This Cartesian project, being disembodied and logocentric, has failed, although the technology it has left behind has enormous economic and political significance. Artificial intelligence, so characteristic of Enlightenment rationality, was a strictly limited way of understanding natural intelligence. Now, intelligence is taken to arise from embodiment, that is, from a form of life, something that has a body, that has to act, that has values and, perhaps most importantly, something that has a history of action related to a particular environment. The project of AL is to create these conditions within cyberspace. Cyberspace is sign and arena, a stage on which a melee of actors, texts and signs mingle in more than mere deconstructive confusion.
New meaning is born of the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
This productive miscegenation points away from rational universalism and towards a constructive multiplicity of views and practices. This multiplicity is clearly manifested in the chaotic sensitivity of cyberspace as structures mingle and transform. This transition traces the tension between form and fluidity, part of Zhu's contrast between Eastern naturalism and Western logocentrism. This transition can be better understood by placing it within the framework of cultural evolution. For human beings, cultural evolution has outpaced biological evolution for over a million years.