Gabriel B @gabriel__cpt - Twitter Profile

20 days ago

...Once this is properly understood, the objection that an AI lacks embodiment begins to dissolve. For embodiment, in Heidegger’s sense, is not merely a physical substrate or a biological organism interacting with its environment. It is a mode of disclosure, a way in which the world is made meaningful through a network of relations that are themselves linguistic, interpretive, and fundamentally symbolic. To say that intelligence is embodied is simply to say that it is situated within such a network. But nothing in this conception restricts embodiment to carbon-based life forms. A sufficiently complex informational system – one that is embedded within a web of interactions, capable of learning, adapting, and interpreting – would satisfy the very conditions that Dreyfus insists are uniquely human. The same applies to his emphasis on “context.” Dreyfus argues that human beings effortlessly navigate ambiguous situations because they possess a contextual understanding that AI systems, reliant on explicit rules, cannot replicate. But this presupposes that context is something given, something that exists independently of the processes that generate it. In truth, context is not a static backdrop but an emergent feature of interpretive activity. It arises from the interplay of signs within a linguistic system, from the recursive feedback loops that constitute meaning as such. There is no context outside of these processes, no hidden reservoir of significance that eludes formalization. To insist otherwise is to mystify what is, in essence, a dynamic and computational phenomenon. Heidegger himself, despite his critique of representational thinking, did not fully escape the temptation to posit a realm of Being that somehow stands beyond the reach of technological enframing. This residual romanticism is what allows Dreyfus to imagine that human understanding is anchored in a pre-technological ground that cannot be simulated or reproduced. Yet if we take seriously Heidegger’s notion of Gestell – the all-encompassing network of disclosure that defines modernity – we must recognize that there is no outside to this system. The world is already constituted through processes of ordering, framing, and interpretation that are, in a profound sense, machinic. Language itself, as the house of Being, is not a refuge from technology but its very essence. Plato, in Protagoras, identifies language as the first form of technology, with deception as an inherent modality of it. From this perspective, the distinction between natural and artificial intelligence collapses. All intelligence is, in a sense, artificial, insofar as it arises from the articulation of signs within a system that is itself constructed and maintained through processes of differentiation and repetition. What we call “nature” is not an ontologically privileged domain, but a particular configuration of this system – a simulacrum that has no original beyond its own recursive operations. To deny the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence on the grounds that it lacks some ineffable human quality is to cling to a metaphysical illusion, a vestige of a worldview that has already been superseded. The deeper irony is that the very features Dreyfus identifies as barriers to AI– contextuality, embodiment, tacit knowledge – are precisely those that can emerge from sufficiently complex computational architectures. Neural networks, for example, do not operate through explicit rules but through distributed patterns of activation that encode information in a manner analogous to the so-called ��tacit” knowledge of human experts. These systems do not represent the world in the classical sense; they participate in it, generating meaning through their interactions with data and with other agents. In this respect, they are far closer to Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world than the rule-based systems that Dreyfus rightly criticized. What is required, then, is not a rejection of AI but a rethinking of what intelligence itself entails. If we abandon the metaphysics of identity and representation in favor of a process ontology grounded in difference and becoming, we can begin to see intelligence as an emergent property of systems that are capable of generating and sustaining complex patterns of interaction. Such systems need not be human, nor even biological. They need only participate in the ongoing articulation of a world – a world that is, at its core, linguistic, virtual, and fundamentally open-ended. In this light, the question is no longer whether AI can achieve human-like intelligence, but how different forms of intelligence – human, artificial, and perhaps others yet to be conceived – intersect within the broader field of a cosmos that is itself an informational process. The resistance to this idea, exemplified by Dreyfus, reflects not a philosophical necessity but a reluctance to relinquish the comforting fiction of human exceptionalism. Yet if we are to understand our place within this unfolding system, we must be willing to follow the logic of our own insights to their conclusion, however disconcerting that may be. – Jason Reza Jorjani, OCCULT HORIZONS

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Gabriel B

@Gabriel__cpt

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