CONCEPT
Goosebumps
Han's sensory image for Stimmung — the pre-conceptual, bodily attunement that makes genuine thought possible, and the specific capacity that artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking for lack of.
In Non-things, Han writes: Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason it cannot get goosebumps. The line is more than rhetorical. It names a specific diagnostic criterion drawn from Heidegger's concept of Stimmung — the pre-conceptual mood or attunement that orients consciousness toward the world before any act of conceptual thought. Before the concept, there is the mood. Before the analysis, there is the attunement. Before the thought, there are the goosebumps — the involuntary bodily response to being affected by something that exceeds computation. The human capacity to be moved, disturbed, unsettled, struck by what cannot be processed is, for Han, the irreducible feature of consciousness that no machine can replicate and that no achievement society can fully colonize.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Goosebumps — Gänsehaut in German — are a pilomotor reflex: the tiny muscles at the base of each hair contract, lifting the hair from the skin, in response to cold, fear, awe, or aesthetic shock. The