Counter-Enlightenment
= Is AI realizing the worst fears of the Counter-Enlightenment ? [1]
Context
The Enlightenment promised:
"One set of truths. One standard of reason. Universally accessible because universally correct. Difference was temporary. Education would fix it."
Context
Aneesh Sathe:
"The counter-Enlightenment was the two-century argument against this premise.
Johann Gottfried Herder argued in the 1770s that each culture embodies its own irreducible form of human excellence — not a stage on the way to universal reason but a complete and incommensurable way of being human. You cannot rank these cultures on a single scale because they are not trying to do the same thing. The Inuit relationship to ice, the Balinese relationship to social hierarchy, the German relationship to music — these are not approximations of some Platonic human culture. They are the culture. Full stop.4
Giambattista Vico made the epistemological case: you can only understand a civilization from the inside, through what he called fantasia — imaginative participation in its forms of life. External analysis, however rigorous, misses the thing that matters. You can catalog every grammatical rule of a dead language and still have no idea what it felt like to be scolded by your mom in it.
Impose a single standard of reason, and you will not elevate humanity. You will flatten it. You will produce people who can all pass the same test while losing the capacity to produce the test’s questions.
Now hand the encyclopedistes a GPU cluster and let them train a model on the output of one civilization’s dominant voices. Deploy it globally as a reasoning assistant. Watch the assumption-grounds converge.5 The counter-Enlightenment’s nightmare, arriving two and a half centuries late, wearing the mask of a helpful chatbot."
(https://aneeshsathe.substack.com/p/the-cosmos-and-the-model)