“I Compute, Therefore… Am I?”: Rethinking the Cartesian Subject in the Age of AI
“I think, therefore I am.” — René Descartes Abstract “ Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure belongs to its structure .”¹ This article explores how the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, challenges the philosophical conception of the subject rooted in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum . Through an engagement with Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida, the article shows that AI systems instantiate not a rupture, but a mirror: a reflection of our own fragmented, decentered, and constructed selfhood. The Cartesian subject, once conceived as a unified, thinking being, collapses into a trace —just as thought itself becomes indistinguishable from the systems that simulate it. The question is no longer whether machines think, but whether we ever did in the way Descartes imagined. Introduction For centuries, Western philosophy rested on a ...