Intelligence from the Future of the Past
A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.
The brain is set firmly within the cranium, but the position of the mind is indefinite. Part individual, part collective, part made, part acquired, part deliberative, and part automatic. The mind’s patchwork complicates the effort to separate individual capability from collective and tacit capacity.
In 1998 Andy Clark and David Chalmers asked where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins. They posed three thought experiments to confront what might be called the hermetic-mind hypothesis — that mind and brain are coextensive. Experiment one involved rotating shapes into a socket in one’s mind; experiment two rotating the same objects on a screen; and in the third, alternately using a neural prosthetic implant or one’s unassisted mind. Clark and Chalmers propose that the second and third share technology, whereas the first and third share cranium. Perhaps it would be more parsimonious to describe them all as cognitive.
The entwinement between thought and tool is illustrated by the instrument-augmented reasoning achieved by several technologies of intelligence: Galileo’s Sector, Napier’s Bones, Oughtred’s Slide Rule, and Newton’s Cursor. Each of them a mathematical device or part whose outputs are not material products but a dizzying variety of calculations. None of them is what might be described as “user friendly.” They are all expert-friendly and expert-enhancing. They are to the analyst what a tennis racket is to Roger Federer.
Galileo’s Le Operazioni del Compasso Geometrico et Militare was a proprietary operational manual for a range-finding and calculating compass. It introduced users to Galileo’s incredibly versatile, protractor-like device, capable of measuring heights, distances, depths, and weights, calculating roots and compound interest, and estimating volumes. It was made from two metal legs connected through an articulating disc with support for a plumb line. It is spanned by a quadrant with the faces of each part marked with polygonal, polygraphic, and stereometrical lines.
To the modern eye it is little more than a metal doodad, an alchemist’s gimcrack, or Renaissance savant’s idol. In practice, it is a case study in the minimal use of matter to amplify the power of mind. It barely has two moving parts and yet assists in calculations super-numerous.
As a mechanical device, it is very far in complication from the intricacies of the Pascaline (1644), the Stepped Reckoner (1673), the Arithmometer (1820), and the Difference Engine (1822). Each of these is a mechanical marvel. The Pascaline comprised eight axles and a perpendicular gear connected through numerous ratchets, gears, and drums. The Difference Engine required 25,000 separate parts, and for self-evident reasons, was never built.
The Pascaline and Difference Engine are the rightful progenitors of modern computers and algorithms, at least as defined in terms of mechanical or electronic degrees of freedom. This point was made by Turing in the 1950s. The sector and slide rule, along with their ilk, speak to a different history. The latter are on a cultural genealogy towards exbodiment, or minimally engineered artifacts that enhance the adaptive capabilities of their users. They are from a ratiocinating land that time forgot, or is perhaps trying to forget.
Anne Collins and Michael Frank* at Brown provide an insight into why studying these artifacts is substantive and not only nostalgic. Most non-trivial tasks or problems require the concatenation of several steps, each of which contributes a partial solution, evidence of “cascading hierarchical structures,” as Collins and Frank call them. These tasks are grounded in sensorimotor processing or “executive functions [that] cannot be modularized separately from perceptual and motor systems, and that … scaffold on top of motor action selection.” One implication of this work is that calculating instruments are like limbs and joints that move the mind through a sequence of calculations rather than a body through the space of behavior.
The Hewlett-Packard 35, HP35, is often described as the first “pocket calculator.” Pocket as defined by the sartorial specification of the engineer, the shirt pocket, or habitual receptacle of a slide rule. The slide rule is a transcendental marvel. Inspired by Galileo’s sector, extending Napier’s Lattice, and then hybridizing these with the carpenter’s rule to enlarge the class of possible calculations from multiplication and root-finding to exponential and logarithms. In 1972, the projected market of the HP35 was 50,000 total units. Within a couple months of production General Electric alone had ordered 20,000 units. Within a few years slide rule production ceased and HP’s revenue increased by a half an order of magnitude. The last slide rule, the endling of the line of Oughtred, was produced in 1976 and donated to The Smithsonian Museum where it remains a relic of reason.
The slide rule is nearly synonymous with ready analytical ingenuity. Any self-respecting employee of NASA from the age of Apollo would be naked without one. Buzz Aldrin was pictured with a slide rule in free-fall on board Gemini 12 in 1966. Spock saves the Starship Enterprise with a slide rule in the third millennium. Calculators like the HP35 would be laughable on the super-futuristic Enterprise. The slide rule projects a timeless cognitive semiotics of resourcefulness.
Spock is from a wiser future that understands what contemporary society is already forgetting in its infatuation with all things AI. That there are two technologies of intelligence, one complementary and the other competitive, the first the expert’s amanuensis and the other an extraordinary labor-saving device. Neither model conforms readily to what the philosopher Jerry Fodor called the language of mind, wherein all true cognition requires internal–intracranial representation. Both extend the mind in ways conceived by Clark and Chalmers, but only one of them threatens mindlessness.
— David Krakauer
President, Santa Fe Institute
* Collins AGE, Frank MJ (2016) Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures. PLoS Comput Biol 12(3): e1004785. doi:10.1371/journal. pcbi.1004785
From the Summer 2024 edition of the SFI Parallax newsletter. Subscribe here for the monthly email version, or email “news at santafe.edu” to request quarterly home delivery in print.
