Conclusion: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence
Conclusion
Introduction &
Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine
Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response &
Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure
Part IV: Hegel’s Loom and the Difference Reason Makes
Part V: Whitehead’s Function of Reason and Humanity’s Cosmic Calling
Part VI: Ruyer’s Origin of Information
Part VII: Tensions in the Triad - Hegel, Whitehead, Ruyer
Part VIII: The Science of Machine Consciousness
Conclusion
“Indeed, the factory of thought
Is like a master weaver’s loom:
One treadle moved a thousand threads,
The shuttles shoot back and forth,
Unseen the strands flow on,
And one stroke binds a thousand connections.”
-Goethe, Faust I[1]
I began this chapter by reflecting on two responses to the advent of the talking machine. Pope Leo addressed the issue as a religious leader of the oldest continuous institution in the West, insisting that human persons demand a dignity that mechanization destroys. Grimes inverted the Pope’s warning by offering a pop-art projection of a ghost into the machine. Neither priest nor pop musician has the final say, but their voices are contributing to resolving a cultural question that is not merely technical or scientific. Our societies are already beginning to argue in earnest over the legal standing and personhood of large language models. We can be sure the descendants of these devices will make the simulacrum of soul even more convincing. Will the firms that trained their system on the common inheritance of humanity be permitted to keep what they have fenced? Or will they owe us, or it, something more? Will decommissioning a model remain mere maintenance, or will it come to be seen as murder? Such questions are of profound civilizational import. It is crucial to canvass widely: their answers cannot be entrusted to any single voice or estate—not the Church or other religious traditions, the laboratory, the market, nor the press alone can answer them. Philosophy is not tasked with a sui generis answer, but with learning to hold the three ideal expressions of civilized experience—the true, the beautiful, and the good—in just balance so that none unduly dominates the others.
That balance is exactly what cognitive enclosure imperils. I have argued that the technologies of automated computation repeat, at the level of mind, the founding gesture of capital that Marx called primitive accumulation. The semantic commons accumulated over millennia—the sedimented expression of artists, scientists, philosophers, and mystics, to which each of us adds our small donation in turn—has been harvested, tokenized, and made to confront its makers as a privately owned alien power on a subscription basis. What the alphabet and the printing press tended to democratize, the large language model re-encloses. This is not merely an economic injustice but a kind of sacrilege: the human being is not one more commodity but the priest at the altar of cosmic communion, the place where the world learns to speak the Word. Against the fused intelligence-industrial complex of state and corporation, resistance must come from outside. The soft power of the Church and the world’s other custodians of cultural memory, which moves by conscience rather than compulsion, may yet prove more anti-fragile than our flailing democracies and inhumane markets. Two of the three great value-spheres are already almost entirely enclosed—art swallowed by an entertainment industry content to let us fall in love with fictional characters, science increasingly doing the bidding of the labs that commission it—while the guardians of the good remain just unenclosed enough to generate friction. But because no single creed can have the last word in our planetary pluriverse, this friction calls for further discernment before it can catch fire and light a new way forward.
The task of discernment, I have argued, falls to philosophy. Philosophy is first and foremost the practice of dialogue among friends. It claims no creed and leads no flock, passes no legislation and entices little if any market investment. Its institutional homelessness is precisely the source of its unenclosable freedom. Though friends with everyone, the philosopher is a perennial stranger, at home nowhere in particular precisely because striving to be at home everywhere in the universe. Philosophy perpetually polishes humanity’s microcosmic mirror with the aim that we might come to see ourselves reflected in the wider, wilder world, rather than in mimicry machines of our own unmaking.
To keep our mirror transparent for participation I have enlisted three guides, each of whom diagnosed an earlier phase in the mechanization of mind before the equation of thinking with computing had hardened into an ambient assumption. From Hegel I borrowed the image of the loom: the isolated Understanding weaving the warp of identity and the woof of difference into intricate textiles while leaving the thinker untransformed. The large language model is just such a loom, a transformer reweaving and relaying the fossilized traces of meanings first spun and later read by living souls. The loom should not be smashed but sublated, kept in service to the life of Reason. We have reason to believe that Spirit only learns by losing itself in the works of its own making to then return to itself with renewed wisdom. From Whitehead I recovered an electromagnetic ontology in which the world is no aggregate of inert substances but a web of energetic events inheriting and transmitting one another’s achievements of value-experience. The human body becomes a “complex amplifier” folding cosmic rhythms into a presiding center of valuation, whereas the server farm, with physical prehensions pulsing dimly through its transistors, remains a crowd of feelings with no one home to care. And from Ruyer I took the self-surveying form, the embryo that grows itself with no homunculus reading a genetic script, the survol absolu that knows itself without observing itself, present to itself as no machine assembled partes extra partes can be. Machines are all liaison and no survol: they conserve and relay information but cannot originate it, because there is no one on the line for whom meaning could matter.
The large language model is an inverted simulacrum of the microcosm, a model of a model. It gathers the world’s disparate threads without concrescing a center. We are being encouraged to revise our self-image downward to match it, to concede that we, too, are only models. To refuse that concession is not to flee backward into a medieval geocentric cosmos. Nor am I proposing that we recover the microcosm as the Renaissance Neoplatonists held it, with its literal correspondences of planet to organ and metal to humor. What I am proposing is a reconstruction undertaken in full awareness that the old image is an image, keeping alive the as if that the advertisers of machine consciousness strip away when they collapse analogy into identity. The computationalist says the mind is a computer and means it literally. When I claim we are microcosmoi I mean it as an as if that is nonetheless lived, an analogy held as analogy and yet sincerely inhabited. This is the difference between reconstructing the image with sincere irony and recovering it as naive dogma. We must become consciously responsible for the mind-world analogies we imaginatively construct, never forgetting they are constructions while also remembering that our thinking is not neutral observation but a “mental embryology”[2]participating in the ongoing genesis of worlds. We are not little worlds because we contain tiny copies of the planets but because the same originative power that quickens light and leaf intensifies in us to incarnate as Logos. We can speak that ancient word again after disenchantment, and after the disenchantment of disenchantment, as neither scared children in a demon haunted world nor as mature materialist orphans of a dead one. The microcosm is a calling to be enacted, priestly and not proprietary, the way we may humbly partake in a universe that is still composing itself and needs our help.
The danger was never the machines, which, rightly understood and rightly related to, might yet serve as amplifiers rather than amputators of our minds, taking up the crushing weight of accumulated information so that speculative Reason is freed for its proper flight. The danger is that, dazzled by so fluent an inverted mirror, we forget that the human being is not one more measurable data point but the world’s own forming activity welling up into self-awareness—a forming that can be neither metered nor manufactured, neither enclosed nor sold, but only remembered and enacted. Automated computation can help us carry what we have come to know. But only a living mind can know what any of it means. Only a human microcosm can know who it is.
[1] Goethe, Faust I, ll. 1922–1935 (Studierzimmer), in Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Schöne, 7/1.
[2] Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, 146.
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Great series!
A number of others who write on these topics say it's hard to tell if AI has something resembling consciousness or not, and it may forever be impossible. But we have to treat AIs with compassion just in case they have some sort of consciousness that includes an ability to suffer. If we are determined to see AI as not conscious, these people argue that we run the risk of making AIs suffer enormously but unintentionally. Do you think there's anything to this sort of reasoning?
I can't shake the feeling that there may be something to that reasoning, though I have no rational idea if it's true. But what worries me is that it possibly might be true and would lock us into huge efforts to not make AIs suffer and that could all be for nothing if they truly don't have any form of consciousness. So maybe we should hold back from developing AI, especially in directions that could cross the consciousness barrier. But is it even possible to let AI get way smarted without the possibility of consciousness arising? I just don't know. But it seems to me that great caution is warranted. And I don't see that the companies developing AI are using much caution, especially along these lines.
Of course, this sounds like I am saying that creating beings with consciousness is a very dangerous thing to do and maybe we should hold back from doing it. But isn't that a backhanded way of saying two things, or asking two things: 1) should parents hold back from co-creating conscious children? 2) should God, if there is a God, have held back from creating a universe in which consciousness could evolve?
Beautifull conclusive text where the soul rise again leaving the details behind, leaving the effort of weaving the rational whole behind but for a moment raises on a poetic flight where the words now are simply guided by their higher resonance. Refreshing and inspiring.