CONCEPT
The View from Everywhere and Nowhere
Appiah's distinction between AI's comprehensive perspectiveless perspective — Thomas Nagel's impossible view from nowhere, now computationally simulated — and the rooted cosmopolitan view from somewhere that carries the moral weight of a particular life.
Thomas Nagel's 1986 book The View from Nowhere identified a problem that refuses to go away: every attempt to achieve objectivity requires stepping outside one's own perspective, but there is no place to step to. Every view is a view from somewhere. AI appears to offer what Nagel said could not exist. A large language model has processed more perspectives than any individual mind could hold. In a computational sense, it holds the view from everywhere — not from no particular perspective but from all perspectives simultaneously, weighted by their representation in training data. Appiah's framework draws a distinction that renders the apparent breakthrough misleading: the distinction between knowing about perspectives and thinking from a perspective. AI knows about every perspective. It thinks from none. The unrooted perspective — the view from everywhere — lacks the moral weight that comes from holding a position. By being everywhere, it is nowhere.
