Descartes' "Daughter"

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There's a story told about French philosopher René Descartes and his daughter. He boards a ship for a voyage over the North Sea with a large wooden box which he insists be handled with such great care that the sea captain’s curiosity is aroused. When Descartes is out of his cabin the sea captain opens the box and is horrified to find a life sized automaton inside. He's so shocked he throws the "daughter" overboard. Descartes championed a view of nature in which everything happened because of the physical forces acting between its constituent parts: nature as a machine. It was a coolly rational vision that caught the scientific spirit of the seventeenth century. He was fascinated by automata and what they tell us about what it is to be human. Philip Ball tells the story of Descartes and his "daughter" and his writings about humans and machines. He finds out more about the thirst for mechanical wonders and what it said about theories of the human body in Descartes’ time, from historian of science Simon Schaffer of Cambridge University. And Kanta Dihar of the Centre for the Future of Intelligence also at Cambridge University talks about current research into AIs, driven purely by some mechanism of formal logic, that can mimic the capabilities of the human mind, and how contemporary culture explores our fears about them. Picture: People And Robots Modern Human And Artificial Intelligence Futuristic Mechanism Technology, Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:05.0	The French philosopher René Descartes boards the ship for a voyage over the North Sea.
0:10.0	With him he has a large wooden box which he insists be handled with such great care
0:16.4	that the sea captain's curiosity is aroused.
0:20.3	While the philosopher is away from his cabin, the captain puts his ear to the door and hears noises from within, as if something is shifting around.
0:29.0	Finally, he can contain his curiosity no longer. He enters the cabin and prizes the
0:35.9	lid off the box. What he sees chills his blood. Inside the satin lined container is a young girl, but like none he has ever seen.
0:48.1	She is beautiful, but as still as death.
0:51.3	And that's because the captain realizes realizes she is made of wood.
0:55.8	She is a mechanical being, an automaton.
1:01.1	Seized with fear at such a strange, even diabolical creation, he grabs the life-sized doll and throws it into the waves.
1:09.0	And that was the end of Descartes daughter.
1:14.3	I love this story and almost beyond doubt it is totally fictitious.
1:20.0	It has been recounted many times through the ages, ever since the first telling in 1691, four decades after
1:26.9	Descartes' death.
1:28.9	These accounts have been fancifully embellished, just as that one was. Some set it in the 1620s, others in the 1640s.
1:36.7	Some say that the sailors, not the captain, did the deed. Perhaps stirred by fear that
1:42.1	Descartes mysterious cargo was the cause of a storm.
1:46.4	In one version the mechanical figurine leaps out of the box and dances around the ship.
1:53.2	Where this story comes from is a curious tale in itself, because it seems that Descartes may really
1:58.8	have had a daughter, and what's more, that he lost her. It was apparently this flesh and blood daughter who gave rise to the myth of the mechanical one.
2:08.4	But the very popularity of the tale comes from what it supposedly reveals about
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.