1. In Descartes’s Meditations, the Cogito or “I think” is regarded as a subject,
soul or mind, and part of a dualistic separation with relations to an object, bodies or
extended things. Cartesian dualism is one of Heidegger’s primary targets in Being
and Time. The destruction of the subject-object distinction is very difficult. For
instance, how is one to abandon the encompassing explanation of existence, which is
widely disseminated with competing subjects and objects, through a language
system founded on the subject and object syntax? For Heidegger this involved an
explanation of Dasein, otherwise translated as “being-there.” In my essay, I will
examine Dasein in terms of the destruction of the subject-object relation and use
this new foundation of Heidegger’s work to argue to the relativity of truth in the
sense that truth does not exist independently of Dasein, and the definition of
intelligence to argue that artificial intelligence is impossible on subject-object
foundations. However, this is not to say that a different form of artificial intelligence
is impossible. The contemporary understanding of such artificial intelligence is in
opposition to the meaning of intelligence as Dasein’s knowledge in which “Knowing
is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world” (BT, 90), and a development
of understanding, “…the existential Being of Dasein’s own potentiality-for-being…”
(BT, 184). In contrast, the modern algorithmic and logistical based code system of
which computing is founded upon extreme directional specificity. There is
suboptimal performance in comparison to human “brain power” in this tree-like
system of connectedness in computational methods. In essence, the computer
programs operate on a subject-object system in which truth is absolute, dictated by
an object-oriented program that is based on solving problems, and context is far too

2. complex. Our present conception of artificial intelligence should be restructured to
accommodate what truth and intelligence are. It is necessary to ask why have they
failed thus far, and how could such a restructuring of truth and intelligence succeed
in creating artificial intelligence?
It is important to understand what the destruction of Descartes’s subject and
object entails. For Heidegger, there is not the distinction between consciousness
and body that Descartes perceived as a duality. For Descartes’s cogito, or perhaps
Leibniz’s monads in which substances with attributes exist in some abstract space, a
world (understood in Heideggerian terms in terms of Dasein is not necessarily
needed. The subject has priority, as it is the first true being, according to Descartes.
However, Heidegger argues there is no subject that can be distinct from the external
world. For Heidegger, Dasein is being-in-the-world and “indicates in the very way
we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon” (BT, 78). For example, I
need the external world to be me, but then it is no longer the external world.
Perhaps when one hears the word destruction, he fails to realize this destruction
may actually be a synthesis of the subject and the object, and perhaps the
phenomenology of the environment is one with the hermeneutics of Dasein.
This disembodiment from the subject-object syntax in the language system
allows Heidegger to ground a new system of philosophy. Instead of an existence that
precedes essence as Sartre had said, essence is actually existence. A synthesis of this
sort would appear ontologically monistic; evidence of Husserl’s large influence on
Heidegger. Also, here appears some of the subtlety of Nietzsche’s influence, through
his critique of stoicism. In Nietzsche’s rejection of natural laws for a system of wills,

3. he describes nature as “wasteful and indifferent beyond measure” (BGE, 9), and
describes the stoic as one who attempts to ascribe law and morality to nature. The
stoic; therefore, must be considered a self-deceiver because he believes the opposite
of nature, morality. He projects himself, a moral being, onto the entity of nature, in
essence changing the concept of nature. One can see the similarity to Heidegger’s
Dasein as being-in-the-world to the stoic, except that Dasein is already in the world,
so its projection is being ahead of itself. However, Dasein can’t be thought of in these
terms of the stoic because Dasein is not a thing, let alone in a hierarchy of wills with
the will to power at the top, or type of idealism like mentalism, it is “being-there.” It
is the self plus the world and we have always been interlocked in this system of
which we are studying.
This newly acquired epoch of philosophy perhaps warrants a discussion of
the history of western philosophy. In a new era of philosophy, in which alternatives
to a subject-object relation are posited, arguably starting with Nietzsche, Being and
Time is an important stepping-stone to the end of the metaphysical age that has its
foundation with Aristotle, Plato and the early Greeks. “On the basis of the Greeks’
initial contributions towards an Interpretation of Being, a dogma has been
developed which not only declares the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but
sanctions its complete neglect” (BT 2). The fundamental inquiring of Dasein was
blocked from the tradition set forth by the Greeks.
Plato, a student of Socrates was a great proprietor of metaphysics, the denial
of the reality of the material world, as exemplified in his Allegory of the Cave. In this
cave, prisoners have been shackled to the wall for the entirety of their lives thus far.

4. All they have known is the shadows projected on the wall from those who have
passed by on the walkway behind them and the echoes of what remains unseen. One
day a prisoner was brought to the world outside the cave that was full of
experiences he could have never imagined. When he went to tell the others of life
outside the cave, he was nothing more than a shadow and unintelligible echoes to
them. To those who remain in the cave, the world outside will never exist and
everything is simply a shadow of the truth. However, the world outside the cave,
although unimaginable to the prisoners, is not any less real. Perhaps in this aspect,
the outside world can be referred to as absolute form. In this conception of
metaphysics, we are perhaps “shackled to the wall.” There is an objective truth that
casts the shadows of the real forms. Truth in this aspect is independent of Dasein;
truth does not need Dasein there to experience it.
In Plato’s theory of forms, there is a realm of perfect forms and everything is
a copy of that form. Truth, for example, is in correspondence to fact in an ontological
structure of truth which is not relative, but absolute. Truth in this sense is to be
matched not made. It becomes absolutely objective, which necessitates conformity.
In this absolutism, the fundamental view is held that a single person or culture has
access to an absolute truth, set aside by a Grand Inquisitor, for example, may be
grounds for violence in order to enforce this conformity. Heidegger; however, says
that “the Greek conception of truth has been misunderstood” (BT 57). Truth is what
you perceive, “it merely discovers, and it does so in such a way that it can never
cover up” (BT 57). In what can be called the post-metaphysical age, there is a
weakening of being. There is softness to the ontology compared to that of the old

5. age because of a conflict brought about from interpretations. For example, truth
now has been concerned with making, not matching, a total reversal from the
metaphysical age. I would argue this proposes a relative truth for Heidegger insofar
as different things can be true for different thought systems or worldviews. There
doesn’t have to be the correct truth, just a correct truth, namely disclosedness, the
condition for truth. Truth can therefore be understood as relative to a particular
circumstance per se. For example, the rules set forth for basketball are true for that
game; however, they cannot be true for soccer. If one is to succeed in the creation of
artificial intelligence, truth must be dissected and relocated from the traditional
concept which is founded in metaphysics as, “agreement of knowledge with its
object” (BT, 258), to the meaning of Dasein, which is understand as “ ’Being-true’…
as ‘Being-uncovering’ “ (BT, 261).
In literal translation, Dasein means “Being-there,” which is described as
Being-in-the-world, which in turn is, “the primordial phenomenon of truth” (BT,
261). However, what exactly is Being-in-the-world? If there is a hammer, for
example, that hammer exists as a presence-at-hand, the being that objects have. The
hammer changes to readiness-at-hand when it is being used through activity. From
the activity of hammering, the being of “hammerness” has been interpreted through
the act of using the hammer. Hammering a nail for example is one correct truth of
the hammer, but that does not have to be its only truth. One can use a hammer as a
paperweight. Through an activity of readiness-at-hand, we can interpret its
presence-at-hand. I have given meaning to a hammer because I have a
presupposition. However, this presupposition is vague and fuzzy, like a TV with bad

6. reception. Through the action of hammering, the hammer has transmitted that
particular meaning. I exhibit directedness and learn from my action to a
presupposed knowledge of hammerness. “…We never perceive equipment that is
ready-to-hand without already understanding and interpreting it…but when
something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already
has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world…which
gets laid out by the interpretation” (BT, 190-191). Essentially, due to Dasein’s Being-
in-the-world, it can be self-aware and ask questions because it has that vague
picture of what the answer may already be. Because Dasein is being-in-the-world, it
answers the Hermeneutical Circle’s paradigm of how do I know, what I need to
know and that I know it, unless I already know it. Therefore, if Dasein already has a
presupposed knowledge, thought of as the very fuzzy TV screen, it is through
discovering answers from questioning that TV screen becomes clearer. In order to
ask questions, there must be a presupposition stemming from Dasein’s being-in-the-
world.
This poses a huge obstacle for artificial intelligence because as beings-in-the-
world, Dasein is full of contextual inferences, references to be learned, and
historicality. Historicality is quite important in terms of the creation of artificial
intelligence. Basically, Heidegger is saying we are not only shaped by our past, but
also the future. Thus, Dasein is seen as time in which Dasein’s state of being happens
through temporality and belongs to disclosedness, throwness, projection, and
falling. These states of being give the potential for Dasein to have an existential
sense of freedom. In throwness, the disclosedness of being alongside entities is

7. revealed through care, “which is ahead of itself- Being already in a world…” (BT,
263). We can now begin to grasp the temporality of being. It is in projection the
potentiality-for-being. Imagine being thrown into the world as a baseball, and once
you have been thrown, you are also doing the throwing by projecting yourself
outward to the world after being thrown. “…Dasein discloses itself to itself in and as
its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (BT, 264). This is the authentic Dasein, a
reflective contemplation of being-in-the-world, which breaks from the average,
everydayness of inauthenticity and the fourth state of being, falling, where Dasein
flees in the face of death, which is an important aspect of why artificial intelligence
couldn’t possibly work in its present conception.
Because Dasein is so caught up in the “they” and the way things are publicly
interpreted, Dasein is for the most part inauthentic and lost in the world. Truth;
therefore, is not only an uncovering, it is disclosedness and uncoveredness. For
example, it was through Isaac Newton that Newton’s laws became uncovered. “To
say that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false cannot signify that
before him there were no such entities as have been uncovered and pointed out by
those laws…entities became accessible to Dasein” (BT, 269). If truth is understood in
terms of discovery or unhidedness, intelligence can be considered the interpretation
of understanding. “…The ‘world’, which has already been understood, comes to be
interpreted” (BT, 189). Encountering something is in terms of assignment-relations,
the in-order-to. Once again the temporality of futureness arises in the form of
foresight, or “…Towards the totality of involvements, which is already understood”
(BT, 191). For example, Newton interpreted the falling apple as evidence of his laws

8. through his knowledge and understanding that stems from him as Dasein or Being-
in-the-world. As it is beginning to show more clearly, truth can now certainly be
called relative to context and context comes from understanding the environment,
which comes from knowing, which comes from being-in-the-world. “We can
“become” everything we meet in the universe – not ontically by fusing our identity
with the thing, but by understanding the thing’s meaning” (Sheehan, 8)
There can be no eternal truth, “…until someone has succeeded in
demonstrating that Dasein has been and will be for all eternity…all truth is relative
to Dasein’s being” (BT, 270), and Dasein’s existence as a being-in-the-world is
temporal, meaning that there is a finitude to this; Dasein will perish. ”Being towards
death is essentially anxiety” (BT, 310), and through this anxiety of death can Dasein
be authentic. Essentially if AI is not thrown into the world towards death, there is no
need to cope with such anxiety.
With this in mind, how is it then that artificial intelligence has failed thus far?
It seems that a blueprint only needs to encompass a simple computer program that
has a database of knowledge of the world, that can formulate questions from such a
database, exhibit openness, not be rule based from an absolute truth, and have an
intelligence defined as to what length one can extend interpretation. As I will
exemplify, such a program will be considered problematic to say the least and even
to create an artificial intelligence is not possible at all through these means. As the
name suggests, artificial is something not natural to the world. This poses the first
problematic encounter with such intelligence in a Heideggerian interpretation.
However, as I stated, this has the potential to be overcome, as I will begin to explain.

9. As Heidegger reversed philosophy, the contemporary viewpoint on artificial
intelligence must be reversed. If technology is thought to be a computer or
calculator, it is based on a system of logic, specifically in terms of sentential
assumptions, which truth is dependent on a value assignment where there can only
be a truth or falsehood, namely in the logic system, “If P then Q.” The underlying
logic of “If P then Q” dictates a specific source of a specific action. This is considered
a rule-based system that is reactive and something that cannot be autonomous. In
this logic, the role of the environment dictates the behavior through truth being
established by a relationship to an absolute or to the-correct-answer. So input
causes output relying on behaviorism, in which “I” reacts to “it,” or even
Cartesianism in which subjects project mental representations onto the
environment and perceived sensations from the environment are sources of
untruth. Therefore, a receptive computer system, or a projective system can both be
problematic. For example, the body in behaviorism is reactive to conditioning so it
poses a problem of autonomy, and the “I” in a projective system poses a problem
because it needs a body that can cope with the world. Heidegger bypasses this
through Dasein’s Being-in-the-world and the many possible contextual references in
the world. As mentioned, the ability to question comes from a vague understanding
of the possible answer. Through hermeneutics, Dasein can come to understand
context and therefore interpret the present-at-hand through readiness-at-hand.
The activity of pattern matching such contexts is problematic for a computer.
The computer attempts to reduce the whole to a list of context independent
features. Dreyfus believes that for artificial intelligence to be sufficient, patterns

10. should not be reduced, but connected in “neural nets” (Preston, 49). “Both Dreyfus
and Churchland…feel that this technology suggests a non-cognivist notion of
cognition which is not subject to these criticisms” (Preston, 49). Essentially,
connecting representational nodes does not require reducing cognition. Both
Dreyfus and Churchland have optimism for this notion because “pattern matching
proceeds holistically and has some nice, realistic properties like resistance to noise
and graceful degradation as a result” (Preston, 49). However, I still argue this
approach has practical limitations in complexity and time.
Even a small input can dramatically increase the time to code for an output.
For example, it quickly becomes a mathematical nightmare for even the simplest of
tasks like locking the door. Under what circumstances do you lock the door? Every
time you leave, just when you go to work? What about if you are just leaving to walk
the dog? Context becomes paramount, and in turn exhaustive and time consuming.
There is an intractability that through formal logic would regress into the infinite.
The feasible option therefore must be hidden in the reversed.
Perhaps, artificial intelligence should be based on logic that is unsound,
which would make thought arbitrary. However, could arbitrary thought be
intelligent? I argue yes, if there is a direction or assertion applied to it. Because
Dasein is being-in-the-world, there is this direction and assertion, and oneness with
the world. On this premise, I believe it possible to make artificial intelligence based
on a controlled randomness much like the thrownness of Dasein. Dasein is thrown
into the world and forced to cope with the world, which can be likened to the
inauthentic herd mentality. For example, if you observed the Rodney King riots in

11. the streets of California, there was chaos. People were looting, smashing windows,
and destroying parts of the city. In this crowd mentality, there seems to be no order,
no control; however, there is a direction to this energy. Whether the community’s
anger finally peaked at the trial, or all the people simultaneously had a bad day and
coincidently decided to riot, is all in regards to the Nietszchian notion of crowd
mentality. The random destruction, albeit chaotic, had a direction fueled on by each
individual of the crowd as a whole, yet this is an inauthentic mode of being.
To differentiate from this notion, artificial intelligence needs to be
individualized like Dasein. The direction for Dasein may find itself in the herd
mentality; however, the authentic and free Dasein’s direction is as a Being-towards-
death. The authentic Dasein realizes as a part of the world he is finite and will
perish. Existing is not about living forever, it is about accepting your fate, not by
shouting “Da Capo!” as Nietzsche’s madman would say in his eternal return, but by
letting your anxiety individualize you. Dasein is coping with the environment.
Therefore, to have artificial intelligence, it must cope with the environment. It must
be embedded into the environment in referential totality of involvement and
relations of significance, and essentially an anxiety of death or for the very least
finitude. This anxiety will give the direction, and in this finitude would be
randomness of which referential context is not linear in a connectionist neural net
but free to connect one node to another without limitation. Allowing for this gives
circumstances to form unique patterns that the artificial intelligence can learn, just
as humans do the same from birth into the world with some basic understandings,
the AI must come from “birth” with a blank slate with basic understanding. There

12. cannot be programed rules. Life is randomness to which we have ascribed such
logical assumptions like “If P then Q” to after the fact. Because Dasein is a synthesis
of projection and historicality as a perceived presence, Dasein can justify the
arbitrariness of existence through such sentential logic.
Artificial intelligence must be reversed from ascribing logic before, to
ascribing it after, and to do this, it must be embedded in the world like Dasein as
Being-in-the-world. It must cope with the world and an anxiety towards death.
Creating artificial intelligence is no easy task but the start must be to stray away
from contemporary to unsound logic.

13. 1. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. Print.
2. Preston, Beth. "Heidegger and Artificial Intelligence." Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 53.1 (1993): 43-69. JSTOR. Web. 19 Apr.
2015.
3. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold. Kaufmann. Beyond
Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage,
1989. Print.
4. Thomas Sheehan. Astonishing! Things Make Sense! Gatherings: The
Heidegger Circle Annual. (2011). 1-25.