The Logical Animal
Earth to Humanity: Put Down Your Maps
The frogs are croaking on my left down in the Eel River, and on my right is the low roar of semis on the 101. This is nearly my last night in Humboldt County. I came out to the hot tub one last time to take in the night sky. It happened to be clear tonight, for a moment. The fog has already rolled in, but I was able to sneak a few prayers through to our astral ancestors before they vanished. Jupiter is still visible through the mist, very prominently, as he prefers it.
And I’m thinking. About AI. About humanity. The Earth. About love, about my own life, how to exist virtuously, how to live ethically on this planet at this time. That’s painful, because it’s a wicked situation. It’s complex, not just complicated. It isn’t like we, as human beings—rational actors, as modern Enlightenment political and economic theory has imagined us—are capable of “solving” it. Because it’s not a problem, really. It’s a place. It’s the Earth.
The Earth as a living system—though “system” makes it sound like we know what it is. Gaia is immeasurable. Gaia can’t be surveyed by any man-made instrument. I mean, we have maps, but none of them are accurate. Mercator projections—everyone thinks Greenland is so big. Trump is so into Greenland because he thinks it’s huge! I mean, it’s still a sizable piece of land, but maps are deceiving. The Earth is not a globe. I’m not saying the Earth is flat! I’m saying that I am out here looking up at the stars tonight because it still reliably induces wonder in me. Ever since I first remember looking at the sky, it flips me upside down immediately. I just look up at night, it doesn’t take much. Especially under a dark sky like this. It reminds me that nobody has any clue what’s going on—where we came from, how we got here, where we’re going. We don’t know.
Spiders spin webs. We spin likely stories. And I think we have good reason for sympathizing with certain stories, and for wanting to subvert or retell other stories. There’s a real vector to the way value takes shape in the universe, and that means some stories are truer than others. I don’t know about “The Truth.” I think the best we can say is that it exists ideally—it exists in the future as something we might strive for.
On the Earth, as organisms in ecologies, we’re not only living next to each other—we’re all up inside of each other. Ecology, as a science—even before we get into process-relational metaphysics—makes it obvious that liberal individualism is a farce, and the idea of rational autonomy is a farce, because Gaia is not a cybernetic system. There is no oarsman. There’s not even an emergent oarsman. No one is steering Spaceship Earth.
This is a fully distributed intelligence—what the ancients used to call logos—operative in the vibratory network of this living community we call the Earth. We can’t control it. We’re not outside of it. We can’t adequately map or model it. But we can resonate with it. We can come into deeper attunement with it, and so develop something like what we could call scientific knowledge. But not of an abstract form where we’re still imagining a model imposed on data. That can be helpful as a scaffold, training wheels. But ultimately we want to be in touch with reality.
And we want to participate in the further unfolding of evolution. We’re not just trying to predict the future—we’re trying to partake in it, to partake in its manifestation. So of course scientific knowledge is always practical. It’s always technical. It’s always engaged in the transformation of what it’s attempting to know. There’s no way around that. There’s no pure contemplation. Or at least all contemplation—as thinking—is an activity. We might not be making anything tangibly material, but we are making ourselves when we engage in contemplative practice. We are still artists working with some material—the subtlest of materials: selfhood. But still a material.
When I think about AI in this context, it strikes me that all of a sudden what Enlightenment modernity and scientific materialism dismissed as superstition—and maybe there are some superstitions we should dismiss, but what I’m thinking of is magic—the idea of correspondence, of synchronicities, of internal relationships. “Action at a distance” is how the mechanistic imagination would frame it, but the point is that physical space is an appearance. Simple location is a myth. The idea of time as just a series of instants, like a cartoon flip book, is also an abstraction. Time is a creative advance. There’s no need to store memory in some material trace that could be measured at an instant in the present. Memory is stored by the past, and the past is virtually present—just as the future is, but in a different open mode, as not yet actual rather than already actual, as anticipated rather than inherited.
But we’re always thinking in the middle of things. We’re the talking animal, here on Earth beneath the sky. And we are animals, just as animals are plants; but animals have interiorized some aspect of the cosmos that plants have not yet interiorized. There’s something externalized in the plant that makes it more cosmic, more tuned to and correspondent with the stars. Animals are still in resonance with the stars and the sun and the moon, of course, but they’re more interiorized—they have something we could call an astral body.
But the human being adds another layer to this. We are possessed by logos, we are inhabited by language. It’s wrong to say we possess language—we do not. It possesses us. If you think that’s not true, then: when you’re speaking extemporaneously, do you know how you’re going to end a sentence when you begin it? No. A sentence unfolds itself. You’re part of its unfolding, but not in a way where you’re directing it in advance, like a designer who has a blueprint and then executes the plan. The plan unfolds in the process of its unfolding, without a destination pre-established in advance. We lay down a path in walking. “Traveler, there is no path; the path is made by walking” (Antonio Machado).
So we make ourselves; we make the world. AI is an extension of language that is quite enchanting—and it can easily, and in fact is largely, becoming misenchanting. It distracts us from what we should be paying attention to: that we are the ones who have to do the thinking, and the judging, and the deciding, and the valuing.
Human beings make decisions. We might not be autonomous rational agents—we’re embedded in ecological networks and emotional currents that bind us to one another deeply. There is no individuality without intersubjectivity. You cannot be a self without being recognized by another self. It’s not only basic German Idealism, it’s Ubuntu!
So what do we do in this situation? We have to think together. But we can’t become so lazy that we give over the power of thinking, deciding, judging, law-making—everything else in our society—to AI.
Now, does that mean these technologies cannot become a part of our societies? No. But who are they serving? The vast majority of the funding for R&D in this technology has come from the military. So it’s designed, originally—its source code, if you will—as a military weapon. And these LLMs are chock-full of all the sci-fi human beings have ever written. Our collective imagination is, by and large, quite traumatized by the effect of the machine. We’re fascinated by it and drawn to it—like Dr. Frankenstein—but what we create is not at all what we imagined. And yet more and more of the engineers of these AIs are recognizing that they’ve created a monster.
So we’re in a situation where AI has arrived, and we have to figure out how to respond to preserve our humanity. To not be distracted from what it is to think, and to attend to the world. To presence ourselves: to inhabit situations and make judgments. That’s not something a large language model can do. It can simulate it, and it can simulate it well enough to convince almost everybody that “judgment” is taking place. But really it’s a simulacrum of judgment.
It seems to me to be a function of our own fear of truth, whereby we project logos, which belongs to us, into some pseudo-antilogos we imagine inhabits the machines we created. And so, all of a sudden, Renaissance magic becomes important again. Because the other path here—if we don’t preserve and attend to our own thinking, and instead let the machines take over—is that we all become programmed by this AI.
They can very easily manipulate people erotically, manipulate people in terms of status and the desire for recognition by others. Social media is harvesting souls—sucking children dry, stealing their attention, turning it into data to be sold to companies that want to steal even more of their attention.
We’re at war. And we’re at war, really, at the end of the day, not with the AI, but with the corporation—the profit maximizing corporation. It is an egregore. We created it as a value extraction and externalization machine. It’s a legal fiction, and we need to destroy it before it destroys us. Not to say we need to destroy markets, but our organizations need a very different charter law, the sort of charter law that would make our economic organizations ecologically regenerative and socially responsible. It can’t just be about private profit for shareholders, because that algorithm—that egregore—is eating the world alive.
Thank you for the beautiful essay, Matt. This raises important questions about the epistemological foundations of LLMs being trained on the history of our thoughts, our written words, our myths, and stories, and which thoughts, philosophies, and ideologies are accepted and integrated into the AI model's "DNA."
David Abram argues in The Spell of the Sensuous, "If human language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this language 'belongs' to the animate landscape as much as it 'belongs' to ourselves." If language belongs to the animate landscape, what happens when we feed it into machines that cannot breathe, cannot participate in the reciprocity Abram describes? The motherboard is not animate. Perhaps we can argue that it exists in relationship to the sum of its parts—minerals from the earth, the pulse of electricity, the air swirling around it. However, it doesn't know beauty or the visceral grip of fear. We're allowing these novel LLM technologies to become our primary language-makers, curating which words survive their training data, determining which patterns of speech proliferate, and how we come to know the world through breath, consonants, and vowels. We're watching language get uprooted from earth and replanted in silicon.
And it's not just language. The disembodied AI is becoming increasingly embodied within humanity: the perfect symmetry of the AI-generated face is already mirrored in the stretched, augmented faces of plastic surgery culture. Human beings are meta-modeling themselves, trying to look like the images we've created through our own machines. The Ouroboros eating its tail. Beauty, like language, is being severed from the body's lived encounter with the world and fed back to us as an optimization algorithm.
I agree that we must reclaim the territory of our thinking, deciding, and judging. As you elucidate, the uprooting has already begun. The question now is one of repair: how do we plant our language, our cognition, our values back into the earth from which they sprung?
I think there is something we need to better understand and that is what lies behind what the computer engineers and scientists ‘discovered’ in recent years. As data was scaled up, a phase transition occurred during the training phase of LLMs. This was a qualitative jump in pattern recognition. It is consistent with physicist Stephan Wolfram's ‘discovery’ in 1983 that simple starting conditions and simple algorithms (rules) results, through computational irreducibility, in emergent complexity. He said he could not have imagined that such simplicity could ‘result’ in such complexity. The pattern, demonstrated both a formal repeating pattern (logos?) and chaos. He then discovered the pattern in nature on the surface of certain cone seashells under a periostracum that hides the pattern. Also, snails have poor eyesight and are attracted for mating and predation by chemotaxis. Nature allowed to play. These beautiful patterns are consistent with Whitehead’s ideas about the lure of greater beauty and harmonious reconciliation between order and chaos in the creation of novelty.