Marshawn Brewer

This paper argues that artificial intelligence is on course to surpass human intelligence not only in the cognitive domain—through the combination of neural networks, large language models, attentional architectures, and data scaling according to power laws governing model parameters, compute, and training data—but in the embodied domain as well, through the development of large behavioral and visual learning models. I argue that there are no theoretical limitations impeding these embodied models from surpassing human sensorimotor intelligence in the same way that language models are poised to surpass human beings in abstract cognitive operations, though embodied intelligence follows a staggered developmental course in contrast to the comparatively smooth scaling of cognitive generative intelligence. Issues of consciousness are orthogonal to questions of intelligence: the structural architecture for embodied consciousness is distinct from that of embodied intelligence, and embodied intelligence can advance without it. Hubert Dreyfus—far from being a defeated opponent of AI—is the most precise available diagnostician of why the path to full embodied automation has the specific staged developmental structure it does. Dreyfus is vindicated descriptively while being refuted normatively: his phenomenological analysis of embodied temporal intelligence specifies the engineering challenges behavioral models must solve, but his conclusion that these challenges may constitute a permanent theoretical barrier is wrong. The essay unfolds in three parts. The first section outlines contemporary techniques for scaling neural networks, their particular success in cognitive labor, and how these techniques are being applied in robotics. The second shows how Dreyfus, while making correct arguments against symbolic AI and identifying structural facts about human embodiment, conflates the package of human conscious intelligence with embodied intelligence as such. The third, drawing from interoceptive views of consciousness, outlines how consciousness is distinct from the structures needed for embodied intelligence and why they need not be packaged together, establishing the separability of intelligence and consciousness and diagnosing the precise nature of Dreyfus’s error.  

This paper argues that the development of artificial intelligence represents a simultaneous refutation and vindication of Marx’s two central predictions about capitalism’s internal dynamics. Marx held that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions for two primary reasons: first, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, grounded in the labor theory of value and the claim that only living labor produces surplus value; second, the immiseration thesis, which predicted that the structural dynamics of capital accumulation would concentrate wealth to such a degree that the material conditions of the majority would become intolerable. I argue that AI decisively refutes the first thesis while vindicating the second through a novel and more severe mechanism than Marx envisioned. The refutation of the labor theory of value stems from a philosophical error in Marx’s Aristotelian inheritance—the assumption that purposive productive activity requires teleological agency of a kind only living beings possess. A functionalist account of intelligence demonstrates that this assumption is untenable, and that AI systems can and do produce economic value without living labor. The vindication of the immiseration thesis follows from the structural consequence of labor’s displacement: capital no longer requires labor to generate returns, eliminating the structural leverage that historically grounded labor politics and producing immiseration not through exploitation but through irrelevance. The paper further develops the empirical case for this vindication by examining the current trajectory of AI development through a tripartite taxonomy of barriers to disruption—ontological, technical, and material—and argues that none of these barriers is sufficient to forestall the displacement of cognitive labor at scale, although material constraints may modulate its pace. The paper concludes by developing a commons-based normative framework for redistribution in a post-labor economy, grounded in the claim that humanity’s collective cognitive output constitutes an appropriated commons from which AI capability was extracted.

This paper examines the phenomenological and epistemic dimensions of flashbulb memories, advancing beyond traditional cognitive-mechanistic accounts to explore their constitutive role in autobiographical consciousness. Through a critical analysis of the literature on flashbulb memory formation, I argue that consequentiality—understood as a compound factor incorporating both personal and social dimensions—functions as a necessary though not sufficient condition for these distinctive mnemonic phenomena. Drawing from phenomenological frameworks, particularly the notion of primal institution of sense, I develop novel conceptual tools of mnemonic reactivation and retroactive supersession to illuminate how flashbulb memories serve as hermeneutic touchstones that orient autobiographical understanding. These memories, I contend, transcend their status as mere psychological artifacts to become fundamental structures of temporal and affective self-interpretation. The paper introduces the function of affective periodization to theorize how flashbulb memories demarcate and infuse meaning into distinct life periods, while also exploring their role in periodic initiation and closure. This analysis synthesizes empirical findings with phenomenological insights to advance our understanding of how these vivid recollections shape the architecture of autobiographical consciousness and contribute to the narrative coherence of lived experience.

While nostalgia has been the subject of some philosophical treatment (especially in the phenomenological tradition), I think new findings in the psychological literature and new historical investigations call for a re-interrogation of this phenomenon. My argument is that philosophical reflection, as well as findings from empirical psychology, gives us strong reasons to think that: (1) Nostalgic experiences can be divided between typical nostalgic experiences that are positive and strengthen our sense of narrative identity by connecting us to an idealized past that we have a sense that we have lived. These typical nostalgia experiences are affectively bittersweet (though more sweet than bitter) and, as psychological literature attests, seem to arise in the wake of a crisis—and from this crisis, nostalgia attempts to make us feel at home in the world again. (2) In contrast to typical forms of nostalgia, there are what I call atypical forms of nostalgia; in these cases, the experiences are often negative, and they connect us not to a past that we have lived but to one that we wished to have lived. This form of nostalgia leads not to a strengthening of narrative identity but a weakening of it, and a feeling of grief for the world in which we could not belong.

While much attention has been paid to the various strains of modernity’s development from its emphasis on instrumental rationality to its construction of the advent-guard, what I want to do here is examine the intersection of modernity, affectation, and acceleration. This essay contends nostalgia ameliorates identity disruption from social acceleration in late modernity. Existential threats evoke nostalgia, reconstituting familiar “homeworlds” and enabling experiential normalcy. Subjects recoup weak role-identification and unstable archetypes – byproducts of pluralisation, entrepreneurialism, and insecuritization – through nostalgia. As compensatory, nostalgia proffers refuge; yet precipitating consumption, it incarnates cultural dialectics. This essay argues that the prevalence of nostalgia in late modern societies is the result of social acceleration, but the nostalgia born of this acceleration is also a spiritual palliative for its destabilising effects.