of the Quest for a Conscious Machine.