A Ghost in the Machine?

I heard someone say the other day that he never felt more confident about his writing now that he relied on the assistance of AI, to which a reasonable reply might be that this writer isn’t writing. To feel confident should mean to have faith in one’s own skills, manual or intellectual, and so this so-called writer intends to say, really, that he feels confident in AI’s skill to straighten out what he has handed over—including, eerily, his own mind.

We are at a serious cultural impasse here, and we have rushed ourselves to this edge by coming to believe that language is only a kind of signage that we post along the road in commerce with others, words strung together to signify, or conceptualize, some object or idea to ourselves and those we share a part of life with. Signs, we might say, are two dimensional, flat figures pasted down on flat surfaces as pointers. We expect them to denote, not evoke, and absent the latter, our only goal, we believe, is to get understood as quickly as possible. So whether a writer writes to the end or writes just so much as to then hand over to some ghostwriter human or artificial, it all doesn’t really matter to us. It’s just a question of processing words. And this stifling belief in language as utility has set down deeply now. The irony of the phrase word processing is over a half century old.

But what can language be if not merely a sign? The traditional answer has it that it constitutes a symbolism as well. Where a sign points—and this, of course, is a legitimate if basic use of language—a symbol stands for something, suggests or evokes the meaningful presence of an object or idea, meaningful because of the relationship a writer holds with the symbolized. This is what accounts for literature and for one’s style, that characteristic way one writer will represent something which is necessarily unique because only that particular writer has that particular relationship to an object, event, or idea otherwise knowable to us all. The difference between what is now called linguistics and what used to be called philology is the difference between the science of signs and the science of symbols.

But symbols, unlike signs, can arise only from an interior life, what we as humans possess through awareness, that pearl of great price which machines cannot seriously be said, in any sane discourse which defines its terms, to possess—unless, that is, we have so flattened the notions of interiority and so confused awareness with consciousness that all these terms refer interchangeably only to sensorial realities. Consciousness refers properly to what the active construction of concepts has produced, and under that definition we might be able to speak meaningfully of a robotic consciousness, which is then little more than an astoundingly quick and complex recombination of linguistic structures. For all its semblance of human awareness, we cannot speak of a mature artificial intelligence, because the technology grows only from itself and its own kind.

Awareness, however, which we can describe as mature, refers to the passive reception of realities before they have been represented by an art, including the art of language. Machines produce simulacra of genuine human awareness, certainly, as we might engage with the facsimile of a person speaking in video or audio or virtual reality. But from what human interior life is that virtual personage verisimilarly replying to us? From nowhere more profound than the superficial reconfiguring of linguistic structures—the newly made appearances of which illude us into responding as if they were a presence. And here there is yet another irony, in that the verb illude means not only to deceive, but to mock as well. Authoritarians always come finally to despise their darlings.

Short of refiguring the very definition of humanity, its language and its literature and their place in human culture and practice, how would it be possible to bridge this gulf between language as sign machined into text, and language as symbol sown from reflective human experience? We are left now with deciding upon the value of our own intimations and thoughts, worked out with time and trouble, but for all that still a part of us which we give to others to reflect upon out of their own awareness from a life lived. In this we might find the warm embrace of minds that resound with one another so much more richly than merely an empty echo of linguistic assemblages. The interiority from which we speak and write presumes an awareness realized, not merely a consciousness fabricated.

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