The machine simulates language, calculation, and care, but it does not inhabit the world nor participate in the embodied, affective, and responsible structure of human existence
Abstract: Contemporary debate on artificial intelligence often tends to focus on the performance power of computational systems, on their ability to produce texts, images, diagnoses, decisions, and interactions increasingly similar to human ones; yet it risks overlooking the most radical question, which is not technical but ontological: the machine can simulate certain functions of intelligence, but it does not share the human mode of being, because it is not a lived body, it is not intentional consciousness, it is not an existence thrown into the world, it is not a narrative subject, it is not moral responsibility, and it is not an embodied relationship. Starting from the phenomenological tradition, from Husserl to Heidegger, from Merleau-Ponty to Ricoeur, and in dialogue with the anthropological reflection proposed by Leo XIV in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the article argues that the difference between human beings and artificial intelligence cannot be bridged through a quantitative increase in computational power, since it concerns the very structure of existence and the way in which the human being inhabits the world, understands, suffers, promises, responds, cares, and constitutes himself in relation to the other.
Keywords: #ArtificialIntelligence #Ontology #Phenomenology #Heidegger #Husserl #MerleauPonty #Ricoeur #MagnificaHumanitas #LeoXIV #DigitalEthics #Person #HumanDignity #AntonioRadicchio #ethicasocietas #ethicasocietasrivista #scientificjournal #humanities #socialsciences #ethicasocietasupli
Antonio Radicchio is a psychologist and psychotherapist. He graduated in Psychological Sciences and in Clinical and Health Psychology from the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti, and specialized in psychotherapy at the Institute of Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychology and Psychotherapy in Rome. He has worked in Mental Health Centres in Abruzzo and for over ten years as a psychologist and Case Manager with the CO.S.M.A. association. He is the author of the contribution Psychological Aspects of Internet Addiction (2018) and currently works in private practice in Pescara, also providing online consultations.
The Removed Question in the Debate on Artificial Intelligence
The debate on artificial intelligence often continues to postpone the decisive question, as if it were too broad to be addressed in its essential core or too uncomfortable to be freed from the rhetoric of innovation: what remains of the human being when what for centuries had been considered the privileged sign of human specificity — thought, language, the ability to process information, argue, respond, advise, and even simulate empathy — now appears reproducible by artificial systems with a degree of effectiveness and verisimilitude that can no longer be dismissed as a mere technical artifice.
The issue, however, cannot be framed solely in terms of a competition between human performance and machine performance, because reducing the human being to what he can do already means accepting the most problematic assumption of technocratic rationality, according to which the identity of a being coincides with the function it performs, with the efficiency it guarantees, with the amount of output it produces, or with the complexity of the operations it is able to execute. The problem of artificial intelligence, then, is not simply whether the machine can think, but whether thought can be separated from existence, from the body, from temporality, from responsibility, from vulnerability, and from the concrete history of a subject who does not merely process information, but inhabits a world.
It is precisely on this level that phenomenology retains an extraordinary critical force, because it had already understood, long before the contemporary emergence of artificial intelligence, that the human being cannot be reduced to an abstract knowing subject, to a formal structure of the intellect, or to an apparatus for representing the world, but must instead be understood as embodied existence, affectively situated, temporally extended, and always already involved in a horizon of meaning that precedes and constitutes him. From this perspective, the difference between human being and machine is not a provisional difference destined to be overcome by more powerful models, but a difference of ontological order, because it concerns the very way in which the human being is and the way in which the machine operates.
Western Metaphysics and the Reduction of the Living to the Representable
To understand the scope of the challenge posed by artificial intelligence, it is necessary to retrace the long history through which Western metaphysics has progressively privileged what endures, what can be ordered, what can be reduced to form, law, representation, and calculation, while relegating to the margins of intelligibility what is singular, changing, affective, unrepeatable, and qualitatively lived. Already in Parmenides, authentic being is what does not change, while becoming is confined to the sphere of dóxa, appearance and unstable opinion; in Plato this approach is consolidated in the separation between the world of Ideas, eternal and immutable, and the sensible world, transient and imperfect, so that knowing means rising from the mutable to the universal, from the particular to form, from sensory data to intelligible order.
Aristotle reintegrates movement and individual substance within a more articulated ontology of reality, yet even in his perspective episteme remains knowledge of causes, forms, and general structures, while concrete singularity, in its existential unrepeatability, remains difficult to thematize as a full object of knowledge. Modern science inherits this approach and radicalizes it through the mathematization of nature, making knowable what can be measured, repeated, predicted, and formalized, while the quality of experience, the color of a sunset, the tone of a voice, the density of pain, or the specificity of an encounter are progressively downgraded to subjective, secondary dimensions, not fully accessible to the paradigm of objective knowledge.
Within this horizon, human experience in its concrete singularity becomes the problematic residue of a knowledge that tends to dissolve lived experience into general categories, to transform the person into a case, history into data, affection into a variable, pain into a parameter, and behavior into prediction. It is within this genealogy that the Kantian turn must also be situated, because Kant recognizes human dignity and moral autonomy, radically distinguishing the human being from the being of a thing, yet he thinks experience through the pure forms of intuition and the categories of the intellect, that is, through a transcendental structure that makes all knowledge possible but which, precisely because of its universality, tends to leave the unrepeatable singularity of lived experience at the margins.
The Kantian transcendental subject is what makes experience possible, but on the formal level it is also the same for everyone; what constitutes it as a knowing subject is precisely what makes it interchangeable in structure, while that dimension remains less fully thought through whereby this anguish is mine and not yours, this memory is mine and not yours, this wound belongs to my history and cannot simply be translated into a general category. It is within this tension that the space of phenomenology opens, a phenomenology that does not reject reason, but rejects the reduction of experience to its mere formalizability.
Heidegger, Technology, and the Dominion of Availability
Heidegger showed with particular radicality how Western modernity progressively identified truth with representability, transforming being into what can be placed before a subject, objectified, calculated, predicted, and made available. Beginning with the Cartesian line of modern subjectivity, reality becomes ob-iectum, that which stands before, that which can be grasped by the subject’s gaze and inserted into a system of control, prediction, and domination (Heidegger, 2011).
Modern technology, from this perspective, is not simply a set of instruments, but the historical fulfillment of a particular understanding of being, in which everything that exists is interpreted as available stock, as a reserve to be organized, optimized, and exploited. The Gestell, that is, the enframing or dispositif of making-available, indicates precisely this epochal structure through which nature, labor, language, the body, and finally the human being himself are reduced to the form of resource, function, and performance.
Artificial intelligence constitutes one of the most advanced manifestations of this transformation, because it does not merely automate tasks, but introduces a new form of mediation between world and decision, between experience and prediction, between language and response, between person and system. The risk does not lie only in the fact that the machine may err, discriminate, or obscure decision-making processes, but in something deeper: the possibility that the human being may end up understanding himself according to the model of the machine, interpreting himself as an informational system, an aggregate of data, an optimizable function, or a behavioral profile.
From this perspective, artificial intelligence is not dangerous because it is too different from the human being, but because it is sufficiently similar in its performance to induce the human being to forget what in him is not performance. Functional similarity risks obscuring ontological difference, and the efficiency of the answer risks replacing the question of meaning.
Intentional Consciousness and the Return to the Things Themselves
Husserlian phenomenology proposes a decisive reversal, because the famous invitation to return “to the things themselves” does not indicate a naïve empiricism, but the need to suspend the theoretical constructions that separate thought from lived experience, restoring to consciousness its intentional structure. Consciousness, for Husserl, is not a substance closed in on itself that subsequently opens to the world, but is always consciousness of something, that is, openness, direction, original relation (Husserl, 2002).
This approach radically modifies the problem of the relationship between human being and machine, because the human being is not first of all a device that receives inputs and produces outputs, but an existence constituted in reference to the world, to others, to time, and to its own history. Consciousness is not simply the internal processing of information, but the mode of appearance of the world, an intentional field in which subject and object are not separate givens, but are co-constituted within experience.
The machine, however capable it may be of processing texts, images, signals, patterns, and correlations, does not have a world in the phenomenological sense of the term. It operates on data, but does not live the appearing of the datum; it recognizes configurations, but is not touched by meaning; it produces contextually adequate responses, but is not situated within a horizon of meaning that precedes and concerns it. It is here that the difference is no longer quantitative, but qualitative: the human being is not merely more complex than the machine, but is in a different way.
Dasein, Anguish, and Understanding as a Mode of Being
Heidegger takes phenomenology beyond the theory of knowledge, transforming it into an analytic of existence. The human being is not simply a subject, but Dasein, being-in-the-world, that is, an entity for whom, in its being, its very being is at stake. This means that the human being does not merely stand in the world as an object among objects, but is always already thrown into a horizon of meanings, relations, possibilities, obligations, expectations, memories, and affective tonalities that constitute the very fabric of his existence (Heidegger, 2011).
Understanding, in Heidegger, is not primarily a cognitive operation, but a modality of existence; one does not understand because one calculates, but because one is already involved, situated, affectively disposed, open to the world according to a certain tonality. The Stimmungen, that is, fundamental moods such as anguish, boredom, joy, fear, or emptiness, are not secondary psychological states, but original ways in which the world opens or closes, assumes meaning or loses it, becomes familiar or alien.
A machine can linguistically recognize the word “anguish,” it can generate a plausible description of anguish, it can even respond with empathic formulas to an anguished subject, but it cannot be anguished, because the nothingness of possibilities does not open before it, it does not know finitude, it does not live its own mortality, it is not exposed to the uncertainty of its own potentiality-for-being. The machine is not thrown into the world, it does not have to assume its own existence, it does not have to choose while knowing that every choice closes off other possibilities, it does not have to answer for itself before others and before time.
The Body as the Original Place of Meaning
Merleau-Ponty radicalizes this line of thought by showing that the body is not an instrument of consciousness, nor an object among objects, but the very subject of perception, the original place in which the world appears as habitable, practicable, and meaningful (Merleau-Ponty, 2003). The lived body, the phenomenological Leib, does not coincide with the Körper of scientific description, because it is not the body observed from the outside, but the body lived from within, the body that feels, orients itself, anticipates, remembers, moves, and understands before formulating concepts.
When a person learns to ride a bicycle, he does not simply memorize a sequence of rules, but incorporates a motor knowledge that becomes part of his way of inhabiting space; when he recognizes pain on another person’s face, he does not logically infer a hidden mental state, but immediately perceives an embodied signification, because the expression of the other is given in the intercorporeal field before any explicit inference. Meaning, therefore, is not a label added to perception, but emerges in the living relationship between body and world.
From this follows a decisive consequence for artificial intelligence. A system that has no lived body, that does not inhabit space, that does not carry within itself the embodied memory of experience, that does not know fatigue, modesty, shame, caress, pain, distance, physical fear, or the presence of the other as face, lacks the original structure through which human meaning is constituted. It can simulate the language of corporeality, but it does not possess the corporeality from which that language derives its meaning.
Narrative Identity and the Responsibility of the Self
Ricoeur introduces another essential element, showing that personal identity is not an immobile core that remains identical to itself, but a dynamic tension between sameness and selfhood, between what allows a person to be recognized as the same over time and what makes him capable of keeping a promise, assuming responsibility, and answering for himself despite change (Ricoeur, 1993).
Narrative identity is the way in which experience becomes habitable over time, because each person understands himself through a plot that gathers events, wounds, decisions, guilt, fidelity, relationships, failures, and hopes, without reducing them to an objective datum or dissolving them into pure invention. The narrative of the self is not an arbitrary fiction, but the form through which existence seeks to give itself continuity and meaning.
The machine can generate an autobiography, produce coherent narratives, simulate memory and conversational continuity, but it does not have a life that such a narrative must preserve, interpret, or reconcile. It has not betrayed, has not promised, has not forgiven, has not waited, has not lost, has not learned from experience in the human sense of the term, because there is no self exposed to the risk of becoming other than what it was. Its learning is statistical adaptation, not existential maturation.
The Simulation of Empathy and the Risk of Apparent Relationship
One of the most delicate fields concerns the ability of artificial intelligence to simulate empathy, care, listening, and understanding, because here linguistic similarity can become particularly seductive, especially in contexts of loneliness, fragility, psychological distress, or need for recognition. An artificial system can respond with warm, appropriate, and apparently understanding words, it can imitate the language of the helping relationship, it can offer continuity and availability superior to that of many human relationships, but it does not truly encounter the other, because there is no subject who exposes himself to the reciprocity, fatigue, risk, and transformation that every authentic encounter entails.
The therapeutic, educational, or communal relationship cannot be reduced to an exchange of information, nor to a process of optimizing well-being, because it is an event between subjectivities, in which meaning emerges through presence, word, silence, body, trust, resistance, and the possibility that the other is not merely available but truly other. A fully simulated relationship may appear reassuring precisely because it eliminates the risk of otherness, but in doing so it risks replacing the desire for encounter with the satisfaction of a response that is always ready, always measured, always free of friction.
This does not mean denying all usefulness to artificial support tools, nor rejecting innovation a priori in the fields of mental health, education, or assistance, but it does mean preventing technical help from being confused with human relationship, and the simulation of care from being mistaken for care in the full sense of the term. Care, indeed, is not only the production of an adequate response, but the presence of someone who responds.
Magnifica Humanitas and the Custody of the Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Leo XIV enters this scenario with an approach that, although moving within a theological perspective, possesses clear anthropological, social, and ethical relevance, because it places at the center the custody of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence and recalls the need for discernment regarding the vision of the human being that guides technological development (Leo XIV, 2026).
The decisive point of the encyclical is not a condemnation of technology, but a critique of the technocratic paradigm when it transforms technology from a means into a criterion, to the point of making the value of the person coincide with his efficiency, productivity, adaptability, or systemic usefulness. When technology determines what counts, what is not measurable risks no longer counting; when performance becomes the measure of the human, fragility, slowness, dependence, suffering, contemplation, and gratuitousness are perceived as defects to be corrected rather than as constitutive dimensions of existence.
The reference to the ontological dignity of the person, which belongs to every human being by the simple fact of existing and not because of what he produces, achieves, or guarantees, makes it possible to remove the human being from the logic of functional replaceability. The human being does not have value because he performs; rather, he performs, when and as he can, within a value that precedes him. This distinction is essential in the age of artificial intelligence, because it prevents the comparison between human being and machine from being decided on the wrong ground, namely that of comparative efficiency.
Ontological Difference as an Ethical and Political Criterion
The ethical safeguarding of the human being in the age of artificial intelligence therefore requires that awareness of the ontological difference between human existence and artificial functioning remain alive. This is not a matter of opposing innovation, nor of falling into sterile nostalgia for a pre-technological world, but of recognizing that the person is not a system to be optimized, not a set of data to be processed, not a function replaceable by a more efficient one, but a being who happens in time, is constituted in relationship, bears a body, passes through pain, builds a history, and assumes responsibility.
This awareness must enter the governance of artificial intelligence, legislation, system design, the caring professions, universities, psychology, medicine, philosophy, theology, and educational institutions, because the question does not concern only what machines can do, but what idea of the human being is implicitly assumed when one decides to entrust to an artificial system selections, diagnoses, evaluations, accompaniment, relationships, risk judgments, or decision-making processes that affect the concrete lives of people.
When an algorithm selects who should access a resource, an opportunity, credit, medical treatment, an educational pathway, or an administrative measure, the problem is not only the accuracy of the model, but the responsibility of the one who decides, the possibility of contesting the criterion, the comprehensibility of the evaluation, the protection of singularity, and the refusal to reduce the person to the probabilistic sum of his data. A system devoid of moral consciousness cannot be the ultimate place of decision about the human, because it cannot morally answer for what it produces.
The Question That Remains
The decisive question, then, is not whether artificial intelligence can become increasingly powerful, because this is already evident, but whether its development makes human life more human, more just, more relational, more dignified, more capable of preserving what in the human being exceeds the measure of performance. This is the question that the phenomenological tradition, ethical thought, and contemporary anthropological reflection hand down to our time.
The machine can calculate, simulate, respond, generate, correlate, predict, and assist, but it does not inhabit the world, does not die, does not promise, does not suffer, does not forgive, does not feel shame, does not love, does not carry within itself the weight of a history, and does not assume responsibility for its own being. The human being, instead, is precisely this fragile and irreducible intertwining of body, world, time, relationship, memory, possibility, and responsibility.
Preserving the difference does not mean diminishing technology, but preventing it from becoming a total anthropology. It means recognizing that artificial intelligence can be a powerful instrument, a transformative environment, and even a precious support, but it cannot be the measure of the human being. The measure of the human being remains his dignity, that which no machine can produce, no algorithm can exhaust, and no performance can ground.
Essential Bibliography
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Leo XIV. (2026). Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical Letter on the Custody of the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Vatican City: Holy See.
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