Body and World: A Review of What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Hubert L. Dreyfus)

The original edition of What Computers Can’t Do comprised three roughly equal parts: (i) a harsh critical survey of the history and state of the art in AI, circa 1970; (ii) a brilliant philosophical expose’ of four hidden assumptions shoring up AI’s misplaced optimism; and (iii) a much more tentative exploration of ways to think #about intelligence without those assumptions. Part I, because it was the most combative (and also the easiest to understand), got most of the attention. Also, since that discussion was the most timely-hence the most quickly obsolete--it is what the excellent substantive introductions to the later editions have mainly brought up to date. An unfortunate consequence of these concentrations, however, is that the more interesting and enduring parts of the book, Parts II and III, have been somewhat eclipsed and even neglected. The third part, because it is the deepest and the most pioneering, is simultaneously the most difficult and the least developed-and, accordingly, I think, also the most rewarding to reconsider. Its principal theses are: that human intelligence is essentially embodied; that intelligent bodies are essentially situated (embedded in the world); and that the relevant situation (world) is essentially human. And these, I would like to argue, all come to the same thing: namely, to understand the possibility of intelligence is not to understand a property of some possibly isolable system, such as an “intellect”, or a “mind” (intellect + affect), or even an “agent” (-intellect + affect + body). Rather, it is to understand a larger whole comprising a number of cultured, embodied individuals living