from Hacker News

AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion

by jger15 on 5/24/25, 2:26 PM with 83 comments

by vunderba on 5/24/25, 7:44 PM
I'm not sure how this affects the premise of the article, but the "jaw dropping quote created by an LLM about NYC" reads like so much pretentious claptrap:
```
  Because New York City is the only place where the myth of greatness still 
  feels within reach—where the chaos sharpens your ambition, and every street 
  corner confronts you with a mirror: who are you becoming?

  You love NYC because it gives shape to your hunger. It’s a place where 
  anonymity and intimacy coexist; where you can be completely alone and still 
  feel tethered to the pulse of a billion dreams.
```
If I read this even before ChatGPT was a mote in the eye of Karpathy, my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat.
The author of Berserk said it so much better: "Looking from up here, it's as if each flame were a small dream, for each person. They look like a bonfire of dreams, don't they? But, there's not flame for me here. I'm just a temporary visitor, taking comfort from the flame."
by 13years on 5/24/25, 5:41 PM
> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories. https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
by keiferski on 5/24/25, 7:14 PM
A bit of a rambling essay without much depth, but it did make me wonder: if AI tools weren’t wrapped in a chatbot pretending to be a person, would all of this hullabaloo about AI and human nature go away? That seems to be the root of the unease many people have with these tools: they have the veneer of a human chatting but obviously aren’t quite there.
I tend to treat Ai tools as basically just a toolset with an annoying chat interface layered on top, which in my experience leads me to not feel any of the feelings described in the essay and elsewhere. It’s just a tool that makes certain outputs easier to generate, an idea calculator, if you will.
As a result, I’m pretty excited about AI, purely because they are such powerful creative tools - and I’m not fooled into thinking this is some sort of human replacement.
by jwalton on 5/24/25, 6:03 PM
It's somehow a little poetic that the author's chatgpt example has already been plagiarized by a realtor blog: https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/beautiful-suffering-of-...
by Garlef on 5/24/25, 6:15 PM
This made me happy: It offers an interesting take on AI.
(After reflecting a bit on this I think this is for the following reason: Not only does this take a step back to offer a meta perspective. It also does so without falling into the trap of rooting this perspective in the hegemonic topos of our everyday discourse (economics).
Usually, takes on AI are very economic in nature: "Gen AI is theft", "We/our jobs/our creativity will all be replaced", "The training data is preduced by exploiting cheap labour".
In this sense this perspective avoids the expected in not only in one but two ways.)
by johnea on 5/24/25, 10:21 PM
> What unsettles us about AI is not malice, but the vacuum where intention should be. When it tries to write poetry or mimic human tenderness, our collective recoil is less about revulsion and more a last stand, staking a claim on experience, contradiction, and ache as non-negotiably ours.
Vacuous BS like this sentence make me think this whole article is LLM generated text.
What unsettles me isn't some existential "ache", it isn't even the LLM tech itself (which does have _some_ very useful applications), it's the gushing, unqualified anthropomorphization by people who aren't technically qualified to judge it.
The lay populous is all gaga, while technically literate people are by and large the majority of those raising red flags.
This topic of the snippet about "life in NYC": is the perfect application for the statistical sampling and reordering of words, already written by OTHER PEOPLE.
We can take the vacuous ramblings of every would-be poet who ever moved to NYC, and reorder them into a "new" writing about some subjective topic that can't really be pinned down as correct or not. Of course it sounds "human", it was trained on preexisting human writing. duh...
Now, try to apply this to the control system for your local nuclear power plant and you definitely will want a human expert reviewing everything before you put it into production...
But does the c-suite understand this? I doubt it...
by roxolotl on 5/24/25, 7:46 PM
This piece addresses the major thing that’s been frustrating to me about AI. There’s plenty else to dislike, the provenance, the hype, the potential impacts, but what throws me the most is how willing many people have been to surrender themselves and their work to generative AI.
by myaccountonhn on 5/24/25, 7:57 PM
There are quite a few practical problems that bother me with AI: centralization of power, enablement of fake news, AI porn of real women, exploitation of cheap labour to label data, invalid AI responses from tech support, worse quality software, lowered literacy rates, the growing environmental footprint.
The philosophical implications are maybe the least of my worries, and maybe a red herring? It seems like the only thing those in power are interested in discussing while there are very real damages being done.
by TimorousBestie on 5/24/25, 5:38 PM
> Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.
As a call to action this is inadequate. I have no idea what this is persuading me to do.
If I dig into how Heidegger solved this problem in his own life, well, I don’t think that should be replicated.
by pglevy on 5/24/25, 7:27 PM
Just happened to read Heidegger's Memorial Address this morning. Delivered to a general audience in 1955, it is shorter and more accessible. Certainly not as complex as his later works but related.
> Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/DiscourseOnThinking/MemorialA... (p43)
by bombdailer on 5/24/25, 9:15 PM
Meanwhile this article is quite clearly written (or cleaned up) by AI. Or perhaps too much dialectic with AI causes one to internalize its tendency to polish turds smooth. It just has the unmistakable look of something where the original writing was "fixed up" and what remains is exactly the thing is warns against. I understand the pull to get an idea across as efficiently as possible, but sucking the life out of it ain't the way.
by bowsamic on 5/24/25, 7:34 PM
This is basically my experience. LLMs have made me deeply appreciative of real human output. The more technology degrades everything, the clearer it shows what matters
by throwawaymaths on 5/24/25, 8:28 PM
"When an LLM “describes the rain” or tries to evoke loneliness at a traffic light, it produces language that looks like the real thing but does not originate in lived experience"
does it not originate in the collective experience ensouled in the corpus it is fed?
by alganet on 5/25/25, 3:41 AM
> In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the “Human Instrumentality Project” offers to dissolve all suffering through perfect togetherness.
That is what Gendo says, and it is obviously a lie. It's an _unreliable universe_ story: you don't really know anything. Even the most powerful characters lack knowledge of what is going on.
All the endings, of all revisions, include Gendo realizing he didn't knew something vital (then, after that, the story becomes even more unreliable). If that's the goal of the story (Gendo's arc of pure loss despite absolute power), it's not ambiguous at all.
So, very strange that you used the reference to relate to AI.
by deadbabe on 5/24/25, 6:54 PM
We never valued the human element in the work that surrounds us. Do you care that the software engineer who produced the CRUD app you use everyday had a “craftsman mentality” toward code? Do you care about the hours a digital artist spent to render some CGI just right in a commercial? Do you appreciate the time a human took to write some local news article?
Probably not, you probably didn’t even notice, and now it’s over. It’s too late to care. These things will soon be replaced with cheaper AI pipelines and much of what we consume or read digitally will be proudly AI generated or at best only merely suspected of being AI generated. Did you know that soon you’ll even be able to install browser plugins that will automatically pay you to have AI insert ads into comments you write on popular websites? It’s true, and people will do it, because it’s an easy way to make money.
Reversing this AI trend means everyone should just do things the hard way, and that’s just not going to happen. If no one cares about how you do your work (and they really don’t give a fuck) you might as well use AI to do it.
by dtagames on 5/24/25, 4:58 PM
This is fantastic. Perhaps the best philosophical piece on AI that I've read.
by akomtu on 5/24/25, 7:05 PM
AI will be the great divider of humanity. It's one of those ideas that can't be ignored or waited out, and everyone will need to take a decisive stance on it. Human civilization and machine civilization won't coexist for long.
by djoldman on 5/24/25, 7:18 PM
1. I suspect that the vast majority couldn't care less about the philosophical implications. They're just going to try to adapt as best they can and live their lives.
2. LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this. That LLMs are essentially a distillation of human-generated text makes this next-level ironic: occasionally people will deride LLM output... In some ways this is just a criticism of human generated text.
by BlueTemplar on 5/25/25, 2:57 AM
And just how do you know LLMs don't have a soul, hmm ?
"Uncanny valley" is interesting here because I am pretty sure I would have failed this "Turing Test" if stumbling on this text out of context. But yeah, within context, there is something of this rejection indeed... And there would be probably a lot more acceptance of AIs if they were closer to humans in other aspects.
by niemandhier on 5/24/25, 8:23 PM
In Heideggers philosophy objects and people are defined by their relations to the real world, he calls it “ in der Welt sein”.
Llms pose an interesting challenge to this concept, since they cannot interact with the physical world, but they nevertheless can act.
by poopiokaka on 5/24/25, 9:16 PM
Clearly written by AI
by freen on 5/25/25, 2:11 PM
Ted Chiang: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
by layer8 on 5/24/25, 10:40 PM
> 2003 Space Odyssey
???
by httbs on 5/24/25, 5:17 PM
Great read
by neuroelectron on 5/24/25, 5:30 PM
My chatgpt doesn't like nyc that much:
New York City, as a global symbol, exports the myth of America—its exceptionalism, hustle culture, capitalism-as-dream, fashion, Wall Street bravado, media dominance, cultural swagger. NYC has always been a billboard for "brand America," selling a narrative of limitless opportunity, grit-as-glory, and urban sophistication. Think Times Square's overstimulation, Broadway's fantasy, Wall Street's speculation, and how these are consumed worldwide as aspirational content.
But what's exported isn't necessarily real—it’s hype. The marketed dream, not the lived reality.
“...and its biggest import is grime and grief”
In contrast, what flows into NYC is the cost of that image: the labor of the marginalized, the psychological toll, the physical debris. “Grime” evokes literal pollution, overwork, and class stratification; “grief” brings in the emotional fallout—displacement, burnout, violence, economic precarity, and cycles of trauma.
NYC absorbs the despair of a world it pretends to uplift. Refugees, artists, outcasts, and exhausted believers in the American Dream all converge here, only to be consumed by the very machine that exports the myth of hope.