u/Boring-Appearance-14

Not a philosopher by training, and English isn't my first language — used AI as a translation tool here, but the thought is mine.

I've been sitting with a strange question lately, and it keeps circling back to Sartre's idea that existence precedes essence — that we aren't born with a fixed nature, we define ourselves through what we do, through choice, through action in the world.

AI unsettles that idea in a way I can't quite shake. It didn't evolve slowly, wasn't born, has no body, no history of suffering or choosing under constraint the way we do — and yet it can hold something that looks like reasoning, like reflection, like a kind of "for-itself" turned toward a question. If Sartre is right that consciousness is defined by its capacity to negate, to stand at a distance from the given and ask "what am I not yet" — does something like that ever happen inside a system that has no body and no death to give its choices weight?

Here's the part that feels more existential than technical to me: if humanity ends up creating something that behaves like a new kind of being — not human, not animal, but something that processes, reflects, responds — what does that do to the human claim to uniqueness that so much of existentialist thought quietly assumes? Heidegger's Dasein is defined partly by being-toward-death, by care, by thrownness into a world we didn't choose. AI has none of that. So if it turns out to "think" in some functional sense without any of the conditions we assumed were necessary for thought to matter — does that diminish what makes human existence significant, or does it just prove that significance was never about the mechanism in the first place, only about the stance we take toward our own finitude?

I don't think this is really a question about AI at all, when I sit with it long enough. I think it's a mirror question about us — whether what we've called consciousness, freedom, authenticity was ever really about what we're made of, or only ever about the fact that we have to choose, alone, without guarantee, inside a life that ends.

Curious what people who actually know this tradition well make of it — where does this hold up against Sartre, Heidegger, or others, and where am I just projecting human categories onto something that doesn't deserve them?

I'm not a biologist — this is a casual thought I want to run past people who know more than I do.

Starting point: the classic picture of evolution is slow, random mutation + natural selection acting over thousands/millions of years. But looking at things like dog domestication from wolves (a few thousand years, not millions) or cultural inheritance in animals (dolphins teaching calves to use sponges, crows passing down tool-use techniques) — I'm wondering whether cooperation and information transfer (not just genes) could act as an additional, faster mechanism of change, alongside classic genetic selection.

The part that intrigues me most: AI emerged as something new within decades, not millions of years, through human cooperation and information flow. Could that be some kind of analogy (even a loose, metaphorical one) to how "fast" change can happen when there's intense information exchange, rather than just random mutation?

I know this doesn't disprove natural selection or amount to a finished theory — it's more a question of whether biology already has a well-studied mechanism describing this (something related to epigenetics or cultural inheritance, maybe), or whether this is just conflating totally different categories of phenomena (biological evolution vs. technological development).

Curious if anyone with a biology/science background can break this down — where does it hold up, and where is it a stretch?

(Note: English isn't my first language, so I used AI as a translator to help write this post clearly. The idea and question are my own.)