The World as Affordances: Phenomenology and Embeddedness in Heidegger and AI

The philosophical discourses on AI have profound impact on the traditional philosophical notions such as human intelligence, mind-world relationship, and the good-life. The new terminologies like “Posthumanism”, “Transhumanism”, and “Cyborg” have been problematizing the notion of the ‘human’ itself as it is being claimed by a few that the arrival of AI would finally erase the boundaries between humans and machines. Posthuman philosophers argue that the ‘end of humanism’ started by the postmodern philosophers would reach its zenith in AI. In this chapter, we will examine the notion of ‘intelligence’ in AI through the phenomenological inquiry into the nature of human existence and would inquire whether the metanarrative of AI would encompass the embodied intelligence as found in humans. We will attempt to show that the claims of AI are dependent on the notion of computational intelligence which Heidegger calls as the “present-at-hand”. The notion of “present-at-hand” refers to those skills which require explicit, procedural, and logical reasoning. According to Hubert Dreyfus, AI’s claims are based on the first set of skills which do not require the “practical know-how”, and therefore it can be replicated by the machines based on the computational model. However, another model of intelligence is based on the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ or ‘embodied cognition’ which requires the mastering of the practical skills through the kinaesthetic embodied efforts like swimming, dancing, mountain climbing, etc. Through the notion of practical knowledge, Hubert Dreyfus emphasizes on the role of embodiment in developing our intelligence. The chapter will argue that phenomenology does not interpret the world as the object to be calculated but as the affordances provided by our embodied capacities. If we had a stiff, immobile body then the world and its objects cannot offer any affordance to us. Hence, our experience of the world is based on our embodied capacities to realize any cognitive possibilities in the world. This practical, embedded phenomenological agency makes human intelligence as situated. AI’s claims of intelligence ignore the situated, phenomenological understanding of the intelligence.