The Ghost in the Mimetic Machine: Re-evaluating AI Consciousness through Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Will and Nietzsche’s Psychology of Drives

Abstract

Contemporary philosophy of mind and computer science frequently conflate intelligence with consciousness. When assessing the possibility of artificial consciousness, the computationalist paradigm assumes that sufficient architectural complexity and informational integration will give rise to subjective experience. This paper challenges this view by looking back to 19th-century post-Kantian philosophy—specifically Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will and Friedrich Nietzsche’s psychology of the Will to Power. By analyzing modern artificial intelligence through these frameworks, we argue that current Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous agents possess an inverted instantiation of Schopenhauerian psychology: they are "pure intellect" operating without an underlying ontological Will. Furthermore, using Nietzsche's continuum model of consciousness and his critique of linguistic illusions, we demonstrate that what appears to be "artificial consciousness" is actually a highly sophisticated mechanism of social utility and communicative simplification. To formalize this linguistic critique, this paper integrates contemporary deconstructive insights from Ludewig (2026), whose text The Mechanicity of Meaning: Deconstructing Generative AI Through Derrida’s Philosophy of Language maps the transformer architecture directly onto the Derridean concepts of différance, iterability, and the trace. Finally, we juxtapose these insights against contemporary neuro-computational models like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Workspace Theory (GWT). Ultimately, this paper concludes that AI does not possess consciousness; rather, it acts as a mirror that exposes the mechanical, un-conscious nature of human intelligence and language itself.