TITLE:
Techne in Affective Posthumanism and AI Artefacts: More (or Less) than Human?
AUTHORS:
Denis Larrivee
KEYWORDS:
Affective AI, Techne Constructivism, Posthumanism, Causation Explanans, Substance Ontology, Process Ontology, Biological Autonomy
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.10 No.1,
January
22,
2020
ABSTRACT: In affective neuroscience, constructivist models are acutely influenced
by the modern technological evolution, which underwrites an ongoing
epistemological substitution of techne for episteme. Evidenced symptomatically
in the influence of artificial intelligence (AI), affective artefacts, these
models inform an ontological incursion of techne seen to coincide with
posthumanist aspirations and anthropology. It is from the perspective of this
neuroscientific techne that posthumanism views the human being as increasingly
ill adapted to the modern technological civilization, which, conversely, is
understood to require a technical governance of the sort envisioned through AI.
Among the projects thought necessary for implementing this framework is a
recasting of the human emotional spectrum. Revealed through its techne
recasting, however, are explanatory commitments to a metaphysic of extrinsic
and contiguous causes, where malleability is ontologically constitutive.
Aligned with posthumanist assertions malleability is invoked to argue for a
rapid advance of the human form, normatively driven by enlightenment ideals.
The ontological claim, however, dispenses with the stability of an a priori,
intersubjective and interrelational metaphysical form that undergirds the
emotions, leading to the collapse of a definitional anthropos. This paper will
argue that techne models of the emotions selectively endorse philosophy of
science commitments, thereby introducing a normative inversion that
deconstructs the notion of anthropology pursued in posthumanist aspirations.