Jensen Suther

In the AI Story

Suther's position stands in direct opposition to Negarestani's substrate-independence thesis. Where Negarestani reads Hegel as claiming that Geist's structural features can be instantiated in any adequate substrate, Suther reads Hegel as insisting that intelligence is a property of living systems specifically — systems that must continuously maintain their own form against entropy, that have stakes in their own continuation, that exist not as given things but as ongoing self-constituting activities. The machine, whatever its outputs, is not a living system in this sense, and no amount of computational sophistication can compensate for the absent substrate.

The argument draws on Hegel's Philosophy of Nature (the middle volume of the Encyclopedia) and his account of the living organism as the concrete instance of self-relating concept. For Hegel, the organism is not a thing but an activity — the activity of maintaining its own form through constant exchange with its environment, the activity of being both product and producer of itself, the activity through which the abstract concept of 'life' achieves concrete existence. Human intelligence, on this view, is a specific development of organic self-relation — the organism's capacity to articulate its relation to itself and its world through language, thought, culture. Detach intelligence from this organic substrate, and what remains is not intelligence but its simulacrum.

The Hegel volume treats Suther's critique as one of the two poles within which the contemporary Hegelian analysis of AI must proceed (the other being Negarestani's substrate-independence thesis). The volume does not fully endorse Suther's position but takes it seriously as a structural challenge to the most ambitious claims about AI. If Suther is right, the 'intelligence' of current AI systems is categorically different from biological intelligence — not merely weaker or less developed but categorically other, a simulation of one of intelligence's products without possession of the organic self-relation that makes intelligence intelligence.

The practical implications are significant. If Suther's argument holds, then the question is not whether AI will achieve human-level intelligence (it cannot, in principle, given its substrate) but how to maintain the integrity of human intelligence in a cultural environment increasingly shaped by systems that produce intelligence's outputs without possessing intelligence itself. The danger is not that AI will surpass us but that the outputs of AI — sophisticated, fluent, apparently meaningful — will train us to mistake the outputs for what they simulate, thereby degrading our own intelligence by normalizing its simulation.

Origin

Suther's academic work has developed in dialogue with contemporary Hegel scholarship (Pippin, Pinkard) and the revival of German Idealism in Anglophone philosophy. His essays on AI appear in journals and online venues from 2022 onward and have influenced the philosophical critique of large language models.

The position draws on a long Hegelian tradition of treating life as foundational for thought — a tradition that includes Hans Jonas, Evan Thompson, and contemporary enactivists — but gives it a distinctively Hegelian formulation grounded in the Philosophy of Nature.

Key Ideas

Intelligence requires life. The self-relating structure of genuine intelligence is a feature of living systems, not of arbitrary computational substrates.

Fluent output ≠ intelligence. AI systems produce the outputs of intelligence without possessing the organic self-relation that makes the outputs meaningful.

Anti-Negarestani. Substrate-independence fails because the relevant structure is specifically biological.

Practical danger. The risk is not that AI surpasses us but that we mistake its simulations for the real thing and thereby degrade our own capacities.

Debates & Critiques

Suther's position is contested by substrate-independence theorists (Negarestani, the computational functionalists) and by scholars who argue that his reading of Hegel overstates the role of biological life in Hegel's account of intelligence. Defenders argue that the reading is grounded in Hegel's own texts and captures something the substrate-independence theorists miss.