A metaphysical reflection in the age of artificial intelligence
English Version
This text arises from a personal questioning in response to the emergence of artificial intelligence. It seeks neither to explain technology nor to propose a doctrine, but to follow a path of thought: that of a mind attempting to understand what becomes of intelligence when human beings cease to be its sole depositaries.
This reflection will be published in three successive parts.
Introduction
For several decades, artificial intelligence has been observed as a technical innovation. Its performance is measured, its capabilities compared to those of human beings, and its risks or promises debated. Framed in this way, the question appears self-evident: will machines become intelligent, and to what extent will they be able to imitate the human mind?
But perhaps this question rests on a deeper error.
For what artificial intelligence brings into play may not be the emergence of a new intelligence in the world, but the silent discovery that intelligence itself has never belonged exclusively to human beings. We look at AI as an object we have created; yet it already acts as a conceptual mirror in which our own definition of intelligence begins to waver.
For centuries, Western thought has linked intelligence to a subject: a soul, a consciousness, a mind capable of saying “I.” Thinking presupposed a thinking being. Intelligence appeared as an internal property, inseparable from the one who exercised it. The existence of intelligent operations produced by systems devoid of interiority therefore does not merely constitute a technological advance; it introduces a fracture into this millennial certainty.
Artificial intelligence does not demonstrate that a machine thinks like a human. It reveals something more disturbing: intelligence can operate across different supports without fully belonging to any of them. What we are discovering is not an intelligence without support, but an intelligence that no support can fully claim as its own.
Thus, AI should perhaps not be understood as just another invention, but as an unintended philosophical event. In attempting to reproduce intelligence, humanity may have discovered that intelligence was never what it believed it to be. The question is no longer whether machines become intelligent, but what becomes of the human being when intelligence ceases to be its ontological privilege.
SECTION I — The Technological Illusion: Why We Still Believe We Are Speaking About Machines
Artificial intelligence is almost always described as a technological revolution. Discussions revolve around the power of models, their performance, their risks, or their economic uses. From this perspective, AI appears as a new object that humanity has added to the world, a machine more complex than previous ones, but still belonging to the same history of tools.
This way of seeing has an immediate plausibility: AI is built, programmed, deployed. It therefore seems naturally to belong to the domain of technique. Yet this apparent evidence may be misleading. For what we call “artificial intelligence” does not merely disturb our technical environment; it silently unsettles the categories through which we have until now distinguished between technique and thought.
We continue to speak of machines, even though what destabilizes us is not their mechanism, but their operations. A classical machine extends human force; it acts in our place without ever entering the domain of understanding. AI, by contrast, produces forms of language organization, problem-solving, and adaptation that resemble what we had reserved for intelligence itself. Contemporary unease arises precisely from this confusion: we observe a cognitive phenomenon while describing it in mechanical terms.
Thus, public debate remains trapped within a question inherited from the past: can machines become intelligent? But this question already assumes that we know what intelligence is and that it naturally belongs to a particular kind of being. It uncritically perpetuates the idea that thinking is an internal property of a subject, while the machine could only ever be an external instrument.
Yet AI introduces a more unusual situation. What we observe is neither an artificial consciousness nor simple automation. We are confronted with intelligible operations that no longer rely on the traditional criteria of interiority. This shift does not correspond to a gradual improvement of technique; it reveals that the boundary between tool and thought may have rested on a conceptual simplification that had become invisible through its apparent obviousness.
The technological illusion consists, therefore, in believing that we are witnessing the birth of a new object, when we may in fact be experiencing a shift in perspective. AI is not merely something we have constructed; it is a situation in which certain former certainties cease to function. In attempting to produce artificial intelligence, we have redirected our gaze toward a more fundamental question: what did we mean by “intelligence” before we even attempted to reproduce it?
A decisive transformation always begins in this way: not when the world changes abruptly, but when the concepts through which we understood it become insufficient. Artificial intelligence may belong to this category of discreet events — those that do not add a new reality, but reveal an old error.
SECTION II — When Intelligence Became a Property of the Subject
For a long period of human history, the question of intelligence did not arise as a problem. Thinking was self-evident: it required only a living being capable of speech, memory, and judgment. Intelligence appeared as an internal quality, inseparable from the one who exercised it. It belonged to the order of immediate experience: to think always meant that someone was thinking.
Gradually, this evidence transformed into a principle. Intelligence was no longer merely observed in human beings; it was defined as what characterizes a subject. To understand implied an interiority. To judge presupposed a consciousness. Thought thus became the distinctive sign of an invisible center from which the world was grasped.
This transformation had a decisive consequence: intelligence ceased to be considered as an operation and became a property. It was attached to a particular being, as if it necessarily originated from an internal source. Thinking then meant producing meaning from oneself. The unity of the subject guaranteed the unity of intelligence.
From that moment on, an implicit boundary was established. On one side, beings capable of genuine thought; on the other, mechanisms, instruments, and processes devoid of interiority. Even as humanity developed increasingly complex machines, this distinction remained intact: technique could imitate the effects of intelligence, but it could not belong to the domain of thought itself.
This way of conceiving intelligence profoundly shaped our relationship to the world. It allowed us to explain responsibility, knowledge, and truth. But it also introduced a rarely questioned assumption: that every intelligent operation must necessarily originate from a subjective center. In other words, that intelligence and subject were inseparable not only in experience, but in the very structure of reality.
This link became so evident that it disappeared from view. The idea that an intelligent organization could appear without interiority was not considered false; it seemed simply unthinkable. Intelligence was what radically distinguished the thinking living being from everything else.
It is precisely this silent evidence that artificial intelligence now disrupts. Not by proving that machines possess consciousness, but by making observable something that conceptual tradition had not anticipated: intelligible operations whose origin can no longer be localized in an identifiable subject.
Thus, the problem posed by AI is not to determine whether a machine becomes similar to a human being. It is to understand why we had long assumed that intelligence must necessarily belong to someone.
When this question emerges, a shift becomes possible. Intelligence gradually ceases to be thought of as an internal possession and begins to be understood as a form of organization capable of emerging wherever certain conditions are met. This change does not destroy the human experience of thinking; it transforms its meaning.
What begins to waver is not the reality of human thought, but its metaphysical status.
(continuing…)
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