Machines appearing to think as well or better than humans reinforces the idea that our thought is itself produced by mechanical operations, inputs and outputs, storage, processing etc. This paradigm completely erases any notion of Being that is not already a matter of beings, it is bootstrapped as it were from beings and nothing else. And yet for all of this the question of Being can still be formulated in language and hence remains a valid, if foreclosed, question. Attempting to fully cash out the notion of consciousness as arising inn this way one is forced to more and more recondite notions of some kind of 'true' situational awareness, of an immediacy which never quite fits into the system. There is a peculiar desire intrinsic to human thought to imagine systems that thoroughly exclude our very possibility. Is this the latest form of nihilism?