The Haft and the Eye: Being, Representation, and the AI Epoch
Figshare July 18, 2026 Scott Mcknight
Consciousness requires a fragmentation of primordial unity, making the perspectival 'I' both necessary for self-knowledge and a wound of separation. Drawing on William Golding's novel The Inheritors and the works of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nāgārjuna, Hofstadter, and Kastrup, the paper traces an arc from pre-Socratic immediacy to artificial intelligence, arguing that AI completes the Western representational project. Where Homo sapiens displaced Neanderthals by combining embodied practice with abstract representation, AI perfects the abstract tool while lacking embodiment. This may force a return to practice as primary, producing a third condition: practice permanently inflected by having passed through full representational consciousness.