Hans Driesch re-visited after a century : on "Leib und Seele – Eine Untersuchung über das psychophysische Grundproblem"

Abstract

Long before Alan Turing laid the foundations of the ongoing artificial intelligence project with all its computer-scientific and philosophical consequences and side effects, we can find in a short but intellectually dense booklet by the German biologist, bio-and-psycho-philosopher and philosopher of science, Hans Driesch, the following noteworthy remark: ‘It is conceivable that once a great technician of the future might reproduce the internal state of a brain at one moment; according to our doctrine there would not be 'on the other side' any corresponding state of a conscious having.’ The ongoing philosophical disputes about the possibility or impossibility of 'strong artificial intelligence', with well-known participants such as John Searle and Roger Penrose, provides sufficient reason and motivation to look once again at what Hans Driesch had told us approximately a century ago. From his many books and essays I have chosen "Leib und Seele – Eine Untersuchung über das psychophysische Grundproblem" (1st:1916, 3rd:1923) for this review, specifically because of that book's persistent relevance for the ongoing discourses in the philosophy of computing and AI. These contemporary AI-philosophical discourses are –at least in part– characterised by the occasional re-emergence of naive mapping models for mental and mechanical 'states' which Driesch had convincingly refuted already two decades before the first Turing-equivalent freely programmable digital computers were electro-mechanically or fully electronically implemented – long before the linguist Searle came up with this famous 'Chinese Room' argument, and long before mathematical physicists like Penrose attacked the position of 'strong' AI by means of an intellectual pincer manoeuvre with Gödel's incompleteness theorems on the one flank and quantum physics on the other.