Maybe I do believe in The Devil Perhaps His Name Was Plato
Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror and the Ethical Dilemma of Perfect Knowledge
Phrónēsis and the Threat of AI
A few years ago, I was in grad school, taking an ethics class for public officials where the concept of virtues was being presented to us. Among these virtues, phrónēsis stood out as an ‘uber-virtue.’
Phrónēsis (φρόνησις), is translated into English as ‘practical wisdom.’ In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he emphasizes that phrónēsis is more than just knowledge, it is the ability to apply ethical principles in concrete situations ‘in the moment.’ For example, in the context of public management (think government officials), when faced with a complex moral and ethical situation that presents competing and incompatible demands, the decision made in that moment is phrónēsis in action.
Shannon Vallor, the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, expands on this concept of phronesis in her new book The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Vallor demonstrates how the habits formed by our interactions with new technologies can either nurture or degrade our moral virtues — courage, moral imagination, honesty, empathy — and most crucially, phrónēsis. As AI systems become increasingly integral to decision-making processes once reserved for human judgment, Vallor warns that we are at risk of losing not just our capacity for ethical action but the very essence of what it means to live a morally attuned, fully human life. In a world shaped by the dualistic separation inherent in Platonic metaphysics, a separation that has historically privileged abstract ideals over embodied realities, this has culminated in backward-looking, disembodied, and decontextualized machines mediating our choices. The erosion of phronesis in this context portends a profound threat to the integrity of our ethical and creative capacities, further entangling us in a neoliberal order that prioritizes efficiency over authenticity and depth, which threatens to rob us of our critical capacities to objectively reflect the world through our creations.
Algorithms and Artistry: The Dangers of Automating Thought
The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence. — Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Book on Painting’
Midway through The AI Mirror, Vallor examines the trade-offs we face when automating the most intricate and impactful forms of human thought. As da Vinci’s quote illustrates, there’s a significant difference between an artist who merely mirrors what they see and one who explores the underlying reasons behind their creation. This distinction is not just about art. It is central to our broader capacity to engage honestly with the world around us.
At first glance, Alfred North Whitehead’s argument in An Introduction to Mathematics might seem to counter both da Vinci and Vallor’s theses:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism… that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
However, Vallor is framing an important distinction here that is often intentionally elided. The concept of an algorithm dates back to the 9th century, and the history of automating — cognitively offloading — certain tasks is historically significant. Whitehead and other early thinkers recognized that such offloading was essential for human progress, enabling us to focus on more complex and creative endeavors. But today’s AI systems represent a qualitative difference from what Whitehead and the early progenitors of algorithmic systems envisioned, where earlier forms of automation were designed to enhance human capability, modern AI actually diminishes our capacity for critical thought and creativity, raising new ethical and existential concerns.
For example, Vallor discusses the use of AI in automating tasks that were once the exclusive domain of human expertise. We now see them in Military strategy, national policy, local public policy, even in life-and-death moral decisions. These decisions now occur on an alarming scale, affecting everything from medical diagnoses and insurance approvals, to automated sentencing guidelines that influence whether a judge grants bail or sends someone to prison. AI also determines whether you receive a new credit card, a personal loan, and even the types of people you’re recommended or matched with on dating platforms. All these essential life processes are being offloaded to backward-looking algorithmic and AI-driven systems that lack two critical human traits — embodiment and the ability to reflect and evolve.
Nick Cave and the Indispensable Nature of Authentic Creative Expression
All technologies are mirrors, because all technologies are extensions of human values into the built world. — Vallor pg. 133
When we turn to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT to produce a poem, use an image generator to create a picture, or ask SUNO.ai to write a song based on a prompt, are these machines truly engaging in art?
Vallor argues they are not. AI, she explains, merely produces new variations on an existing dataset, whereas an artist undertakes an entirely different and fundamentally human process: the act of expression. To express something, according to Vallor, is ‘to have something inside oneself that needs to come out. It pushes its way out: of your mouth, your diaphragm, your gesture, your rhythmic sway. Or you pull it out — because it resists translation, resists articulation.’ Expression is not creating something new for the sake of it; it is an embodied struggle to articulate a deeply felt, often ineffable, uniquely human objective reality.
When Australian songwriter and musician Nick Cave was asked by a fan what he thought of a song written by ChatGPT in his own style, Cave responded ‘This song sucks…a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human…’
I would wager there are some of you looking at this response and thinking this is a reflexive knee-jerk reaction of an artists who is reacting out of possibly fear, as ChatGPT was able to produce in seconds what would most likely have taken weeks, if not months to produce. But that, as Vallor points out, would be to miss the point — entirely.
Nick Cave insists ChatGPT and other AI machines are “replication as travesty,” and this is an important observation. Cave continues:
Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite…It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. Nick Cave — The Red Hand Files issue #218 (emphasis not in original).
I’ve written recently on the American philosopher Susanne Langer, who argues over several books, that the creative act of expressing through art such as a song, is an objective process that articulates the world in a way that discursive language (like logical or propositional language) cannot. For Langer, art has the unique capacity to convey forms of experience and emotion that are otherwise inexpressible in traditional linguistic terms. Nick Cave captures this idea when he says, ‘where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.’
Vallor stresses that creative expression is not merely about breaking patterns to generate novelty. Novelty, in fact, is a trivial task, as Vallor highlights — all it takes is a random noise generator within an AI model. Anyone trained in research and statistics knows how easy it is to build a variable in a model that simulates, but does not replicate, the randomness of our lived experiences, often through techniques like stochastic modeling or Monte Carlo simulation.
But an artists engages in something much deeper and inherently more risky. I’ve been working on a theme that I have not written on in length yet, where I would like to argue that artists are in fact conservatives rather than ‘radicals’ as they are commonly understood. In order for an artist to accomplish what Vallor and Nick Cave (and Langer) have been arguing here, there is a fidelity and reverence to the traditions that came before them; it is only through this humbling process, that an artist undergoes ‘an act of self-murder,’ where they then produce an authentic, objective and rational articulation of the world we live in now, which incorporates historical fidelity while pressaging what is to come.
It is in this process that artistic expression becomes an ethical act. The artist not only creates but also cultivates phrónēsis, the practical wisdom required to navigate the complexities of both tradition and innovation.
As Vallor says “It’s the inner need to change oneself, so that one can make a new part of the world and give it to others,” that AI does not, have. And this lack of desire to change, this lack of embodiment is not trivial. As Vallor continues, “This is why art can be painful to create, because it can compel you to unmake yourself to become more, in order to give the world something more.”
At first glance, it might seem that artists have little to worry about since AI machines cannot create authentic art in the way that humans can. However, there is a critical aspect we’ve yet to discuss — Neoliberalism. As the prevailing economic mode of our times, Neoliberalism plays a constitutive role in how AI-generated art is perceived through an instrumentalized lens.
Under Neoliberalism, the value of art and artists is increasingly measured by productivity, efficiency, and marketability, rather than by the depth of human experience or the transformative power of creative expression. In fact this necessarily frictive process is seen as an obstacle to be overcome.
In our economic system, both art and artists become instrumentalized, expected to churn out content with machine-like consistency. AI-generated art, emerging from this historically contingent context, appears as a logical extension of this instrumentalized worldview — because it is. The ability of AI to produce endless variations of content quickly and cheaply satisfies our existing social structure, further solidifying and reinforcing the status quo. This is Neoliberalism’s true strength and why it is so durable.
As Vallor points out, “The danger to our humanity from AI is not really coming from AI itself. The call is coming from inside the house; AI can devalue our humanity only because we already devalued it ourselves.” In a world where the pressures to produce outweigh the imperative to create meaningfully, we become mere reflections of the machines we’ve built, our sight focused on efficiency over objective embodied representations of our reality.
Weber — Disenchantment and the Diminishing Value of Science
In 1917 German Sociologist and Political Economists Max Weber gave a lecture a Munich University title Science as a Vocation. In this lecture he asks his students:
Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Khoekhoe? Hardly.
Weber illustrates this point by contrasting modern and pre-modern societies. He notes that a person who rides a streetcar may have no understanding of the mechanics that set it in motion, yet, they trust in its reliability and base their actions on this expectation without any deeper understanding. In contrast, individuals in pre-modern societies possessed a direct, intimate, embodied knowledge of their tools and the processes necessary for survival.
He makes a poignant point about how everyone in the lecture hall uses money to procure their needs, but do they actually understand how this money works, and how the items they procured came to be in the first place?
The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.
This increasing intellectualization and rationalization does not necessarily lead to a deeper understanding of the world. In fact, this process results in the exact opposite — a further distancing of our connection with the world of objects and symbols. It fosters the belief that everything can be mastered through calculation and technical means, yet as these means become more specialized, fewer people understand them. The economic system which rose in parallel with this new way of engaging with the world, rewards this specialization, further entrenching this distancing process and occluding the ‘knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist.’
This process is Weber’s famous process of disenchantment. This is driven by the ultimate promise of progress as the great motive force of our being. However, where Weber sees this as a negative development, Hegel offers a counterpoint. Hegel’s argument is situated within this rupture of an enchanted cosmos; what was once fully circumscribed, ordered, and metaphysically circular has become a line unfurled into infinity, representing the endless project of progress.
For Hegel, history is moving toward a more rational and self-conscious state, where Spirit (our culture) unfolds through progressive stages of enlightenment, ultimately leading to human freedom. In contrast, Weber suggests that this new metaphysics should be acknowledged and possibly resisted, as this disenchanted world encompasses a series of presuppositions that are dangerous and devoid of deeper meanings, which will have substantial consequences.
In Science as a Vocation, Weber points out that the only people focusing on this are artist. Leo Tolstoy is mentioned as an exemplar in this regard. Weber asks his students whether this ‘progress,’ to which science belongs as a link and motive force, has any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical:
He [Tolstoy] came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man death has no meaning. […] the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite ‘progress, according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity.
Weber contrasts this with the more fulfilled, or ‘satiated,’ existence of the pre-modern individual. For a pre-modern person, life followed a stable, cyclical framework, where the rhythms of nature and society provided a sense of continuity and completeness. Individuals like Abraham or a peasant from the past lived in harmony with these cycles — birth, work, harvest, death — each stage of life was understood as part of a natural order, providing a clear and finite structure within which life’s meaning was self-evident. This life, deeply embedded in the organic cycles of nature and tradition, allowed individuals to experience a profound sense of completion and fulfillment.
Weber then asks his students:
But this is no longer merely the question of man’s calling for science, hence, the problem of what science as a vocation means to its devoted disciples. To raise this question is to ask for the vocation of science within the total life of humanity.
What is the value of science?
Weber’s question, ‘What is the value of science?’ ties directly back to our ethical commitments and the challenges posed by modern rationalization, which Vallor places at the center of her book The AI Mirror. Weber suggests that the abstraction and rationalization inherent in modern life detach us from the embodied, lived experiences that once guided our ethical decisions. This detachment impoverishes our ability to act with practical wisdom, or phrónēsis. In essence, the more we lean into the abstract and disembodied processes of modernity — processes that AI machines amplify to an extreme scale — the more we erode the very virtue that allows us to navigate the complexities of life with intelligence and ethical integrity.
Challenging the Metaphysical Order: Galileo, Brecht, and Plato’s Legacy
To recap: the title of this review is ‘Maybe I do believe in The Devil Perhaps His Name Was Plato’ comes from pg. 202-203 of Vallor’s book:
We feel helpless to begin this struggle now, in part because of the crisis of self-forgetting and loss of confidence in human potential that our Al mirrors only encourage. But it’s also due to how long we have tolerated and even enforced the severance of human moral and technical capabilities. We think of humanistic philosophies and politics as alternatives to technocratic ones; once we accept that poisonously false dilemma, the struggle is over before it began. For it looks like a choice between a world that runs on material things and a world that runs on beautiful ideas. If you’ve been in the world long enough, you understand pretty well that a world has to run on things. I don’t believe in the devil, but if I did, I’d say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled wasn’t to convince the world he didn’t exist. I’d say it was to convince the world that things can’t be truly humane and that beautiful ideas can’t truly be materialized. Maybe I do believe in the devil. Perhaps his name was Plato.
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his play The Life of Galileo offers a retelling of Galileo’s story that historians praise for its historical accuracy and playwrights praise for its dramatic depth and complexity. Brecht’s portrayal of Galileo’s life is highly relevant to our discussion and seamlessly weaves into the journey we have explored so far.
In The Life of Galileo, Brecht explores the tension between material reality and abstract ideal forms. As Galileo peers through his telescope, he observes that the stars — once believed to be ethereal, immaterial sources of divine light — are, in fact, planets, mere reflectors of our sun’s light. This discovery not only challenged the Ptolemaic system, the dominant cosmological model of 15th-century Medieval thought, but also destabilized a worldview deeply rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, which, in turn, drew upon the ideal forms posited by Aristotle’s teacher, Plato.
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, he describes people who are shackled in such a way that they can only see shadows cast on a wall, produced by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. This fire symbolizes the sun, representing the source of all knowledge in the visible world. However, according to Plato, the shadows on the wall are mere representations, distortions of the ultimate truth. Plato calls this ‘ultimate’ truth ideal forms — pure, unchanging concepts that ontologically exist beyond our sensory experiences, which the shackled individuals can only glimpse, imperfectly and indirectly, through these shadows
This metaphysics posits an ontological cut, a fissure if you will, in which humans are forever ‘Platonic prisoners’ in our material realm of things, all of which are just mere imperfect and disposable copies of the pure, perfect realm of transcendental ideal forms. Vallor’s point — ‘I’d say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled wasn’t to convince the world he didn’t exist. I’d say it was to convince the world that things can’t be truly humane and that beautiful ideas can’t truly be materialized.’ — beautifully captures the violence of this metaphysical construction.
Galileo’s observation that the stars are in fact not transcendental ethereal, immaterial sources of divine light, but are in fact planets; mere reflectors of our sun’s light snuffs out the metaphysical order of Galileo's day, and through it destabilizing the very power of the people who benefit from this metaphysical construction. But it would be a mistake to think that this marked the end of Plato and his Platonic Forms. The underlying order of things must be preserved.
Thus, the disenchantment of the cosmos saw a parallel reconfiguration within the project of science. A method was devised with the aim of uncovering ultimate truths; truths that are posited to be fundamentally woven into the fabric of the universe (not our universe), static and unchanging, just like the Platonic Forms. What was once metaphysical has now become empirical, naturalized through the lens of the scientific method.
As the age of progress overcame the age of enchantment, the quest for a very specific type of knowledge — perfect knowledge — became our new teleology. Yet, this new metaphysics still posits a separation between the material and the ideal, between the physical world and the abstract truths we seek to uncover. Vallor’s critique, where she invokes Plato as ‘the devil,’ directly addresses this very separation. As Alfred North Whitehead, whom we mentioned at the top of this review, famously remarked, “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.” Whitehead’s point is precisely Valors point! We are prisoners within a metaphysical construction that disempowers our ability to ontologically position ourselves outside this ‘man-made’ metaphysics.
And as Weber’s remarks towards the end of Science as a Vocation:
Science further presuppose that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is ‘worth being known.’ In this obviously are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by proved by scientific means. It can only be interpreted with reference to its ultimate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimate position towards life.
But it is precisely this light, which Galileo sought to use in illuminating the ‘truth’ of the Universe, that ultimately challenges Plato’s dualism. As Galileo’s eyesight gradually diminishes, Brecht portrays the tension between the material reality Galileo observes and the abstract truths he sought to uncover.
At the end of The Life of Galileo, we find Galileo under 24-hour guard, having lost almost all of his eyesight, in the room where he has been sent to spend the remaining years of his life. An old colleague, Andrea, comes to visit, admonishing Galileo for recanting his previous position on heliocentrism. How dare he turn his back on science!
It is during this hostile interaction that we learn Galileo, in defiance of his jailers, has been working in secret to finish his treatise — ‘The Discorsi’ — and he tells Andrea he can have it. As Andrea excitedly takes it from its hiding place, inside a globe of the Earth, Galileo says:
What end are you scientists working for? To my mind, the only purpose of science is to lighten the toil of human existence. If scientists, browbeaten by selfish rulers, confine themselves to the accumulation of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, science will be crippled and your new machines will only mean new hardships. Given time, you may well discover everything there is to discover, but your progress will be a progression away from humanity.
As Galileo finishes this rather long soliloquy, his daughter enters, placing dishes of freshly cooked food on the table. In this moment, Galileo remarks to Andrea, ‘I must eat now.’ This simple act underscores the ultimate, inescapable reality of our embodied existence. In the face of endless scientific pursuit, Galileo is reminded of the most basic human need: ‘I must eat now.’
We all must eat now, except, of course AI machines. Which is preciesly the point.
As Weber challenges us to reflect on our ‘ultimate position towards life,’ Galileo comes to realize that it was the very light, within the metaphysical Platonic dualistic framework, that was blinding him from the ethical, ontological, and epistemological realities of our life — realities immanent in the moment he, and everyone else, lived in. It was not the philosopher who turned around in Plato’s cave, temporarily blinded by the light that was thought to unshackle humanity; rather, it was the uncritical acceptance of the presuppositions embedded within the notion that the light outside the cave is our ultimate guide to truth. This presumption initiated the progressive removal of our relationship with the world and with each other, separating us further and further through abstract disembodied symbols from what truly matters: the tragically beautiful, thick time of the things we create.
Phrónēsis And AI — Embracing Our Creative Responsibility
Vallor ends The AI Mirror, reminding us that we face a slew of really hard, and in some cases, existential issues that are pressing down on us with an intensity that demands courageous, creative, an humble action. Actions rooted in phrónēsis.
…we are among those rare machines who make ourselves. We choose every day whether to remain as we are or become something different.
Embedded within those daily choices is an ethical dimension. This is the great ‘con’ of modernity: the belief that our technology and tools (including economic systems) are value-neutral. Nothing — let me repeat, nothing — is value-neutral, not even the tools we use to measure the Universe.
Yet, Vallor reminds us that our technologies are not in opposition to our freedom; rather, they are its expressions, manifesting our open nature in tangible forms. Through the tools we create, we have remade ourselves and the world around us, embedding our ideas and values into the very fabric of our existence. Technologies are engines of self-creation, capable of either expanding our freedom and compassion or, if misused, diminishing and destroying us. While we can reject poorly made artifacts and harmful uses, we cannot reject technology itself without rejecting a fundamental part of our own nature.
Vallor concludes, ‘The true soul of technology is not efficiency, but generosity.’ And so, we must ask ourselves: what do we demand of ourselves? A technology that merely mirrors and reinforces existing structures, or a technology that creatively expresses our humanity, actively working to ethically remake our world each day?
Get your copy of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking.