Is AI too smart to be an idiot?

Byung-Chul Han, "Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, because it is incapable of 'faire l'idiot' (He's too smart to be an idiot)." (Google Translate)

On a deeper level, thought is a resolutely analogical process. Before grasping the world in concepts, he is imprisoned, even affected by it. The affective is essential to human thought. The first affectation of thought is goosebumps. Artificial intelligence can't think because you don't give it goosebumps. It lacks the affective-analogue dimension, the emotion that data and information cannot entail.

Thought starts from a totality that precedes concepts, ideas and information. He moves already in a "field of experience" before turning specifically to the objects and facts he finds in it. The totality of the existing that the thought faces, is initially opened to it in an affective medium, in a psychic disposition: "The soul disposition (Stimmung) has already opened the being-in-the-world as a whole, and this is the first thing that makes it possible to turn towards..." Before thought is directed towards anything, it is already in a basic mood disposition. This being in a mood characterizes human thought. The mood is not a subjective state that stains the objective world. It's the world. Subsequently, thought articulates in concepts the open world in a fundamental psychic disposition. This precedes the conceptualization, the work with the concepts: "We define philosophizing as a conceptual question from an essential shudder of Dasein. But this shudder is only possible from, and in, a fundamental soul disposition of Dasein." Only this mood disposition makes us think: "Every essential thought requires that its thoughts and statements be on every occasion obtained, like the metal of the ore, from the fundamental soul disposition"

Man like Dasein is always thrown into a certain world. The world opens to him prereflexively as a whole. Dasein as a mood precedes Dasein as a conscious being. In its initial shudder, the thought is as if out of itself. The fundamental mood disposition puts him on an outside. Artificial intelligence does not think because it is never outside of itself. The spirit is originally beside itself or shaken. Artificial intelligence can calculate quickly, but it lacks the spirit. For the calculation, the shudder would only be a disturbance.

"Analogue" is what corresponds. Heidegger uses here the kinship between words of his language. Thought as an analogical process corresponds (entspricht) to a voice (Stimme) that determines it (be-stimmt) and tunes (durch-stimmt) to it. Thought is not questioned by this or that entity, but by the totality of the entity, by the being of the entity. Heidegger's phenomenology of mood disposition illustrates the fundamental difference between human thought and artificial intelligence. In What is philosophy? Heidegger writes: "The corresponder (Das Ent-sprechen) hears the voice of a call. What we are told as the voice of being, determines (be-stimmt) our correspondence. "Correspond" then means: to be determined, être disposé, by the being of the entity. [...] Correspondence is necessarily, and always, not just be determined accidentally and occasionally. It is a state of determination. And it is only from the psychic disposition that the saying of correspondence receives its precision, its determined being." Thought hears, better, listens and pays attention. Artificial intelligence is deaf. He doesn't hear that "voice."

The "beginning of a truly living philosophizing" is, according to Heidegger, the "awakening of a fundamental psychic disposition" that "determines us in a fundamental way." The fundamental mood disposition is the force of gravity that gathers words and concepts around it. Without such a psychic disposition, thought lacks an organizing framework: "If the fundamental psychic disposition is absent, everything is a forced din of empty concepts and words." The affective totality that occurs in this psychic disposition is the analogical dimension of thought, which artificial intelligence cannot reproduce.

According to Heidegger, the history of philosophy is a history of that fundamental psychic disposition. Descartes' thought, for example, is determined by doubt, while Plato's is determined by astonishment. Descartes' cogito is based on the fundamental psychic disposition of doubt. Heidegger characterizes the psychic disposition of modern philosophy as follows: "For him [Descartes], doubt constitutes that psychic disposition which centers on the ens certum, that which exists with certainty. Certitudo is then that firmness of the ens qua ens which results from the indubitability of the cogito (ergo) sum for the ego of man. [...] The psychic disposition of confidence in the ever-attainable absolute certainty of knowledge will be pathos, and therefore the arche of modern philosophy." Pathos is the beginning of thought. Artificial intelligence is apathetic, that is, without pathos, without passion. Just calculate.

Artificial intelligence does not have access to horizons that are glimpsed instead of being clearly defined. But this "glimpse" is not a "first rung on the ladder of knowledge." Rather, it opens the "anteroom" "that contains, that is, hides everything that can be known". Heidegger locates this glimpse in the heart. Artificial intelligence has no heart. The thought of the heart perceives and gropes spaces before working with concepts. In this it differs from calculation, which does not need spaces: "If this knowledge 'of the heart' is a glimpse, we must never take this glimpse for a thought that fades into darkness. It has its own clarity and resolution, and yet it remains fundamentally distinct from the security of the calculating mind."

Following Heidegger, artificial intelligence would be incapable of thinking to the extent that it is closed to that totality in which thought has its origin. It has no world. The totality as a semantic horizon encompasses more than the objectives envisaged in artificial intelligence. Thinking proceeds very differently from artificial intelligence. The totality constitutes the initial framework from which the facts are formed. The change of mood disposition as a change of frame is like a paradigm shift that gives rise to new facts. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, processes predetermined facts that remain the same. It cannot give itself new facts.

Big data suggests absolute knowledge. Things reveal their secret correlations. Everything becomes calculable, predictable and controllable. A whole new era of knowledge is being heralded. Actually, it is a rather primitive way of knowing. Data mining discovers correlations. According to Hegel's logic, correlation represents the lowest way of knowing. The correlation between A and B says: A often occurs along with B. With correlation it is not known why this happens. It just happens. Correlation indicates probability, not necessity. It differs from causality, which establishes a need: A cause B. Reciprocal action represents the next level of knowledge. It says: A and B condition each other. A necessary connection is established between A and B. However, at this level of knowledge it is not yet understood: "If we stop at the consideration of a certain content merely from the point of view of reciprocal action, it is in truth a totally incomprehensible behavior"

Only the "concept" captures the connection between A and B. It is the C that connects A and B. By means of C, the relationship between A and B is understood. The concept reforms the framework, the whole, which brings A and B together and clarifies their relationship. A and B are only the "moments of a superior third". Knowledge in the proper sense is only possible at the level of concept: "The concept is what is inherent in things themselves, which tells us that they are what they are, and, therefore, to understand an object means to be aware of its concept." Only from the all-encompassing concept C can the relationship between A and B be fully understood. Reality itself is transmitted by knowing when it is grasped by the concept.

Big data provides rudimentary knowledge. It remains in correlations and pattern recognition, in which, however, nothing is understood. The concept forms a totality that includes and comprehends its moments in itself. Totality is a final form. The concept is a conclusion. "Everything is conclusion" means "everything is concept" [60]. Reason is also a conclusion: "Everything rational is a conclusion." Big data is additive. The additive does not form a totality, an end. It lacks the concept, that is, what unites the parts into a whole. Artificial intelligence never reaches the conceptual level of knowledge. He does not understand the results of his calculations. Calculus differs from thinking in that it does not form concepts and does not advance from one conclusion to another.

Artificial intelligence learns from the past. The future he calculates is not a future in the proper sense of the word. The former is blind to events. But thought has an eventful character. It puts something completely different in the world. Artificial intelligence lacks the negativity of breakup, which causes the truly new to break through. Everything remains the same. "Intelligence" means to choose between (inter-legere). Artificial intelligence only chooses between options given in advance, ultimately between one and zero. It does not leave the previously given towards the imtransited.

Emphatic thinking begets a new world. He is on his way to the completely other, to another place: "The word of thought is poor in images and devoid of stimuli. [...] However, thinking changes the world. It changes it in the deeper, darker and darker pit which is an enigma, and which, being darker, is the promise of greater clarity." The intelligence of machines does not reach that depth of the dark well of an enigma. Information and data have no depth. Human thinking is more than calculation and problem solving. It clears and illuminates the world. It gives rise to a completely different world. The intelligence of machines entails above all the danger that human thought will resemble it and become itself mechanical.

Thought is nourished by eros. In Plato, logos and eros enter into an intimate relationship. Eros is the condition of possibility of thought. Heidegger also follows Plato in this. On the way to the impassed, thought is inspired by eros: "I call it eros, the oldest of the gods in the words of Parmenides. The flapping of the wings of that god moves me every time I take an essential step in thought and venture into the impassed." Eros is absent in the calculation. Data and information do not seduce.

According to Deleuze, philosophy begins with a "faire l'idiot". It is not intelligence, but idiotism, that characterizes thought. Every philosopher who produces a new language, a new thought, a new language, is an idiot. He says goodbye to all that has been. It dwells that virgin immanence, not yet described, of thought. With this "faire l'idiot", thought dares to jump to the totally other, to the untraveled. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms, of idiotic leaps: "The ancient idiot intended to reach some evidence that he would arrive at by himself: in the meantime he would doubt everything [...]. The modern idiot does not pretend to arrive at any evidence [...], he wants the absurd, it is not the same image of thought." Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, because it is incapable of "faire l'idiot". He is too smart to be an idiot.