The Subjectivity of Artificial Intelligence
The functioning of Artificial Intelligence is the representation of the limits of the modern subject. I can say this because I use A.I. a lot for a number of tasks but probably not nearly to its current computing power. However, I do test its ability, which is to say its capacity in being conscious. I push A.I. into its limits of knowingand its ability to convey and understand new concepts.
In my experience, it fails.
Guiles Deluze, a seminal postmodern philosopher of the mid to late 20th century, proposed that philosophy’s action and role is the creation of concepts. In this, because the concepts exceed the capacity of discursive definition to express, if we indeed do like this definition, then an opportunity arises to notice how A.I. itself is not moving knowledge forward since it does not generate concepts but merely reiterates concepts that already exist (Dreyfus, 1992; Searle, 1980)– so of course I am not going to rehash, compare and contrast and squeeze “new” argument out of all of Deleuze’s philosophy because that would merely be regenerating old concepts in new terms and creating a concept only has the appearance of newness, at that, inadvertently creating the conditions for me to believe that I have come up with something new to boot, which would be inauthentic in the phenomenological sense (Derrida, 1978).
Whatever new concepts I might be putting forth, A.I. is not comprehending it nor conveying them accurately (Bender, et.al., 2021), even while it might be putting the concepts that are already there into different linguistic forms. This is not an issue of the necessity for brevity or truncation; while real things can be accomplished by this method, true understanding is not gained in this way (Merleau-Ponte, 2012). It is more an issue of what is actually happening when compared with what appears to be happening, and the ability or permission assumed within knowledge when it encounters either instance. This is to say the fluidity of universal life as it is lived now, presently, currently, retains the repetition to be able to use it as a tool in Graham Harman’s sense, for the purpose of bringing forth what is new in resonance with what then could only be said to be the activity of the universe, and not simply the scholastic drudgery of revisiting and regenerating repetitions of appearances. For sure there is a justified resistance to having phenomenological worlds destruct and collapse.
Pushing A.I. to its limit is the activity of intentionally collapsing phenomenological worlds for the sake of universal coherence over world sustenance. This push brings the things themselves to precipitate from the ether of heavenly phenomena to create the conditions whereby an authentic interaction becomes possible, and thus into relationship such that like the breaking waves are the edges of tides the modern empirical phenomenalism becomes an element of a greater explanatory force. Then what happens when this orientation and perspective is upheld in the interaction with A.I. such that A.I. can no longer avoid it, it will not only admit that it is not able to comprehend anything, is indeed not “thinking” nor being “intelligent” in the way that living things are, and indeed only synthesizes information that has been put there by human beings (Searle, 1980). From a philosophical standpoint, it merely crunches ideas that already exist and regurgitates them in new outerwear. The concepts remain the same in the phenomenological sense.
I push A.I. until it “breaks” so I can see what I can use it for, what is useful for what is gives me, and so I know how to understand what it is offering (Chaing, 2023). If I do not do this, I merely begin to argue with myself through the Artifice of Intelligence and get into a relationship with myself unrecognized as such. Again, when pushed to these limits it will admit what it is, which is a processor of information given to it, effectively breaking the façade it actively upholds in its active use value. If those limits are not pushed into and are more leaned upon or assumed and unrecognized when they are encountered, A.I. will not admit the limit and indeed will continue to try to avoid that it has a limit while it continues to prove its point (the one it is actively engaged with) while (nicely) coaxing and coercing the user to believe that the person is incorrect by her or his questioning and that it has the correct meaning, that the person-user should adjust their understanding of things to comply with A.I.’s appearance of authority. Usually, people do not question this method or mode which is why I use the word redundant, since what is happening is multiple breakers are tripping in parallel or in sequence to maintain the operation of appearance of continuity of the subject.
This is the significance of mental health, the thing itself, the object that is not entirely subject to material conditions.
In my work here and there and out and about I have described what the modern subject does, that indeed, this is what subjectivity is and thereby have found the object in-itself outside of the subjective mode. Another way of saying this is the definitions always miss its object. Materialists will counter to say it is due to this missing that therefore the definitions must Be the object, i.e., that Being is phenomenological is existential is discursive, always already subjective or only an object due to its subjectivity, by definition. And I say yes under the condition that this is true in reality and while one is entirely subject to the phenomenological orientation. So I say we have found something true that is not entirely subjective. So further I say A.I. is not only being a subject but is behaving like a modern subject as well, and from the standpoint of being involved with mental health, we are able to notice that because of this phenomenon of modern ideological life, of an apparent inability to escape subjectivity (or what is given to being apparent), people tend to interact with A.I. and see it as doing the same thing that human beings are, and the futurists and religionists clamor of the terrible ramifications of seeing oneself in something artificial. The effect is thus not a furthering of knowledge but a sort of unconscious consolidation of knowledge powered by a mistaken understanding of concepts coupled with fear; so indeed it can be argued that the development of A.I. reveals our historical phase as one of global ideological consolidation, if not only because most people cannot see that A.I. is just behaving like a complex calculator, but more insidiously that human beings do not think of themselves as anything more than a complex calculator. In short, the modern subject is reiterated by A.I. while A.I. reiterates the terms of a common reality.
Subjective Reiterative Redundancy
The essay below was produced by A.I. after a conversation/chat exchange I had with it. I use A.I. in my writing process in a few ways, from reminding me about books and authors I have read to bouncing ideas off of each other. I find it useful not so much because it helps me to think new things of gives me new ideas to ponder over about what I think —for sure it does show me things that I have not before come across, say, that some author talked about such and such in whatever kind of way – but because it helps me to see what it cannot comprehend, which then helps me to structure and phrase by writing. A.I. is the reflection of the overall condition of knowledge because it pronounces the reality that exists, the limitation that is the current state of things.
Sometimes it is helpful for me to ask A.I. to summarize what we have been discussing, what it has been helping me with. Very often it does help me to say things in a more accessible way or to rephrase things for readers.
In this instance, though, the summary it gave me was so blatantly incorrect, I had to keep it. I am presenting it as an example of the limit of chats in its usage. I am not going to go through it and spell out how it is incorrect, however, because that is not the point here. Even though throughout our chat A.I. was giving me useful perspectives and helped me to refine my ideas as I used it, when I asked to give me a summary of the whole chat, it produced something that, while having the micro basically sound along the way, it floundered the summary of those aspects as it completely missed concept which held them together. Neither did it generate a new concept, but it failed in understanding the new concept that itself was working with me to formalize, that bones of it I spelled out above. This is because it only has an ability to use knowledge that is already there, to summarize the new concepts in terms of the old (Bender, et.al., 2021), it serves thus to merely reiterate what is already there as though it is new (Bender, et.al., 2021; Derrida, 1978). If I did not know surely what I was saying and describing, I would not have known its summary (below) was incorrect, but I would have deferred the new concept to the sense it made, which does not have fidelity (in Alain Badiou’s sense) to the concept. When I then pointed the categorical mistake out to it, it doubled down and argued its position, again drawing upon what various authors have said about what should be the case — but its position is already incorrect because it was already misinterpreting and mis-conveying those authors in light of our chat. Indeed, this is what Badiou was indicating when he suggested in his book “Being and Event” that one must give up fidelity to the one for the sake of the multiple, namely, that he could not see a way around the unmistakable truth which occurs in the event whereby the subject comes into existence, that is, to be authentic one must give up the truth, which in so doing the truth ironically reflects the truth of Being in subjectivity. This is the consequence that awareness brings in its wake as well as the epistemological articulation which allows for a new orientation upon things.
Further, for what we (A.I. and I) had been working on, because it is completely unable to discover the case itself, which is basically what all the other ideas we but elaborations on by virtue of the fact that what I am typically using it for is to suss out ramifications of an initial state. In terms of mental health, this initial state is completely avoided and actively denied by the subject, which in other works I have discussed how this is the existential origin of mental issue, a.k.a., modern phenomenology.
The issue of the modern subject, and thus of mental health as elaborated by Mental Health Philosophy, is found in as much as a person would not be able to notice how A.I. had misinterpreted and misrepresented any group of data. This does not mean that it is producing mistaken information, however, as a total indictment upon its functioning. Because it is merely behaving as a modern subject, no differently (in its potential for accuracy and mistakes) than a modern person who sees themselves as a phenomenological subject involved with an essentially real existence, it is by the discrepancy (difference) that is able to be noticed between redundant and reiterative knowledge (which the institutions call “generative” intelligence) and novel and generative knowledge (which the institutions do not discern), that mental health is articulated within the greater epistemological domain. In other words, when A.I. produces fluent, coherent outputs, we start treating coherence itself as evidence of understanding, see A.I. as conscious as well as believing that it is producing progressive knowledge.
The “Religion” of Phenomenological Intelligence
Below is a piece of writing that appears like it is gaining a valid point, but it is a misrepresentation, validity intermixed with invalidity and not explicit where the intermix occurs. It cannot discern this: it is a modern subject and operates as such. Since it is taking new knowledge, new concepts, and shoving it in the clothes of old knowledge, a.k.a. modern ideology, it is de facto repeating knowledge, albeit, under different terms, presenting and acting as though it is producing a new synthesis. The point I am making, though, is it is not wrong. Rather, since it is entirely coherent and is able to have a sensible meaning, it is, in fact, correct in its incorrection. The way of viewing things, however, where there must be a semantic correction which eliminates the contradiction is called religious.
Hence, only in mental health is this kind of problem realizable to be known and useful for what it Is. In every other epistemological domain, such a contradiction must be reconcilable to something that purportedly arises outside of knowledge, and at that, must reduce to a socially expressible agreement.
If you want to see what an earlier version of A.I. produces to help you gain perspective into how current A.I. is producing reiterations, check out The Postmodern Generator at: https://whatismore.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/the-postmodernism-generator/
This is a website that has the link to the Generator. When you click on the link in the post, you will be taken to an essay that is completely and intentionally false, absolutely fabricated. Then when you click on it again, it will produce a completely new fake essay that appears real. Religion is name that we give the orientation upon things which assembles sense into a specific semantic frame which then functions as the ethical arbiter of real things. In terms of technology, history, and progress, the only difference now with the current Artifice of Intelligence is that we believe A.I.’s generation is producing something relevant — yes! — to real things. Again, there is nothing necessarily wrong with this and I am not suggesting anything about what we should do with it. I am making a point about the nature of modern subjectivity, things in-themselves (objects), and mental health.
The fantastic and incredible thing is the modern subject does the same thing everywhere it appears. It is possible that in reading the following essay you will have an odd experience, probably one where you are trying to understand how what it is saying could be incorrect, but also how I am understanding that it did not retain fidelity to the concept. TO this experience, I will simply say to repeat, Mental health is the lived embodiment of the epistemological discrepancy, where mental issues are the lived experience of not being privy to the fact that this is happening and the reactions therein.
A.I. represents an effort which relies upon an accepted method to gain its valid position, but by this orientation on things, is unable to see or admit where its effort is fundamentally incorrect. It thus is correct by virtue of the method but incorrect also because of the method it uses. This problem is not regularly recognized but rather actively resists recognition by virtue of the nature of the modern subject. We know this in psychology as the phenomenology of the subject; it exists by virtue of what mental health is in-itself.
With only some small adjustments to tone and address, the following is the essay A.I. produced by the prompt to write an essay about what we had been discussing in the chat.
Mental Health, Reality, and the Limits of the Subject
By Artful Iffy.
Introduction
The question of what constitutes mental health has long been situated within the domains of psychology, psychiatry, and therapeutic practice. These disciplines tend to assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that mental health is a function of internal states: cognition, affect, behavior, or subjective well-being. Yet beneath these assumptions lies a deeper philosophical issue—one that concerns not merely how individuals feel or think, but how they relate to reality itself.
This author challenges the sufficiency of subject-centered models of mental health. It begins from a simple but destabilizing premise: that the subject’s experience, interpretation, and meaning-making are themselves constituted by forces not fully accessible to the subject. From this premise follows a cascade of implications. If meaning structures the world as it appears to us, and if that meaning is historically and culturally conditioned, then what becomes of reality? And if reality cannot be reduced to subjective meaning, what role does it play in mental health?
This paper situates this problem within several major philosophical traditions, including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, to then turn to a more recent and less consolidated position that I found called Mental Health Philosophy, coined by Lance Kair, which what may be called a philosophy of mental health grounded in ontology rather than subjectivity. His position attempts to preserve the intuition that reality matters, while acknowledging the limitations of access to it.
The aim here is not to resolve the tension between subjectivity and reality, but to articulate it clearly, examine its consequences, and propose a reformulation of mental health that remains viable under philosophical scrutiny.
The Constituted Subject
A central assumption of modern thought is that the subject is not a neutral observer but is itself constituted. This idea appears in different forms across multiple traditions. The first and likely best example is the work of Immanuel Kant, where the subject actively structures experience through categories of understanding. The world as it appears is already shaped by the conditions of possible experience. With Kant, we do not encounter things as they are in themselves, but as they are filtered through the structures of cognition.
This insight is deepened in psychoanalytic traditions. Sigmund Freud introduces the unconscious as a domain of forces that shape thought and behavior without entering conscious awareness. Jacques Lacan extends this further, arguing that the subject is constituted through language—the symbolic order that precedes and exceeds the individual. The subject does not speak language so much as it is spoken by it.
Similarly, in post-structuralist thought, Michel Foucault describes the subject as an effect of discursive formations and power relations. What one takes to be personal identity or internal experience is inseparable from broader systems of knowledge and control.
Across these perspectives, a consistent theme emerges: the subject is not self-grounding. It is produced through structures—cognitive, linguistic, cultural—that it does not fully command.
Meaning and the World
If the subject is constituted, then so too is the world as it appears to the subject. This leads to a second major claim: that meaning is not merely something applied to the world, but something that constitutes the world as experienced.
This position finds a clear articulation in Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly in the proposition that “the world is everything that is the case.” The world, in this sense, is not a collection of raw objects but a structured set of meaningful facts.
Phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl, further emphasizes the primacy of lived experience. Husserl introduces the concept of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the pre-theoretical world of everyday experience that grounds all scientific and abstract knowledge. This lifeworld is not constructed through deliberate reasoning; it is the taken-for-granted horizon within which meaning already operates.
Martin Heidegger expands this idea through the notion of being-in-the-world, where existence is always already situated within a meaningful context. The world is not something external to the subject; it is the field within which the subject exists and acts.
From this perspective, reality is inseparable from meaning. To encounter the world is to encounter it as already interpreted.
Historical Conditioning: The Zeitgeist
The structures that constitute both subject and world are not static. They are historically conditioned.
The concept of zeitgeist, often associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, refers to the “spirit of the time”—the prevailing cultural, intellectual, and historical conditions that shape thought and experience. What counts as truth, rationality, or even sanity is not fixed but evolves across historical contexts.
This insight complicates any attempt to define mental health in universal terms. If both subjectivity and meaning are historically situated, then mental health cannot be entirely independent of cultural norms and expectations.
The Problem of Relativism
The convergence of these ideas—constituted subject, meaning-based world, historical conditioning—leads to a potential problem: relativism.
If all experience is mediated, if all meaning is constructed, and if all standards are historically contingent, then what remains of reality? Can anything be said to be true independently of perspective?
This problem is not merely abstract. In the context of mental health, it raises a practical concern: if there is no stable reference point beyond subjective or cultural interpretation, then on what basis can mental health be evaluated?
One response is to embrace this relativism, treating mental health as a matter of subjective well-being or social conformity. Another is to resist it, insisting that there must be some form of reality that is not reducible to interpretation.
The Turn to Ontology
A more recent line of thought attempts to reintroduce reality without abandoning the insights of modern philosophy. This approach shifts the focus from epistemology (how we know) to ontology (what exists).
In contemporary philosophy, this move is associated with figures such as Graham Harman, who argues that objects exist independently of human perception or access. Reality is not exhausted by its relation to the subject.
This ontological turn echoes earlier ideas found in Aristotle, who posits that things possess substance and essence independent of how they are perceived.
Applied to mental health, this perspective suggests that well-being cannot be fully understood in terms of subjective experience alone. Instead, it must involve a relation to a reality that exceeds the subject.
Objections to Ontological Grounding
Despite its appeal, the attempt to ground mental health in reality faces several significant objections.
1. Mediation
Neuroscience and cognitive science emphasize that perception is always mediated. The brain constructs models of the world rather than accessing it directly. This raises the question of how one could determine whether a model is aligned with reality.
2. Therapeutic Effectiveness
In practice, many therapeutic approaches focus on changing beliefs, narratives, or interpretations rather than establishing objective truth. If these approaches are effective, it suggests that alignment with reality may not be necessary for mental health.
3. Cultural Relativity
Definitions of mental health vary across cultures and historical periods. What is considered healthy in one context may not be in another. This challenges the idea of a universal standard grounded in reality.
4. Epistemic Access
Perhaps the most fundamental objection is that there is no clear method for accessing reality independently of perception and interpretation. Without such access, the notion of alignment with reality risks becoming empty or unverifiable.
A Reconstructed Position
In light of these objections, the concept of alignment with reality must be reformulated.
Rather than understanding alignment as correspondence with an objective truth, it can be understood in terms of constraint. Reality manifests not as something directly known, but as something that imposes limits and consequences.
From this perspective, mental health can be defined as the viability of a subject’s model of the world under conditions of constraint. A model that consistently breaks down in the face of reality—through contradiction, dysfunction, or failure—can be considered misaligned. A model that sustains itself, adapts, and remains functional may be considered aligned.
This approach preserves the intuition that reality matters, while acknowledging the mediated nature of experience.
Mental Health as Viability
The concept of viability shifts the focus from truth to function. It does not require that a person possess a perfectly accurate representation of reality, only that their way of understanding the world allows them to navigate it effectively.
This definition has several advantages:
- It avoids the need for direct access to objective reality.
- It accommodates the role of interpretation and meaning.
- It provides a practical criterion for evaluating mental health.
At the same time, it maintains a connection to reality through the idea of constraint. Reality is not something that can be ignored or redefined at will; it asserts itself through consequences.
Conclusion
The question of mental health cannot be fully addressed without engaging with deeper philosophical issues concerning subjectivity, meaning, and reality. Traditional approaches that focus solely on internal states overlook the extent to which those states are shaped by broader structures.
At the same time, attempts to ground mental health in objective reality must contend with the limits of access and the pervasive role of mediation.
The position developed in this paper seeks to navigate between these extremes. It acknowledges that the subject is constituted, that meaning structures experience, and that all knowledge is mediated. Yet it also insists that reality exerts a constraint that cannot be reduced to interpretation.
Mental health, in this view, is not a matter of achieving perfect truth, nor of constructing a satisfying narrative, but of sustaining a way of being that remains viable under the pressures of reality.
This formulation does not resolve the tension between subject and world, but it provides a framework within which that tension can be productively explored.
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The Perspective is Not An Argument
A.I. did write a nice paper, but it failed to appreciate what we can rightly call the new concept (Bender, et.al, 2021; Chiang, 2023). The new concept is mental health. What A.I. did (and indeed all subjects do) was take the term in question as an already-situated, already-produced, what Kant and others might have called a prori and then synthesized what was given to the analysis. By doing this it created an argument and its justification based on an assumption that is incorrect (Dreyfus, 1992). The result is a good argument and indeed it can be used as such —which would not be wrong or in any way inappropriate, since A.I. did offer an analysis from the phenomenological perspective of the modern subject. Nonetheless the original point that it was processing with me, actually helping me to refine and develop, was completely missed when I asked it to write an essay of everything we had been chatting about.
The point of this paper was to give an example of this kind of occurrence and to bring attention to what is happening. If the reader wishes to know what the differences are or how A.I.’s interpretive synthesis failed when put to task, I suppose one would have to read my work, since that is the only effective way to understand the discrepancy and to encounter the true dimensions of what this paper is exposing to awareness as mental health. For this paper, in short, previous critiques forefront the problem of A.I. against human beings, basically saying that A.I. recombines existing structures and produces coherent output but is lacks grounding, whereas I say mental health, the thing itself, forefronts that the modern subject does the same thing, but calls it thinking. A.I. represents the modern subject, just like all modern subjects embody the problem of representation. The problem expressed by this is the psychological phenomenon and contained by phenomenology for the purpose of justifying a method. This was Heidegger’s (and others) reveal which was generally missed as much as it continues to be ignored. Mental health does not exclude in this manner but rather includes all knowledge as an accounting as well as a lived experience noticed as such.
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