Humanity’s First Exam1850–1940 ⇄ now

1879 · Spanish · Argentina

Horacio Kalibang o los automatas

Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg

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Passage selected for Humanity's First Exam
¿Qué es el cerebro, sino una gran máquina, cuyos exquisitos resortes se mueven en virtud de impulsos mil y mil veces transformados? ¿Qué es el alma, sino el conjunto de esas funciones mecánicas? La acción físico-química del estímulo sanguíneo, la transmisión nerviosa, la idea, en su carácter imponderable e intangible, no son sino estados diversos de una misma materia.

Working English translation

What is the brain but a great machine, whose exquisite springs move by impulses transformed a thousand times over? What is the soul but the sum of those mechanical functions? The physico-chemical action of the stimulus in the blood, nervous transmission, and the idea in its weightless and intangible character are only different states of the same matter.

Printed page 12 of the 1879 pamphlet; OCR normalized against the page image

2 selected passages and classifications

Passage 1

¿Qué es el cerebro, sino una gran máquina, cuyos exquisitos resortes se mueven en virtud de impulsos mil y mil veces transformados? ¿Qué es el alma, sino el conjunto de esas funciones mecánicas? La acción físico-química del estímulo sanguíneo, la transmisión nerviosa, la idea, en su carácter imponderable e intangible, no son sino estados diversos de una misma materia.
Free will and automatismMachine minds and made personsautomatism · reports or quotesemergent mind · reports or quotesScientific or empirical evidenceMetaphysics of mind and lifeNo judgment offeredIndividualMind and bodyMachine or artificial system

The materialist account is spoken by Baum, not simply adopted by Holmberg; the fiction stages its apparent explanatory force before destabilizing it.

Printed p. 12, Oscar Baum's materialist account of brain and soul

Passage 2

Cuando Luisa tenga hijos, esa máquina humana les enseñará, con métodos especiales, todo lo que deban aprender. ... Tengo el mundo en mis manos, porque lo manejo con mis autómatas.
Dependence, succession, and replacementGovernment, measurement, and surveillanceMachine minds and made personsdependence · reports or quoteshuman institutions · considersEconomic and material powerRights and self-governmentDiminishes autonomyInstitutionalCivilizationalMachine or artificial systemAdministration and public order

The final reveal turns artificial people into an infrastructure for education and social control; its critical force is authorial staging, not an adopted program.

Final letter, artificial people as education and social-control infrastructure

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