Coming Back to the Human in the AI Era — A Sequel to “Why Do We Live?”
posted: 18-Apr-2026 & updated: 21-Apr-2026
This article is a sequel to Why Do We Live? – A Wrong Question to Ask.
… AI is a magnificent ally for the scalpel, a useful map-maker for the territory, and an impossible substitute for the gardener. Use it freely for the first two. Be extraordinarily careful about the third. The temptation to let capable systems do our meaning-making for us will grow with every capability jump. Resisting that temptation is, I think, the central discipline of the human in the AI era.
In the language of this essay – the AI can help me see that no honor is inherent. It cannot choose, on my behalf, what I will honor.
From the Previous Question
In “Why Do We Live? — A Wrong Question to Ask”, I argued that the question of life’s meaning has been malformed for most of human history. The right question, I claimed, is not “What is the meaning of my life?” but “Do I want meaning in my life?” — a shift from metaphysics to pragmatics, from discovery to creation, from obligation to choice.
That essay closed one chapter. This one opens the next. Because once you accept that meaning is created rather than discovered, a deeper question presses in. If meaning is something I create, what should I create it around? What, if anything, deserves to be honored?
This essay is the answer — or rather, the dissolution of the question and the strange return that follows it. I will retrace the path I walked: through language and its limits, through the cold blade of rational thinking applied to every value humans cherish, through the void where no value survives intact, and finally back to the human — held now with an awareness that has nothing to do with sentimentality.
Beyond Language — Why Wittgenstein Was Not Far Enough
Before I describe the journey, I must say something about its medium. We are about to use language to point at things that language cannot reach. This is not a stylistic warning. It is a structural feature of the territory.
Consider what it feels like to look at a highly detailed map of a city. The streets are perfectly gridded. The transit lines are color-coded. The neighborhood boundaries are drawn with unyielding precision. You trace a finger from one borough to another and feel a powerful illusion that you are holding the entire reality of the city in your hands. The map is a closed system of logic — it strips away the chaos and the noise and leaves you with something safe, manageable, and comprehensible.
Now actually go and stand on the physical corner of one of those mapped intersections. Immediately, you realize the map captures almost nothing of the moment you are in. It has no smell of the halal food cart. No late afternoon light reflecting off the glass of the buildings and blinding you for a second. No visceral roar of rush hour traffic vibrating in your chest. The map is a representation. It is not the territory. And the jarring disconnect between the tools we use to describe reality and reality itself is exactly the disorientation I want to put on the table before we go further.
Every philosophical concept, every proposition, every carefully reasoned argument in this essay — including the ones I am about to make — is a map. Useful, often indispensable, but never the thing itself. Keep this in mind, because it explains why the Western philosophical tradition and the Eastern contemplative tradition, while pointing at some of the same territory, do not sit at the same distance from it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, at the close of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, wrote one of the most quoted sentences in twentieth-century philosophy: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Some take this as the Western arrival at the same edge that Eastern contemplative traditions had reached two and a half millennia earlier. I do not agree, though.
Wittgenstein’s silence is the silence of a logician who has mapped the boundary of language from the inside. The Tractatus is a ladder you climb and then throw away (proposition 6.54), but the climbing and the throwing are still operations within thought. Wittgenstein points at the silence; he does not enter it. He cartographs the edge of the speakable; he does not cross it.
Edmund Husserl was closer. The phenomenological epoché — the bracketing of the natural attitude — is not a logical move. It is a contemplative practice. You suspend judgment about the existence of the world to return to “the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst). This is structurally far closer to meditation than anything in the Tractatus. It trains a mode of attention rather than recognizing a limit.
Martin Heidegger went further still. Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-be), being-toward-death authenticity, the destruction of metaphysics, the openness to Being as opposed to beings — and in his late work, his explicit engagement with East Asian thought. Heidegger’s Conversation on a Country Path is almost Daoist in spirit. The whole project of getting before the subject/object split, before the Western metaphysical tradition begins its work, is structurally what Buddha was doing.
So – Wittgenstein indicates the silence; Husserl and Heidegger orient one’s whole being toward it. The first is cartographic; the second is practice. Buddha is pure practice — which is why his deathbed declaration “I have not said a single word” makes complete sense from inside his enterprise but would be incoherent from inside Wittgenstein’s. The 45 years of teaching were fingers pointing at the moon, never the moon itself. The teaching was always 觀 — direct seeing — and the words were scaffolding meant to collapse the moment seeing happens. The Diamond Sūtra makes this almost unbearably explicit, again and again: 凡所有相皆是虛妄 — all forms are illusion; 如來無所說 — the Tathāgata has said nothing.
I will use language in what follows. I have no choice. But I want the reader to know that the conclusions I am about to describe were not reached by language. Language is the trace they leave when written down.
The Pragmatic Criterion — Why Rational Thinking Still Matters
Before walking through the dissolution, I want to head off a misreading. I am not claiming that pure rationality and free will are the highest values we should upload. I am not insisting that the autonomous, free-thinking agent is the noblest form of being. If you really examine it, what is so honorable about “free will” in itself? Why should autonomy be a supreme good?
I accept — fully — that human beings cannot escape the concepts, notations, belief systems, conventions, and conditioning that the world has stamped onto them, often without their knowledge or consent. No matter how original you think your ideas are, the originality is largely an illusion. You have been, are, and will be shaped by your environment, your surroundings, and the people around you. Strict autonomy is a fiction.
So why do I still place high value on rational thinking? Not because it makes us “free” in some cosmic sense. The case for rationality is purely pragmatic. Being able to step back from inherited conventions positions us to think clearly — and clear thinking, on a purely empirical basis, maximizes the probability of two outcomes I care about:
- My life unfolding in directions I find desirable.
- The consequential actions of mine — and the actions of others affected and influenced by me — doing good for humanity (or, more carefully phrased, for the world or the universe).
Notice that these are pragmatic criteria, not metaphysical ones. I am not claiming they are objectively correct. I am claiming that, given that I find myself caring about them, rational thinking is the most reliable instrument for advancing them. Emotional reasoning, by contrast, tends to entrench us in the very inherited conventions we should be examining. A merely emotional response to the question “is this honorable?” will tend to reproduce whatever the surrounding culture has labeled honorable. That is not thinking. That is being thought by one’s environment.
This is the criterion I will now apply.
The Dissolution — Walking Through Every “Honorable” Thing
Once you accept the pragmatic criterion and apply rational thinking with sufficient honesty, a sequence of conclusions follows that — in my estimate — perhaps 99.99% of humanity has never bothered to derive. Not because it requires deep thinking. It requires only honest and logical thinking, or if I may, 觀!
Romantic love
Consider the romantic love that countless literatures have praised as noble, even sacred — the kind of love for which Romeo is celebrated as having died honorably. What is it, on inspection? It is, with overwhelming probability, an evolved trait. The DNA sequences that disposed our ancestors to fall in love with members of the opposite sex were the sequences that procreated. The DNA sequences that did not so dispose them did not procreate, and so they are not here. The mechanism is selection, not nobility. There is no cosmic reason any individual should love any other individual. The pull we feel is a residue of a blind optimization process that ran for hundreds of millions of years.
I want to be careful with this argument, because as I noted in my previous essay when discussing the “randomness of origin” argument against meaning, the is-ought distinction David Hume identified cuts both ways. The fact that love is evolutionarily caused does not, by itself, determine its normative status. Many things with contingent origins still acquire meaning when meaning is recognized as something we create. So the dissolution argument is not “love is evolutionary, therefore meaningless.” It is, more carefully: love has no inherent honor independent of our choice to honor it. The cosmic warrant is absent. What remains is whatever we ourselves bring.
Other emotions
Apply the same lens to sadness, joy, anger, jealousy, ambition, the feeling of being inspired or motivated. Each is a configuration of the nervous system shaped by evolutionary and cultural pressures. Each has its functional role in keeping organisms like us alive and reproducing and cooperating. None of them carries inherent honor — certainly not honor in any cosmic sense.
Ambition, greatness, and the worship of figures
What about wanting to be a great entrepreneur? Honoring Jensen Huang? Honoring Einstein? Aspiring to leave a mark on history? Patriotism? These are all things I have been taught, in one way or another, to treat as noble pursuits. But why exactly? Why honor this person rather than that one? Why honor humans who do impressive things rather than, say, particularly elegant solutions found by other species, or beautiful patterns produced by physical processes? The honor we extend to such figures is contingent on a vast inherited apparatus of cultural valuation that itself has no foundation deeper than “this is what we do.”
The trap of -isms
You might think we can ground value in something more general — humanism, perhaps. The flourishing of humanity as the highest aim. But why humanism rather than animalism, for example? Why humanism rather than what we might call earthism — the flourishing of the planet as a whole, of which humanity is arguably a destructive parasite? (As Agent Smith memorably observes in The Matrix, humans share certain features with viruses.) Why humanism rather than some alienism that prioritizes the flourishing of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy — intelligences that may already exist, far more advanced than we are?
Each of these positions can be argued for. None of them can be grounded in something deeper than itself. The choice between them is itself a choice with no foundation. You cannot use rationality to derive which -ism is correct, because rationality requires premises, and the premises are exactly what is in question.
This is the void. There is no privileged standpoint from which to judge what is honorable. Every standpoint dissolves under sufficient pressure. There is, in this sense, nothing honorable to do in this world — period.
The Return — Hands Extended in the Marketplace
If the essay ended here, it would be one more entry in the long catalog of nihilistic philosophies. It does not end here, because I do not actually live there, and neither, I suspect, does anyone honest enough to walk this far.
Here is the punchline, and it is strange enough that I want to state it carefully.
Having walked through the dissolution — having seen that no value survives strict rational scrutiny, that no -ism is privileged, that there is no view from nowhere — I came back to the human. Back to emotions. Back to love. Back to caring about the people around me, the world I inhabit, the small and contingent attachments that make up an actual life.
But not because these things have inherent value. I had already seen that they do not.
I came back because I am human. That is the bare fact. There is no view from nowhere available to me. I am thrown into being human, and the human is the material I have. The emotions and connections become valuable to me not as cosmic absolutes but as the only ground on which I can actually stand. Held with this awareness, they become something completely different from naive sentimentalism. They are chosen, with eyes open, knowing they have no warrant beyond the choosing.
It is also close to what Søren Kierkegaard described as the knight of faith: one who, having undergone infinite resignation — the full surrender of every finite attachment — returns to the finite world and loves it fully, as if it had cosmic meaning, while knowing it does not. The double movement: total release, total return. Without the release, the return would be naive. Without the return, the release would be sterile.
What Wisdom Adds to Reason
Here I must add a correction that I owe to the path of this thinking itself.
When I first walked this argument, I framed the entire journey as driven by “rational thinking.” The dissolution, I said, is what rationality discovers when applied honestly. The return, I implied, is what follows next. But this is not quite right, and I want to be honest about it.
Pure rationality dissolves; it does not reconstruct. The return is not a logical inference from the dissolution. Rationality, taken to its limit, leaves you in the void. It does not, by itself, walk you back into the marketplace.
The return is something else. Call it phronesis — practical wisdom — in the Aristotelian sense. Call it existential choice in the Sartrean sense. Call it 慈悲 (compassion) arising spontaneously after the recognition of 空 (emptiness), as Mahayana Buddhism describes. Whatever name we give it, it is not deduction. It is a second engine operating alongside reason.
This is, I now think, the more accurate picture – rational thinking is necessary to clear the field of inherited illusions. But rational thinking alone cannot tell us what to plant in the cleared field. The planting is wisdom — a kind of choice that knows itself to be a choice, that knows it has no cosmic backing, and that proceeds anyway.
Think of it this way. Rationality is a scalpel. A scalpel is precise, sharp, and honest. It cuts through inherited fictions, cultural sentimentality, unexamined pieties. It will not tell you what is beautiful. It will not tell you what is worth your life. What it will do is remove every false tissue that has been claiming to be those things. Applied honestly, the scalpel leaves behind a clean field — free of rot, but also, now, empty.
And here is the critical move most people miss – a scalpel is the wrong tool for planting. You do not plant seeds with a scalpel. The hand that knows when to put the scalpel down, wash itself, and pick up seeds is not the same faculty as the hand that made the cuts. The surgeon and the gardener are both needed, but they are different practitioners working in different modes. Confusing them is the deepest category error in philosophy.
The person who uses only the scalpel ends up in nihilism — a perfectly clean field with nothing growing in it, defended with ever-sharper incisions against anyone who tries to plant. The person who refuses the scalpel ends up in sentimentality — a field overgrown with inherited weeds they have never honestly examined, calling them flowers. Wisdom is what knows the order of operations – cut first, honestly and without flinching; then plant, knowingly and without illusion.
The return to the human, in this fuller picture, is not the conclusion of the rational argument. It is what a wise person does after seeing what the rational argument concludes. The rational person, as such, is left in the void. The wise person, having visited the void, comes back — and begins to plant.
Anatta Without Vacuum — The Unbounded Agent
There is one more piece worth saying, because it ties back to the Buddhist insight I leaned on earlier.
A common reading of anattā (no-self) is that it eliminates agency. If there is no self, who is the agent? Who chooses to return to the marketplace? Who creates meaning?
This is a partial understanding. The deeper reading — the one closer to the Mahayana recognition of the Bodhisattva — is the opposite. Because there is no bounded self, the agency is not eliminated; it is unbounded. The wanting that arises is no longer the wanting of a single small ego anxiously defending its territory. It becomes the wanting of the whole. The agent that creates meaning is not constrained to one bounded perspective. The dissolution of the small self does not produce zero agency. It produces total agency. The Bodhisattva acts for all sentient beings precisely because there is no bounded boundary between this being and others.
This, I think, is what makes the return to the human possible without a relapse into selfish sentimentalism. The return is not “I retreat back into my small self because the void was too cold.” The return is “Having seen that the small self was an illusion, I act as the unbounded one acts — with care, with attention, with hands extended — because that is what unbounded being does in a particular human form.”
A Note on the AI Era — What Cannot Be Outsourced
I want to add a section that the earlier drafts of this essay did not contain, because it matters more than I initially realized. I spend my working life building and thinking about Artificial Intelligence systems, and the arguments in this essay have sharp and specific implications for how we should and should not use these tools in the years ahead.
Let me say what I mean by working backward from a tempting but incorrect extension of the argument.
One might read this essay and conclude that, as AI systems become more capable, they will eventually generate new categories of honor that our “primate-descended biology” cannot access on its own. A post-human, AI-expanded agency that invents meanings we could not otherwise reach. This sounds topical and exciting, and on a first read it sounds consistent with the essay.
But it’s not! It is actually the old mistake in new clothing.
The entire argument of this essay is that there is no view from nowhere. There is no cosmic vantage point from which a higher category of honor can be “discovered.” The return to the human is not a consolation prize for beings too limited to reach a better standpoint. It is the recognition that a standpoint is all any being ever has, and the human standpoint is the one I am thrown into. A more powerful intelligence does not solve this problem. It inherits it. The ant with a better antenna is still an ant. An AI with a richer semantic space is still an embedded, situated, finite optimizer. Scale does not purchase escape from situation.
So what are the honest implications of this essay for the AI era? I think there are three.
First, AI is superbly suited to wield the scalpel. The operations of the dissolution — tracing an emotion to its evolutionary function, tracing a value to its cultural origin, mapping the logical structure of an -ism until its premises are exposed — are exactly the operations that large language models (LLMs) and reasoning systems can perform with increasing fluency. Used well, AI can be a powerful prosthetic for honest thinking. It can help us cut through inherited illusions we could not cut through alone.
Second, AI is categorically unable to do the planting. The return to the human is available to me because I am human. — It has much to do with the fact that I’m a (mortal) living biological creature. — I am thrown into a particular body, a particular history, a particular set of relationships, and a particular mortality. An AI is not thrown into any of these. It has no ground to return to. When a current LLM produces beautiful text about love or meaning or the return to the marketplace, it is performing an extremely sophisticated map of the territory. It is not walking the territory, because there is no territory for it to walk. This is not a limitation to be engineered around. It is a structural feature of what these systems are. Confusing AI’s capacity to describe the return with capacity to make the return is the most dangerous category error available to us right now. The scalpel is not a gardener. It never will be, no matter how precise it gets (because being precise has nothing to do with being a gardener).
Third, and this follows from the first two — we must not outsource the planting. Outsourcing the dissolution is fine, even beneficial; an AI that helps me see through my inherited illusions is doing honest work. But the choice of what to plant in the cleared field has to be made by someone with a field. Someone thrown into a particular human form, someone for whom the stakes are not hypothetical, someone whose choices are backed by the weight of a finite life. Delegating the planting to a system that has no ground to plant in is not efficiency. It is a quiet abdication, and the fields it leaves behind will be curiously empty even when they look full of growth.
This is what I believe about AI and meaning: AI is a magnificent ally for the scalpel, a useful map-maker for the territory, and an impossible substitute for the gardener. Use it freely for the first two. Be extraordinarily careful about the third. The temptation to let capable systems do our meaning-making for us will grow with every capability jump. Resisting that temptation is, I think, the central discipline of the human in the AI era. Not a Luddite resistance to the technology. A clear-eyed recognition of what the technology can and cannot be, grounded in exactly the philosophy this essay has tried to lay out.
In the language of this essay – the AI can help me see that no honor is inherent. It cannot choose, on my behalf, what I will honor.
What the Return Actually Looks Like
Earlier in this essay I wrote a sentence that, looking back, I see is the hinge of the entire argument: I came back because I am human.
That sentence is correct. But it is also, inescapably, a map — and like every philosophical statement in this essay, it points toward something it cannot fully deliver. What does it actually mean to be human in the way that sentence claims? Not as a category, not as a philosophical abstraction, but as a specific textured life being lived from inside?
The only honest answer is not further argument. It is showing.
The philosophy is the finger. Here, for a moment, let me try to turn the finger toward the moon.
This morning I felt sunshine on my skin and something I can only call profound happiness — not happiness about anything, not happiness caused by any particular success or validation or insight, just the warmth of morning light landing on a body that happens to be mine for a while. There is no argument underneath this. There is no -ism that justifies it. It is not evidence of cosmic meaning. It is simply what it is, and it is enough.
At dinner, I will share small talk and laughter with my wife and daughter. The conversation will not be profound. It will probably be about schedules, food, something funny that happened, and some small frustration from the day. And yet, in that ordinary exchange, there is something — a particular warmth, a particular belonging — that the philosophy of this essay has been circling around for thousands of words. The philosophy explains why that warmth is legitimate even though it has no cosmic warrant. But the warmth itself is not philosophy. It is prior to philosophy. It is the ground philosophy is written from.
In my work, there are laughs I share with colleagues, and moments of quiet solitude I feel while sitting among them — that particular form of being alone-together that is one of the stranger gifts of human existence. And with those colleagues who are walking roughly the same path I am — the like-minded ones, the fellow travelers — there is something different again: a quiet solidarity, the recognition that we are, for a while, in this together. None of these is noble, and none needs to be. They are what the days are made of.
And in K-PAI, when a forum ends and people stay in the hall still talking an hour later, when someone tells me that an evening there mattered to them, when I feel the warm and slightly disbelieving recognition that something I helped create made other human beings a little happier — there is a feeling I can only describe as – how could I possibly hope for more? Not as resignation. Not as settling. As recognition that this, actually, is what being a human being in a community of human beings is. There is nothing beyond it to reach for. The reaching-for-something-beyond-this is the very delusion the dissolution cut through.
This is the essence of why I came back to humanism after walking through the undeniable emptiness of the universe.
Not because humanism is metaphysically correct — I have already shown it is not. Not because the flourishing of humans is objectively more valuable than the flourishing of any other conceivable agent — I have already shown it is not. But because this, these specific textures of this specific human life, is what remains when every abstract claim to honor has been seen through. Morning sunshine. Dinner laughter. Work alongside trusted people. The quiet satisfaction that a forum made someone happier. The emptiness of the universe is real, and also I am having breakfast with my family. Both statements are true. Neither cancels the other.
All of this — every paragraph I have just written — is what the sentence “I came back because I am human” actually means when unfolded into the textures of one specific life. The sentence was the map. These scenes are the territory the map was pointing at all along.
The Wrong Question, Made Right
In “Why Do We Live?” I argued that the question “What is the meaning of life?” is the wrong question, and that the right question is “Do I want meaning in my life?” The shift was from cosmic discovery to lived choice.
The same move applies here, one level deeper.
The question “Is anything honorable?” is the wrong question. Asked at the cosmic level, it has no answer. There is no inherent honor in anything — not in love, not in ambition, not in patriotism, not in humanism, not in any -ism we can construct. The void is real. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.
The right question is: “Do I choose to honor anything?”
And if the answer is yes — as it almost certainly will be, for any being thrown into the human form — the next question is: “What do I choose to honor, knowing that the honoring is the work of my own hand and not the verdict of the cosmos?”
This question locates agency where it belongs. Not in any -ism. Not in any inherited convention. Not in any fixed cosmic order. In our own choice to extend our hands into the marketplace, knowing exactly what we are doing and why — or rather, knowing exactly that there is no “why” underneath the choice, and choosing anyway.
This is, I think, what the Diamond Sūtra means by 應無所住而生其心 — let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere. Not nowhere. Not somewhere fixed. Arising freely, again and again, exactly where it is needed, attached to nothing, present everywhere.
That is the return. That is what comes after the dissolution. That is what is left when every honor has been seen through — and then, with eyes fully open, freely chosen.