CDCS Colloquium: Professor Carolyn Biltoft

Henri Bergson’s Turing Test for Humans

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About the Event

As other media scholars have argued, in his own media contexts of mass journalism, radio and cinema, the French philosopher Henri Bergson theorized the meanings of the “virtual,” as something more than a mere opposition to “reality.” We know too that Bergson’s theories of time influenced cybernetics in the second half of the twentieth century. However, in this talk, I try to take those insights a step further, in order to assess Bergson’s broader and in some ways anticipatory critiques of modern media and information systems. I argue that throughout his work Bergson mapped what is most “machine like” in humans and how our “coded” linguistic and social selves are the least “vital” aspects of human consciousness. In other words, it was the part of the human mind that Bergson considered the most automatic and the least creative that would come to serve as a model of artificial intelligence. As such Bergson left us a cautionary critique of “machine learning” and a thoroughgoing defense of the cognitive and social importance of “slow” and “analog” humanistic inquiry.

About the Speaker

Carolyn Biltoft was trained in the world/global intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Princeton, 2010) Methodologically, her work fuses the tools of intellectual history, media history and theory, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in how the changing material and immaterial infrastructures of globalization emerged, developed and altered finance, politics and culturally local and globally. Her first book, A Violent Peace: Truth, Media and Power at the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2021) demonstrates how the League of Nations constituted a global stage for the production and contestation of a wide range of truth claims in an era of mass media, propaganda and totalitarian political projects. Her other work has also focused on the concepts of modern myths and the question of belief and disbelief in an era of disinformation. 

Her current project is entitled, The Trouble with Avatars: Henri Bergson’s Digital Premonitions. The book claims that the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories of the self and consciousness can be interpreted as having anticipated many of the humanistic dilemmas of our own digital age. The book also offers a Bergsonion critique of AI and a scientific defense of humanistic inquiry.