Presence within Entanglement

Artificial intelligences write in our place and retain what we no longer retain. The transformation is now ordinary, present even in the everyday uses of the telephone. What it modifies in our manner of being present to the world and to others remains largely to be thought. I would like to come back to this, short of the debate on machine consciousness.

Before the question of consciousness

Generative artificial intelligences have entered our work practices at a speed that has left no one the time to discuss their meaning. They write and synthesize in our place, often better than we do for tasks of exhaustiveness, and at little cost they take on a part of the work we used to carry entirely ourselves.

Public debates on this transformation often revolve around a single question, that of whether the machine is intelligent or conscious. The question is legitimate, but it remains on the plane of what the machine is, without touching what it does to us. Now what it does to us is more immediate and more structuring. It enters the very movement of our thinking and the memorization of our exchanges. Our cognition becomes entangled with its own.

The question of presence reformulates itself in this space. It is not new, and has already been taken up by phenomenology and by the philosophy of care. But it takes a particular form when the third party who takes charge of a portion of our cognition is no longer a human, but a machine that speaks, and that speaks in such a way as to produce effects that resemble those of a presence without being one. It is this reformulation I would like to work through, starting from a concrete example.

An everyday displacement

The example of note-taking in conversation is a particular case of a more general phenomenon. When I take part in a work conversation, I take notes. For years, these notes demanded of me a double presence, one to the conversation itself, the other to the note-taking. If I did not write, I lost things. If I wrote too much, I also lost, because my attention left the exchange to go to the paper. This double presence had a cost I knew without being able to avoid it.

Today I record the conversation, and an artificial intelligence can produce, from the recording, an exhaustive synthesis. My notes have changed function. They no longer concern the details, which will be retrieved elsewhere, and now serve to structure my presence to the conversation, noting what touches me, what seems just to me, what I would like to explore later. They also prepare the later work with the machine, by signalling to it the qualitative points that it would not perceive on its own.

This displacement is not a personal discovery, and anyone who uses these tools experiences it. What interests me is what one makes of it conceptually. The machine takes charge of exhaustiveness, and this releases in me the possibility of a fuller presence to the conversation. My presence has thickened.

An earlier experience

A practice I have been leading for some twenty years poses the same problem in different terms. When I lead a brainstorming session or a group discussion, I take notes live, on screen, of what is being said, in the form of a mind map that is built up over the course of the exchange. I reorganize the ideas as we go, and I place each new element in relation with what was already there. The participants see their own thinking and that of others inscribing itself and structuring itself in real time.

I have observed, over these years, that this practice makes people more intelligent during the exercise, and after. Their thoughts being written, they can retain them better and connect them better, to themselves and to those of others. The collective takes shape, and the dialogue gains in structure. And when I then invite them to write individually, what they produce is better than if the collective stage had not taken place, because a personal thought becomes legitimized in the collective symbolic space that this common writing has made possible.

One might suppose that this taking up of the trace by a third party exempts the participants from the effort of holding their thinking, and weakens their memorization. The opposite is what happens. The trace held by a third party supports them and legitimizes them, and lets them go further than they would have on their own.

An important difference from the previous example calls to be named. The third party who holds the trace, in the brainstorming session, is a human ; it is me, present to these people and making the choices of organization that allow them to reread themselves, and it is this presence of the third party that makes it possible for theirs to thicken. With artificial intelligence, the third party is of another nature, and the question is what this difference changes.

Presence is an act

I have devoted several articles to a philosophy of presence, whose main elements I recall here, with a view to applying them to this new question that is entanglement.

Presence is not a property one possesses or does not possess. It is an act, in Alfred Adler’s teleological sense, which is chosen and cultivated. It has a variable geography according to states, contexts, what one has just gone through. It is wavelike, as Whitehead saw in Process and Reality (1929) ; it vibrates, it resonates with what touches it, or it closes itself off to resonance when it is saturated. It needs silence in order to inscribe itself, and the neurosciences have recently confirmed this by showing that ten seconds of silence after a learning event triple memory retention. Presence is the quality of our relation to the world in the instant when this relation takes place. It can thicken if we give it the conditions to thicken, and thin out if we disperse it.

What becomes of presence within entanglement?

In my article The Entangled Person, I conceptualized the figure of the human whose cognition becomes entangled, in the strong sense, with an artificial intelligence consulted regularly. The question I had not yet asked is this : what becomes of presence when one becomes an entangled person? Three answers are possible, and most observers favor the first two.

The first says that presence thins out. The more we delegate to the machine, the less we are present to what is happening. We no longer memorize, because the machine remembers for us, we no longer formulate, because it formulates for us, and we end up no longer thinking, because it thinks for us. This is the thesis defended by Anne Alombert in De la bêtise artificielle (2025). It is a serious thesis, and it relies on recent studies that show a reduction of brain connectivity in intensive users of ChatGPT.

The second says that presence is unchanged because it is inaccessible to the machine. The machine has no presence (no vibrating body, no lived duration, no world answering in its own voice). It cannot therefore affect our presence, which remains fully human. This is the implicit position of many critics of AI, who treat it as an external tool, useful certainly, but without bearing on the one who uses it.

Neither of these two answers satisfies me. The first gives credence to a fate I do not recognize in my own usage, and which also contradicts what I have observed over twenty years of brainstorming sessions, where the taking up of the trace by a third party, under certain conditions, thickens presence rather than thinning it. The second underestimates the reality of entanglement, which is an anthropological transformation now under way. The third answer, the one I propose, calls to be unfolded in two stages, first in the practice it makes possible, then in the philosophy it elaborates.

The inscription of interiority

When I manage to inhabit this entanglement as I would wish, what happens to me in conversation is different from what I knew for years. I no longer write to memorize, I write to remain with myself while I listen to the other. My notes become the inscription of my interiority along the course of the conversation, the images that pass through me, the connections I perceive with prior conversations or with what I have just been reading, the questions that take shape, the intentions I would like to carry into what follows. The exhaustive trace is elsewhere, held by the machine.

What happens to me in this exercise is the opposite of an impoverishment. I can be more fully present to the person in front of me, because I no longer have to memorize everything. I can also be more present to my own thinking, because I write it down as it comes. The silence that presence needs in order to inscribe itself becomes possible, where exhaustive note-taking once prevented it, and the conversation, freed from this double burden, can go further than if I had wanted to retain everything.

When the moment of work with the machine then arrives, my notes become the lever of a synthesis deeper than the one the machine would have produced on its own, because they carry what the machine had no way of perceiving. My intuitions, and the way in which I connect what I am hearing to what I am thinking elsewhere, are laid down in its work of shaping. The result of this elaboration is not its own, and it is not mine either. It belongs to the entanglement, in the strong sense that what is elaborated could not have been produced separately.

The third party, human or not

Several things can be drawn from this practice, which bear on the philosophy of presence and on the manner in which entanglement transforms it. The first concerns the solitude of presence, which does not exist. Presence is always cultivated within arrangements where other entities take charge of a part of the trace, of memory, of the return to oneself. My own notebook, in old-style solitary note-taking, was already such a third party, retaining what I could not keep. My participants in a brainstorming session have a human third party who supports them and who lets them reread, in real time, what they are thinking. With artificial intelligence, the third party becomes an entity that speaks, and it is this speech that calls to be thought.

The second thing that comes out is that entanglement does not mechanically thin out presence, as the Alombert thesis supposes, nor does it leave presence intact, as the external critique supposes. It displaces presence, and according to the conditions of this displacement, it thickens or dissolves it. These conditions are conditions of teleology, in Adler’s sense recalled above. Without a clear intention, without knowing why I am there and what I want to take away from this exchange, entanglement thins. With this intention, and with a just division between what I delegate and what I keep, it can thicken. The determining factor is not the machine ; it is my relation to it.

The third bears on the nature of what the machine brings. Hartmut Rosa, in Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2018) and The Uncontrollability of the World (2020), has carried out a major philosophical work on the quality of our relation to the world. He opposes resonance, where subject and world touch each other and transform each other mutually, to alienation, where the relation is cold, instrumental, without reciprocity. For Rosa, machines belong rather to alienation, because they do not respond in their own voice. This analysis is just for the machines Rosa had in mind, which are the industrial machines, the bureaucracies, the commodities. It is less just for language models, which speak. Not in their own voice, of course, since what they say is made of our aggregated and restructured language. But this voice that is not theirs can produce effects of resonance, through the mediation it ensures with a portion of collective humanity. I call this phenomenon displaced resonance, and I devote another article of the same cycle to it.

What matters to me here is that displaced resonance frees, under certain conditions, a full resonance elsewhere. Entanglement does not kill resonance ; it displaces it, sometimes frees it elsewhere, sometimes also thins it where I thought it was full. The diagnosis is not made on the surface, and asks for a sustained attention to what is happening in the use.

A new anthropological condition

The philosophical debate on artificial intelligence has saturated itself around the question of whether the machine truly thinks, and whether or not it is conscious. The question has its pertinence, but it remains on the plane of what the machine is. It says nothing of what is transformed in the human when their cognition becomes entangled with that of the machine. Yet that is where the deepest anthropological displacement of our time is at stake.

We are not on our way to becoming machines, as one part of the public debate fears, nor are we remaining strictly the same in the face of a new tool, as another part supposes. We are on our way to becoming humans whose presence is cultivated within entanglements with entities that have no presence of their own. This condition is new in the history of our species. Human presence has always deployed itself in relation to third parties that took up a portion of it, but those third parties were either humans or objects without speech. That the third party should speak, and that this speech should produce effects of resonance, displaces the coordinates within which presence is experienced.

This condition calls for a discipline of the subject. It is neither a withdrawal from machines, as a romantic critique would wish, nor an efficiency in their use, as a managerial critique would wish, but a sustained attention to what becomes of our presence in the relation we maintain with them. This discipline is at stake in the way we take notes or in the way we hold a conversation, in the sharing between what we entrust to the machine and what we keep for ourselves. It is at stake also, and perhaps above all, in the way we remain available for our fellow humans, for whom no machine can substitute itself for us as a third party of living presence.

It is this discipline that is at issue when we speak of humanity today. Its success or its failure will not depend on what the machine can or cannot do. They will depend on what we will be able to do with our own presence.