On the Use of the Term Philosophy
Authors: D'Aloia Alessandro 
Published: November 2024

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond the sciences has not only ushered in a wave of controversy amongst the humanists but the humanities in general—more stridently than when Wittgenstein did it with his infamous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That language can ultimately be (pre)determined algorithmically (a notion, I am sure, that Wittgenstein himself would take no small pleasure in availing his interpretation of language as a calculus), wherein the essence behind the meaning of a word is simply a dictionary’s definition away from complete and total erasure. Indeed, “one can calculate whether a proposition belongs to logic”, as Wittgenstein puts it, “by calculating the logical properties of the symbol … . And this is what we do when we ‘prove’ a logical proposition. For, without bothering about sense or meaning, we construct the logical propositions out of others using only rules that deal with signs” (76-77). It remains to be seen whether or not consciousness can arise on this basis, as in a truly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and by only using those same rules that seem to emerge from their own, inherent complexity; themselves just another form of statement, to recall Wittgenstein, and those statements caught “in an eternal relation to a proposition about a constituent of the complex” (15). But for me to even acknowledge Wittgenstein in some respects, and in some circles, is to contemplate the end of philosophy itself, or at the very least to dwell on the significance of the sense or meaning of the end.
Karl Popper might have us refrain from stoking this fire altogether, although neither Popper, nor Wittgenstein for that matter, could have ever anticipated the extent to which the sciences, let alone the computer sciences, would eventually go on to ‘prove’ that a reductionist approach towards language does, in fact, work; in light of, and in spite of, Leibniz’s postulation of a giant brain the size of a windmill, fundamentally reducing the thinking and experiencing capacity of an individual to a series of cogs and wheels; Lawrence Davis’s duplication of the brain’s own synapses using telephone wires (no doubt an early precursor to neural networks and machine learning); Ned Block’s description of a Chinese brain (as being somehow different from any other brain); and finally John Searle’s Chinese room argument, perhaps the most recognisable variation of and to a thought experiment in which an individual is placed inside a room and asked to associate a symbol in Mandarin with another in English without knowing Mandarin, and in much the same way an input parses through a computer that is none the wiser about its output (Cole). The computer does not think, that is to say, about what any of these inputs or outputs are supposed to mean, least of all the use of the term philosophy.
I, however, want to focus on the sense and meaning behind the use of this term, in particular, and for two main reasons. Firstly, because the sense and meaning of philosophy tends to differ from philosopher to philosopher, in as much as someone like Locke contiguously builds upon the likes of Descartes, and Descartes on Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and their ideas. Secondly, because the difference between the one and the other philosopher is also demonstrative of a (con)temporality to language, especially when the use of the term philosophy itself does not strictly imply existentialism, or existential nihilism, or, as in the case of Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy, any more than it does phenomenology, or Socratic method, or film philosophy. Of course, if we were to define and differentiate these terms, like analytics from technics from aesthetics, say, well might we then go on to ‘prove’ their logical propositions as statements (analytics is this, technics is that, etc.), but that is entirely my point: in the absence of the presence of any logic, any curation, and without bothering about sense or meaning at all, well might LLMs then go on to construct their own predominantly English rooms out of rules that deal with only one philosophical statement to the exclusion of all others.
Moreover, even if we were to curate such statements, well might these propositions lack the capacity (re: empathy) to sense or mean anything beyond the sign of the times in which they were produced—well might the affect of this time come into play as part of another, eternal relation to propositions about time and affect themselves as exponential functions in the arrangement of these terms caught in another eternal relation between their past and present meaning. Long have we outgrown Cartesian dualism, for example, with regard to Locke and Hume, but the philosophy of the one is meaningless without the other; instead, we should try to imagine the intelligence of a machine caught in an eternal relation between mind and body without body, and in light of a more than likely Christian interpretation of God, or, as is more popularly the case with the likes of James Barrat, a self-styled Busy Child that is just as omnipotent as it is superintelligent. Would the machine judge us on the basis of Cartesian dualism, or Locke’s social contract, or Hume’s empiricism, as they are understood and reflected upon now, or in the past—or, in the past of the future, which is become now?
I must admit that Barrat’s rather hyperbolic use of language when it comes to AGI gets us little to no traction with the Ray Kurzweils of this world, which is why I think a much more innocuous consideration of the use of the term philosophy paves the way with a series of similarly good intentions. No philosopher, no good scientist, sets about in earnest to create a means by which to act against their own best interests, but then again: “here is this tendency to think that well-intentioned people create nice Ais [sic],” according to Eliezer Yudkowsky, “they themselves assume that if they are good-intentioned people the Ais [sic] they make are automatically good intentioned, and this is not true” (qtd. in Barrat, 53).
Let us take, for example, Jianqiu Zhang’s article "Should We Fear Large Language Models? A Structural Analysis of the Human Reasoning System for Elucidating LLM Capabilities and Risks through the Lens of Heidegger’s Philosophy". As well-intentioned though it may very well be, it begs the question: why Heidegger? What is it about Heidegger’s philosophy as opposed to Wittgenstein’s that someone like Derrida has not already elucidated through Writing and Difference about language through its meaning-making? “Heidegger’s framework illuminates the dual nature of entities; ‘ready-to-hand’ entities are appreciated for their practical utility”, according to Zhang, “while ‘present-at-hand’ entities are scrutinized for their intrinsic qualities from a scientific attitude. This duality forms the basis of what we term our Faculty of Knowledge, delineating the intricate structure by which we perceive and engage with our surroundings” (3). My emphasis on the use of the term duality here is that Zhang’s choice of Heidegger’s philosophy not only forms the basis for a convenient, if not computationally binary, interpretation of language, and by again calculating the logical properties of a symbol no less, this same scientific attitude would sooner relegate than ‘prove’ another logical kind of proposition algorithmically, away from the subjectivity of the ostensibly clunky rules that deal with signs, as well as the consequences of those rules, that have been up for debate across the humanities, and to a greater extent philosophically, since time immemorial.
These properties, I might add, are in no way restricted to just Wittgenstein, or to just Heidegger, or even to just Derrida, but unlike Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Heidegger’s framework—in Zhang’s case, Being and Time—is fraught with its own problems, the least of which concern its translation from German into English. By Heidegger’s own admission, he considers this framework a failure, and to such an extent that he abandons “the second half … . After a quarter of a century”, leaving Being and Time effectively unfinished (17). There are also the rather pragmatic, if not proto-fascistic, tendencies to these so-called ‘ready-to-hand’ entities that are only really being appreciated for their practicality in much the same way that a being might only be considered human in terms of their usefulness—at first to certain roles, to applications, and finally to society at large, in a slippery slope towards an abject (and utterly objective) utilitarianism that even now threatens to outmode swathes of the population under the guise of innovation, automation, and business agility (Baron). To Zhang’s credit, this utilitarian approach is clearly not what they intended when invoking someone like Heidegger, but, again, this is entirely my point: philosophy, as it is understood nowadays, can often be confused for, and conflated with, one’s own worldview not unlike a business philosophy. The goal of any business, any good business, and I use the term ‘good’ not in the sense of what is morally right or righteous, but effectively good for business, is to make a profit. Of course, there are going to be various businesses that would claim that their business philosophy, in particular, is more or less agile, sustainable—ethical—than others, but this only goes to show that the use of the term philosophy is itself up to interpretation. So, what philosophy means for us today, it may or may not mean for us tomorrow.
“When we make something present by bringing it close from its ‘thence’ [seinem Dorther], the making-present forgets the ‘yonder’ [das Dort] and loses itself in itself. Thus it comes about that if ‘observation’ of entities within-the-world commences in such a making-present”, according to Heidegger, “the illusion arises that ‘at first’ only a Thing is present-at-hand, here of course, but indefinitely—in space in general” (421). In this sense, the ‘yonder’ constitutes a mix of that which is unknown and that which is unknowable about the future (usefulness or uselessness) of something, especially when it is only considered in the present, given moment. There is a tendency, in other words, for us to treat a Thing only in its nowness, as if the rules that deal with signs were not in some way prone to change by and of themselves (indefinitely), or influence (re: affect) those entities already within-the-world—this is the illusion of which Heidegger speaks, and why Heidegger himself tends to frame a Thing (a Being) in terms of its temporality, as if “the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses”, as Heidegger puts it, “but in Dasein’s kind of Being. Temporality is essentially falling, and it loses itself in making present” (421). Words themselves can also be interpreted as falling, in that they, too, lose all meaning in the presence of being made into (and out of) data that needs to be continually scraped just to be able to keep up with the effective ‘observation’ of language in the real world.
I will concede, however, that presently, or at the very least temporarily, something like ChatGPT’s identification with the philosophy of William James perfectly demonstrates how even our own Structural Analysis of the Human Reasoning System is conspicuously flawed, both in our assessment of, and association with, Heidegger’s Philosophy (see figs. 1-9). If the machine does not (or will not, it is hard to estimate the difference between the backend from the frontend of its development as a user) identify with that very ‘yonder’, even though we think it might or should identify this way or that, this only goes to show us that our own understanding of language still has a long ways to go yet. And we have known about this falling for as long as Derrida, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose translation of Derrida from French into English bears with it its very own connotations of Searle’s Chinese room argument: “‘Being’ is the master-word that Heidegger crosses out. Derrida does not reject this. But his word is ‘trace’ (the French word carries strong implications of track, footprint, imprint)”, as Spivak puts it, “a word that cannot be a master-word, that presents itself as the mark of an anterior presence, origin, master. For ‘trace’ one can substitute ‘arche-writing’ (‘archi-écriture’), or ‘differance,’ or in fact quite a few other words that Derrida uses in the same way” (xv).
What I am essentially trying to resolve with this article, then, is in some way making this ‘yonder’ forever ‘thence’, and not just as the mark of an anterior presence (of an absence of) meaning that would generally and presently be (mis)understood as the definition of a given word, but the exponential Articulation of these concepts as significations, and the very anteriority of this presence, and the affect of this time, as yet another, different kind of Being. This meaning is prone to change, yes, and this change in meaning is therefore not an objective, or even quantifiable subject now and for all time—such a Thing, I think, we often take for granted about language is that meaning oscillates, but that it also vacillates between instability and calm, historically speaking. The figurative distance between the input and the output of a given word, however, “is not the origin”, according to Derrida, “but that which takes its place; which is not, moreover, the opposite of an origin. It is not an absence instead of presence, but a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun” (372).
Already there are signs that training LLMs on their own generated datasets thusly is affecting the quality of these outputs, mostly because language, like writing, “involves more than placing an existing document on an unreliable photocopier and pressing the Print button. It’s possible that, in the future”, according to Ted Chiang, the author behind Denis Villeneuve’s linguistic thriller Arrival (2016), “we will build an A.I. that is capable of writing good prose based on nothing but its own experience of the world. The day we achieve that will be momentous indeed—but that day lies far beyond our prediction horizon”. I would even go so far as to suggest that good prose, as a conceptual placeholder for the ‘observation’ of entities within-the-world, is not beyond our prediction horizon at all. It is that horizon place that constitutes an inherently affecto-temporal object, and one that Jean Baudrillard once referred to as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). A thought of Being without Being (and so without Body) that, while “Heidegger’s [crossed-out Being] might point at an inarticulable presence”, as Spivak puts it, “Derrida’s [crossed-out trace] is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack of the origin that is condition of thought and experience” (xvii). Derrida’s is actually the mark of the necessity of the absence of a presence of a meaning to language so that new meanings can eventually take the place of old ones through our interpretation (and misinterpretation) of them.
Finally, I would like to conclude this article with a series of artificially generated comments from Giacomo Miceli’s experimental discussion, The Infinite Conversation, further demonstrating my point about AGIs, LLMs, and the use of the term philosophy in a rather self-reflexive way; comments that I merely chanced upon, but found to be extremely relevant on this topic. Entering the Website, Miceli greets visitors with a pop-up: “Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon”, including a button saying “Play audio” (Miceli). Clicking the button, the pop-up disappears, and the Infinite Conversation resumes—never at the same point in the Conversation, never on the same topic, sometimes starting with Žižek, other times Herzog.
This time, Herzog opens the Conversation by stating: “No, no. I’m not a Marxist. I don’t believe much in theories. Not that I’m claiming to be a thoroughly skeptical philosopher, but I simply don’t believe much in theories and ideologies. I have my own way of looking at the world. It’s maybe similar to some Marxist views. But there’s no label for it. Yes, I’m not a Marxist” (fig. 10). Žižek counters, at first replying:

I heard rumors that you are sometimes designated by your critics as a kind of anti-Marxist. I was always a bit afraid of this because even in my writings there are some formulas for example, about how nature itself is the primordial form of class struggle which sound [sic] like a very nice metaphor but maybe are also used to mystify what goes on between people so that every natural catastrophe is then somehow denounced as part of the same struggle with primitive humanity. So I would prefer an open question mark instead of being called something. (Fig. 11).

Herzog concurs with Žižek on this last point, stating “there are no categories. Yes, I would rather have an open question mark” (fig. 12). Žižek agrees with Herzog, following up by saying: “the tendency of every ideology is to close the open question mark. With every new theory, each time we get a new ‘ism,’ we should resist it” (fig. 13). Even the chatbots are in agreement: substitute ideology for philosophy, categories for terms, and the open question mark for the affect of time and meaning disintegrates into theory, and those theories towards the closure of meaning-making altogether through the origin of the word. What are we to make of the use of Miceli’s own use of the term hallucination, then, verging on the cusp of an almost metaphenomenological questioning—at what point does the merely uncanny of the distinction between the actual and the virtual complicate our very understanding of what this language already no longer means to us?
Figures

Fig. 1: Prompting ChatGPT to describe the philosophy that best describes its function.

Fig. 2: Prompting ChatGPT to describe the philosophy that best describes its function again.

Fig. 3: Prompting ChatGPT to choose one philosopher who reflects pragmatism.

Fig. 4: Prompting ChatGPT to describe the philosophy that best describes its function again.

Fig. 5: Prompting ChatGPT to describe whether it identifies with any philosophy or philosophies.

Fig. 6: Prompting ChatGPT to describe whether it identifies with any philosophy or philosophies in particular again.

Fig. 7: Prompting ChatGPT to describe whether it has a preference for any philosophy or philosopher.

Fig. 8: Prompting ChatGPT to describe whether it has a preference for any philosophy or philosopher again.

Fig. 9: Prompting ChatGPT to assess whether it agrees with the philosophies that academic papers assert refer to its functions.

Fig. 10: The Infinite Conversation: Herzog contends he is not a Marxist.

Fig. 11:The Infinite Conversation: Žižek responds to Herzog.

Fig. 12: The Infinite Conversation: Herzog reasserts that he is not a Marxist.

Fig. 13: The Infinite Conversation: Žižek responds to Herzog again.
References
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