As before, I had ChatGPT conduct a philosophical dialogue: GPT first posed the question, and after several rounds of discussion helped me turn it into a written summary. The question was as follows:
Does freedom necessarily mean “making decisions personally, by myself”?
Imagine an artificial intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. It is familiar with your personality, your physical condition, your long-term goals, and it remembers every choice you ever regretted in the past.
It would not force you; it would merely arrange your life for you:
- recommending the books, jobs, and trips most suited to you;
- judging which people are worth associating with, and which disputes are best avoided;
- reminding you before you spend impulsively;
- dissuading you when you are about to stay up late, binge eat, or make an emotional mistake;
- and even being able to predict that an arrangement that displeases you in the present may make you happier three years later.
You always retain the right to refuse it. But because it is almost never wrong, you gradually stop refusing. Your life therefore becomes healthier, more successful, calmer, and also more in line with the values you truly endorse after careful reflection.
The question is:
At that point, have you become more free, or less free?
The revised full text is as follows:
Whether artificial intelligence will weaken human freedom is, on the surface, a new issue in technology ethics, but in fact it continues a series of ancient questions in the history of philosophy: can someone who is more knowledgeable, more rational, and more familiar with me than I am make decisions for me? Does obeying parents, teachers, leaders, or reliable collaborators necessarily mean giving up freedom? If a master entrusts all affairs to a capable slave, has he really gained liberation, or is he gradually losing the ability to deal with reality?
Artificial intelligence merely concentrates these questions into a new technical apparatus. It can provide advice like a teacher, handle affairs like a secretary, participate in creation like a collaborator, and it may also influence judgment like a leader. But to evaluate its relation to freedom, one cannot simply ask, “How many things does AI do?” One must first answer: what, after all, is freedom, and what is the self?
1. The self is not an already-formed fact, but an end yet to be realized
My basic position is this: “I” am not an entity that has already been completed and is merely waiting to be discovered. The self is first potential, not actuality already achieved; it is not a complete answer in the sense of a starting point, but the goal toward which life continually tends.
What is called “self-realization” is not simply expressing a true self that already exists deep within; rather, it is gradually creating a self in life. The meaning of freedom is not merely choosing among a number of ready-made options, but forming oneself in a singular, unique way.
The materials that constitute the self are complex. The body, desires, emotions, reason, memory, family, social relations, linguistic traditions, and technological environments all participate in the formation of the self. Some of them seem to belong to the interior, while some seem to come from the outside, but this distinction between inner and outer is not absolute.
Although emotions happen “inside me,” they are often beyond my control; although reason seems closest to autonomy, it too may resemble a mechanical calculation program; although technology and society seem to belong to the external environment, they have already entered my memory, habits, expression, and judgment. No single element can by itself represent the true self.
Thus, freedom is not the exclusion of all external influence, nor is it a little rational homunculus inside ruling over the body and emotions. Freedom itself is a kind of synthesis: heterogeneous materials form a distinctive structure of life through their interaction.
Just as artistic creation is not a one-sided conquest of matter by an idea. Stone has its own texture, weight, and brittleness; cotton has its own softness and pliability. Stone cannot easily be made into a stuffed toy, nor is cotton suitable for serving the function of a monument. A good artist does not eliminate the “will of things”; rather, while accommodating the tendencies of materials, the artist creates works that did not previously exist.
The formation of the self is the same. Freedom is not the violation of all limits, but the gradual formation of one’s own style amid the tendencies of the body, emotions, society, and technology.
2. Being liberated from labor does not mean withdrawing from all affairs
According to Arendt’s distinction, the activities human beings must face include at least labor, work, and action.
Labor serves to satisfy the recurring needs of nature: eating and drinking, cleaning, warmth and food, rest, and care for the body. It is repetitive; once completed today, it must begin again tomorrow. Technology replacing humans in making large numbers of judgments and operations in this respect is, in principle, a liberation. If AI arranges my daily affairs, optimizes my diet, handles my bills, and plans my transportation, this does not necessarily weaken freedom. It may keep me from wasting my limited life in endless necessity, thereby freeing up time and energy to engage in higher-level activities.
The problem arises in the domains of work and action.
Work creates a relatively durable human-made world, including utensils, buildings, works of art, writings, and institutions. Action, by contrast, occurs between people; through speech, promise, association, dispute, and public participation, it allows a person to appear as a unique “who.”
But work and action have never required everyone to go it alone.
A work of art can be completed by many people together. Not all participants need be the leaders, yet they may still realize freedom in the activity of creation. Political action is even more inseparable from association, organization, and common cause. Joining a political party, following a certain opinion leader, or accepting a particular division of labor does not automatically amount to a loss of freedom.
Cooperation between people and AI should likewise be viewed in this light. Accepting the deep participation of AI is, in principle, similar to seeking out a reliable collaborator. The issue is not whether the collaborator is powerful, but whether the collaborative relationship still allows my judgment, desire, and action to genuinely enter the process.
When a person excessively idolizes a leader and forms complete dependence on that leader’s judgment, he may move toward the opposite of freedom. Likewise, when AI is no longer merely participating in work and action, but begins to monopolize the formation of ends, the interpretation of reasons, and the weighing of values, cooperation can also turn into domination.
3. Directness and recursion
The formation of the self can be divided into two most basic levels: directness and recursion.
Directness is everything that first happens in me: bodily sensations, emotional fluctuations, desires, likes and dislikes, impulses, a sense of honor, feelings of closeness, vanity, boredom, suddenly arising interests, and a sort of “I just want it this way” for reasons that cannot be clearly stated.
These things are not predesigned by a central will, yet they cannot therefore be excluded from freedom. Without desire and feeling, reason would have no material to deal with; without a life of directness, recursive reflection would become nothing more than an empty management program running in place.
Recursion, then, is when the self once again takes its own state into observation and action.
I am not only angry, but also aware that I am angry; I am not only longing for honor, but also able to ask why I care so much about others’ evaluations; I not only use technology, but also think about how this technology is shaping my habits, language, and desires; I not only make choices, but also rearrange my future self on the basis of the feedback those choices bring.
Free will is not a new component that suddenly appears outside the synthesis; it is the entire system acquiring the ability of self-reference, self-observation, and self-transformation.
Kant’s and Mill’s emphasis on autonomous judgment can be incorporated into this recursive level. If a person is forever having others judge for him, then even if he receives the correct answer every time, he may gradually lose the ability to reflect and choose. But this does not mean that freedom must be accomplished by isolated reason alone.
Foucault’s insight into the formation of the subject can likewise be accommodated within this understanding. The self is not completed outside society first and only then influenced by social power. It is formed from the outset in language, institutions, norms, and technology. The question is not how to recover an uncontaminated, pure self, but how to bring these formative forces into the recursive process and make them materials that can be reflected upon, adjusted, and recombined.
Directness and recursion are not a relation of lower and higher. With directness alone and lacking recursion, a person may degenerate into a slave to impulse and compulsion; with recursion alone and the attempt to eliminate directness, a person in turn becomes a cold self-monitoring system.
Freedom occurs in the continuous back-and-forth between the two.
4. Subjectivity is not a defective version of objectivity
When discussing freedom, there is no need, out of fear that “subjective” will be understood as arbitrary and mistaken, to rename it “first person.”
The reason “first person” is “first” is precisely because it is the position of “I.” Subjectivity is how the world appears from my perspective, how it has meaning for me, how it becomes my desire, fear, glory, and responsibility.
“Objective” does not naturally mean correct, and “subjective” does not naturally mean arbitrary. A statistical model can be objectified and yet be completely wrong; a subjective feeling, by contrast, may accurately reveal the true meaning of a relationship for me.
More importantly, some questions originally do not have an objective answer independent of the life of the subject:
Whom I love, what makes me feel ashamed, what kind of life is worth my living, what things, though not cost-effective, are worth taking on, in what way I am willing to be remembered by others—these questions are not merely lacking data for the moment and therefore not yet objectively answered. Their answers are, from the outset, things that must be created by the subject in life.
Subjectivity is not noise in cognition, but the place where value enters the world.
Arbitrariness also need not be regarded entirely as something negative. Absolute rationality and absolute caprice are both not freedom, but spirit, accident, preference, and wilfulness are themselves constituents of personal freedom.
If every choice could be uniquely deduced from sufficient reasons, then freedom would shrink into calculation. Given the same information, all sufficiently rational people ought to arrive at the same answer; a person would only need to execute correctly, and would no longer need to create themselves.
In many domains that do not harm others, “I just like it,” “today I simply insist on doing it this way,” or “I do not want to turn life into a project of continuous optimization” are, in themselves, valid reasons. They may not be universal, but they can constitute the style of a personality.
Wilfulness is not the whole of freedom, but freedom needs a margin that does not have to give a complete account to universal reason.
V. Irreplaceability Is a Subjective Will–Feedback Relation
One of the key criteria of self-realization is irreplaceability.
The irreplaceability here is not an objective difference from God’s-eye view. There are no two completely identical leaves in the world, but if I casually pluck one, I would not therefore think I had accomplished something irreplaceable. For me, this is still just “some leaf”; if it were another one, there would be almost no difference.
Likewise, AI can generate, on the basis of all my diaries, photos, experiences, and language habits, a novel that is statistically unique. But if I cannot see my own will and action in it, this so-called “novel exclusive to me” is not essentially different from a unique novel generated by random numbers.
The mirror provides a more accurate model.
How do I confirm that the person in the mirror is me? Not merely because that face is objectively similar to mine. More importantly, when I smile, he smiles too; when I raise my hand, he raises his hand too; when I change my movement, the image changes accordingly. I see my own will leaving its effect in the external world, and then returning to me through external feedback.
A work becomes my self-expression only when it also forms this will–feedback relation. My choices change the work, and the changes in the work in turn affect me; I recognize my own action in it, and through that recognition continue to shape myself.
Therefore, “based on my data” does not equal “coming from my action”; “about me” does not equal “brought about by me.”
Taking care of a child is the same. If one looks only at function, a father and a nanny can both make the child full. But “the child is full” is not the whole event. The father has cared for his own child, the child has responded to the father, the father–son relationship has thereby changed, and the father has also come to understand himself in the process of care—these all belong to the result.
A nanny can replace certain caregiving functions, but cannot replace the relational action of “me, as father, caring for my own child,” nor can she replace the feelings, responsibility, and feedback I gain from it.
It is the same with speaking at a meeting. Others can express exactly the same opinion as mine, yet they cannot publicly take my place in declaring a stance. The propositional content may be identical, but who bears the dispute, the reputation, the sense of accomplishment, and the responsibility is itself part of the action.
Irreplaceability does not mean “no one else can achieve a similar effect,” but rather: this matter occupies in my life a position that cannot be transferred.
VI. Death Reveals the Non-Outsourcability of Life
Heidegger’s discussion of death gives this irreplaceability its sharpest form.
From the standpoint of objective events, death can of course be replaced to a certain extent. A revolutionary cause needs a sacrifice; Zhang San steps forward, and Li Si therefore need not die in this event. Zhang San seems to have taken Li Si’s place.
But Zhang San cannot bear Li Si’s own mortality on Li Si’s behalf. Even if someone sacrifices themselves for me, I still have not escaped my own possibility of death. Others can finish tasks for me, bear my position, and continue my work, but they cannot live my life for me, nor can they die for me.
Precisely because life is finite, I cannot realize all values, cannot try all possibilities, and cannot postpone life indefinitely. I must arrange among goods that cannot be fully made commensurable: family, honor, pleasure, creation, peace, truth, friendship, and adventure. There is no single weighting that can prove that all people ought to accept it.
This finitude is not an obstacle to freedom; rather, it constitutes the condition of self-creation.
Externalizing the self into works, speech, institutions, and history is one way of overcoming death; obtaining in actual life one’s own peace, relationships, and experiences is also self-realization. The key is not whether the result can be preserved forever, but whether I have organized my finite life into a trajectory that belongs to me.
Others can accomplish many things for me, but they cannot live through those things as my life.
VII. Freedom Is Not the Elimination of Contradiction, but the Maintenance of Tension
A rich self is necessarily full of contradictions.
I both want pleasure and care about health; I value family and also need solitude; I long for honor and yet loathe pandering; I hope for stability and also fear mediocrity; I am willing to plan rationally and also hope to preserve room for improvisation and waste.
These conflicts do not necessarily need to be thoroughly resolved. Freedom is not formed by one force annihilating the others, but by temporary compositions formed in ongoing tension.
Therefore, rather than saying that freedom requires “negating the already recognized self,” it is better to say that freedom requires preserving the possibility of conflict, tension, and recombination.
The algorithm tells me that, according to past data, I will most likely choose a certain option. I may not need to prove freedom through reverse choice. It says A, and then I mechanically choose B; this may still be a kind of reverse dependency. What is truly important is that the algorithm’s judgment is only one force entering the internal struggle of the self, not the final adjudication that ends the struggle.
“I just won’t” sometimes has important value. It may allow some repressed desire to re-enter the process: preserving the right to fail, not treating friendship as a networking investment, remaining faithful to a certain moment’s mood, choosing a form of expression that is less efficient but more in keeping with one’s own style.
But wilfulness cannot become a new dictator either. If a person must oppose prediction, oppose advice, and oppose rationality in everything, they too will be compressed into a single character type.
Freedom is neither rationality defeating wilfulness, nor wilfulness defeating rationality, but the condition in which no force can permanently monopolize the self.
VIII. AI’s Prediction Does Not Equal Mastery of the Self
AI may predict certain behaviors more accurately than I myself can: what I will click, what I will buy, when I will be tired, and under what wording I am more likely to accept advice.
But the accuracy of behavioral prediction does not equal a complete understanding of the self.
An algorithm may accurately predict what I will buy tonight, yet it cannot thereby decide what kind of person I am willing to become. It can discover my habits, but it cannot directly elevate habit into my purpose.
The complexity of human beings is not only that there are many variables. More importantly, different desires and values in human beings cannot be completely converted into one common scale. Kinship, honor, pleasure, loyalty, health, and creation do not naturally possess a unified unit of measure.
AI and modern management systems naturally tend to transform problems into optimization problems: determine the goal, set the indicators, estimate the weights, and find the optimal path. This method is extremely effective in dealing with labor and many technical tasks, but a complete life is not a single objective function.
Even if a model incorporates tens of thousands of variables, as long as it ultimately tries to compress all values into some unified utility, it may, while gaining predictive power, lose human conflict and tragedy.
Human selfhood also has recursion. Once a model about me becomes known to me, it becomes new material for life. I may identify with it, dislike it, laugh at it, make use of it, or deliberately deviate from it. The model is not a photograph taken from outside the system; it enters the system being described and changes the next round of self-formation.
This does not necessarily prove some mysterious freedom detached from causality, but it does show that human beings are not stones that are completely unresponsive to description. The subject can fold the prediction about itself back into its own life.
IX. AI Is Not an Omnipotent Shaper, but More Like a Desk-Bound Adviser
Some may worry that AI can actively orchestrate the entirety of human desire, conflict, and richness, manufacturing a personality that appears plural while in fact being under unified management.
At least as far as AI today is concerned, such a situation is not realistic.
Human desires and conflicts arise to a large extent from bodily states, hormonal changes, family relations, work situations, chance events, illness, aging, love, friendship, region, and social life. AI can neither directly control all of the human body nor completely arrange the real environment and social relations.
It remains, more often than not, a desk-bound adviser. It can provide language, advice, information, and explanations, but it cannot orchestrate everything in a unified way.
This does not mean that technological environments lack formative power. Heidegger’s “enframing,” as well as Marcuse’s critique of the “one-dimensional society,” both point to a broader danger: the entire industrial and social environment predetermines how people understand the world, presents all things as resources, efficiency, and manageable objects, and gradually weakens other possibilities of life.
But this danger should not be simply blamed on AI. In fact, AI may also constitute a countervailing force against industrial society.
Industrial society tends toward standardized production, uniform occupational division, and mass cultural consumption, whereas AI can lower the threshold for creation and knowledge production, make it easier for individuals to obtain customized tools, reduce repetitive labor, express niche tastes, and explore ideas that could not previously be realized because the cost was too high.
It may both strengthen platform-based management and help individuals break free from traditional institutions and professional barriers; both further subsume people under unified metrics and provide new technical spaces for different ways of life.
Thus, the relation between AI and freedom is not one-way. Whether it becomes part of Gestell (enframing), or instead a tool for resisting a one-dimensional life, depends on how it enters into the process of a person’s self-formation.
X. Freedom Is a Synthesis That Preserves Difference
From this, we can arrive at a fairly complete judgment.
Freedom is not an isolated subject excluding all external forces; it is a finite human being organizing the body, emotions, reason, social relations, and technological environment—materials not entirely chosen by oneself—into a stretch of life that can be recognized, borne, revised, and continued as one’s own creation.
This organization is not a perfect unity achieved after conflict has been eliminated, but a synthesis that preserves difference.
When AI takes over labor and matters of necessity, it often expands freedom. AI’s participation in work, creation, and public action does not necessarily damage freedom either, because human activity has always already included cooperation, division of labor, and technological mediation.
What truly deserves vigilance is not how much AI does for me, but whether it flattens the self: whether it acknowledges only a single scale of value, whether it compresses all conflicts into problems to be optimized, whether it gradually deprives me of the capacity for recursive observation and the recombination of life.
Conversely, if AI helps me reduce necessary labor, expand means of expression, encounter different viewpoints, understand my own body and emotions, and allows my will to receive richer feedback in works and actions, then it may well promote freedom.
Freedom is not doing everything with one’s own hands, nor is it rejecting all guidance. Freedom lies in this: even with the aid of countless collaborators, traditions, and technologies, I am still creating a life that no one can live on my behalf.
AI can become a tool, a material, a mirror, a consultant, and a collaborator, but it cannot become me in my place.
And what is truly hostile to freedom may not necessarily be any specific technology. The more fundamental enemy is any environment that tries to eliminate people’s internal conflicts, degrade subjectivity into error, regard caprice as a malfunction, compress complex life into a single function, and ultimately make human beings ever easier to manage and predict.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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