Kaspars Kļaviņš

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence requires a reconsideration of established conceptual categories through which human–technology relations have traditionally been described. Terms such as tool, instrument, observer, interaction, agency, partner, and symbiosis carry meanings formed within particular epistemic and philosophical environments, and their transfer into the context of generative AI may alter their conceptual content. This article examines this problem through a dialogue between relational approaches in Western philosophy of physics, Western dialectical thought, and Chinese philosophical traditions, particularly Daoism. Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), for example, rejects the assumption of observer-independent physical states and treats physical systems in terms of relations between systems (Rovelli 1996). At the same time, the history of quantum theory demonstrates that dialectical approaches have also played a significant, though non-dominant, role, most notably in David Bohm's engagement with dialectical materialism (Bohm 1957; Gutfreund and Renn 2025). Chinese philosophical traditions provide additional resources for conceptualizing relationality, process, contextuality, and the interdependence of human beings and the wider cosmos (Ames 2011; Song 2021; Wang 2021). Yet neither physical relationality nor traditional human–nature relationality can simply be transferred to the human–AI situation. The article proposes the concept of a dialectical epistemic environment to describe a specific form of recursive human–generative-AI interaction in which AI-generated conceptual responses can modify the subsequent epistemic state of the human researcher and thereby alter the conditions of the next interaction. This model differs both from the conventional tool relation and from physical interaction between measuring systems. It does not require attributing consciousness, intentionality, or human-like subjectivity to AI. Instead, it identifies a transformation occurring at the level of the epistemic environment itself. The article further introduces conceptual migration as a methodological problem and ontological inflation as the unwarranted elevation of functional or epistemic descriptions into stronger ontological claims.

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude represents one of the most influential attempts in contemporary philosophy to reopen the question of realism after the dominance of post-Kantian correlationism. By introducing the concepts of the arche-fossil and factiality, Meillassoux argues that philosophy must recover access to an absolute reality independent of human cognition while avoiding the return to traditional metaphysical foundations. His central claim is that the only absolute necessity is the necessity of contingency. This paper examines whether Meillassoux’s principle of factiality necessarily entails the stronger ontological thesis of Hyper-Chaos: the claim that reality possesses an absolute capacity for arbitrary transformation. The argument developed here is not an external rejection of speculative realism but an internal examination of the logical transition from factiality to Hyper-Chaos. While factiality successfully demonstrates that no necessary foundation of reality can be established, it does not by itself prove that reality must possess an ontological power of unrestricted transformation. The distinction between the contingency of existence and the instability of existence is therefore essential. A reality without metaphysical necessity may still contain stable structures and enduring regularities. Hyper-Chaos remains a possible speculative interpretation of contingency, but it requires an additional metaphysical commitment beyond the principle of factiality itself. The broader conclusion is that Meillassoux’s greatest contribution may not lie in establishing Hyper-Chaos as the ultimate structure of reality, but in demonstrating that philosophy must continue to confront the question of reality independently of human thought without transforming any single explanatory principle into an unquestionable absolute.

I should state at the outset that I write not as a physicist but as a scholar in the humanities who has long followed developments in theoretical physics with great interest. My purpose is therefore not to evaluate the technical research problems of the exact sciences, such as theoretical physics or quantum mechanics. What interests me is something different: the philosophical significance of the questions that emerge when contemporary physics begins to speak not merely about particles, fields, and forces, but about information, reality, space, time, and existence itself. Whenever physicists formulate claims of this kind, they inevitably enter a territory shared with philosophy. Their ideas become relevant not only for scientists but also for historians of ideas, philosophers, and scholars in the humanities.