Fuji metaphor in Ukiyo-e

Our Fuji is intelligence

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Fuji in Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e, also known as “pictures of the floating world”, is a genre of Japanese art that flourished during the Edo period (17th - 19th). Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings to describe the hedonistic lifestyle.

Hokusai, A view of Mount Fuji Across Lake Suwa

Fuji, one of the many subjects displayed in Ukiyo-e, haunts Edo Japan and especially haunts the floating world.

Omnipresent of Hokusai’s 36 views of Fuji

Many people have seen the Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji, a series of landscape prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai, which depicts Mount Fuji from different locations and in various seasons and weather conditions. Fuji was seen as the source of the secrets of immortality in Japanese tradition, a powerful recurring theme.

Hiroshige, Suruga-cho, No. 8 in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

It is a metonym for Japan as a whole.

Hokusai, Groups of Mountain Climbers (Shojin tozan), from Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji

It is bigger than all of us.

Hokusai, In the Mountains of Totomi, from Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji

And sometimes, smaller than us.

Hokusai, Reflection in Lake Misaka, #42

It is both literal and conceptual, both banal and uncanny.

Hokusai, Red Fuji

It is sometimes looming

Hokusai, Fuji View Field in Owari Province

Sometimes distant.

Hokusai, Watermill at Onde

Always and already there.

Hokusai, The Appearance of Mt. Fuji in the Fifth Year of Korei

It is a focal point for elaborating and integrating an entire cosmology: on timescales both long…

Hokusai, Rainstorm Beneath the Summit

and short.

Hokusai, Under Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa

It integrates nature, the sacred, the human, the social, the provincial, the technological, and the commonplace.

Hiroshige, In the Mountains of Izu Province

The Edo Japanese understood it to be lifegiving…

Hokusai, The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mount Fuji

But also a source of precarity.

Hokusai, Under the wave off Kanagawa

Even at times an existential threat.

Our Fuji is intelligence

Like the totalization Fuji presents on woodcut, intelligence can be applied to different sorts of systems as a way to understand computers, brains, societies, ecologies, planets, arguably everything and beyond.

To understand this mountain and grapple with the big questions (people, machine, philosophy, ethics, historiography, art and creativity…), we’ll need to take on a lot of perspectives, some with very different timescales, landmarks, and points of references - though they are connected…

In fact, for a long time, we take intelligence as an emotional concept, an unwillingness to admit that mankind can have any rivals in intellectual power. Alan Turing in his unpublished 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery says that “The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner is determined as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under consideration.” Also, people view intelligence that’s not derived from humans as a threat. In Turing’s later 1951 paper Can Digital Computers Think, he says “Many people are extremely opposed to the idea of a machine that thinks, but I do believe that it is not for any of the reasons that I have given, or any other rational reasons, but simply because they do not like the idea.” This resistance to non-human intelligence is deeply held but nevertheless erroneous in assumptions regarding individual originality and inventiveness. The opposition is a reflection of anthropocentrism, also known as human exceptionalism, the belief that human beings are the most important entity in the universe.

Besides machine intelligence, we need to consider all kinds of intelligence both collective and computational, in addition to human and individual. Just like in those Ukiyo-e arts,

the mountain is always in view.

Resources:

1. Alan Turing, Intelligent Machinery, 1948.

2. Robert Merton, Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science, 1963

3. Alan Turing, Can Digital Computer Think?, 1951

4. Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950

5. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics