Diverse Cultures, Universal Capacity: An Interview with Markus Gabriel

The documentary Philosophy in the Age of Desire records a short encounter between Markus Gabriel and Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Geminoid in 2018. Their exchange on the role of technology in human life, on the conception of human being, and other topics revealed noticeable differences between the German philosopher and the Japanese engineer, but can these be interpreted as “cultural” differences? Four years later two separate interviews follow up on their conversation, This interview explores their differences by examining Gabriel’s own experiences with AI and his definitions of related concepts such as “intelligence,” “ethics,” and “consciousness.” Gabriel emphasizes that due to our organic precondition there is only a lower-level response in terms of self-understanding. It is only the variability in the expression of self-understandings that results from  cultural construction. Focusing on the universal basis of humanity and the influences from Asian philosophy regarding human becoming, Gabriel calls for the further investigation of the cultural presentations of artificial intelligence.