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Just a note: A short piece of mine on AI has appeared today on the site of IAI News, which is associated with the biannual How the Light Gets In festival.
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© 2025 David Bentley Hart
Substack is the home for great culture
Very timely. I watched a YouTube video yesterday where an NBC journalist was showcasing a lab that showed a stimulus (four sequential images of a girl knocked down by a dragons tail) to a person. An AI, then, somewhat successfully processed the brain’s electrical responses to the stimulus and spat out something about seeing a girl be hit and knocked down. I, being the meat machine that I am, was quick in allowing myself to, once again, be fed a large spoonful of meaninglessness and wonder if the computers have us all figured out and if that’s all there is to humanity. Your recent Narcissus letter and this are invigorating reminders that experience is irreducible, imitations are not the same as the thing itself, and that it is precisely because one holds to reductive presuppositions that we think of ourselves as nothing more than machines.
I continue to feel that if the planets ever align for you to be able to speak at that festival it would justify the pilgrimage on my end.