Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 369.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
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        Date: 2026-03-14 11:14:58+00:00
        From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.346: Kapferer on AI

Dear Willard,

[Winding the present back some, to when I was ...]  reading
the Kapferer piece, the Left-me and the Right-me kept arguing
about what "cognitive unity" can mean.  The Centre-me said
it's simple.  The Top-me rolled my eyes and wondered off.  The
Bottom-me kept kicking my left and right shins.  The Front-me
kept pulling in different directions, for fun.  The Back-me
just giggled to add to the noise.

From all this I concluded "cognitive unity", for everything it
might be, must be an empty unity.

What really counts here is the embodied unity which allows me
to be all the me-s I need to be, want to be, and enjoy being.
Cognition, whatever that is, looks different to each me which
thinks to look at it.  But, if I didn't have one body, I
wouldn't be able to do all this: an anthropology of an
embodied unity, perhaps we might call it; an anthropology
which doesn't make heroic hand waving claims about a grand
"integrated partnership," nor demands any "co-evolutionary
dynamic."  What kind of anthropology is that, I (Left, Right,
Centre, Top, Bottom, Front, and Back) wonder?

-- Tim




> On 28 Feb 2026, at 07:46, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
>              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 346.
>        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                       www.dhhumanist.org
>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>        Date: 2026-02-27 19:23:33+00:00
>        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
>        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.345: anthropologist Kapferer on AI
>
> Why the heck would we even want a "cognitive unity"? Really fast
> calculators are just fine doing what they do.
>
> Jim R
>
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 12:21 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 345.
>>        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>>                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
>>                       www.dhhumanist.org
>>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>        Date: 2026-02-26 12:21:14+00:00
>>        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
>>        Subject: anthropology of AI
>>
>> The Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer has written a fine
>> editorial in the latest issue of Anthropology Today 42.1: 1-3, "To be or
>> not to be in the age of AI",
>> <https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70053>.
>>
>> I quote from Kapferer's editorial:
>>
>>> The argument draws on my ethnographic work on Sinhalese healing
>>> rituals, material that anticipated cybernetic insights before I
>>> encountered them in theory. These rituals demonstrate the
>>> autopoietic, or self-producing, character of human intelligence that
>>> AI systems have yet to approximate. Fieldwork intuition led me to
>>> recognize what von Foerster would later articulate: that genuine
>>> intelligence emerges from embodied participation, not disembodied
>>> processing. Ritual achieves what AI cannot: the participatory
>>> transformation of persons and relationships through embodied
>>> collective action. And yet this very limitation suggests
>>> possibilities. The gap between AI and human intelligence can be
>>> closed, though not crossed, through designs that couple machine
>>> processing to human participation.
>>>
>>> There is considerable ambivalence concerning the positive and
>>> negative possibilities of AI intimated in this brief essay, not
>>> least its dehumanizing threat to human being. A more hopeful
>>> possibility is the potential of an integrated partnership, a co-
>>> evolutionary dynamic in which human being and AI form a cognitive
>>> unity.
>>
>>
>> Comments?
>>
>> WM
>> --
>> Willard McCarty,
>> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
>> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
>>   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
>> www.mccarty.org.uk
>
> --
> Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>
>
>   - *David Bowie and Romanticism
>   <https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
>   Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
>   - *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
>   <https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
> Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
>   Routledge, 2023



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