I'm Training An AI on Heidegger to Write Division 3 Of Being & Time So You Wouldn't Have To
An announcement of a philosophical project anticipated by Q2 2027, obviously
Lately I’ve been sitting in the sun and re-listening to Hubert Dreyfus’s lectures on Heidegger’s Being & Time (while feeling like a huge sell out on decisions made versus decisions not versus the inevitable versus where I’ve ended up,, but then again, it’s complicated, very complicated, and more than any parenthetical could ever capture properly) - anyways, I’m sort of sick and tired of hearing about the end of the world so I decided to recently re-retreat into Ideasland (insert trademark emoji here).
And that is how I ended up here violating the cardinal rules of how to begin a sentence (yes, and - not that, no ands) in a post announcing Yet Another Thing I’m Planning On Doing (it will join a large list of other items remaining actionable including reading Dostoyevsky’s the Brothers Karamazov and watching The Sopranos, but both of these have been goals for longer than any amount of time I am willing to admit to publicly anymore). So yes, I will be training AI large language models to finish the unfinished portion of Heidegger’s work from Being & Time (*that being the Time portion - there is no Division III. So waarom niet? (Plenty of reasons why not…plenty. But plenty more intrigue as to why not try to begin with to demonstrate something.)
So! Why such an undertaking? Why would anyone want to train AI on the corpus of Heidegger’s work to have whatever it ekes out to answer for the never done time portion of Being & Time?
Three reasons - beyond the obvious novelty of it all:
The hollowness of language generated by an LLM: does this reflect fully? Could it give something substantial in exchange for meaning when swapped with text tokens?
The opacity of language generated by Martin Heidegger: better yet, in English, because this isn’t a pure project in the way it should be (sorry, I only speak French and Dutch, not German, though the tangy wonder of currywurst sauce definitely transcends any arbitrary cultural and linguistic boundaries imposed on meaning making regardless of your level of sobriety at the time of taste testing this claim)
The utter procrastination and anxiety underlying all attempts to fuel energy into creative projects lest reality be confronted
These are my goals, two of which will be reflected publicly in this undertaking, the third of which I attempt to deal with (oftentimes in vain) by going on long runs (and I hate running in theory, but it’s a great way to force yourself to go distances because all paths lead back to the starting route anyways, so you might as well do something with it - a bit of amor fati, I guess)
I understand this is giving pillow princess with control issues but reality, for now, this is just a declarative post to put it out (into the ether) as the origin story. I believe there’s some text/natural language processing resources available out there on the Heideggerian corpus. I have to check my notes, much like this very in the moment train of thought piece.
So the actual project I’m harping on about here in this very unedited post (uncharacteristic of me, believe it or not)….I’ll be training an LLM on Heidegger to complete Division III of Being and Time and sharing the results.
Why do I find this interesting? For those of you unfamiliar with the lore behind this, it’s because the author never finished the damn book.
TLDR: Heidegger never finished the time section of Being & Time! In the meantime, he became a Nazi and never got around to the second part of the book. There’s plenty to say on that as done by plenty of others (also he wrote horrible love letters, egads) but think about how cool the concept of time is and then in the context of an existential dress-down of its meaning. Or its form. Or its essence. Or all of the above. Anyways, time, what is it - besides a great Pink Floyd song you should listen perched from a hill in Albany overlooking the yay area while smoking - well, time is…
What is time? Division III was supposed to be about temporality/time. LLMs have no temporal existence. So….can technology (Heidegger’s Gestell) write about Being?
This is all just so exciting to me, because if you think about it from one angle, theoretically and in execution, an LLM trined on Heidegger would indeed produce text that is grammatically and pattern matched correct to Heideggerian sounding text - yet…consider the trick here. The LLM produced text would be produced as grammatically and pattern matched correctly - say a text matched correctly to be giving Heideggerian temporarily - while having zero temporal existence itself!!!
Okay, fine, in other words, this is just so exciting to me and probably 3 other people in the world at best. It’s giving ‘everything about me is fake and I’m perfect’ (which is an excellent memoir written by supermodel Janice Dickinson).
The question “can technology (Gestell) write about Being?” is actually substantive! An LLM trained on Heidegger would produce grammatically correct Heideggerian-sounding text about temporality while having zero temporal existence itself. It’s the ultimate inauthenticity - das Man (the “they”) writing about authenticity.
Also, I suspect Heidegger would hate this, which makes it better in a way. I’d like to explore the gap between the hollowness of language produced by LLMs and authenticity, authentic meaning, meaning making, just all of it really. In another way it’s also inauthentic AF because it would be das Man (the generalized others, the “they”, everything of everyone - ok I’m butchering the translation, das Man is like the way of the worlds of others in a collective swoop of tomfoolery, that’s my best shot at it). Das-man writing about authenticity through the parameters of training data fed to the models fed on the corpus of Heidegger’s work to produce thought - ah, it’s giving zombie. Very inauthentic, very chic in its blatant emptiness, non?
So - a midnight philosophical project but the song remains the same - all things with depth. All things with analysis. All things, all words. All the WhatsApp messages I have not responded to (I’m sorry, I meant to. I’m sorry!). Writing is as solitary as it seems and feels but the real fun stuff is in the hellish landscape of everything in all directions of interest that requires project management, attention to detail, and accountability.
So I’d definitely like to get around to this by…Feburary 2027 at latest. This is just the announcement, llke an RSVP for a wedding or whatever.