By Howard Gardner
A recent op ed in The New York Times (link here) caught my attention. Apparently NASA is looking for astronauts for the next phase of space exploration. According to author, Joseph O. Chapa, the hiring committee is likely to look for scientists and engineers. Given the hiring pattern in the past, this is an understandable predilection—or bias.
Photo by NASA
But Chapa believes that tack is a mistake. Now that our species has figured out how to navigate space, we need the expertise of many other disciplines. As he puts it:
“[We] will require thoughtful inquiry from many disciplines. We will need sociologists and anthropologists to help us imagine new communities; theologians and linguists if we find we are not alone in the universe; political and legal theorists to sort out the governing principles of interstellar life.”
As a one time student of Harvard’s Social Relations department, and as a long time wanderer across the disciplinary landscape, I find this vision appealing. But what really stirred me in Chapa’s essay is his contention that such teams of space explorers could benefit from his own discipline—philosophy.
By his account, some of the greatest philosophical discoveries emerged because the authors had encountered very challenging conditions. Stoics had faced slavery; Thomas Hobbes had been trapped in England’s Civil War (of the 17th century); Hannah Arendt’s insights into totalitarianism came from mortal vulnerabilities in the Nazi era, even as her concept of the “banality of evil” emerged as she covered the trial of Holocaust perpetrator, Adolf Eichman.
In this era of increasingly smart machines, I often ponder which of our multiple intelligences can be easily and adequately replicated by ChatGPT and other large language models. It seems clear to me that the standard academic intelligences: linguistic and logical-mathematical, are well replicated by these instruments—as they were even decades ago. I’d probably add musical intelligence to the list as well.
Other intelligences present a more complex picture. I am not confident, for example, that a computational system can exhibit intrapersonal intelligence; and I don’t think that the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence exhibited by even the best designed robot would have interesting or revealing analogues to human bodily-kinesthestic intelligence.
As I have described it, existential intelligence entails the positing and pondering of the biggest questions—the meaning of life, of death, of love, of hatred, of other facets of the human condition. We look not only to philosophers, but also to poets and painters, to visit and revisit these questions and, as feasible, to put forth tentative answers… about which we can and will reflect, debate, and perhaps replace.
Until this point in recorded history, our thoughts, reflections, questions, and tentative answers were all based on our imaginations—and if we posited such questions to a large language model, it would no doubt come up with the same kinds of answers as our most imaginative human beings have done.
But once astronauts, as “advance-guard human beings,” actually begin to explore the broader expanse of the universe, I suspect—indeed, I anticipate—that members of our species will pose, ponder, and perhaps provide at least provisional answers to a whole new set of puzzles and quandaries. No doubt LLMs will help in this endeavor, but it will be actually experiencing human beings who will be in the privileged position to visit and revisit what it means truly to exist beyond the surface and the experience of our own planet and our own species.
I ask the sponsors of such voyages—be they governments (like the US or China) or billionaires (like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk)—to preserve a few places for philosophers and a few niches for existential intellects.
Cover photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash