Artificial History of Natural Intelligence
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A01=David W. Bates
Artificial Intelligence
Author_David W. Bates
Brain
Category=QDTM
Category=UBJ
computers
cybernetics
epistemology
eq_bestseller
eq_computing
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
error
mind
organism
reason
Technology
Product details
- ISBN 9780226849140
- Weight: 653g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Feb 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
David W. Bates is professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books, including Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France.
