In grad school, I read Cavell’s “The Argument of the Ordinary” and found much to love in it. But especially I loved the final lines:

At any time I may find myself isolated. A moral I derive from the Investigations is accordingly: I am not to give myself explanations that divide me from myself, that take sides against myself, that would exact my consent, not attract it. That would cede my voice to isolation. Then I might never be found (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome 100).

This is one of those lines, I suspect, that made my friends think I was enamored of nonsense. But it was not and is not nonsense, and I find myself thinking of it more and more in this age of ersatz. I understand the source of their skepticism. It’s difficult to say precisely when an explanation “divides me from myself.” Someone might think that scientific or 3rd personal explanations of our minds divide us from ourselves insofar as they make it sound as though we are not the ones in charge there. Yet someone might find an explanation—say that they have ADHD, and that the condition accounts for certain experiences and frustrations—not disempowering but empowering. Unless the person has a particularly defeatist attitude and external locus of control, someone’s understanding themselves in this way need not in any way cede the power of their personal voice. 

We understand ourselves through a wide variety of labels, names, descriptions given by others. None of this need be disempowering or inauthentic, provided that the labels, names, and descriptions resonate with us—feel right, match something in our experience, or seem helpful in our understandings of ourselves. Self-understanding is a process that is active and interpretative. And the interpretations that are helpful might be inspired by or come from other sources, even scientific ones. If those interpretations resonate with us, we are not ceding our voices—we are using them, to interpret ourselves; to say this description fits some aspect of me. That might be what Cavell meant by attracting our consent. Even if it is not, it is a plausible model of what it might mean. 

There is a dichotomy in a lot of work on self-knowledge, in philosophy, that I think false—and this is the dichotomy between the theoretical and the agential/first-personal. Understanding is essentially a theoretical enterprise. And surely we should want to understand ourselves. Yet the thought is that if someone else could surmise something about me as easily as—or perhaps more easily than—I can, then there is nothing special about my surmising it. For that reason theoretical self-understanding is thought to be less privileged, or special, than other, simpler kinds of self-knowledge, like my current awareness of a pain in my toe. 

To a certain extent, I simply do not care about the privilege of knowing I have a pain in my toe through feeling it; it seems to me contingent on the way I am embodied, and so another might have the same awareness if they were wired up to my toe, or were embodied in my body in place of me. What matters to me more, though, is the privilege we have in understanding ourselves. Certainly others can understand us; and there is a sense in which the difference between my self-understanding and someone else’s understanding of me is simply that I am better placed. I have access to much more and different information. 

In the case of another person feeling the pain in my toe, the other person simply comes to have my sensation. So we both share the same experience. If another person had a cable that fed into their mind my entire mental life, they would find this odd and likely overwhelming. In addition to that, they would have access to all the information I use to understand myself. Now I ask: would their understanding of me be any different than my understanding of myself? 

While in a sense these are both interpretative acts with the same data—some of which others don’t usually have access to—I believe there is a fundamental difference. When we interpret ourselves we are also speaking for ourselves. We are giving the official interpretation, and this is something another cannot do for us. It is an exercise of agency and use of our first-personal authority. In the foregoing example, the second person had only passive access to my mental life; they did not have the ability to create new thoughts or fancies or lines of inquiry. Nor do they have the ability to determine how I understand myself, at least not directly. Self-interpretation is in fact privileged and special, despite being an interpretative and theoretical activity, at least in part. But it is also a deliberative activity—one in which I decide how I am going to see things, one in which I make a choice. 

This is one way of thinking of authenticity in self-understanding; and one reason to think that our authentic voices matter. To echo Audre Lorde, If I do not speak for myself, others will speak for me. If I do not offer my own understanding of myself, others’ understandings might crowd it out, even in my own mind. A heap of derogatory adjectives I do not relate to, like so many ill-fitting clothes, might be all there is of my self-understanding. This is why it matters that we not only try to understand our own minds, but speak for what’s really in them.

Where I am going with this is the horrible onslaught of inauthentic and inhuman speech into the world, invited in—like a vampire—by humans wanting to make their lives easier. Students, businessfolk, ordinary people are all ceding their voices to the voices of LLMs. The internet is slowly filling with ersatz words, ersatz art, ersatz music that no one wanted to receive but which someone thought was passable enough to get them what they want out of it. Although no one wants or cares about the products of AI, for the most part, it serves as a tool for bulshitting one’s way through. For someone to use LLMs to write school assignments, cover letters, and so on iis to treat writing not as a means to working out their thoughts—to making up their mind—but purely as an output that will achieve a desired result. It is to deny their own agency, to cede their voice to isolation. It frightens me that so many people are eager to do this. One reason is that I worry we cannot be a society of free individuals if individuals are not willing to speak their own minds, or even pay their minds the respect of working out what’s in them. Another is that it sounds deeply isolating to not develop one’s own voice, to befriend one’s own mind.. It makes me wonder if the source of the “loneliness epidemic” doesn’t start closer to home.