Participation in Being, Hildebrand, AI and the Liberal Arts: A Fragment
Dietrich Von Hildebrand wrote that the primary function of the intellect is what he called “participation in being.” What Hildebrand meant by that intriguing phrase, I think, means we allow reality to become genuinely present to us and we enter into an appropriate personal relation with it, first through knowledge, and then, where the object warrants it, through affective, volitional, contemplative, or loving response. This is what knowledge and learning should do for us, and these are acts and human responses which AI cannot do on our behalf.
The most valuable tools in a liberal arts curriculum are both unremarkable and surprisingly modest: old books, slow careful reading, discovery, delight, making mistakes, then realizing those mistakes, discussion, friendship, and growth. The focused attention we learn this way stands against the continuous and unrelenting momentum of competing content streams, and the flickering, distracted inattention this diet creates in our appetites.
Those streams are both ravenous and shallow. Reading an old book takes time and appears to some as unproductive. It stands against doom scrolling with no remaining memory of what was previously consumed. The products of such rapid consumption evaporate in a moment. But slow reading and rumination accumulates and ages with us. You can spend an hour scrolling, constantly over-stimulated, and then remember nothing of what you just watched. But you can return to a book you read decades ago as an older person and discover things you didn’t see, before in the text. The best old books offer that gift to us. The more life experience we bring back to the reading or rereading, the more they give to us. (Quote by Augustine about memory.)
Books create connective tissues inside us that connect with each other. Aristotle read Homer, Dante read X, Augustine read Y.
We are foot soldiers holding the line against cognitive surrender, and the resulting cognitive decline.
I am not against artificial intelligence. I use it every day: for research, for testing my theories and arguments, for toning down the unintentional fire that creeps into my critique of decisions being made. I use it as a sparring partner for my ideas. In my work, I have to use it. During the recent Hugging Face AI incident, reports estimated the number of logs under review by investigators totaled over 7 billion. No human being can crunch that kind of big data in real time, and our response time is now measured in minutes.
Those of us gearing up for the coming events and conflicts in cybersecurity are beginning to feel like Greek peasants standing at the foot of the mountains watching as gods and titans cast thunderbolts at each other in the clouds above.
My work keeps me suspended between two worlds, between what technology is becoming, and what human beings have always been. My work requires me to strive towards the bleeding edge of what’s happening today, to stay several steps ahead with an eye towards the future. The rest of my intellectual life, which feeds me and sustains me, pulls back toward older things.
But AI technology is changing us. It’s changing the way we write. (Example.)
It’s changing the way we think, or how we don’t think and outsource our thinking. One of the biggest tells right now in AI writing is a flat sameness in the wordage. Reading reminds us of the possibilities of language. An awkward but beautiful turn in the middle of a sentence, the way words rub together and make music,
That is part of what makes us human, and it is that sense even AIs continue to consume.
I need to feast on books and art and music for life itself, to participate in being.
AI validates the value of historical texts, rather than diminishing that value. Increasingly, AI engineers turn to destroying old books in a quest to deliver new content to AI models to prevent them from consuming only their own content.
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The liberal arts train us in participation in being. AI becomes dangerous when it ceases to augment that encounter with reality and instead substitutes for it.
AI is extraordinarily good at delivering products. A liberal education is often valuable precisely because of what happens to the student while getting there.
Hildebrand → liberal education → attention → cognitive surrender → your technological life → legitimate augmentation → illegitimate substitution → why the humanities matter more, not less, in an AI age.
The answer to AI is not abstinence from technology. It is a richer human life.
"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity. " - Pope Leo
