What Makes Us Precious as Humans Comes Precisely from Our Limits

Today's almanac: "Auspicious for abstaining from AI"

In 2023, not long after ChatGPT came out, I added "use AI at least once a day" to my list of daily check-in habits.

Yet today we're already asking — beyond immersing ourselves in AI's convenience and grandeur, how do we find the value that truly belongs to "humans"? —

So now I require myself to have "non-AI writing time."

This shift both frighteningly shows AI's influence on humanity's collective mind, and reflects the precious pursuit of, and struggle for, meaning and self-worth by our tiny species.

Now, to bring myself back to "me," I'm letting go of the wave I've been working so hard to keep up with and returning to a more primal path of practice.

Writing by myself is a choice. What characterises humans, what makes us unique, comes precisely from the narrowness of our brains' abilities.

In the age of AI, the place of humans may also come precisely from our "limits."

Realising that I am both everything and nothing.

A couple of days ago I came across this passage:

"Each of us is both everything and nothing — a huge paradox.

From our own point of view, we are everything. For instance, when our life ends, the whole world disappears for us... That is why, for most people (and other species), losing one's life is the worst thing there is, and living the best life possible is immensely important.

But if we look down on ourselves from nature's perspective, we clearly carry no weight at all. The reality is that each of us is just one of roughly 7 billion humans, and humans are just one of roughly 10 million species on Earth. Earth is just one of roughly 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, and the whole universe has roughly 2 trillion galaxies. 🪐 A human lifespan is only about 1/3,000 of human history, and human history is only 1/20,000 of Earth's history.

In other words, we are unimaginably small and fleeting, and whatever we achieve, its impact is negligible."

We instinctively want our lives to mean something. How can we seem to matter? Do we matter to others? But from the big-picture view, they don't matter any more than we do. Or do we matter in some larger, more mysterious sense we can never truly understand? Or is the question of whether we matter not even important?

Questions like these are both profound and funny to think about.

Where does human value come from?

A couple of days ago at Tsinghua University, I sat in on an undergraduate psychology class. Before the class, a group of undergrads presented on a really interesting topic:

Once emotional value and caregiving value are replaced by AI and machines — what is special about long-term, stable, exclusive intimate relationships between humans?

Their 15-minute presentation was fascinating in both content and delivery, full of philosophical reflection — they laid out the differences between the two from six angles, for example:

Human interaction is in-the-moment and spontaneous, while technology is a preset framework;

The experiences human lovers create through unspoken understanding are private and limited,

while technology is the "big Other," the sum of all information;

Human lovers have subjectivity, and love is spontaneous,

while technology carries a strong purpose — it is service-oriented;

technology has no room to choose, so we can't feel chosen.

They were brilliant! Better still, at the end they even critiqued "the method of critique" itself:

So far, all human experiences of intimacy have been based on "human-to-human experience."

When we criticise machines, we can't use our existing, habitual human yardstick to compare what humans can do and machines can't.

Because that yardstick of critique is unfair to technology.

So why do we choose to love that one "particular person, THE ONE"?

Is each person unique?

When we place ourselves in the wider world, no one is unique. Abstract far enough, and everyone is a patchwork. Experiences, memories and personalities share a great deal of similarity. Memory is a construction — what I remember remembering isn't necessarily what I actually remember.

But a human life lasts only a few short decades, and the chance of meeting "a person like this" is vanishingly small — so to me they are unique, and so am I to them.

Memory too — my time flows in only one direction, I have only one youth; it may be like everyone else's, but it carries my label.

We don't have to, and shouldn't, always place ourselves in the boundless expanse of time and space.

Intimacy is something I bestow; it carries my projection, and to myself, I am unprecedented and unrepeatable.

What am I actually trying to say?

What I want to say is:

In the garden of forking paths, we have countless choices. In countless parallel universes, the me of this moment has countless things to say to you, countless things to do, books to read, people to love — countless "unfinished selves."

And yet, because of my brain's limitations, my finite time and my life's one-way direction, in every present moment my personality, my understanding and my expression can only be one of those choices. That choice isn't necessarily the most perfect answer, precisely calculated by AI; it is in-the-moment, full of chance, and irreversible. It is exactly these limits that make up "me."

In the past, we pursued rich understanding and complete unfolding; now, human value may come precisely from this — I can only be this way, and I choose to be this way.