Thursday, March 3, 2011

Babbage located Intelligence in the Mind not the attentive crafting body


Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was particularly interested in machines and is remembered as the inventor of a calculating engine, a kind of proto-computer.Ure was an industrial chemist and the author of a well-known dictionary of chemistry.

Never, in the history of technology has so long an interval separated the invention of a device and its realisation in hardware as that which elapsed between Charles Babbage's description, in 1837, of the Analytical Engine, a mechanical digital computer which, viewed with the benefit of a century and a half's hindsight, anticipated virtually every aspect of present-day computers.
During the World War 2, all tedious numerical calculations were carried out by human workers. These were performed mostly by female corps of young mathematicians, known as ‘computers’. Babbage’s Analytical engine was initially built to replace the human computers. He thought that the introduction of machine would increase accuracy. Babbage’s definition of intelligence is the combination of memory and foresight. He understood that intelligence is of the mind and not of the body. As Simon Schaffer aptly puts it,
"To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible”.
Babbage writes: "One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents".
It is particularly important to foreground the ontological aspect of Babbage's and Ure's texts because it is here that their most important ideological move is made. Conventionally, ideology criticism has focused on discovering concealed relations to the economic base in apparently apolitical texts.
The inventiveness of Babbage's and Ure's arguments can only be understood, however, when their ostensible referentiality to any external real condition is first bracketed out. To thematize the ontological claims of these texts thus requires separating the economic base and the ideological superstructure.
It purely once gain emphasizes on the dominance of intelligence over strength and the concept of separation of body and mind. Therefore intelligence lies in the mind and not in the physical body.

- R.SURENDER NAIK
  CH09B071

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