EXCERPT MAREK POLIKS: What do you say to people who think that AI can’t be intelligent because it needs to have some physical meat body? PETE WOLFENDALE: I’d say there’s roughly two strands to this position. One you might call vitalist: people who want to say that there’s something really important about life, about living matter, which might even just be meat – there’s something really important about meat, and mind has to be instantiated in meat. Others are a little more abstract: they say there’s got to be organic unity, or evolutionary adaptability. There are various flavours of vitalism, some more coherent than others. On the other hand, there’s what you might call the hermeneutic approach inspired by phenomenology. Both of these perspectives are deeply inspired by Hubert Dreyfus. You can see Dreyfus’ influence splitting off in these two different directions, because he says that, in order to be intelligent, you need a body and you need purposes/needs. The hermeneutic phenomenological approach, rather than thinking about the body as a meatsack, prefers to talk about the lived body as that which enables our immediate intentional purchase upon the world by providing the basic structure of agency. This also comes in various flavours. But often these two ideas get blurred together: When people are talking about the ‘lived body’, do they really mean the spleen? Or do they mean something more like the body schema? If they’re even willing to countenance the idea that the body schema and the lived body can be understood in representational terms.…