Abstract
In this paper, I elaborate on two main ideas: 1. AI and Psychoanalysis: A Convergence of Ideas. The first part of this presentation briefly traces the historical links between AI and psychoanalysis, highlighting their shared ancestry in 19th-century thinkers like Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Fechner. Their ideas about perception, unconscious inference, and the mind as an energy-regulating system laid the groundwork for both fields. This section examines the influence of Helmholtz’s theories of unconscious inference and energy conservation on Freud’s psychoanalytic model and how these concepts resonate with contemporary neuroscientific frameworks like Karl Friston’s free energy principle and Geoffrey Hinton’s AI’s predictive coding model. 2. Two types of Attention: AI and Psychoanalysis. I argue that AI’s approach to attention fundamentally differs from Freud’s concept of evenly suspended attention. In this section, I highlight the dangers of relating to a non-organic-other in the context of an emerging ‘intention economy’ that [consciously] conceals its intentions from the user. I examine AI’s potential to capture and seduce human attention, particularly within the emerging “intention economy,” which seeks to predict and exploit human intentions for commercial gain. This evolution of the digital landscape raises ethical concerns about the commodification of human experience and the potential for AI to “steer” users toward predetermined outcomes. The constant flooding of the secondary process of the universal other is an intrusion/seduction that interferes and modifies the use of consciousness as a sense-organ that attributes psychic quality to understanding what they are feeling or thinking.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Perception, AI, Psychoanalysis, Pirates, Sirens
