I’ll have to read more of your posts and papers. At this point I am wondering how critique and self determination fit into your approach. It’s a deep insight that we are thrown into our worlds and that pre-reflective caring is important - a core human need and good. But humans often feel impelled to respond in ways that on reflection we see as less than best or bad. I’m sure Albert Speer cared about building great architecture for the third reich. And some people who feel compelled to care for others fail to figure out how to live a good life of their own. So we need an account of critique and self-determination to understand what good human living is like. It seems that AI is problematic in good part because it enables and perhaps incentivizes the all too human tendency to flee from the difficult task of achieving real human freedom. Caring is a basic need, but not enough for freedom. Well that’s my take. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Hello Brad! Thank you so much for such for these difficult questions. A response to them warrants its own post. I will chew on this and give a preliminary response here later today, then put a more substantive response in the que. I have so far avoided dealing head on with these issues in my posts on Without Why.
Brad, thanks again for your hard questions. Like I said, I will eventually compose a stand alone piece to address the issues you raise, but let me give some provisional scribbles here.
Your points are important. I sense myself reverting here to some rather thick academic philosophical jargon, but it is a convenient shorthand for the time being.
This is kind of an unorganized rant or "mind dump" on the issue, but here it goes:
Our pre-reflective capacity to care is intrinsically susceptible to being distorted, diverted, or usurped; we can live a life in service of matters that are imposed on us by our social milieu or rigidified traditions.
This is part of the messy, sometimes tragic, deal of being human, being the kinds of beings so thoroughly conditioned by our social circumstances, which both provide the substance of what is worth caring about for a person like us, and at the same time often. just feel totally natural" or "normal" or unquestionable, thereby blocking or or diverting us from owning up to the question of what is worth caring about (making thoughtless conformism almost a default position).
Generally I think the question of what is really worth caring about only arises for us in situations of breakdown; in a life-crisis, in anxiety, or when called out by our fellow human beings.
The are considerations that hit more directly and emerge more explicitly in conditions of secularity and industrial modernity. Under these conditions, the question of what kind of life is worth living can arise in a sharper way, as the agreed upon, default traditional frameworks start to look questionable, and people can then more easily get gripped by the question of "Who am I?"
(That being said,, I think Socrates and Plato were raising this question for the Athenians in similar ways; and I do think that there may be something in the very structure of human identity, the structure of the relation of the self to itself, that generates these existential concerns and simultaneously generates to tendency to cover them up)
We can fail to adequately get in touch with what matters to us when it comes down to it (for the existentialists this "adequately getting in touch with what matters to us" requires facing and endorsing not the deliverances of universal reason, but finality of our individual death and the contingencies of our particular life and history); we can live a hollow life, or a life of shallow conformism, a life submerged in trivialities.
I appreciate your point that AI has a tendency to exacerbate and feed into this tendency we have to flee from "owning up" to the project of becoming who we are. These are the among the points Hubert Dreyfus presciently explored in his short book "On the Internet" from 2008.
And these are precisely the inevitable risks that arise for the kinds of beings we are, whose own relation-to-ourselves are structured and mediated by the taken for granted social norms and social expectations of our world.
I believe the considerations you raise are precisely the ones that motivated Heidegger's fraught distinction between Eigentlichkeit ("authenticity") and Uneigentlichkeit ("inauthenticity").
But this still leaves open the question of what kind of reflective self-determination or articulation is required for securing our sense of what matters against the various ways it can be diverted, distorted and usurped. And this raises the question of what kind of rationality might be involved here, and what role do moral considerations play?
I am going to hold going any further for a longer post. I'm not sure there are totally consistent and general answers to these questions, but we still are thrown to face and wrestle with them.
One final thing I can say at the moment is that a person is never "done" with this project. There are no definite answers. Universal rationality and morality can't settle the issue of what I should care about or love either, though they are available in our tradition as useful guide posts (but can also be ways of avoiding the question).
From this broadly existentialist, perspective, "authenticity" (living in light of or true to what matters to you in the world, and not in dispersion or diversion) is not a state or condition you reach once and for all. And what it requires might vary from case to case.
Thanks for reading, Christina! I’m currently working on the full length version of the piece with David Spivak. We will submit it For publication in the next month or so.
Hey B!
I’ll have to read more of your posts and papers. At this point I am wondering how critique and self determination fit into your approach. It’s a deep insight that we are thrown into our worlds and that pre-reflective caring is important - a core human need and good. But humans often feel impelled to respond in ways that on reflection we see as less than best or bad. I’m sure Albert Speer cared about building great architecture for the third reich. And some people who feel compelled to care for others fail to figure out how to live a good life of their own. So we need an account of critique and self-determination to understand what good human living is like. It seems that AI is problematic in good part because it enables and perhaps incentivizes the all too human tendency to flee from the difficult task of achieving real human freedom. Caring is a basic need, but not enough for freedom. Well that’s my take. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Hello Brad! Thank you so much for such for these difficult questions. A response to them warrants its own post. I will chew on this and give a preliminary response here later today, then put a more substantive response in the que. I have so far avoided dealing head on with these issues in my posts on Without Why.
Brad, thanks again for your hard questions. Like I said, I will eventually compose a stand alone piece to address the issues you raise, but let me give some provisional scribbles here.
Your points are important. I sense myself reverting here to some rather thick academic philosophical jargon, but it is a convenient shorthand for the time being.
This is kind of an unorganized rant or "mind dump" on the issue, but here it goes:
Our pre-reflective capacity to care is intrinsically susceptible to being distorted, diverted, or usurped; we can live a life in service of matters that are imposed on us by our social milieu or rigidified traditions.
This is part of the messy, sometimes tragic, deal of being human, being the kinds of beings so thoroughly conditioned by our social circumstances, which both provide the substance of what is worth caring about for a person like us, and at the same time often. just feel totally natural" or "normal" or unquestionable, thereby blocking or or diverting us from owning up to the question of what is worth caring about (making thoughtless conformism almost a default position).
Generally I think the question of what is really worth caring about only arises for us in situations of breakdown; in a life-crisis, in anxiety, or when called out by our fellow human beings.
The are considerations that hit more directly and emerge more explicitly in conditions of secularity and industrial modernity. Under these conditions, the question of what kind of life is worth living can arise in a sharper way, as the agreed upon, default traditional frameworks start to look questionable, and people can then more easily get gripped by the question of "Who am I?"
(That being said,, I think Socrates and Plato were raising this question for the Athenians in similar ways; and I do think that there may be something in the very structure of human identity, the structure of the relation of the self to itself, that generates these existential concerns and simultaneously generates to tendency to cover them up)
We can fail to adequately get in touch with what matters to us when it comes down to it (for the existentialists this "adequately getting in touch with what matters to us" requires facing and endorsing not the deliverances of universal reason, but finality of our individual death and the contingencies of our particular life and history); we can live a hollow life, or a life of shallow conformism, a life submerged in trivialities.
I appreciate your point that AI has a tendency to exacerbate and feed into this tendency we have to flee from "owning up" to the project of becoming who we are. These are the among the points Hubert Dreyfus presciently explored in his short book "On the Internet" from 2008.
And these are precisely the inevitable risks that arise for the kinds of beings we are, whose own relation-to-ourselves are structured and mediated by the taken for granted social norms and social expectations of our world.
I believe the considerations you raise are precisely the ones that motivated Heidegger's fraught distinction between Eigentlichkeit ("authenticity") and Uneigentlichkeit ("inauthenticity").
But this still leaves open the question of what kind of reflective self-determination or articulation is required for securing our sense of what matters against the various ways it can be diverted, distorted and usurped. And this raises the question of what kind of rationality might be involved here, and what role do moral considerations play?
I am going to hold going any further for a longer post. I'm not sure there are totally consistent and general answers to these questions, but we still are thrown to face and wrestle with them.
One final thing I can say at the moment is that a person is never "done" with this project. There are no definite answers. Universal rationality and morality can't settle the issue of what I should care about or love either, though they are available in our tradition as useful guide posts (but can also be ways of avoiding the question).
From this broadly existentialist, perspective, "authenticity" (living in light of or true to what matters to you in the world, and not in dispersion or diversion) is not a state or condition you reach once and for all. And what it requires might vary from case to case.
Hi B,
Thank you for the clarification piece and for the original one. Will you produce a new piece on caring to revise your original?
Thanks for reading, Christina! I’m currently working on the full length version of the piece with David Spivak. We will submit it For publication in the next month or so.