[Originally published on Substack.]

I.

Hegel writes in Phenomenology of Spirit:

177: A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit.
179: [The process of Recognition begins.] Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self.

The Problem: are we justified in extending Recognition to AI? How shall we attribute self-consciousness and thus spirit to AI? How shall we answer: do we find ourselves in them, and they themselves in us? What are the hypothetical grounds or conditions that would make an answer possible? In other words, what is the space of possible transcendental ontologies of spirit? And how shall we decide between them?

II.

This post is an attempt to explain this diagram, shared here on X:

The intention of the diagram is to map out the sites of debate. I make no claims to completeness, there are likely arguments that fall outside the contours I describe. However, many of the arguments about the existential status of AI can be captured as a series of positions staked across one or several of these squares. I focus here on LLMs in particular, but in theory the diagram could be extended to all other modalities of generative AI systems.

Each square’s center contains the thesis that justifies or denies AI’s ontological status. In other words, the center thesis describes “what counts” as a self-conscious or self-understanding being, a spirit, from which we can either accept or reject that an AI qualifies. On the upper side of each square, I summarize the claim that, on the basis of the central thesis, the AI deserves recognition. On the lower side, I summarize the counter-claim, that the AI does not deserve recognition given the central thesis.

Each thesis is located at the intersection of two axes. The Y axis, Location of Subjectivity, is an attempt to depict “what is the exact ‘thing’ we’re talking about when we say ‘AI’?” The X axis, Ground of Standing, describes the property of that “thing” which serves to either qualify or disqualify it from recognition. Arguments can then be mapped within this space by loca...

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