Category Archives: Continental philosophy

what about human life is essential to preserve?

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At the beginning of the 20th century, people could presume that we are terrestrial creatures whose habitat is Planet Earth. They could predict that we will continue to live as humans until our far-distant natural demise or an end decreed by God. They could define human beings as creatures who work (homo laborans) and make tools and who understand the tools we’ve made. They could presume that we alone speak and reason in language, unless divine beings also interact with us.

Technology changed all those presumptions. It became clear that we could live on other planets, we could wipe out the species in a few moments, we might be able to automate all work, we might make machines that exceeded our own understanding, and we might build machines that could reason and talk, perhaps better than we do.

Hannah Arendt mentions each of these developments in the Preface to The Human Condition, which she published in 1958. Some of the traditional assumptions about humanity had already collapsed by then, due to atomic weapons and space exploration. So far, there were no machines that could do all our work or think better than we can, but she saw that those developments were coming unless we blew ourselves to dust first. Just five years later, she worried that “electronic ‘brains,’ devised and constructed by men” will “not only do man’s brainwork incomparably better and more swiftly (this, after all, is the outstanding characteristic of all machines), but can do ‘what a human brain cannot comprehend” (Arendt 1963, 530.)

She therefore posed the question: what is the human condition? She wanted readers to consider what is essential to us. This is what must be preserved if we love humankind. For her, love of our species was not contingent on our being excellent in some way–for example, the best thinkers on the planet. It was a fundamental ethic.

Clearly, human life will end if we vaporize ourselves. Presumably, we can live as humans on other planets: science fiction has envisioned that situation vividly. Whether we can be human without working or once we share the world with machines that think better than us are harder questions, and the answers depend on what it is to be us.

Later in the book, Arendt will explain that part of being human is to “act.” In her specific meaning of that verb, to act is to discuss what to do with other people who are independent and heterogeneous (Arendt’s “plurality”) and then to do or make things together.

Because many interacting people are required to decide what to do, Arendt cannot tell us how to address developments like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. We must think them through together. She writes:

To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible (p. 5).

Why should we make decisions together instead of just doing the right thing? Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (p. 4).

We live in a meaningful world–a world with meaning to us–only if we create it together. The question of the moment is whether our world will remain meaningful to us if we transform it through artificial intelligence that we no longer understand.

What are the “truths beyond speech” that Arendt mentions here? The most obvious candidates are transcendent truths, such as religious insights that a person might receive as revelations or intuit by introspecting. But there is a way in which science and technology are also “beyond speech.” Of course, scientists must communicate. However, for them, communication is a cost, a means to the end of analyzing nature. The less talk is necessary to produce knowledge, the better.

Ideally, scientists and technologists apply impersonal methods to generate knowledge that accumulates. A technician can install a light fixture or even design a new electrical device without reading and discussing the words of Alessandro Volta and Nikola Tesla. Historical contributions are now embedded in current techniques, some of which are algorithmic. And if a library is a device for accumulating knowledge, then a Large Language Model may be a better one.

Arendt is a solo scholar, applying her learning and methods to analyze how our thinking has developed so far. Her narrative in The Human Condition is the work of one thinker, yet she is in constant and explicit dialogue with previous writers and with her readers. Thus her contribution lies between “truths beyond speech” and “practical politics.”

The purpose of her text is to set questions that we must answer collectively by thinking and acting:

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing (p. 5).

Sources: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963). See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the papal encyclical on AI

do the liberal arts accomplish civic education?

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Next weekend, I’ll participate in a discussion at a famous liberal arts college about the various crises facing such institutions.

All the other participants will be liberal arts college professors. Although my institution is a research university, the intersection of the liberal arts and civic learning also matters to me.

First, the crises that confront the liberal arts (from the cost of college to the rise of AI; from Donald Trump to cultural challenges within the academy) also threaten the parts of a university where I work.  

Second, we face an important conceptual question whenever we try, at universities like mine and many others that I visit (and in k-12 education) to strengthen civic learning. Are the liberal arts automatically “civic”? In other words, is saving the liberal arts a way to accomplish “education for citizenship” (which will be the title of my talk next weekend)? In practical terms, can we say that a student who has a good basis in the liberal arts is also educated for citizenship? Or is there a distinction between civic and liberal education?

In short, my answer would be that the liberal arts provide education for a good individual life. But the specific question for citizens is how to do good things together. Citizens need collective agency.

Most or perhaps all of the liberal arts are useful for collective agency. A group of people concerned with the condition of their community can benefit from understanding economics, the carbon cycle, liberalism and its critics, and the origins of their language, to name just four examples. However, a mass of such knowledge may not sufficiently inform them about how to act well together. They also need the Tocquevillian art and science of association, the “mother science” in a democracy.

We can learn how to associate effectively and wisely from experience. If one grows up amid functioning voluntary associations and participatory democratic institutions, one may learn how to make them work well without having to study that topic extensively. However, most modern Americans lack such opportunities.

Besides, since the challenges of forming and sustaining effective groups have grown and changed in the 21st century, accumulated experience may not suffice. Civic education requires the explicit study of collective agency, often based on texts.

Note that the scale of collective action ranges from pairs of collaborators to the whole human species. A nation is one “we” among many others.

The precise topics of civic education may vary depending on students’ interests and needs. However, as illustrative examples, it can be very useful to understand how the grassroots leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement formed effective nonviolent organizations, or how a 21st century nonprofit should develop a strategic plan, or how to analyze an argument about values, or how to collect relevant environmental data, or (indeed) what James Madison advises about the problem of factionalism in Federalist #10.

These are classic topics in the liberal arts, likely offered in departments from history and biology to philosophy. What matters is the spirit and purpose of the inquiry, which must involve collective agency. The primary question is not how things work, or how things should be, or what someone thought, but what we (a group to which a person belongs) should do.

Both pedagogy and content are relevant. To learn to govern things together, it is valuable to practice discussing and writing about texts and data. These are forms of pedagogy. But it is also valuable to understand the difference between a labor union and a corporation–that is content, which can be conveyed in a lecture. Both matter.

Three quick historical illustrations may help to convey this ideal.

The earliest attested use of the phrase “liberal arts” occurs in an early and minor work by Cicero, De Inventione (1.35). He is not discussing the liberal arts. The phrase occurs in a long list of ways that people differ. A person can be male or female, strong or weak, Greek or barbarian. (I would like to ask a classicist whether Cicero, a Roman writing in Latin, considered himself a barbarian on account of his country or a Greek because of his education.) A man’s character also depends on “who he had as teachers of the liberal arts” and “who has instructed him in living.”

This brief mention is hardly a theory of the liberal arts. However, Cicero opens the book with this problem: wisdom is moot without eloquence (no one will act wisely unless persuaded), yet eloquence is morally neutral and can be used for evil. His stated objective is to serve “our republic” by uniting wisdom with eloquence. In that context, the liberal arts appear, along with moral exhortation, as ways of making men lead good lives–men who are not only individuals but also citizens of a republic.

Now compare the image of Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts by the remarkable woman Herrad of Landsberg (ca. 1185), which accompanies this post. Here Philosophy is the Queen. Philosophy says that the liberal arts flow from her as seven streams of wisdom, and she gets her wisdom from God. At the bottom of the picture are four bad men (listening to black birds instead of Philosophy) who violate the liberal arts. One of those is a Magician, and another is a Poet, consigned to the bottom because he makes up false stories.

Herrad may have been an exemplary participant and leader of a group–the abbey whose nuns elected her as their abbess in 1167. Nevertheless, her conception of intellectual life is religious as opposed to republican. For her, knowledge is abstract and divine, discovered not created by people. Education leads one up and out of human affairs.

Finally, Hannah Arendt aimed to recover the republican ideals that animated the young Cicero but for modern times. In 1958, she wrote:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.(The Human Condition, p. 4).

Herrad of Landsberg’s truths are definitely beyond speech and relevant to the individual soul, because they are truths about God. But I think the ordinary modern liberal arts also pursue truths beyond “speech” (in Arendt’s idiosyncratic terminology). For example, pure mathematics belongs to the liberal arts. One might think that any science which relies on impersonal methods pursues truths without intrinsically requiring “speech,” and its truths can matter to people. But the liberal arts also involve truths that we make together by talking and acting. That is where the liberal arts and civic education intersect.

See also: love of the world; is Black Studies Civic Studies?; A Defense of Higher Education and its Civic Mission (2013); the humanities as civic education etc.

where is the attention?

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Sometimes, my dog wonders something about me. Perhaps: Will I will play with him?

He stares at my face, which means he must look quite far above his own head. His nostrils may twitch, and I guess that he is gathering as much data as he can with his nose. His head is cocked, which signals to me that he has a question. His ears (being floppy) are harder to interpret, but usually you can tell that they are tensed forward to listen.

Where is he when he attends this way? One valid answer: between his nose and his tail. Or: in the space contained by his fur.

But it would be a normal use of the English language to say that his eyes–or his mind–are on me. Presumably, he is not thinking about his tail, whereas he is intentionally focused on my face. His eyesight is directed, so that he is not looking anywhere other than my face. Even the space between us and behind me is presumably blurred for him. I am the “figure,” and the rest is the “ground.”

The senses of smell and sound are less directed. Information can reach a nose and ears from any direction. But Luca is probably trying to screen out other olfactory and auditory data and lean into information about me that may be carried by smells and sounds.

He cannot feel me from a distance, and he is probably inattentive to the things that he can feel, such as the ground below him–unless it moves. He is not focused on touch because it will not tell him whether I am going to play with him.

Thus, if you ask where is he when he wonders about me, a plausible answer would be: In a zone centered on my face. But my face is merely a source of information, so another answer could be: He is in relation to me. Or: We are together. After all, the purpose of the cocked head is to tell me that he is attending to me so that I will be more likely to answer his question.

This act of attention has duration. Luca sustains his gaze, which is why I infer that he is attentive. Besides, he is interested in whether I will play with him in the future because I have played with him in the past. I don’t know whether a dog thinks about memories or plans, but humans certainly do. And neither memories nor plans are in the present.

If Luca already knew what he wanted to know, he would no longer pay attention. Nor would he attend if there were nothing present that might answer his question. Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that attention arises “in the process of learning” (1945, p. 34). He defines the “attention itself” as “circumscribed ignorance, an intention that is still ’empty’ but already determined” by what is really there.

Let’s say that any sentient being is its attention, or at least that its attention is a very significant aspect of the being. I have explored that thesis a bit here.

Our attention has a location that is related to the location of our body, but the two are not coterminous. In fact, we are rarely aware of most of our body, and we cannot become aware of some parts or aspects of it, such as the blood in our veins. Although Luca’s sensory capacity is concentrated inside his skull, he is not attentive to his skull and can never even see the back of it.

Still, the body has an important relationship to attention. If something happens to the body, we may immediately notice it and may be compelled to attend. I pulled a muscle in my back on Monday, and that certainly got my attention. If the body dies, the attention ends.

Our attention has a location in time that is related to the present hour and minute, but the two are not identical. We can be deeply engaged with a memory or a fear or hope for the future. And an instant of attention may make sense only as one part of an extended act. I may attend to one word while writing this whole post, but no word means much alone.

Two or more attentions can be connected, with each serving as the object of the other. Then it may be more meaningful to ask where we are than where I am.

Where? and When? seem to be questions about limitations. We are finite, limited creatures who cannot be everywhere or last forever. However, we are not limited in quite the way we may assume when we identify with our body at the moment that is shown on a clock. Our place and time are different from that.

Source: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard, 1945). (“La conscience en train d’apprendre” is “cette ignorance circonscrite, de cette intention <<vide>> encore, mais déjà déterminée“). The metaphor of figure and ground also comes from this text.

See also: people as clusters of attention; paradigms of attention; effortful attention and moral responsibility; Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy; Rilke, ‘The Grownup’.

ten thoughts about time

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[Caveat: there is a large literature on the philosophy of time that I have not investigated carefully. The following thoughts may be naive.]

  1. Our habitat exhibits temporal regularities

Like all species on this planet, we evolved in an environment strongly marked by the regular movements of the earth and moon in the presence of the sun. Most species respond to these regularities–resting by night or by day, budding every spring, foraging at low tide. For species that are sentient, it pays to be aware of at least the most relevant regularities.

  1. We perceive rhythms

Human beings can sense temporal regularities. We can notice that a frog is croaking at an even pace or that each day is about as long as the next one. We can also make rhythmic sounds of our own. My colleague Anirudh Patel shows that some birds experience rhythm much as we do, but that monkeys do not. As hard as they try, monkeys cannot predict the next beat. It seems likely that our ways of perceiving and creating temporal regularities are adaptive for us, as highly social creatures living on a planet with pervasive temporal rhythms. For one thing, music and dance strengthen social bonds. But different species have adapted to the same context differently.

  1. Our ideas of time are deeply cultural

People are taught how to perceive time from a very early age. We learn words for minutes, days, and years. Our languages mark time in complex (but diverse) ways, such as verb tenses or adverbial expressions. We learn metaphors for time, such as the clock’s round face or a calendar’s rows and columns. And elements of time are deeply imbued with significance, sometimes even sacredness.

This inheritance makes it hard to tell whether individuals could perceive (or invent) temporal regularities all by themselves. When one of my daughters was about two, she went to nursery school every other weekday. She said that this pattern was a “stripe.” I don’t know whether she was reinventing the metaphor of time as a line divided into periods (in which case this metaphor could be hard-wired) or whether she was simply applying a metaphor that she had already learned from us. But at least some of our notions of time are cultural inheritances.

  1. Our direct perceptions of temporal regularities are imperfect

We can perceive that a clock’s ticks are spaced evenly, but if the clock slows down very gradually, we will not notice. We can perceive that the seasons rotate through an annual pattern that takes hundreds of days to complete, but I do not think we would notice that a year took 350 or 400 days if we didn’t measure and record the passage of time.

  1. We use tools to measure time

Because we can recognize temporal patterns, we can identify objects that are particularly regular and use them as measures by comparing them to other objects. For our ancestors, the regular motions of heavenly bodies provided reliable measures, and they erected objects that cast shadows to track these motions. Sometimes we simply perceive that something (such as water dripping through a narrow hole) is regular and use it as a measurement tool. But it is better to have an explanation of the object’s regularity. For instance, Newtonian physics can explain why the earth has rotated at an even pace during our recorded history. With modern physics, we can now invent quantum clocks. All of the objects that exhibit temporal regularities are consistent with each other.

  1. These five background conditions encourage us to model time in certain ways

We pervasively think of time as a line (whether straight, circular or oval), with the present as a point that moves along steadily. We may think that only the present point is real or actual. The past has left residues in the present, including effects on our nervous system that we can summon as memories. And the regularities of nature allow us to predict the future. But all of our direct perceptions are of the present, which has no duration and turns instantly into the past.

Such models may be contingent on our background conditions: our physical capacities, which evolved for a particular environment, plus the tools and cultural apparatus that we have developed. A different culture–let alone a different species on a different planet–might grasp time in fundamentally different ways that would work just as well.

On the other hand, I would not quickly assume that a linear model of time is “Western” or “modern,” whatever those categories mean. Writing ca. 400s CE, the Buddhist monk Buddhaghosa introduces a simile of a chariot wheel that touches the ground at one point while it spins, saying that the “life-moment of living beings” is equally brief. Although we perceive a moving wheel as a continuous thing, Buddhaghosa wants us to see each instant as discrete.

  1. Our sense of time causes distress

To varying degrees, we are troubled by feelings that time is running out, that we are wasting the present, that we would change the past if we could, that the future will be bad in certain ways, or that we wish we could directly experience what we did in the past (nostalgia).

  1. A linear model of time might be the root of the distress

These feelings seem rooted in the class of models that I mentioned above, which represent time as linear with the present as a point.

  1. Linear models do not describe our consciousness of time

A linear model of time works well to describe history or physical processes. It enables useful objects such as chronologies, calendars, and time-stamps. Because of its utility, we will always return to it. But it does not describe how we experience time.

As many have noted, if we only experienced the present, we could not hear a melody. We would only hear the current note or chord. We could not understand a sentence; we would only hear the word being uttered. And we could not catch (or duck) an incoming ball, because it would appear as a circle in our visual field. Evidently, we perceive objects that extend in time and change.

Kant thought that our perceptions were momentary, but there must be a persistent self that puts our perceptions together. William James disagreed that the perceptions themselves lack duration. “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end” (p. 609).

Edmund Husserl reached a similar conclusion, in a different way. I suspect that he and James were right, but their disagreement with Kant is relatively subtle. The main point is that mental models that represent time as a line, which we have developed to understand history and nature, do not reflect how we actually experience time.

  1. It may be possible to experience time differently

If a linear model of time is highly useful and embedded in our language and culture, we will never just drop it. But if it is contingent on our circumstances and fails to describe our own experience, then it is not exactly objective or obligatory. We may be able to think in different ways, at least at times.

The great Zen thinker Dogen (1200-1253 CE) worked out a theory in which time is not separate from being, a vessel or dimension or space in which things occur. Instead, being and time are the same. “The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time” (p. 92).

I am not sure that his abstract metaphysics persuades me or communicates what he perceived while he meditated on time. I get more from his verse (p. 177):

For thousands of yards, the cold lake soaks up the color of the sky. 
Evening quiet: a fish of brocade scales reaches the bottom, 
then flits this way and that; an arrow notch splits. 
Endless water surface, moonlight brilliant.

Sources: Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli (Buddhist Publication Society, 2010), viii.7 (p. 476); James, The Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt, 1918); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt (editors and translators), The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambhala, 2013)

See also: how to think about the self (Buddhist and Kantian perspectives); phenomenology of nostalgia; A Husserlian meditation.

the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial

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In 1958, Hannah Arendt could see where were were headed:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. …

It would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company tor good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 3)

What is “human existence as it has been given”?

For most of our history, most human beings have lived with other people whose names they know. They have worked individually and collaboratively with materials in their context to make an environment that I will call a “world.”

A world has these features:

  • It is imbued with moral significance, because other people have made it, given it meaning, cared about it, and been affected by it. An individual cannot interact with a world without causing good or harm to other people.
  • It is real, not imaginary, and therefore it is stubborn. It rarely turns out the way we want, but we can learn from experience to work more effectively with it.
  • The other people involved in any world hold partially conflicting interests and goals and can be stubborn in their own way. Both the materials and the people resist any single will.
  • Each person has partial and even biased knowledge, beliefs, and feelings about the world. But their varied ideas can accumulate as they express them and record them. Each person can therefore explore not only a world but the accumulated human experience of that world.
  • Because we must act in the company of other people and learn by acting, our “thinking and speaking” are closely connected.
  • Because our deepest concerns (moral, spiritual, and otherwise) relate to the world that we shape with our minds and hands, our “thought” is also connected to our “know-how.”
  • Each world typically predates each human being and survives the person’s death, yet each person can affect it. In fact, the birth of any human being automatically changes the world, if for no other reason than a birth turns people into parents, siblings, and other kinds of relatives.
  • There is not one world but many human worlds. But worlds can interact to various degrees without becoming subsumed into one bigger world.

Why it is good to live in a world

It is not obvious that living in this kind of world is the best imaginable form of life. Most people have envisioned heaven or a political utopia differently. (For instance, in an ideal world, the other people usually become less stubborn!) But I could make three arguments in favor of living in a world like this.

First, it seems plausible that homo sapiens evolved for such a life. Our brains, senses, and bodies are equipped to navigate it.

For instance, newborn infants already recognize faces, which are designed to communicate information and emotions. And our languages and cultures have accumulated deep resources for sharing a world with finite other human beings. The Proto-Indo-European language already used first-, second-, and third-person verbs and indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods to make distinctions that are useful for group discussions about a common world. Thus a world is arguably our habitat.

Second, the combination of agency and humility seems morally compelling. It is fitting that we can affect our environment but not do just anything we individually want with it. And we should see our context as imbued with moral significance.

Third, navigating a world is a way for creatures like us to achieve comprehension, to make sense of matters. As Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the
singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (1958, p. 4).

Threats to human worlds

Each human world has always been fragile, subject to destruction if invaders arrive, a plague strikes, or the community breaks down.

In addition, tyrants threaten any shared world because they can turn individuals into means to their solo ends.

Mass society puts each world at risk by bringing us into relationships with millions of others, whose names we will never learn. And mass economic exploitation makes matters worse. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says, “loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, … is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. [It is] is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.”

When history seems to move quickly and beyond anyone’s control, humans cease to feel that they are agents in any recognizable world.

Ideology can be defined as any system of thought that substitutes core assumptions for actual engagement with other people in a common world.

Finally, although media can enrich any given world, it can also disrupt it. Imagine people sitting alone or in passive company before a TV screen that tells them about gruesome crimes. Their actual world may be safe, or less dangerous than it was in the past, but the mediated world is cruel.

New threats in the age of AI

This theoretical framework comes from Arendt, who drew on Heidegger’s fundamental insight that the human form of being (Dasein) is always “‘in’ the world in the sense that it deals with entities encountered within-the-world, and does so concernfully and with familiarity” (Being and Time, H105, trans. by Macquarrie & Robinson). Arendt makes Heidegger’s theory political and republican by emphasizing that people can talk and decide what to do with their worlds.

I have sketched this view to help make sense of a new phenomenon: intelligence that is artificial (AI). But Arendt already feared that we might “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

When a person expresses a view, the content of what they say helps us to understand the world that the person inhabits. Even when people are flat-out wrong, the fact that they err or lie is part of our reality. In addition, a human view comes from a creature that can suffer. As such, it makes a claim on our compassion. In short, we attend not only to the content of the statement but also to the person who expressed it.

In contrast, when a large language model (LLM) answers a query (typically in the first-person singular and with emotive language like “I will be glad to …”), it does not reflect any particular perspective, nor does it come from a body that is capable of suffering. It just pretends to be a fellow participant in our world. We can attend to the words but not to the speaker.

Walter Cronkite was not really a visitor to Americans’ living rooms in 1970. He just appeared on TV screens. But he was a real person who could be assessed as such. An LLM is qualitatively different.

An LLM can be just another tool or resource, like a Heidegger’s hammer or perhaps like a library. I have collaborated with teams of Tufts engineering students to build the Civic Helpdesk and other applications of AI that are not yet publicly available. Working with them to fine-tune instructions or to design a user interface feels very much like collaborative work in a shared world. Note that I naturally said we “built” these tools, because the work feels roughly like building a shed, or perhaps an organization.

I have also developed what I think is a fairly tight practice of asking Claude about the Sanskrit and Pali original words in texts that I can only read in translation. This feels like a modest expansion of my inner life, if not a contribution to any shared world. (By the way, Claude is probably pulling these definitions from a finite set of published lexicons that have human authors.)

On the other hand, as Pope Leo notes in Magnifica humanitas, “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.” This sounds more like Arendt’s nightmare of a time when our thoughts cannot grasp what we have done.

The deepest concern is that we have developed biologically and culturally to flourish in what Arendt would call a world, but an individual who uses AI is no longer there.

See also: the papal encyclical on AI; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the human coordination involved in AI; the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human; and love of the world