The Material Intelligence as Historical Problem (MIHP) inquiry comprises a series of colloquia, training workshops, and interdisciplinary working groups, aiming to generate new approaches to the question of how material (whether biological or inorganic) entities are correlated to, or productive of, the concept-entity of intelligence and how it might be understood historically, as well as technically or biologically.
In recent years, spurred by broad commercial uptake of Artificial Intelligence and big data, there has been a pressing need to build institutions and research networks to scaffold the study of the history of neuroscience and AI from the midcentury to the present. While there are many new interdisciplinary initiatives aimed at assessing the political and social impact of AI and neuroscience, there are none that base their methodology out of collaborations grounded in historical research. Particularly, MHIP aims to establish a research network on the development of the brain and mind sciences, one with a particular “style” that differed significantly from its well-studied counterparts. Undergirding this trend is an implicit premise: that without interdisciplinary scholarly work, the current transformations in how society uses computation will not only not solve social inequalities, but will probably make things much worse.
MHIP will scaffold a critical approach to the neuro-AI disciplinary knowledge cluster that weds technical literacy with historical acuity; one that can thread the needle between political critique, an apprehension of historical zeitgeists, and technical proficiency. In our view, such an approach would represent a novel and much-needed reformulation of this interdisciplinary space. The current vogue for interdisciplinary work between the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and neuroscience on the other, has become so prevalent as to warrant a name—the so-called neuro-turn. Yet a decade after the infusion of funding initiated by the 2013 Obama Brain Initiative, much of this interdisciplinary work remains thin when it comes to a robust and technically-literate interdisciplinary engagement with neuroscience– much less the history of such methods and technologies. By the same token, the tendency of technically-proficient histories of the neuro-AI disciplinary knowledge clusters has generally been to remain internalist,—that is, to narrate technical change within a field as a story of technical development (e.g. the Averaging Response Computer was used to analyze electroencephalograms (EEGs) because it allowed scientists to correlate multiple datapoints) rather than as contingent developments emerging at the intersection of cultural and political social practices (e.g. The Averaging Response Computer was the result of Navy-sponsored radar technology being used by ex-military scientists at MIT to collaborate with neurologists in Boston in the post-World War II era, with implications for how brain data was imagined as a surveillance technology that could evade the need for the patient/enemy’s self-report.)
MHIP aims to bring together a network of scholars to address the pressing need for technically-proficient and encompassingly-theorized historical accounts of the brain sciences from the 20th century to the present. Practically, this means historical work that not only argues gesturally for the significance of the “rise of the brain sciences” across a variety of disciplines, but can, for instance, connect developments in brain science (e.g. particular configurations of EEG, debates about the nature of synaptic transmission, technical innovations in wireless brain-computer interfaces, and so on) with concurrent debates of pressing cultural and political salience (e.g. linguistic nationalism, the organization of the brain sciences, the politicized nature of military funding, and so on.) In this, our goal is to historicize the perpetual scholarly reformulation of the question (Are computers and brains the same type of thing, and if so what does it mean for society?) in order to ask new genres of question: How has this recurrent formulation of the brain-computer question transacted organizations of power through modalities of race, empire, gender, and so on? What are the stakes of the universals (e.g. the human, the brain, thought, and so on) presupposed by these formulations, and how have these stakes structured the organization of power from the 20th century to the present? How have technical chances in the neuro-computational knowledge clusters reconjugated or reshaped crucial cultural practices and concepts, with ramifications for the distribution of power in society? And– above all, and as usual– cui bono?
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