Worldliness and causal binding in intelligent machines: a Heideggerian response to Dreyfus

Abstract

Generative language models seem to refute Hubert Dreyfus’s verdict that AI can never match human “knowing-how.” Re-reading Dreyfus through Heidegger, this paper argues that the decisive divide is not skilled coping versus rules, but correlational patterning versus teleological causation. The latter is termed causal-intentional binding —Dasein’s future-oriented act of opening meanings for which it remains ethically answerable. Derived from the care-structure ( Sorge ) that Heidegger identifies as the being of Dasein, causal-intentional binding names the temporal unity in which thrownness, projection, and falling are gathered into a single directional arc of engagement with the world. While modern AI masters contextual fluency, it remains caught in Heidegger’s idle talk, lacking the binding that turns coping into conscience. Tracing this gap clarifies two horizons: AI-as-curator, a static mirror that organizes human insights, and AI-as-co-evolver, a system that might acquire proto-teleology through self-referential causal modeling, edging toward an “artificial Dasein.” The paper thus relocates the consciousness debate from embodiment to ontological directionality and sketches constitutive and ethical criteria for judging genuine machine worldliness.