I’m reviewing four books for Project Syndicate—will link to the published version when it appears next week—including McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead (2019) and Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2024). [David Barfield and I will be doing a podcast with the latter, stay tuned for that.]
Wark and Varoufakis are deeply knowledgable about the digital infrastructure that constitutes more and more of the social relations of production—the production of goods, public and private, material and immaterial—in these times. On empirical as well as theoretical grounds, both think that the new departure in such production is the extraction of value from the online habits of consumers, the “hackers” or “cloud serfs” who constantly furnish the digital platforms marketable information for free, and do so in off-hours, when they’re not working for wages as plain old proles. In their view, that departure measures the difference between capitalism and the impending new mode of production, whatever we call it. (Wark has many names for it, Varoufakis has the book title.)
These inventive authors address generative AI only in passing because they were writing their books before ChatBots became the next big thing, or rather the only big thing, the thing that drove the stock market to new heights and the rest of us batshit crazy. But they give us important tools, ways of thinking about the immediate consequences and long-term implications of the post-human—or is it a parallel?—consciousness we have begun to sense in the algorithms that propel AI.
For the time being, at least, I don’t want to follow them into the thickets of periodization (is this not capitalism, after all?). Instead I’ll ask three simple questions prompted by their intriguing, interlocking analysis. To begin with, how to define consciousness as sapiens deploy it? Then, is the knowledge generated by large language models consistent with such a definition? Finally, what follows from the answer to the second question—for example, if that knowledge is consistent with what we call consciousness, is it still human?
Acceptable definitions of consciousness are rare, because most knowledge is latent, practical (or operational), and inarticulate. The remainder “seems to vanish,” as the philosopher G.E. Moore said, plaintively, early in the 20th century, when we turn to inspect it. In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger used the notion of “worldness” to explain or specify it, suggesting that human beings typically experience the world without taking up a subject position: they go about their tasks absent a theory or a diagram of what they’re doing, that is, without a prior representation of either their purpose or the objects—the “equipment”—they put to use when participating in activities that are not matters of routine, nor of mere repetition, but nevertheless require rehearsal or practice. They are conscious as they engage in these activities, but consciousness is not to be understood as thinking in a formal sense, nor as the residue or symptom of what Freud defined as the unconscious.
Even in these phenomenological terms, consciousness seems to be consciousness of the self as it moves through the world, and so it is, or rather becomes, a function of individuation. The evidence of this process as we late moderns might recognize it emerges in the extant literature of antiquity, more precisely in the post-Mycenaean period that Homer and Hesiod straddle, ca. 1100-500 B.C. (“straddle” in a figurative as well as a literal sense)—when written texts first became a usable device for the storage of knowledge, conjecture, and imagination, not merely for recording routine transactions (as in Mesopotamia). Both “authors” are poets who navigate the transition from myth as a present, lived reality, where gods still speak to and through mortals, to myth as a receding past that was quite possibly contrived in retrospect by mortals seeking explanation and justification of their current circumstance. So conceived, individuation happens as a function of new perceptions of time, which now separate the smooth continuum of a cosmic order from the jagged edges of human existence—when the self begins to look like the chronicle of a death foretold, as the consciousness of finitude takes hold and the significance of a (not every) life becomes a question worth asking.
The new profile of this self can be seen in the difference between The Iliad and The Odyssey and heard in the prophetic voices of the Old Testament. Achilles listens closely to the Gods and pursues his destiny according to their counsel, mostly ignoring the pleas of his fellow warriors, mere mortals; Odysseus relies on his own wits because he knows the Gods are selfish, fickle, divided over the moral of the story their own quarrels still animate: he “thinks ahead,” he narrates the future, as Julian Jaynes suggested, and thus becomes conscious of his own consciousness, because he has to. Isaiah believes the reconciliation of God and Man is still possible in the nation, in the collective political entity of Israel as God’s servant; Jeremiah knows better, having decided that the future of the nation will be decided by the dialogue between Yahweh and the prophet, a singular figure who seems to know that his narratives are rough translations of unspeakable utterance, crafted from the remnants of myth.
We might then say that consciousness just is an awareness of the divisions of time, that is, an awareness of the differences between the past, the present, and the future which human exertion on earth has made, and will make—the awareness that dawns on the Greeks as they invent an alphabetized written language and begin to think of “justice” as something more than what the ruling class dispenses because it can, or of “truth” as something other than what the Gods and oracles have said it is, or will be; the awareness that becomes poignant in the early texts and teachings of Christianity (“I am divided up in time,” Augustine says), as the eschaton retreats, the heavens darken, and the criterion of need—the founding principle of the Church—becomes a wish, not a practical imperative; the awareness that becomes acute enough in the late medieval west to animate a cultural-intellectual revolution, ca. 1400-1800, as capitalism emerges from the chrysalis of simple market societies and the modern individual—Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Cordelia, Edmund, among others—escapes the plague of custom that had kept him (or her, but to a much lesser extent) from pursuing his private interests at the expense of the public good.
If we can say that consciousness is the daughter of time in this restricted sense, we might also say that its attitude of address is “extrospective” in the sense that it finds itself “out there” in objects, not by staring into “inner space.” That space, expressed in everyday speech by the phrase “in my head,” is, as Gilbert Ryle pointed out in The Concept of Mind (1949), a metaphor. “So when we want to emphasise the fact that something is not really being seen or heard, but is only being imagined . . . we tend to assert its imaginariness by denying its distance, and, by a convenient impropriety, we deny its distance by asserting its metaphysical nearness. ‘Not out there, but in here’ . . . We have no linguistic trick for describing what we imagine ourselves feeling, smelling, or tasting.”
Nietzsche once observed in passing that unlike the man of antiquity, the modern individual was a person riven by an interior to which no exterior corresponded, and vice versa, an observation that Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno turned into their lament over the administered inferno of the 20th century, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Nietzsche was probably right about this—the gap between what exists and what seems possible did widen into a chasm with the advent of modern market society, as the productive capacities of sapiens began to increase exponentially. Still, Heidegger, and before him Hegel and Freud, were clearly right to claim that consciousness was a matter of projection of inchoate thoughts, of restless mental states, into and onto things—a process by which subjects recognized and realized themselves in objects, and, inevitably, through which objects were endowed with vital yet immaterial meanings, a subjectivity of their own. Geza Roheim and Herbert Marcuse called it sublimation, after Freud, and used it to explain the origin and function of culture, on the one hand, and the material conditions of human liberation on the other.
Self-consciousness, so conceived, is no longer an individualized, interior, subjective refuge from the world of objects which is found by retraction or abstention from that world: it, too, is something disclosed by its embodiment as one more object among others in that world. Consciousness is an “external relation [that] unrolls itself in time,” as William James would put it in the first of the essays on radical empiricism (“Does Consciousness Exist?” [1904]), which were, as James Edie suggested long ago, a kind of coda to the phenomenological excursion of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). As the psychoanalysts might say—as Jacques Lacan did say, in contriving a “mirror stage”—consciousness of self is a matter of projection or sublimation, a property that is already socialized by the time it can be called a “private” state of mind.
Ryle followed James’s lead by suggesting that self-knowledge or consciousness, the observation or recognition of our passing states of mind, was attained not through “introspection” in the moment, but always and necessarily in time, in retrospect. That retrospection both permitted and required an orientation toward a future—not “the” future—for it would illuminate certain opportunities or possibilities and foreclose others. But that future would of course have an end; every life was a chronicle of a death foretold, because sapiens are the only species, as far as we know, whose every member feels the fear of its own passing long before the fact, but can’t predict when or how it will die. (Animals fear death, but only at the hour, when it comes for them in the shape of a predator or, if they are unlucky, a farmer or a meat packer.) In this sense, consciousness boils down to being in time, and that means coping with the knowledge of mortality—what we do with and about our fear of death.
Do ChatBots fear death? Probably not. Are they immortal, then, like the corporations that produce them? If so, their consciousness is unlike ours because their experience of time (not to mention space) is very different. Their practices can be called highly intelligent, because each performance has been modified by its predecessors—and these are far more than any human being could identify and assimilate—but their development over time is quantitative, not qualitative: the future doesn’t look any different because the suffering of the past needs no redemption.
Or so I am presently thinking. More to follow.
I love the idea of relocating extraction in workers' "down-time." That's got Josef Pieper's fingerprints all over it. :^) And Karl whatshisname of course. Cool stuff.