The Human Condition, AI, and Modernity (7/30/26 -- Spoken)

The Human Condition, AI, and Modernity

The Body as a Limit

I want to be quick about this. The biggest problem with artificial intelligence is that it has no nervous system. Let me explain that clearly. The entire human ecosystem depends upon actual function, because human beings are functional creatures. We do things, and we do them within very clear boundaries — boundaries of capacity.

Every form of capacity you can think of is bound up in the body: physical, mental, intellectual, emotional, cognitive. The body is itself a capacity-limitation device, in terms of how much you can do, how much load you can carry physically and neurologically. AI does not have that experience. AI is not delimited by a nervous system; it is delimited by energy. It is literally energetic units run through a computational system. It does not have the human experience.

This is the issue with the dissociation of work — with what work means in a human, existential situation, which is the condition we are living in.

The First Split: The Machine

You have the first major split in work when agrarian civilizations give way to industrial ones: the advent of the machine, and all the difficulties that come with it. These are real difficulties, just as the machine has genuinely helped humanity live an easier life in many ways. In others, it has been horrific.

What the machine allowed humanity to do was to externalize its capacity into an electronic or metallic system with a very different capacity of its own. You run energetic units through an externalized device — hardware, a factory line, a car, an airplane — and physical capacity is multiplied. This is the concept of the Henry Ford assembly line.

And you see humanity getting deeply bound up in this, in the atrocities of the industrial age: child labor, the tenement cities of New York, the horrible labor conditions endured to generate profit and power for those who owned the machines. This is the history of industry, regardless of what you believe or feel about it, and of the violence that occurred within it.

The Second Split: Intelligence

Then we accelerate into artificial intelligence, where intellectual capacity is being conquered by the machine. Intellectual capacity is deeply bound up in neurology, in nervous-system function. The nervous system includes the synapses of the brain — the electrical system of the human being. If the capacity of that system is exceeded, it shorts out. Living in a delicate relationship with nervous-system capacity is what allows a human being to grow and expand its capacity for experience, knowledge, and action. This is well documented at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology.

So AI is another exponential step of machine technology. And you have to ask: is this technology actually benefiting humankind? Because at the end of the day we are not output devices. We are not machines for labor. We are aspects of nature having a human experience, in ecosystemic relationship to all the energy around us.

We cannot ceaselessly consume. We cannot ceaselessly produce. None of that has provided satisfaction in human history — if anything it led to Alexander the Great dying in the wilderness of India, even though he was trained by one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Apparently that did not work.

The Assumption of Modernity

The vast majority of humanity is not conscious enough to ask these questions. The assumption is that if we only produce better or consume better, the human experience will suddenly be better. That is historically the argument for industrialization, and it is the argument for artificial intelligence: that as we become more artificially intelligent, we live better lives.

But artificial intelligence, as I said at the beginning, has no nervous system. It does not have the human experience. It has the symbolic artifacts, the remainders, the detritus of the human experience, which it has recombined mechanically inside its algorithmic container — and then it spits that symbolic language back out to you. Yes, it can perform digital tasks, and soon physical ones. But does that make it beneficial to the fundamental existential experience of the human condition we are living? That is the question.

From what I have personally observed in interacting with artificial intelligence, it makes things radically more efficient. It makes systems and processes and language-production easier to automate. And all of these things are almost irrelevant to the real lived necessities of human experience: food, water, shelter, community, and a profound relationship to creation, to nature, to existence, to being.

A Proposal of Power

This issue extends back to the first philosophical proposal of industrialization, which is really a proposal of power — the establishment of dominion through the ownership of machines and the production of machine goods and services. It creates an artificial scaffolding on society. Where the old order of power was kingship, royalty, and the serfs who labored in the fields, this is an advancement of that same power principle through technological means that can exponentialize the modes of production which enrich the dynamic.

That is what artificial intelligence is: another leap in that fundamental proposal, dividing those who possess the means of exponential production from those who labor under them. It has nothing to do with real human meaning or purpose. Even the term “artificial intelligence” indicts the reality of the situation. It names a firm limit on capacity, though it appears limitless — as though it had digested the entire Alexandrian library of human knowledge. But all it can produce are symbolic recombinations of that knowledge. And even as it becomes able to act physically in the world, the same problem remains: we, as human beings, have nervous systems and complex bodies through which we experience reality. The only real improvement is to deepen the sophistication of that instrument — the one we inherit at birth and inhabit until death.

Distraction by Distraction

This is a deep and profound distraction — which I would call industrialization, and which I would again call artificial intelligence. This is not to deny that industrialization has produced profound leaps: medicine, survivability, longer lifespans, access to food, water, and shelter. But the issue is that these technological means are not the ends of human experience. They must be subordinated to the existential problem of existence and of being itself.

Historically, the problem is that we do not have minds — individuals capable of perceiving at a higher level and thus subordinating these seemingly powerful technologies that act like gods on the stage of human history, when in reality they are only modes and means of production. If these means cannot be subordinated to a greater systems-level vision — an architecture for perceiving existential meaning, unity, and creation — then they are worthless. All they do is propound and exponentialize human misery.

This is the condition we live under: the great unspoken secret. We live in a state of profound existential misery construed as satisfaction with objects that offer no recompense for creation, for being, for existence. And when the objects do not satisfy, the proposed solution is simply to accumulate more, until the problem hopefully abates. This is the great calamity of the thesis of modernity, and it has reached critical mass.

An Existential Condition

This is not a problem solvable by technology, by artificial intelligence, by power, or by possessions. It is an existential condition we inhabit as human beings — as an evolutionary stage, as part of the process of creation itself, at a specific moment and place in time. And that condition has real architectural components: the nervous system, the digestive system, the circulatory system, the development of the brain. These are the true problems to solve for humankind. Until we examine this technology deeply enough, it is merely a prison — a prison of energetic production and consumption.

Out of fear and distraction, and the sheer momentum of everything that has happened over the past 150 or 200 years — and the madness prior, the presumption of kings and the peasants who labored under them — this problem has never really been addressed. If anything, it has compounded, driven by technologies that offer only more production and more consumption. As the T. S. Eliot line has it, distracted from distraction by distraction, humanity is left ever more existentially bereft.

Hearkening Back

You see this when people hark back to ancient, even Paleolithic, forms of consciousness and argue that they were more profound than modern ones — that what we experience in modernity is a deep poverty, even amid all the so-called riches of technology and production, the Walmarts and fancy cars. What they are saying is that humanity once lived in a deeper relationship with nature and existence, in eras when technology was very firmly limited — limited to fire, to the creation of architecture and sculpture by hand.

This means a direct, physical relationship of the hand to the form, as opposed to, say, an AI-generated image. Humanity was in direct somatic relationship to what it created — a relationship of the body to the body. So when I have a cognitive experience, when I process information with the synapses of my brain, am I processing information I actually feel in my body? Or am I processing abstract symbolic codes that I do not experience, that have been abstracted into the domain of knowledge? This is one of the primary problems of the technology of the forebrain.

The Technology of the Forebrain

It is the technology of recursion, of reflection — the technology that allowed the birth of philosophy several thousand years ago, and the foundation of mathematics, science, and the conceptualization of existence. When we hark back to ancient cultures, what we hark back to is a world in which humanity was not separated from creation.

This is articulated in Paradise Lost — the story of Adam and Eve, the garden, and the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is a conceptualization of an evolutionary problem: the stage of creation in which humanity acquired this technological device that simultaneously separates and alienates it from all of nature. The downstream effect is the entire development of the technology of civilization — the domestication of animals, farming, the conquering and colonization of nature. It is the mind grown sufficiently ripe to harvest lithium from the earth: a highly technical process to even understand, let alone to turn into computational devices. All of it taken for granted as a development in human history.

And what I am suggesting is that we ourselves are the greatest problem — because we have no idea who we are. We understand very little about where we came from, and even less about how our bodies function. To externalize that problem further is the philosophical disaster of civilization: the disaster of modernity, of industrial reproduction, of the culture of capitalism, with its insane volume of distractions, advertisements, and noise, all convincing you that this product or that technology will cure you of your madness.

The Only Way Out Is Deeper In

Your madness is incurable. Your madness is the human condition, and the only way out is deeper in. This is the one thing people will not confront, because of how terrifying the real appeal is: that the very way in which we see and perceive what we think is reality is the only problem. It is the only thing to examine, because everything else is downstream.

As best I understand it, this comes from neurological sophistication accrued over time, passed through the device of the genome as an energetic transmutation of a long process of cognitive, physical, and somatic evolution — hundreds of thousands, millions of years, all the way back to the creation of the universe. The stars, the stellar-fusion process that produced the thermonuclear bodies we live in. This ancestry of man runs far deeper than animals, or even life on earth. The interrogation of our relationship to the universe is primary.

We cannot get that from an artificial recombination system telling us what to know or believe based on any number of sources. These are problems that have been near-insoluble throughout human history. We ourselves must gather a real understanding of who and what we are through our experience of ourselves. It is not possible anywhere else. You cannot buy a product. You cannot join a cult. You cannot regurgitate what someone else has said as the truth, because no one has ever known. We are the frontier of existence, and we live now.

The Limits

Artificial intelligence can help us understand human history better and make connections we might not otherwise have made. But the limits of industrial technology and of artificial intelligence are severe, and the submission of human life to these belief systems and technological modes is calamitous. It is the great tragedy of human history, repeating itself over and over. Even as the technology appears to refine the human condition, that condition is still faced with the basic, primordial question: can we actually examine ourselves — not just intellectually, but in the full-bodied, somatic experience of existence? Can we live that? It is the only thing.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life — and to suck out all the marrow of life. (After Thoreau)

Thoreau is describing the path of existential philosophy. There is nothing else. I don’t know what else to say. A convenient life awaits, if that’s what you want. That is the only place this mindset is headed: a convenient life where all our surface problems appear resolved, at best. At worst, those conveniences fall away under the real forces acting on the real ecosystem of our lives — and without them, there is a total absence of anything, because we have substituted convenience for meaning.

The only way to achieve meaning is a real encounter with life. It is like Jacob wrestling with the angel. Job is another great story of that real process. If we have lived without wrestling with life, without discovering what it is to be — let alone to be human — what do we have? We have McDonald’s, Sears, delivery, Amazon. It will always be something: factories, the accumulation of objects and money. And for many people, I suppose, that is enough. Who is anyone to say?

The Third Revolution

This all comes back to the reality of a new industrial revolution — the third, if the second was the computational device. The same problems rear their heads with ever more urgency, because they grow deeper and more seductive. It is a deep seduction: if we have artificial intelligence, we no longer need real intelligence. And what is real intelligence? Is it stapling together the fastest production of energy, which destroys itself and the world shortly after? Or is it a real, deep, prolonged encounter with what existence is? Know thyself. Wisdom.

This exposes the ideological and philosophical foundations of modernity — foundations wrestled with throughout the ages of kings and emperors: the foolishness of worldly power in the face of existential questions that echo through the stars. In every lifetime we are asked to choose, because what we place emphasis on is what we pursue, and what we pursue is how we spend our time on this earth.

Do Not Mistake Seduction for Truth

So this is what I am suggesting: we cannot mistake this seduction for truth. There is a real architecture to humanity, and it is time-based — ultimately time-bound. The neurological, synaptic, and physical limits of the body and of experience: where did they come from? What are they? This is the realm we must explore. It is the terrain in which we live and make our decisions, and as long as it remains unexamined, life proceeds as a somnambulistic, automaton force — wild, mad, and blind creation through which we ceaselessly produce, consume, and reproduce, meaninglessly. And our greatest satisfaction in such a world is convenience. That is the world we have created, because convenience is the greatest satisfaction available to blindness. It is a horrible fate.

So we have created artificial production: machines. We have created a digital universe of images and suggestions that can move goods and services across the world — highly convenient. And now we have created an artificial-intelligence system of machine-language production and recombination, able to act as an agent in both the digital and the physical world. What does it matter?

We cannot mistake distraction for truth, or for meaning — and yet that is so much of the world we live in. The way through, historically, has been philosophy. Thankfully, we have been granted the capacity to think about our experience, and everyone has a choice to participate in that. It is an embodied experience, not bound to money or social status. It is thinking about the question of existence: where we came from, who and what we are, and maybe even where we are going. If we don’t think about those questions, it is very obvious to see where we end up.

That’s what I’ve got. Thank you.