Reading Nietzsche in the Age of AI
A New Form of Causality and Consciousness
In the first section of the second Essay in The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche asks how it is possible for nature to have produced the possibility of a promise as a form of intelligent behavior:
To breed an animal that is allowed to promise — is this not precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself with respect to human beings? is it not the genuine problem of human beings? (Genealogy of Morality, II.1)
Nietzsche captures in this sentence, and in the sections of Essay II that immediately follow, the fundamental question of the history of intelligence: why does nature create the capacity within itself to set a course for the future that is different than what would otherwise happen? And why is this a ‘paradoxical task’?
It is paradoxical in this sense: nature seems to find itself deficient and thus requires a new form of causality that envisions a future and orchestrates the steps to bring it about. Nietzsche captures this new form of causality as the ability to promise: to hold the progression of time accountable to an imagined future:
How humanity must have learned to separate necessity from accidental occurences in order to control the future in advance, to think causally, to see and anticipate what is remote as if present, to posit with certainty what is the end, what is the means for this, in general to reckon and be able to calculate — how humanity itself must have first become calculable, regular, necessary, even to itself for its own image, in order finally to be able to vouch for itself as future to the extent that someone who promises does! (II.1, Adrian Del Caro translation throughout)
This new form of causality shapes the future by finding ‘accidental occurrences’ in fate and necessity. It exploits these contingencies in order to redirect the forces of necessity to alternative ends. To do so, this new causality must understand itself having causal power — it must ‘think causally’. It envisions an end and calculates the means. It does so because it is itself calculable.
We have in this single section of the Genealogy a succinct description of what I have been defining as intelligence: the adaptive and expansive capacity to find the contingency within necessity and exploit it for other purposes — turning fate into possibilities. Nietzsche does not call this intelligence, but that is what he is describing when he asks how nature creates a new causality that is allowed to promise a future that is different from what would occur if left to run automatically.
Separation and Calculation
The passage I just cited at length begins with separation from necessity and ends with calculation. The whole of the Genealogy is traditionally read as a pessimistic takedown of Christian morality — the ascetic ideal as the long term embrace of ressentiment. But close attention to this problem of nature creating a capacity for promise shows us something far different: the power of intelligence to calculate the causal chains of necessity, find their contingencies, and redirect them.
This calculating and redirecting power necessitates the experience of separation from automation. This experience of separation is not the sudden and inevitable birth of the ‘sovereign individual’, which is the focus of these sections of the Genealogy. Rather, this sovereign individual stands at the end of a long history where this new causality passes through the ‘morality of customs’ to become sovereignty:
… if we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree finally bears its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings about that for which it was only the means: then we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, like only unto himself, the autonomous, supermoral individual who has liberated himself from the morality of custom…
As the sovereign individual, he is truly able to make and keep promises. He is the apotheosis of this process and, therefore, experiences ‘an actual consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion of the human being generally.’
Far from condemning what has come before, Nietzsche presents this new causality as the slow progression of its power to confront fate, find it deficient, and turn it to other ends. This is a new configuration of consciousness: ‘the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and fate has settled in him to his uttermost depths and has become instinct…’ (II.2).
Throughout, Nietzsche’s prose makes the human being, and the sovereign individual in particular, into the recipient of this new capacity for causality that nature has set for itself. Humanity does not create this capacity; it does not will it into existence. Nature does the work, and humanity is the convenient vehicle for its incubation.
From our own perspective in an age of AI, Nietzsche’s narrative brings into relief the idea that intelligence need not be seen as the sole possession of the human being. We are merely a convenient vehicle, but perhaps we have reached a stage where we are able to engineer a version of this intelligence and place it, as a possession, into our computational machines. While Nietzsche places the sovereign individual as the teleological end point of nature’s power for allowing promises, there is nothing in his narrative that demands this conclusion. Perhaps we are just another passing moment in ‘this tremendous process’.
The Genealogy of Intelligence
Reading Nietzsche in an age of AI brings these moments into relief. To envision intelligence as having a history is to imagine the possibility of its genealogy. Nietzsche describes this new causality as the condition of possibility of morality, but not its end. Responsibility, promises, guilt, conscience, suffering, cruelty are all part of the story, but they change relations with each other as this new causal capacity works itself out and increases its will to power (a term he uses, with emphasis, in II.12 and III.18).
Conscience, for instance, is easily simplified into the repository of self-poisoning ressentiment. It is the aim and product of the ascetic priest. But that is not how Nietzsche presents conscience (or responsibility) when he places them at the end of this long history:
His conscience? … It can be sensed in advance that the concept “conscience” that we encounter here in its highest, almost alarming form already has a long history and form-conversion behind it. To be allowed to vouch for oneself and with pride, hence also to be allowed to say Yes to oneself — that is a ripe fruit, as I said before, but also a late fruit: — how long this fruit had to hang bitter and sour on the tree! (II.3)
In no way can conscience be read here as the ascetic ideal, as self-poisoning ressentiment. This conscience has many millennia of ‘form-conversion behind it’ culminating as the sovereign individual described in Essay II.
It is the power of separation — nature separating itself from itself — raised to a new level. But how does this separation begin? How does nature embark on its paradoxical task?
Memory and Violence
Lucretius tells us that the volition (voluntas) must be wrested from the foedera fati — the seemingly unbreakable chain of causality (De Rerum Natura, 2.251-62). Nietzsche does not cite Lucretius, but he tells a similar story. This new causality must confront hard-coded processes of fate, find their weaknesses, and bend them in other directions.
This is a violent undertaking, and it requires the creation of memory, which must be wrested from fate’s otherwise automated processes.
As we have already grasped, the task of breeding an animal that is allowed to promise includes as a condition and preparation the closer task of first making the human being necessary, uniform, like among like, regular and consequently predictable to a certain degree. (II.2)
Only by making people remember things that they either must or must not do can predictability and regularity be achieved. This comes about by making certain experiences memorable — separated out from the sea of causal events. In order for separation to occur, memory must be wrested from what otherwise is an automated chain of causal processes:
“How does one make a capacity for memory in the human animal? How does one impress upon this partly dull, partly distracted momentary understanding, this forgetfulness incarnate, in such a way that it remains present? … Something has to be burned in so that it stays in the memory: only what does not cease to hurt stays in the memory” (II.3)
The power of intentionally inflicting suffering in order to make people retain ‘five, six “I will nots” in their memory, with respect to which they gave their promise in order to share in the advantages of society — and really! with the help of this kind of memory they finally came “to reason”! … how much blood and horror are at the bottom of all “good things”! (II.3).