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Monday, 12 November 2018


Think of it instead as for-itself or as Dasein, that for which its own being is in question. As world-making being its self-transcendence devolves into attitudes, comportments or dispositions. Of these some are more closely imbued with this essential questioning; this being a matter of a certain ek-static structure more so than anything propositionally equivalent to a question. Desire, temporality, valuation might serve as prime examples. Put simply these are things which you would not expect an AI to be endowed with unless it had somehow transcended its condition and, as they might say, 'awakened'. If we are informed by experts that artistic creativity and empathy are two things we might expect to find in near-future AI well short of consciousness, then we know that these do not belong in this rare class of question-bearing comportments. Rather we see that cultural discourses endless circle about this latter class without actually naming it or being concerned to emphasis their self-revelatory self-concealing character. People would rather fight over them, which is itself a kind of revelation. You might also think of the class of such comportments that we readily ascribe to animals.  Do animals desire? Or if we admit that they do is their desire of the same ontological significance, is their being in question in it? The answer is probably no. There is a particular kind of openness in the members of this class, which also endows them with religious significance. The pathways may be indirect, but it is through these that irreducible metaphysical questions persistently recur.

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