Are we heading towards a disembodied education?

Authors: Antonio Borgogni, Agnese Graticola, Dario Acquaroli, Silvia Sangalli

For centuries, scholars have debated the mind-body relationship as a fundamental puzzle, what Schopenhauer and Feigl termed the Weltknoten (world-knot) of scientific and epistemological enigmas. This complex binomial is now transformed by the irruption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into daily life and academic writing: the physical body risks self-annihilation and disembodiment, while the mind appears replaceable. Sir Roger Penrose argues that "artificial intelligence" is a semantic misnomer because true intelligence requires consciousness, a trait machines will never possess. He distinguishes between cleverness (computation, pattern-matching, and precise formula application) and deep understanding. Grounded in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Penrose asserts that consciousness involves non-algorithmic processes that computation alone cannot replicate. Outsourcing human intellect to AI downgrades humanity into unconscious entities. AI in search engines downgrades intellect by eliminating discovery and incidental learning; an alliance is needed to fund emancipatory algorithms that preserve curiosity.