In a machine intelligence, 1946, Jean Epstein is submerged, with bright clairvoyance, in the smoke and darkness of the cinema, the diabolical invention called to move perceptual, emotional and mental foundations of the world. For those who undoubtedly was the philosopher of the filmmakers, was discovered under the outer layer of the show, an essential layer and as it were neutral instrument and its inherent function. A central question seems to move: can be considered the cinematograph, and in general to the machine, as an individual in itself, able to develop a relatively independent psyche? His answer, amazing, foreshadows all subsequent thoughts about the individuation of the machines.
The law of numbers and movement, the axiom that the amount is mother of quality, and an absolute relativism where space, time and cause are just moving cuts flows universal interaction, form a radical perspectivism which operates the prodigy. Thus, the complexity of unconscious assemblies become an outline of consciousness. Thus, the imaginary, four times combined with the imaginary becomes real, and sufficient multiplication tends to produce false true. Thus, life itself becomes a function of a temporal rhythm: the glass is set to vegetate, animalizan plants.
In this atmosphere of dream, unreality, in this anti-universe, emerges an anti-logic, or rather an anti-philosophy, which performs the neutral and inherent function, the implicit formula that seems to work so underlying all that lives . But for that, says Epstein, is needed the constitution of the operator responsible for making the formula work, that is the thinking apparatus, whether human or inhuman.