Parts II & III: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part II:

Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine

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Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response

If the corporations racing to build these technologies cannot be the ones to tell us what they are, who can? While religious leaders like Pope Leo can still wield influential soft power to move our hearts, it is not the case that Catholicism’s Thomist anthropology is the last word on human nature. In a pluralistic planetary context, intellectual honesty requires respectfully including but avoiding capture by any one religious view. The task of wrestling our humanity free of domination by “artificial intelligence” therefore falls to philosophy. The philosophy of every age could be understood as an emergency response to a mutation in the dominant media technology in which thought finds expression. Plato found himself philosophizing amid the alphabet’s disruption of the Homeric oral tradition. In the dialogue Phaedrus, he has Socrates relay the Egyptian myth of Theuth, god of writing, who offers this new art to King Thamus to pass on to his people. The wise king worries that those skilled in writing would come to rely too heavily on external marks and so atrophy their inward powers of recollection. King Thamus’ reply to Theuth could easily be applied to the (mis)use of LLMs:

“You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”^[1]

Socrates then wryly remarks that those immersed in the animacy of orality, “content in their simplicity,” could still hear the speech of sacred oaks and stones. While the “young folks” rushing to adopt the alphabet believe themselves far more sophisticated, they are, says Socrates, perhaps even more simple-minded. For written words, like ordinary stones, do not respond when questioned. At least, not until the invention of LLMs.

Two millennia later, Descartes’ introspective epistemology and correlate mechanical philosophy of nature are best understood as a response to the printing press. Print intensified the visual bias of Western thought, stabilizing homogeneous, continuous, pictorial space as a seemingly natural field of knowledge.^[2] The reproducibility of diagrams, maps, figures, and geometrical constructions helped make space available as a standardized object of inspection and calculation. In Bruno Latour’s terms, printed diagrams became “immutable mobiles”: transportable visual forms whose relations could be preserved, compared, and recombined across distance.^[3] Descartes’ analytical geometry belongs to this new media ecology of printed visual exactitude. Magnifying the effects of the phonetic alphabet on consciousness—which did not simply record speech but abstracted the spoken word from the breathing body and communal memory—the printing press democratized Theuth’s art, training the masses in the new capacity for linear, decontextualized, ego-centric thought. The printing press not only multiplied the number of manuscripts in circulation but helped midwife a new mode of consciousness: the private, silently reading, self-certifying interiority upon which the whole modern conception of the individual knower would come to rest.

In each case a new media technology intended to expand the power of thought ended up transforming the very nature of the thinker who invented it. Each new medium furnishes the very terms in which we come to understand ourselves. This is why the philosophical response is always an emergency response: by the time anyone has noticed what is happening, what may be lost and what gained, the mutation has already done half of its work.

We are presently living through yet another mutation, the consequences of which may dwarf those of prior media technologies. The alphabet and printing press reshaped us profoundly. They already did more than reshape the products of thought—allowing us to store, transmit, and reproduce words in ways unavailable to oral cultures. They also reorganized the sensorium of the producer. But the act of producing text remained the work of a living mind. LLMs have changed that by mechanizing, or convincingly appearing to mechanize, the act of composition itself. Now the text talks back, generating plausible arguments and the simulacrum of a thinking interlocutor with a “memory” far exceeding any individual human being. The appearance of wisdom King Thamus feared is now mass-produced on demand. The invention of the printing press also invented the private reader sealed inside its skull; the large language model now tempts us to adopt an even stranger self-image: that human minds are no different than machines, our thoughts just the statistical echoes of our training data. The creators of this latest technological upgrade are encouraging us to downgrade our estimate of human consciousness, thus narrowing the distance between ourselves and the machines built to imitate us.

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^[1] 275a-b. Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.

^[2] See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).

^[3] Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking With Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 ( JAI Press, Inc., 1986), 24.

Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure

There is yet another reason this latest cognitive mutation dwarfs those upon which it builds. It is true, as A. J. Liebling once wrote, that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”^[1] But the alphabet and the printing press, for all their literally revolutionary disruptions, tended to democratize literacy, creating an intellectual commons open to all who learned to enter it. LLMs, on the other hand, recall the land enclosures that inaugurated capitalism.^[2] In a process that peaked in the mid-18^th century, millions of acres of pasture, woodland, and field held in common and worked by all for a thousand years were divided and privatized. The people who had lived off these commons were driven off, forced to sell the only thing they had left: their labor time. Thus, as Ivan Illich suggested, with the invention of enclosure came also the invention of poverty. “Computers,” Illich said nearly fifty years ago, “are doing to communication what fences did to pastures”; that is, they are threatening to impoverish thought itself.^[3]

Karl Marx referred to land enclosure as “primitive accumulation,” theorizing it as the founding expropriation upon which the power of modern capital was based, a social theft that afterward came to be dressed up as the natural order of things: “[It] is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”^[4] Our contemporary situation is analogous, with corporations having secured an enormous head start at harvesting the cognitive commons before anyone noticed—extracting the expression of countless generations of human artists, scientists, philosophers, and mystics, and claiming the digital distillate as their own intellectual property. Our cognitive commons—the semantic sediment formed over thousands of years that raised us and to which each of us contributes—has been siphoned off and transformed into a commodity. Marx’s analysis of alienated material labor here finds application to the cognitive sphere: the collective expressions of human intelligence have been gathered up, repackaged, and made to confront its creators as a privately owned alien power to be metered on a subscription basis. Every writer, artist, coder, and ordinary speaker whose words and images were part of the training corpus are like dispossessed commoners, forced off a land we barely knew we held in common until we found it fenced off.

There is a dark parody of the Eucharistic logic in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s proposal to make intelligence into a privatized utility.^[5] In the sacrament, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ: the fruits of earthly and human labor are gathered into a living communion of flesh and spirit. After Big Tech’s cognitive enclosure, the miracle is demonically inverted. Exhausted bodies—the miners, including children in some supply chains, data annotators, and engineers (though many may be well paid)—and the earthly matter of lithium, cobalt, copper, and water are joined to the accumulated literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific expressions of the human spirit. Together they are transubstantiated into streams of information processed by models with proprietary weights housed in gigantic privately owned, military protected data centers. Their outputs are then sold back to us in exchange for a monthly tithe, “gifts” from the new machine god^[6] meant to make whatever remains of human life run more efficiently. Body and spirit alike are converted into instruments of capital accumulation.

Yet language is sacramental before it is instrumental, a participation in communion rather than commodity exchange. The memories and insights of our human and more-than-human ancestors—all the cultural and natural commons enclosed to train the digital demiurges driving the latest stock market bubble—are neither honored nor properly recollected by being compressed into tokenized strings of text. A statistical echo is not living memory. It is not intelligent. It has no breath of its own. The stale air of the mouthless machine gods is suffocating us.

To resist cognitive enclosure is not to refuse the fact that human evolution has always been a coevolution with technology. It is rather to refuse the reduction of the human mind to a manufacturable and metered commodity. Philosophy’s history of emergency responses to new media technologies only begins to scratch the surface of our species’ entanglement with technē. It would be a mistake to meet our moment with technophobia, as if the human mind were an untouchable inner spirit now being defiled by heartless transistors. Human intelligence has always been artificial, technical, artisanal: made by hand and by mouth. Speech was already a mind-manifesting artifact, thought externalized into sonic vibration. The first scripts, the alphabet, the printing press, the radio, the television, the Internet: each is a prosthesis of mind, not only transmitting thought but reshaping the culture in which it grows and the consciousness that conceives it. We have been coevolving with our tools for millions of years. Obsidian blades, bone flutes, spoken words binding scattered attention into shared worlds. Our lips and tongues are nimble enough for language only because fire and stone first softened our food, allowing our jaw to shrink and our brain to swell. We were cyborgs long before we spent our days and half our nights staring at screens. LLMs are not an alien intelligence but the latest prosthesis of human minds that were always already anthropotechnic. This latest coevolutionary mutation does not absolve us of our freedom and responsibility, factors machines remain unburdened by.

At the root of the cognitive enclosure is an ontological sleight of hand making the theft possible. The very idea of “artificial general intelligence” or “conscious machines” is a conflation of metaphysics with advertising, a mythical ruse and not an achievable technical feat. Despite the outdated functionalist philosophy of mind causing so much confusion among computer engineers and the general public alike, phenomenology cannot be reduced to functionality, as though conscious cognition was reducible without remainder to computation.^[7] Consciousness is not simply located inside the skull. Like intelligence, it arises between us, through the living relations that constitute us as co-knowing selves. Consciousness cannot be claimed as private property. We belong to each other, our minds evolutionarily entangled with the Earth—embodied, cellular, ecologically extended. Conscious intelligence is the moment-by-moment achievement of a vast collective of living and dying organisms, not a stream of electrons imprisoned in the labyrinthine circuitry of an Nvidia chip.

Alphabetic writing already risks a certain distance from the basis of all our conscious meanings in the breath.^[8] The frictionless efficiency of LLMs is threatening to put us at such a remove from our embodied thinking activity and earthly responsibility that soon we may no longer even have the capacity to remember what we have lost. We are on the verge of a mass extinction of meaning. And yet the externalization of Understanding in the form of LLMs need not be a total loss. Hegel—to whose Science of Logic I turn in the next section—taught that Spirit must externalize itself, losing itself in the objects of its own making, but only so as to return to itself again, now knowing itself more intimately. The casting of human cognition into machinic form might, in this sense, occasion a heightened moment of self-recognition. Humanity is being given an opportunity to grasp with intensified clarity what its thinking, feeling, and freedom actually are, precisely by confronting so fluent a counterfeit form of them. But Aufhebung is not automatic. Alienation may simply remain alienation, exploitation may simply remain exploitation. Whether our collective confrontation with technologies of automated computation proves an evolutionary catalyst or a cognitive catastrophe turns not on the technology itself but on how we decide to meet it.

There is, then, a silver sliver of hope. The cosmos, in its natural and cultural modes, remains a commons, whatever capitalists may believe. The intimacy of our relationality diverges wildly from the semblance of state and corporate control. Actual intelligence can be neither patented nor automated. All that has been fenced are the recorded traces of our collective intelligence, our past products, not the living activity that produced and produces them still. That activity remains inalienably ours, so long as we remember how to exercise it. But exercising it well under current conditions requires philosophical discipline.

The philosophical labor of resisting the mechanization of mind may be enhanced by the recollection of conceptual implements forged before the analogy had canalized so many converts. I turn next to some ideas developed by Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer. Hegel philosophized amid the looms of the first industrial age, Whitehead as the new physics dissolved the old clock-work universe that had made the machine seem the self-evident model of everything, and Ruyer at the birth of cybernetics, when the claim that thinking organisms simply are information machines was first proposed in earnest. Each wrote before the equation of thinking with computing had settled into an ambient creed, so obvious it hardly needs mentioning (unless, of course, one is in the company of religious fanatics who still believe in the dignity of souls). Each could still regard the idea of machine minds as a proposal to be critically examined rather than an ontology to be assumed.

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^[1] A. J. Liebling, “The Wayward Press: Do You Belong in Journalism?,” The New Yorker, May 14, 1960, 105–10, at 109 (New York: F. R. Publishing Corp.).

^[2] See Vipra, Jai. “AI Automation Is Enclosure: The Case for Data Rent Modelled on Ground Rent.” European Law Open 3, no. 4 (2024): 890–901. https://doi.org/10.1017/elo.2024.48. Vipra holds out hope that “[a] coordinated social response in the form of law can prevent the enclosure of economically relevant intellectual capacity and therefore prevent mass immiseration.”

^[3] Ivan Illich, “Silence Is a Commons,” remarks at the Asahi Symposium “Science and Man—The Computer-Managed Society,” Tokyo, March 21, 1982, CoEvolution Quarterly, no. 40 (Winter 1983): 5–9.

^[4] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1, part VII, chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.”

^[5] Sam Altman, remarks at the BlackRock U.S. Infrastructure Summit, Washington, DC, March 11, 2026, video, 5:14–6:35, especially 5:46, transcript published by Rev, March 12, 2026. https://www.rev.com/transcripts/altman-speaks-at-blackrocks-us-infrastructure-summit

^[6] Karen Hao, a journalist and author of Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination (London: Allen Lane, 2025), interviewed employees at OpenAI in 2019 and shared her sense that “their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour,” or “’the ideological pursuit of the machine god.’” Quoted by Madeleine Spence, “I Saw Up Close the Dark Reality of OpenAI’s Race to Create God,” The Times, May 23, 2026, https://www.thetimes.com/business/technology/article/chatgpt-open-ai-karen-hao-6trbrcdhx.

^[7] As Hilary Putnam, the original architect of the doctrine of functionalism, put it once he had come to his senses: “…functionalism doesn’t work. That is to say, it doesn’t fit the phenomena. But much has been learned, I feel, by trying it on for size.” See Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988),105. Putnam grants that the causal syntax of computation may be modeled in terms of functional information; but he came to realize that mental contents arise and become meaningful only within an open-ended nexus of relations between organisms, environments, and languages with their associated forms of life. Because these conditions cannot be exhaustively formalized without presupposing the intentionality of Reason, functionalist accounts of mind must remain incomplete.

^[8] See William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method 1 (1904), 491: “Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breath’ which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.”