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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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What is the meaning of what philosophy tries to tell us? There are cases where it wants to tell us the true meaning of a concept. Maybe this is always what it wants to do. It then uses argument to tell you why a certain version of an concept is the case. When someone finds the argument agreeable they at least partially (or maybe wholly) become an agent for that system. Heidegger identifies this issue as the question of being. What is the being of something and hence what is the being of being?

The satisfaction that we feel (upon finding something that seems to answer an issue) has two potential explanations. One is that we drift into camps for different philosophies. This is what I wrote about by the notion of manifestationism. This is the idea that, owing to the irrefutable nature of the philosophies, the competing ontologies cannot outcompete each other; rather the agents (philosophers) only choose to adhere to different philosophies based on conscious or unconscious biases.

The second is a more radical conception. This is that there is a correct version. However the correct version is not necessarily one that alligns with an external reality, rather one that aligns with a deep bodily unconscious cognition (as Hayles would call it). In this version, the bodily unconscious already knows what is the meaning of for example, photography. It knows what photography is to the organism, the impact of it, how conceptual interaction interacts with the flat surface and the metaphysics drawn out from this. These exist. Philosophy (or non-philosophy) is trying to access these unconsious bodily understandings that we already have to produce an actually possible true answer. This will not appear in the sense of something proved correct, but rather only with a sequence of argument will give a ‘feeling of correctness’.

The satisfaction we feel in successful philosophy is a kind of almost catharsis at aligning our conscious intuitions or logical processes (either could find the right spot) with this bodily understanding which is already there. This is interesting, as it does not guarantee any particular a priori about reality as such, but it does suggest that a kind of anamnesis is possible, is real. This knowledge would be human actual philosophy. There is a kind of a hint as to difficulties of establishing such knowledge by argument. That is, the philosophical arguments would only be paths that lead you to this harmony with the bodily knowledge, not to be mistaken as abstract procedures that could definitively lead you there. They could be followed badly.

Two consequences seem to appear. One is that the manifestationist issue of multiple ontologies could re-appear through the failure to tread the corrrect paths appropriately, and thus also the failure to find the same places. These issues could be compounded by too much emphasis on seeking the validity of paths, using abstract systems i.e. logic. The second would be that different bodies have different realities within them. That is, deeply encoded in different organisms are quite radically different ways of treating the world (this would then re-align with the manifestationist position). These differences then mean that different cathartic satisfactions must be found to obtain the correct remedy. In Wittgenstein’s terms, there may be different shaped bottles for different shaped flies and different methods to escape them.