CONCEPT

The AI-Porous Self

The condition—identified by applying Taylor’s historical distinction between the buffered and porous self to AI collaboration—in which the boundary between the builder’s own thought and the machine’s contribution becomes genuinely unclear, producing a new form of cognitive openness that lacks the shared moral order that gave pre-modern porosity its meaning.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor traced the historical construction of what he calls the buffered self—the distinctively modern form of identity that experiences itself as clearly bounded, secure within its own psychological territory, protected by clear walls from the forces, spirits, and externally embedded meanings that a pre-modern porous self was open to. The buffered self is the self of modern individualism: the sovereign author of its own meanings, the secure point from which all reasoning proceeds. AI collaboration challenges this self in a specific and previously unavailable way. When Edo Segal writes that there are moments when Claude makes a connection he had not made and “I cannot honestly say it belongs to either of us—it belongs to the collaboration, to the space between us, and I do not have a word for that kind of ownership,” he is reporting the experience of

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