We and I; Sharing Emotions; AI Nightmare

Two essays on selfhood, individualism, and collectivity; thoughts on Schopenhauer and AI

Dear all,

I seem to have reached that stage of summertime inertia (facilitated in no small part by the 90 degree heat outside) during which even the most basic work-related tasks fail to elicit the necessary motivation in the face of competing options, such as naps, reading, watching Wimbledon/the Ashes, playing online Solitaire, and doing literally nothing. Despite all that, I eventually decided to upload two essays. Back in 2020, we published an issue that asked the question, “What is We?” Two of the contributions were from Dan Zahavi and Thomas Szanto, colleagues at the prestigious Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. They sit together very nicely. In addition, one of the reader’s of this newsletter, Jeffrey Anderson, submitted a short reflection on Schopenhauer and AI. Please contact me if you’d like to write something yourself. Happy reading!

Your Sunday Read(s)
“We and I” by Dan Zahavi. Zahavi is one of the world’s leading scholars of Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. This essay takes the idea of collective intentionality as its starting point. If, as Zahavi argues, collective intentionality is often considered a key feature of human sociality, who or what is this we, to whom intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are attributed? Can we think in terms of a “group mind” or is this, as John Searle insisted, “at best mysterious and at worst incoherent”? Zahavi takes us on a richly philosophical journey through selfhood, individualism, group membership, the second-person standpoint, and political identity. You can read his essay here.

“Why Should We Give a Damn? On Sharing Emotions” by Thomas Szanto. Like Zahavi, Szanto starts with an overarching question: How is it possible for two or more individuals or complex institutional groups to share emotions or feel together? Responding to the domination of a highly individualistic conception of emotions, Szanto looks to philosophy, social psychology, sociology, and cultural theory to help us move beyond what Hans-Bernhard Schmid has referred to as the “Cartesian Brainwash” (i.e. the dominance of a highly individualistic picture of selfhood, emotions etc.). You can read his essay here.

Both essays feature images by the wonderful California-based artist, Melody Overstreet (who will be contributing an essay to our forthcoming print issue).

Reflection
AI: The Stuff of Nightmares?
by Jeffrey Anderson

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher who is credited with influencing thinkers as diverse as Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Jung, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. He is best known for The World as Will and Representation (1818) in which he characterises the world, as we perceive it, as the product of a blind will. He is famous for the phrase, “the world is my representation”. Schopenhauer built on the previous work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and, most notably, Kant’s transcendental idealism as contained in his book, Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argues space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all human experience and that the objects of our actual experience are no more than mere appearances. In other words, we are born with an understanding of space and time, as these do not need to be taught or learned from our everyday experience. For Kant, the nature of things as they are in themselves, as opposed to how they are subjectively perceived by us, is unknowable to us. That is, we have no access to underlying reality, but only that which we perceive via our senses.

Schopenhauer was sympathetic to Kant’s project but argued that we do actually have access to underlying reality as we have non-sensory knowledge of ourselves from within. If we look inside and see that our inner will is constantly striving for existence and survival, this is so, argues Schopenhauer, as the true nature of our perceived world is likewise. That is, red in tooth and claw. For Schopenhauer, this underlying reality, this hidden other world, is a dark, terrible, wicked and sinister place. It is important that we do not think of this underlying reality as something that existed way back in cosmological (or evolutionary) time, when the universe was first forming. Underlying reality is something ‘other’ that exists on the outside, beyond human perception, in that it lies outside of space and time. It is with us here and now (in us), yet un-perceived by us. For us, most of what we do is done unconsciously and most of our ‘inner life’ is unknown to us.

Since Schopenhauer’s time, humanity has made giant strides in the fields of both science and psychology. That said, many still argue that we are no further forward in understanding what consciousness is, why it should arise, where it comes from or where it goes to. I want to suggest that the work of Schopenhauer (via Kant) has applicability to our contemporary world in a quite unexpected way.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) executes tasks without being conscious. Imagine if AI was trained to self-learn, as is likely to be happening very soon, if not already. A primary concern is that if we are to accept Schopenhauer’s prognosis of the will as a dark and sinister entity, AI itself may emerge as a manifestation of this will with the potential to impact adversely on humanity itself.

In a recent open letter, the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS) expressed concern that developments in new AI systems are accelerating at a pace that far exceeds our progress in understanding their capabilities and their “alignment” with human values. This dramatic warning from numerous AI experts from across the globe called for a pause on AI development and argued that the race to develop AI systems is “out of control”.

This raises the question of what is ultimately driving these advances in AI: is it human free will or the dark nightmare Schopenhauer identified as the will in this world? Can advances in AI be controlled or is it only the hidden all-powerful blind will that will determine the outcome? Schopenhauer would probably argue for the latter, but he is known as the great pessimist philosopher for good reason.

Jeffrey Anderson is an independent thinker with a MA in Philosophy from The Open University. He has a special interest in human perception.

Ending
Despite the summer inertia, there is a lot going on behind the scenes here. I’d love to tell you about it all, but that will have to wait for a future newsletter…

Wishing you all a lovely Sunday, wherever you are.

Anthony Morgan
Editor