Intersubjective Reality

In the AI Story

The intersubjective is not hallucination or illusion. It is a distinct ontological category with causal power rivaling physical reality. A general orders a division forward; soldiers obey because they share the fiction of military hierarchy. Remove the fiction—through mutiny, revolution, or the dissolution of state authority—and the general's words carry no more force than any stranger's. The physical arrangement of bodies is identical; the intersubjective arrangement has collapsed. Harari's paradigmatic example is money: intrinsically worthless paper or metal that commands genuine goods and services because millions participate in the belief that it should. The participation is not passive. It is renewed with every transaction, every price negotiation, every acceptance of currency as payment.

The maintenance of intersubjective reality requires genuine understanding and genuine stakes. This is the structural feature that AI's entry into the space threatens. When human minds argue about the meaning of 'justice,' they bring experiential substrate—memories of injustice suffered or witnessed, moral intuitions calibrated by upbringing, philosophical commitments refined through education. The argument is not merely linguistic. It is an encounter among conscious beings whose positions carry biographical weight. When an LLM uses the word 'justice,' it deploys statistical patterns derived from millions of such encounters without experiencing any of them. The surface features of participation are present—sophisticated vocabulary, coherent argument structure, contextual appropriateness. The participation is absent.

Harari's framework identifies AI-generated text as a new kind of threat to the intersubjective—not propaganda (which is human-authored deception) nor noise (which is random interference), but plausible hollowness. Text that passes surface tests for genuine contribution while containing no genuine understanding. The danger is not immediate collapse but gradual dilution: as the proportion of hollow content rises, the trust commons that sustains intersubjective reality erodes. Participants can no longer reliably distinguish genuine engagement from sophisticated mimicry. The coordination mechanism weakens—not through attack, but through inflation.

Origin

Harari synthesized the concept from phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger), social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality), and Durkheimian sociology. The three-level ontology—objective, subjective, intersubjective—provides analytical clarity: it explains why you cannot bribe a river (objective reality ignores belief) but you can bribe a border guard (intersubjective reality responds to belief). The framework's power lies in making visible a category of existence that operates as common sense without being examined. Most people know money is 'made up,' but they do not follow the thread to its implications: that the economy, the nation-state, the corporation, the law—every structure coordinating large-scale human activity—belongs to the same ontological category.

Key Ideas

Three orders of reality. Objective (exists independent of belief), subjective (exists in individual experience), intersubjective (exists through collective belief)—and the intersubjective is what enables civilization.

Practical power without physical substrate. A dollar, a law, a corporate charter can move armies, reshape landscapes, determine who eats—yet none possess mass, energy, or location in space.

Maintained through participation. The intersubjective does not persist automatically. It requires ongoing engagement by minds that understand the terms, have stakes in their interpretation, and can argue about their meaning.

Vulnerable to parasitic mimicry. AI produces intersubjective content—text using the vocabulary of shared meaning—without participating in the community that generated those meanings. This is structurally new.

Dilution, not destruction. The threat is not that AI will eliminate intersubjective reality but that it will flood the space with convincing imitations, shifting the ratio of genuine participation to hollow mimicry below the threshold where coordination remains reliable.