Dan Nadasan is right to point out that the main shattering impact of the AI on our lives concerns the status of appearance.[1] In this context, we’ve got to introduce the difference between symbolic appearance proper and appearance as imaginary simulation.

Simulacrum tries to imitate a thing so faithfully that we might be seduced into taking it for that very thing, or, more precisely, into interacting with it as if it were the thing itself although we know it is not. We can get so immersed in the digitally generated fake reality that it affects us (emotionally, libidinally) as the thing itself: we feel as if we are caught in the action itself (sexual, brutal fight…). Just think about fake hardcore clips where we see big stars in sexual intercourse.

Even if our interaction with ChatGPT remains at the symbolic level (although we can also do it so that we speak and we get spoken answers live), individuals can find deep emotional satisfaction in such an interaction which includes emotions, passions, etc. from both sides… In short, the AI program we are interacting with in this way displays enormous phantasmatic power: even if one were to consider it a manifestation of the symbolic order, perhaps even its “supreme” one, there is a different nuance to the fact that, with this development, the symbolic order appears to be out there and to be talking to us. The “thing which thinks” is precisely how Kant defines the transcendental subject: “this I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks” (Critique of Pure Reason, A346/B404). With AI, the thinking subject, (which is for Kant noumenal, outside the domain of representation, of our experiential constituted reality) thus abolishes itself in the highest self-negating act of thinking: it externalizes itself and appears as a thing:

“the synthetic activity of the subject itself becomes rendered in an imaginary form, we see and enjoy AI dreaming, writing poetry, thinking, theorizing, phantasizing and loving in our stead.”

We are thus dealing with the imaginary externalization of something very precise: the moment we enter the AI universe, this universe “quilts the entire field of our experience around itself and thus makes it impossible for all other apparitions to appear again except through itself.” In quite practical terms, this accounts for the endless contemporary debates on the topic of “do we already live in a simulated universe”: “anything that is to be given is always-already given in its appearance as AI, with AI constituting the unconscious synthetic activity of the subject.” As Alenka Zupančič put sit in an unsurpassable way: “The unconscious closes upon itself. Any dimension of the Real is lost.” This “closure upon itself” means that AI functions as a “‘transcendental scheme” which neutralizes the differential power of apparitions to surprise us, perhaps even to shock us into thinking. Or, if I may quote an old text of mine: “what gets lost in today’s ‘plague of simulations’ is not the firm, true, non-simulated Real, but appearance itself’.” The simulated digital world lacks the depth of appearance proper, which is why the questions that haunts us all – does AI think? – should be translated into the question: does AI appear to itself? From what we know, my conclusion is: no. The imaginarization of the symbolic remains a spectacle, staged strictly for subjects external to the AI machine.

Furthermore, this imaginarization of the symbolic is just one side of the process, whose other side is the falling of the symbolic into the real (which implies the disappearance of the symbolic castration). That is to say, the traditional structure of conferring a symbolic mandate on a person, of interpellating it into a socio-symbolic identity, automatically involves a gap between the symbolic mandate and the immediate reality of a person – say, a father is never fully a father, because his psycho-social reality is never at the level of his title. When I am introduced just before giving a talk, I often painfully experience this gap: am I really that, i.e., the way I am described in the introduction (“a world-renowned philosopher with over 50 books published in over 20 languages,” etc.)? Today, however, this gap is gradually disappearing because our social identity is more and more directly recognized through objective observation: documents like bank cards etc. are progressively replaced by fingerprints, eye scans, digital face recognition or, ultimately, DNA analysis, which directly assert what/who I am.

Recall Lacan’s well-known claim that a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king but also a king who thinks he is a king. In this sense, there is a psychotic dimension in this direct grounding of my social status in my actual properties. We thus potentially abolish the gap of symbolic alienation: we are what we “really are,” and the entire mechanism of symbolic rituals basically becomes meaningless.

When I pass a series of difficult exams to obtain a high title, I know from the results that the title is mine, but I have the full right to use it as a public title only after the title is conferred on me in a public ritual. This is a symbolic act at its purest. It changes nothing at the level of empirical facts; it just registers these facts in a symbolic system, and this registration has a performative power. Let’s say I’ve cheated and forged the documents which prove that I passed some exams. If, based on these forged documents, I get the title in a public ritual, I don’t automatically lose the title. Rather, the title has to be taken from me by a formal decision of the body responsible for it. The ideal here would be a system with no formal exams: my performance is all the time closely measured and my social status follows these measurements with no symbolic moments like exams.

This, then, is our predicament: in today’s crazy world, hallucinations and raw reality support each other, and we cannot even clearly distinguish them.

Notes:

[1] I rely here on Dan Nadasan’s outstanding “Dissolution of Appearance and the Reign of the Small Big Other: LLMs in the Hegelo-Lacanian View” (manuscript).