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Human Ontology

What do we consider ourselves to be? To give something of a survey of the answer to this question is essential for considering what comes later. Here we overview the major options of western human ontology. The purpose of this is so that we later on make an assessment as to how AI might interact with what we take ourselves to be and whether or not we should consider this desirable or not.

Humankind has frequently been defined largely by its rationality e.g. Descartes (for whom rational thinking was a dominant feature of humanity), Kant (who emphasised reason as key to our moral nature) and Aristotle called us rational animals; for him, reason was the tool by which we learned virtue and achieved eudaimonia, a flourishing life.

Religious perspectives offer accounts of humans as created by a divinity either in their image (Christianity) or for their worship (Islam) or they are simply trapped in a situation of suffering that may be alleviated through spiritual means (Buddhism). Clearly these are vast simplifications of highly complicated pictures, yet they serve to remind us of another sense in which we can think of the being of the human.

For the existentialists, the very being of man is inextricably linked to freedom. Central to this is the idea that existence precedes essence; humans are not born with a pre-defined purpose but rather define themselves through their choices and actions. This radical freedom implies that individuals are entirely responsible for who they become, carrying the weight of infinite possibilities and often experiencing anguish as a result. Existentialism champions authentic living, urging individuals to embrace this freedom and take ownership of their choices rather than conforming to external pressures. In a world putatively devoid of inherent meaning, humans are tasked with the freedom, and the burden, of creating their own values and purpose. Essentially, human existence is viewed as a constant project of self-creation through the exercise of freedom, emphasizing that individuals are not defined by a fixed nature but are perpetually in the process of becoming through their choices.

Heidegger conceives the human not as a rational animal or a free subject, but as Dasein — literally being-there. Dasein is not a consciousness standing apart from the world but a being always already in the world, entangled with others, tools, and social structures that constitute its everyday existence. This being-in-the-world is not a mere spatial condition but an ontological one: we are defined by our involvement, our concern, and our capacity for understanding the meanings that the world discloses to us.

For Heidegger, the central issue is not the exercise of freedom in an absurd universe (as for Sartre), but the way Being itself is revealed or concealed through our existence. Human life is characterised by care (Sorge): our projects, our concern for others, and our awareness of our own finitude. Dasein’s possibilities — the many ways it might be — are always shaped by the world into which it is thrown and by the temporal horizon of death that bounds it. Authentic existence arises when Dasein recognises and takes up these conditions rather than fleeing them; inauthenticity occurs when it dissolves into the anonymous everydayness of “the they” (das Man).

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari on the other hand, holds a kind of nuanced Spinozistic philosophy that suggests, not unlike Heidegger, that humankind is essentially open; however here the openness beyond the human is made even more overt. The human is essentially never just human but rather a series of becoming-other. There is always a generally static trend of human being (what we sometimes think of as human in a given era) but there is also a bleeding edge of becoming many other things. The Spinoza connection is not always entirely visible, but it lies in Spinoza’s view of the conatus as our ‘power of acting’. To become-other is to participate in this creative expansion of possibility. In such becomings, humanity is not lost but transformed.

Psychoanalytic thought offers yet another way to understand human ontology, this time grounded not in reason or essence, but in desire and lack. For Freud, the human psyche is not a unified rational subject but a conflicting field of drives and their repression (with commensurate symbolic substitution). Consciousness is a surface phenomenon, continually shaped by what it seeks to exclude. Lacan refined this view, describing the subject as fundamentally divided—constituted through language and through the loss that language itself imposes. For her to speak, to enter the symbolic order, is to be separated from immediacy; the self is a void, not a fullness.

From the scientific perspective, the human is best understood as a biological organism — Homo sapiens, a highly evolved primate distinguished by its neural complexity and capacity for symbolic communication. Evolutionary theory situates the human within a continuous natural history, explaining cognition, language, and sociality as adaptive functions rather than transcendent traits. The body is approached as an intricate system of mechanisms, coordinated through the brain and nervous system, sustained by metabolic exchange and genetic inheritance. In this view, what distinguishes the human is not metaphysical essence but quantitative difference — greater brain power, linguistic ability, and technological behaviour. Scientific ontology thus conceives humanity as an emergent pattern in matter: a contingent arrangement of organic processes capable of self-reflection, yet explicable in the same terms as any other material phenomenon.

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Connecting Ontology and Ethics in Relation to AI

In writing this series of posts I’m trying to lay out a certain line of thought I’ve been pursuing. This thought concerns the relation between human ontology and artificial intelligence. Certainly one expression of the issue is: If AI can replace or enhance human cognition and creativity, does it matter? That sounds confusing because I’m asking if enhancement or replacement matters, and possibly one would think the issue turns on replacement. I think the issue relates to both these issues, hence the phraseology.

If something matters then there is an ethical dimension to it. This in turn is what brings ontology into the discussion. The point being that AI potentially alters what we are or what we take ourselves to be. So if there is an ethical dimension to the decisions we make regarding our relation to AI, and our relation to AI is relevant to our self ontology, then the ethics involved are ethics relating to human ontology.

Phrased another way, the reason ethics is relevant is that it seems we must ask the question:  ‘does it matter if humans lose some cognitive/creative abilities if there are successful AI protheses to do it for them?’ (let’s be clear, this question doesn’t say humans will lose them, it only asks about the possibility if they do). This in turn is relevant to ontology insofar as the ethical imperative here concerns, in one sense not our actions (though they are still relevant) but rather what we want to be. That is, if it can be said that we hold that we are a certain kind of being, and if AI can be said to be deleterious to our being that kind of being then it’s usage should be actively resisted such that this kind of being is preserved.

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The nature of dreams of seems almost taken for granted as an area to be decoded rather than respected as actual experience. Dreams might indeed be of the nature of a disconnected blurred sense in which we scarcely seem an experiencing subject at all, yet even in this instance, we actually still are. Unless lucid (in which though, it is still experiential) the dream is the not experienced as dream and hence, at the time, not discounted as ‘unreal’; its events, whatever they are, actually happen to us (to a greater or lesser resemblance that waking life). To discount this experience in favour of the notion that it was ‘just a dream’ is valid insofar as certain criteria of wakefulness do not apply to it, however to then reduce it to something that needs decoding, rather than being experientially relevant to the our consciousness is clearly to place an hermneutic filter on it that is ontologically reductive.

That is, if the dream happened then it necessarily happened to us. That it may or may not be the processing of various unconscious forces is neither here to there. If it terrified us then it terrified us, if it made us weep for a lost time then it also did this. This effect occured to our psyche and as such affects us in a sense like any other event that traumatises or exhalts us. This is not to deny the possibility of learning something deeper from the content of ones dreams, though the comparison with waking life is also reasonable. Our patterns in daily life also need decoding and recognising; in life we move through a quasi random series of events and encounters that may be decoded in various ways; this is also so in the dream sphere.

The emphasis on the event effect on the psyche can be considered stranger yet when we consider how many dreams we do not even know we experienced. I have various repetitive places and structures in my dream world that I sometimes forget even exist, only to sometimes, on the border of sleep, get flashes of, that remind me that there are these visited fixed places that I appear in and interact with. It is clear to me from these half recollections that there is a good deal of activity I am engaged in that I have nearly no awareness of.

This makes the picture even stranger, for initially I pointed out the necessity of the effect that dreams as events must have (since they are experienced phenomena), yet now we are drawn to the conclusion (unless we wish to deny that these events affect us) that for many of us (who do not have perfect access to our dreams) there is exists a world of experience that necessarily affects us and yet we have little or no awareness of.

This does not deny that dreams may be processing/manifesting unconscious forces, but it also means that the experience of this processing/manifesting is a) experiental and b) often unconsciously so. This raises the possibility that if b is true (hard to deny), the unconscious experience of the dream may itself then be a force that determines our reactions and responses to phenomena in the waking world. Which means in turn that dreams especially in their unconscious form, represent an strange feedback mechanism determining part of our worldly attitude and response based on the manifest forces that we have unwittingly experienced, even though those forces might be ontologically be nothing more than our own unconscious processing. This ontological reduction then, even if true, matters not in the face of this effective power.

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Looking again at this title, I can see this could be the name of a childrens’ book, this wasn’t however really my intention. I recently watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where he presents Kerry Thornley as an eccentric who fell into a deluded dream world. It was interesting to see this materialist take (possibly for the BBC) as I had only every considered if from the ontological weirdness positition. For Curtis, the Discordians were clever pranksters who tried to expose the absurdity of conspiracy culture, only to be undone by their own illusions. The show’s neat storytelling — the trickster trapped in his own trick — but it’s also a flattening. Curtis’ materialism leaves him blind to (possible —see agnostic disjunction) the deeper mechanism at work. Operation Mindfuck was intended as parody: a satirical flood of rumors about the Illuminati, designed to expose how easily conspiracy theories could be manufactured and spread. Thornley, Wilson and others deliberately seeded nonsense to make people question their own credulity. Thornley’s life made him peculiarly vulnerable to his own invention. He had known Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines; he was already caught in a web of coincidence and suspicion. When the Illuminati myth circulated, it began to attach itself to these very facts of his biography. What began as parody quickly fed back as paranoia.

Pneuminous theory clarifies what Curtis cannot see. In this framework, a vector is a blank phenomenon — an occurrence, a thing, a thought, a pattern, in the world on any level. In this case Thornley’s military service, his link to Oswald, odd coincidences in time and place: these are vectors.

Accretions of pneuma are the meanings or interpretations that latch onto these vectors. Operation Mindfuck seeded the Illuminati myth as such an accretion —a spell. Once attached, the myth grew beyond its originators. Other people repeated it, embellished it, and passed it along until Thornley himself encountered it not as author, but as implicated subject.

The process looks something like this:

  1. Vector creation — phenomena occur/exist.
  2. Pneuminous Accretive fusion via subject — in this casethe Illuminati myth attaches to them.
  3. Feedback — the pneuminous accretions return to Thornley (from sideways), binding to his life story. This is the a-temporal interaction known as synchronicity.
  4. Entanglement — the myth becomes indistinguishable from his lived reality, which facilitates the literal re-perception of the phenomenon, due it’s appearing to actually be continually happening.

Curtis calls this something like “a dream world.” But from a pneuminous perspective, it is a dream world in a sense (dreams are made of pneuma) but is also a feedback loop of accretions colonising vectors until the operator (in this case at least) himself is caught inside.

This loop also explains why Thornley experienced his life as filled with uncanny coincidences. Synchronicity is the secondary effect of accretions fusing with vectors. Once the Illuminati lens was in play, every odd overlap looked meaningful. His proximity to Oswald, rumors of CIA infiltration, strange recurrences — all were drawn into the orbit of the self creating myth.

Possibly what happened with Thornley was, because of the very powers he was playing with (the invocation of the Illuminati: literally a shadowy cabal of enormous power, even if only as egregore) attached to vectors of already synchronistic phenomena which possibly even were some kind of occult product, human made or otherwise. This double layering may have produced a kind of pneuminous vortex. The more accretions gathered, the stronger the pull. Thornley had effectively created a spiral in which coincidences (vectors) were endlessly absorbed by the Illuminati myth (accretion), generating more synchronicity that confirmed itself. The parody had become ontology (with the number 23 somehow in the mix as a kind of master signifier of it all_.

Curtis isn’t wrong to say Thornley got lost. But he mislabels the process. Thornley didn’t simply “dream himself into unreality.” He underestimated the very mechanism that pneuminous theory describes: once accretions start looping back into lived experience, they gain a grip that no irony can dissolve.

What Curtis dismisses as a dream world is better understood as a vortex of pneuminous accretions attached to vectors, the appearance of which was then fed directly back into the system — a genuine ontological condition, not just delusion. Thornley is not only a cautionary tale but a case study in how pneuma functions in the form of memes, myths and meanings can grow beyond their creators and return with inescapable (pneuminous) force.

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Adam Curtis is well known for espousing the notion that modern society (especially the West) has no notion of where it is heading, or even of how it could be heading somewhere or even what it would mean for it to head anywhere. Western societies cannot imagine anything other than more of the same — more capitalism, maybe slightly stranger capitalism, with AI augmentations, but still weirdly the same. As Nietzsche understood, this doesn’t actually satisfy the the spiritual(a new word is probably needed but it will have to do) nature of the human. Christianity — brutal as it was — offered structure and purpose. Without that scaffolding, we are adrift. Individually, we seem to bear the existence of staring into the void and keep going. Collectively, it tears us apart.

Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that “there is no alternative.” Capitalism presents itself not as one system among others, but as the only imaginable frame. We may dislike aspects of it, even hate it, but we can’t picture a coherent beyond. The future, if we dare to imagine it at all, looks like a more intensified version of the present — just stranger, faster, weirder. Jean Baudrillard gestured in a similar direction: culture untethered from any ground, spinning in loops of simulation, losing orientation.

The problem, though, is even worse. Pneuminous theory, or chaos magick (they are similar projects), doesn’t rescue us from this malaise. It extends the nihilism. It shows that not only rational structures, but even magickal, symbolic, and esoteric frameworks are contingent accretions — pneuma infecting vectors, conscious doubles arising by intention. The abyss doesn’t shrink when one embraces occultism; it expands. There is no final ground, only shifting layers of contingency.

Which leaves us with a somewhat grim recognition: powerful people who manufacture myths and control structures are, in a sense, right to do so. Without myth, societies collapse into conspiracy, nostalgia, or despair. The real question is: can there be an ethical control myth — one that binds without domination, one that acknowledges the possibility of paranormaityl without relegating it to fringe counterculture or totalising it into religion?

Maybe this is where a new myth must be conceived — the Myth of Ur. Ur not as an ancient city, but as a beginning, a foundation that knows itself as contingent. It would say: we are something like multidimensional pneuminous beings, layered, accreted, entangled in vectors of meaning and possibility. We cannot (at least in regular consciousness, know if paranormality actually obtains, but we cannot deny the possibility either. We live inside the disjunction, thus rather than being opposing agents we should dwellers on the threshold so to speak.

Furthermore, the possibility of the actuality is what we should bet on. Even in recognising the agnostic disjunction, we should act as if the fluid-paranormality were real, as it is this side that makes reality truly interconnected hand invokes our responsibility. Like Pascal’s wager: live as if God exists, because it is the safer bet. Our wager is ontological: live as if we are pneuminous beings. Not because it is proven, but because this orientation does the least violence to the complexity of our condition.

These kinds of rules could be examples that might be part of such an ethical ontology:

  • Live as if the world is layered and multidimensional in the most literal sense.
  • Direct power toward preserving openness, not closing it down.
  • Treat technology and capital as the contingent manifestations of the second centre they are: new accretions, not ultimate horizons or grounds.
  • Play seriously with meaning: enact, invent, but never deny fragility.
  • Care for others as beings whose pneuma you inevitably entangle.

This horizon entails the understanding of the accretions as process in a more active sense. This is the wager, the new Myth of Ur: a transparent myth that everyone knows is made (contingently accreted), but which we agree to live inside because it is better than the void. Not salvation, not certainty, but a collective as if — a horizon we can orient toward, even knowing it may be provisional. It doesn’t solve things in the way we might think of a solution, because thinking in that way cannot give an answer. However the acceptance of the radical nature of reality coupled with a deeper understanding of its impermanence may be part of our ability to overcome the place we have become stuck.