Dirk-Michael Hennrich

Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon

On Animal Intelligence: Modes to Deconstruct the Technosphere

11 March 2025, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In the current discussion about the concept of the Anthropocene, the implications of the Technosphere are becoming increasingly serious. The Technosphere refers to the totality of the technical objects and, depending on the interpretation, all activities to be prescribed in technical rationality, which superimposes on the Biosphere due to their exponential growth. In the future, this sphere, constructed by human activities and productions, will be intensively programmed and controlled by Artificial Intelligence. Thus appears a reality conjured already in dystopian science-fiction scenarios, in which the human or, in short, the animal spheres of action and decision-making are progressively restricted and marginalized. Without a determination of the question about the human being, or even the question of consciousness, having been satisfactorily answered, the development of the so-called Artificial Intelligence is being pushed forward and indorsed compared to all other forms of intelligence since an unspoken potential for the mastery of humanity immersed in the Technosphere is projected onto it. To read this tendency critically and to counteract the growing technization of the global sphere, a backward reflection and the rethinking of other forms of intelligence, especially Animal Intelligence, will be necessary. Animal intelligence includes Human Intelligence, and the first question is what exactly Animal Intelligence describes and what distinguishes it from Artificial Intelligence. To give a reason for this distinction, I introduce the concept of Ancestral Intelligence and define it as the potency that cannot be inserted into the artificial. This Ancestral Intelligence includes the ability to catch up with the immemorial/unprethinkable (das Unvordenkliche) and therefore the explanation leads consequently to a determination of what must (paradoxically) be thought of as immemorial. This immemorial is then the starting point for a Politics of the Sensible that is yet to come, and which locates the body and the most diverse bodily experiences of ancestrality in their centre.