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Dasein, Wachsein, AI and the elite…. interesting comment found on my internet meandering this morning:
“Heidegger gets credit for Dasein, but arch-declinist Spengler also had an interesting take on it.

Literally, it is just Da + Sein, “Being-There”, or “Being in the World”.

But it’s more interesting if you contrast it with its partner Wachsein, or “Waking-Being” or “Being out of the World”.

For Spengler, Dasein and Wachsein are the two ways of Being in eternal cycle in the world. Primitive folk ways of being are Dasein- they are organic, musical, unself-conscious. The modern world, by virture of its being awoken in the Enlightenment, is in a Wachsein phase. The world is something other, something we just try to control. “Ontologically stupid” comes to mind.

So AI is a kind of final expression of the Wachsein modality. It’s an attempt to recreate the fullness of cognition on purely informatic terms, without the irreducible experience of living action (Dasein).

For me, it’s much more interesting to consider how modern Western upper class types mimic AI in their lives rather than any successes of AI itself. They’ve never let themselves be in the world; they are just operating on it in some horribly dysfunctional algorithmic way.

AI happened to us humans long before we made it happen in a machine.”