Speaker unverified: belief

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…Let's talk a little bit about Heidegger. So he spoke a lot about our relationship with technology, and I know this is something you've been thinking about. Can you tell us about that? So 1 of the things that Heidegger said, and in many ways he was a grandiose and unpleasant person, but his grandiosity kind of manifested in how he could have read the importance of philosophy to things about the modern world today. So 1 of the things he said was that technology and, cybernetics for him, we could say AI for us today, was the culmination of a metaphysical tradition. Right? So it's because the history of philosophy set out on the certain path that it did that we are here today now with these technologies which seem to be having such a transformative role in our lives, and to the point that we feel like not in control of these technologies. So I'm not a kind of philosophical determinist like that. I don't think, you know, just because some philosophers and ancient Greeks said certain things that this is why we have AI today. But I think there are some features of his The contrast he draws with the philosophical tradition in his own account of what it is to be a human person that give us, like, an interesting perspective on, like, what is being assumed in that path towards AI. So 1 of the things he really insists on is human finitude. Like, we are inherently finite bounded knowers as communities, and we're communities of knowers. But that the philosophical tradition has encouraged a kind of leap that encouraged the idea that something about us as knowers kind of crosses beyond the boundaries of finitude into like a universal, boundless realm of knowledge. And I I do think that the very idea that a non situated, sort of non embodied absorber of fats like an LLM that kind of just sits there and sucks in all the information in the world, that that could somehow be a counterpart to how we know things as human beings. I think that's an instantiation of this lack of acknowledgement of human finitude because it's human finitude coming from a culture which is expert at some things but not other things, and whose knowledge is grounded in a discrete set of sensory experiences that are not accessible to other people, that boundedness of knowledge. To say that that is not inherent what it is to be a knower, that a purely disembodied, absorber of facts is what we are, I think that sort of revealing that lack of acknowledgement of finitude which is there in that tradition that he criticized. We're kind of moving into this technologically embedded world, and it's changing our nature in some way.…

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