In his laconically named 1637 treatise, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences , René Descartes argued that while a mechanical body could imitate human behaviour if it so wished, true thought (therefore true being) was exclusive to the res cogitans – the thinking substance – which machines could never possess. One wonders if this was taken as a challenge, and (separately) if it was meant to be one. In the centuries to follow, mechanistic fantasies could only further proliferate the living world. Jacques de Vaucanson's grain-kernel-digesting-and-excreting duck from 1764, for instance – deft as it was in its intended simulation – marked the beginning of the hunt for the line between imitation and genuine cognition. An American artist's (incorrect) explanation for how the duck managed to eat and excrete grain. On inspection some half century down the line, a French illusionist concluded the it did not, as...
Irreverent | Irrelevant | Irrational