#hegel — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hegel, aggregated by home.social.
-
A new colleague, Alaka Oluwatobi, shared his decolonial essay with me. I share this interest, so I read it and wrote a blog post. The essay is linked there as well as in the first comment if you'd like to read it without my opinions.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #humancondition #language #morality #colonialism #liberalism #imperialism #hegemony #sovereignty #agency #autonomy #assey #blog #podcast #metaethics #metaphysics #fanon #hegel #history #critique
-
A new colleague, Alaka Oluwatobi, shared his decolonial essay with me. I share this interest, so I read it and wrote a blog post. The essay is linked there as well as in the first comment if you'd like to read it without my opinions.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #humancondition #language #morality #colonialism #liberalism #imperialism #hegemony #sovereignty #agency #autonomy #assey #blog #podcast #metaethics #metaphysics #fanon #hegel #history #critique
-
A new colleague, Alaka Oluwatobi, shared his decolonial essay with me. I share this interest, so I read it and wrote a blog post. The essay is linked there as well as in the first comment if you'd like to read it without my opinions.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #humancondition #language #morality #colonialism #liberalism #imperialism #hegemony #sovereignty #agency #autonomy #assey #blog #podcast #metaethics #metaphysics #fanon #hegel #history #critique
-
A new colleague, Alaka Oluwatobi, shared his decolonial essay with me. I share this interest, so I read it and wrote a blog post. The essay is linked there as well as in the first comment if you'd like to read it without my opinions.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #humancondition #language #morality #colonialism #liberalism #imperialism #hegemony #sovereignty #agency #autonomy #assey #blog #podcast #metaethics #metaphysics #fanon #hegel #history #critique
-
A new colleague, Alaka Oluwatobi, shared his decolonial essay with me. I share this interest, so I read it and wrote a blog post. The essay is linked there as well as in the first comment if you'd like to read it without my opinions.
#philosophy #politics #society #culture #humancondition #language #morality #colonialism #liberalism #imperialism #hegemony #sovereignty #agency #autonomy #assey #blog #podcast #metaethics #metaphysics #fanon #hegel #history #critique
-
Certification for being a brutal warlord in the post-apocalypse is super-lax
-
Certification for being a brutal warlord in the post-apocalypse is super-lax
-
No 10 knew Mandelson failed security vetting seven months ago, as revealed by The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/starmer-mandelson-security-vetting-downing-street-b2959664.html
Scapegoating, is it as unique to U.K. politics as is the corrupting influence of “big donors” are to U.S. politics? Undermining the separation of powers; executive, legislative and judiciary, is not that different from the abduction of democracy to undermine the difference between the monarch, government, the estates, corporations, the civil service, business and agricultural class! #Regression #PhilosophyOfRight #Hegel #Philosophy #Progress #DotardPolitics
-
Both Hegel and Heidegger would call small talk unproductive loss of time, each in their own way.
#philosophy #poetry #smalltalk #Heidegger #Hegel
Gerede and Geschwätz in verse.
-
Fascismo à brasileira e o pobre de direita.
- bsoplvr
https://outraspalavras.net/crise-brasileira/fascismo-a-brasileira-e-o-pobre-de-direita/
#CriseBrasileira #Conscinciapoltica #Extremadireita #Fascismo #Hegel #JessSouza #Populaopobre #TheodorAdorno -
Intelligibility is the form in which science is offered to everyone, and is the open road to it made plain for all. For intelligence, understanding (Verstand), is thinking, pure activity of the self in general; and what is intelligible (Verständige) is something from the first familiar and common to the scientific and unscientific mind alike, enabling the unscientific mind to enter the domain of science.
G.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit
-
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries
#HackerNews #Hegel #PBT #propertybasedtesting #softwaredevelopment #testinglibraries
-
Today is the day I begin reading THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY by Slavoj Žižek.
May any existing gods have mercy on my soul.
😆
#SlavojZizek
#Zizek
#agency
#Hegel
#Lacan
#Marx
#philosophy
#reading
#ILoveBooks -
@leyrer Hmmmm, mir fällt ja immer nur Hegels verschlafene #Eule ein...: "Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.“
#Hegel #Minerva
#Philosophie -
This week I wrote about Aphrodite and the Hegelian concept of the beautiful soul:
-
Hypothesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/hegel/
#HackerNews #Hypothesis #Antithesis #Synthesis #Hegel #Philosophy #Debate
-
Godmorgon Mastodoningar
Denna natt avvek jag från Andens fenomenologi (Hegel) pga ordet Dialektik!
Marx/Engels?
Ja men hallå, nämnde inte Ståle Holgersen nått om det i Krisernas tid? Jo, redan i avsnitten "Om boken" refererar Holgersen till David Harvey. Ja man hallå, det namnet är bekant. Jupp, jag har ju ögnat igenom Samtida Marxistisk teori, och vips hamnade jag i den boken också och sedan vidare ut på nätet och Marxs Grundrisse och Engels Anti Dühring. #books #philosophy #hegel -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
@YellowTurtle Suppose no thing, which is put together is nothing, is absolute, so implies being is not absolute. Why should an idea be synonymous with what being is; why are the values of the ideas’ concept not absolute? When absolute values are presupposed, as in merely affirmed according to beliefs e.g. the geocentric model of the cosmos is true, which is actually false, they do not transcend their actual values if science is objective. By that I mean its claims can be independently verified and are not dependent on the beliefs in them. Ideas, having not just a form but being the exposition of the concept, transcend being e.g. the cosmos is infinite in time and or space as opposed to the values of the reasons for its dimensions are. #Philosophy
The dialectic is not linear in that its principle is constituted by the comprehension of contradictions, which are real, not transcendental e.g. as there are exceptions to speculative claims on modality that are spurious, as in without proof e.g. it is necessary that there are no absolutes, as nothing is absolute. #Dialectic #Hegel #TheAbsoluteIdea #TheScienceOfLogic
-
Denis Diderot (1713–84) criticized Hutcheson's application of uniformity amidst variety to geometrical objects and to theorems in his article on ‘Beautiful’ in the ‘Encyclopédie’.
Diderot preferred the system of Yves-Marie André (1675–1764), whose book ‘Essai sur le Beau’ was famous in its time. (I produced an open-access annotated translation in 2010; see the references in the next post.) André thought that in mathematics there was an essential geometrical beauty that was prior even to God and which had been used in the creation of the world. André saw beauty as a motivation for mathematicians from Euclid and Archimedes to Kepler and Huygens:
‘In a word, there is no academy in Europe where the love of mathematical beauty has not given in our days new conquests to the kingdom of truth.’
The attention paid to mathematical beauty in philosophical aesthetics seems to have dwindled in the 19th century with the domination in aesthetics of the philosophy of *art*, rather than of *beauty*, especially under G.W.F. Hegel's (1770–1831) influence. It revived in the first half of the 20th century in the work of philosophers like David Wight Prall (1886–1940) and Louis Arnaud Reid (1895–1986).
2/3
-
Hegel in Marx?! »Ein überaus wertvoller Forschungsbeitrag, der den Blick auf die philosophischen Grundlagen des Marx’schen Denkens lenkt und die ungebrochene Modernität Hegels aufzeigt«. Louis-Florentino Kapp hat sich in der aktuellen Zeitschrift für philosophische Literatur Andreas Arndts Band »Hegel in Marx« vorgenommen: https://zfphl.org/article/view/42580. Arndt überzeugt, indem er »einseitige Zerrbilder von #Hegel und #Marx kritisch in den Blick nimmt«: https://dietzberlin.de/hegel-in-marx
-
Neue Rezension: Andreas Arndt: Hegel in Marx. Studien zur dialektischen Kritik und zur Theorie der Befreiung (https://zfphl.org/article/view/42580) #hegel #marx
-
Ja, "Entfremdung" ist ein spannender Begriff aus dem Marxismus.
Doch schon Hegel schrieb von der "Entzweiung" von Produkt & Produzent, wertete "Denken" als "Arbeit am Begriff"!
Generell plädiere ich dafür, dass wir unsere Debatte nicht länger an Männern des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts festmachen, sondern endlich auch aktuelle Ökonominnen wie z.B. Elinor Ostrom lesen. Fossiles Denken ist langweilig.
-
finally a use for philosophy
https://quokk.au/c/philosophymemes/p/639724/finally-a-use-for-philosophy
-
“The language is the body of thought” - as someone who switches ways of expression constantly - natural languages / math / art as needed - I am not sure I agree with this particular quote from #Hegel
-
found this in my youngest's room while putting away laundry / screaming crying throwing up
#philosophy #phenomenology #germanidealism #Hegel #theory #humor
-
#Nietzsche beschrieb den … • #PolitikerDerAltenWelt … kennt nur Werkzeuge, Feinde, Macht statt Dialog. • #PolitikerDerNeuenWelt folgt #Hegel … These, Antithese, Synthese … Entscheidungen entstehen aus Integration vieler Perspektiven, nicht aus Angst vor ihnen. #SchwellenZeiten für Politiker!🖖
-
Nachdenken einer vernachlässigten Sache https://www.lesering.de/id/4947786/Nachdenken-einer-vernachlaessigten-Sache/ #HannaArendt #FreieTexte #FreieTexte #Nachdenken #Erzählung #Arendt #Hegel #Essay #UPa #UpA #Upa
-
Nachdenken einer vernachlässigten Sache https://www.lesering.de/id/4947786/Nachdenken-einer-vernachlaessigten-Sache/ #HannaArendt #FreieTexte #FreieTexte #Nachdenken #Erzählung #Arendt #Hegel #Essay #UPa #UpA #Upa
-
Nachdenken einer vernachlässigten Sache https://www.lesering.de/id/4947786/Nachdenken-einer-vernachlaessigten-Sache/ #HannaArendt #FreieTexte #FreieTexte #Nachdenken #Erzählung #Arendt #Hegel #Essay #UPa #UpA #Upa
-
#Lenin Fenster in der #Bibliothek der Juristischen Fakultät der #Humboldt #Universität #Berlin am August #Bebel Platz. Das Fenster aus #DDR Zeiten soll daran erinnern, dass Lenin 1895 bei seinem ersten Berlin Besuch in der Königlichen Bibliothek (Vorläufer der StaBi), die sich am selben Ort befand, intensiv #Hegel studiert haben soll. #Stadtführung
-
Winterzeit = beste für Theorie based on #Marx. Wir haben 15 Bände zu seiner Relevanz für die Gegenwart im Programm… z.B. zu Ökonomischer Macht im Kapitalismus | Foucault mit Marx | Postkolonialer Theorie | Hegel in Marx | Geschichte des Geldes u.v.m.: http://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie /1
#bookstodon #marx #karlmarx #friedrichengels #kapitalismus #kapital #walterrodney #ökologie #geld #foucault #hegel #feudalismus
-
Winterzeit = beste für Theorie based on #Marx. Wir haben 15 Bände zu seiner Relevanz für die Gegenwart im Programm… z.B. zu Ökonomischer Macht im Kapitalismus | Foucault mit Marx | Postkolonialer Theorie | Hegel in Marx | Geschichte des Geldes u.v.m.: http://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie /1
#bookstodon #marx #karlmarx #friedrichengels #kapitalismus #kapital #walterrodney #ökologie #geld #foucault #hegel #feudalismus
-
Winterzeit = beste für Theorie based on #Marx. Wir haben 15 Bände zu seiner Relevanz für die Gegenwart im Programm… z.B. zu Ökonomischer Macht im Kapitalismus | Foucault mit Marx | Postkolonialer Theorie | Hegel in Marx | Geschichte des Geldes u.v.m.: http://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie /1
#bookstodon #marx #karlmarx #friedrichengels #kapitalismus #kapital #walterrodney #ökologie #geld #foucault #hegel #feudalismus
-
Winterzeit = beste für Theorie based on #Marx. Wir haben 15 Bände zu seiner Relevanz für die Gegenwart im Programm… z.B. zu Ökonomischer Macht im Kapitalismus | Foucault mit Marx | Postkolonialer Theorie | Hegel in Marx | Geschichte des Geldes u.v.m.: http://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie /1
#bookstodon #marx #karlmarx #friedrichengels #kapitalismus #kapital #walterrodney #ökologie #geld #foucault #hegel #feudalismus
-
"Hegel ... sees things in terms of a 'principle of Idealism' ... It is a teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons, or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it."
J.N. Findlay
#Findlay #Hegel #Idealism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Phenomenology #Nonduality #Teleology
-
#NewIssue
Online il nuovo numero di #Lebenswelt, rivista di #estetica e teoria delle arti.
Si parla dell'estetica di #WalterBenjamin, di religioni orientali nelle lezioni universitarie di #Hegel, delle lettere di Giambattista #Vico a Gherardo degli Angioli, della poetica di #Aristotele
e altro.In #OpenAccess qui:
⬇️ https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/Lebenswelt/issue/view/2709?mtm_campaign=mastodon
-
“sulla funzione della negazione nella poetica di emilio villa”: un saggio inedito di aldo tagliaferri (2025)
https://archive.org/details/tagliaferri-negazione-poetica-emilio-villa
= https://slowforward.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/aldo-tagliaferri_-sulla-funzione-della-negazione-nella-poetica-di-emilio-villa_-pdf-slowforward-nov-2025.pdfcliccare per accedere al pdf
#EmilioVilla #AldoTagliaferri #negazione #GeorgesBataille #FriedrichNietzsche
#AldoTagliaferri #AldoTagliaferri #art #arte #Bataille #EmiioVilla #EmilioVilla #FriedrichNietzsche #GeorgesBataille #Hegel #heidegger #immanenza #letteratura #metamorfosi #negazione #Nietzsche #oggetto #poesia #prosa #sacrificio #sacro #saggio #storia #tempo #teoria #trascendenza #Villa
-
“sulla funzione della negazione nella poetica di emilio villa”: un saggio inedito di aldo tagliaferri
=
https://archive.org/details/tagliaferri-negazione-poetica-emilio-villacliccare per accedere al pdf
#EmilioVilla #AldoTagliaferri #negazione #GeorgesBataille #FriedrichNietzsche
#AldoTagliaferri #AldoTagliaferri #art #arte #Bataille #EmiioVilla #EmilioVilla #FriedrichNietzsche #GeorgesBataille #Hegel #heidegger #immanenza #letteratura #metamorfosi #negazione #Nietzsche #oggetto #poesia #prosa #sacrificio #sacro #saggio #storia #tempo #teoria #trascendenza #Villa
-
"Religion, right, ethics, and everything spiritual in human beings, is merely aroused. We are implicitly spirit, for the truth lies within us and the spiritual content within us must be brought into consciousness."
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, p. 161
#Hegel #Recollection #Anamnesis #Philosophy #Religion #Ethics #Spirit #Consciousness #Mysticism #GermanIdealism
-
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
-- Hegel⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Hegel #Freedom #Necessity
⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Triathlon #Runners #StPetersburg #Florida