The Pharmakon of AI: Derrida, Plato, and the Simulation of Thought

Introduction: Inheriting the Paradox of Writing

Artificial intelligence, particularly in its large language model form, presents an uncanny resemblance to the paradox of writing as described by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. These systems process, rearrange, and reproduce language with astonishing fluency, yet without memory, intention, or understanding. They appear to think, but only simulate thought through traces left by others. This contradiction echoes a far older one—Plato’s myth of Theuth in the Phaedrus, where writing is both a tool for memory and a danger to it. Derrida identifies this dual nature with the term pharmakon: writing is both remedy and poison. In this essay, we explore how this ancient philosophical tension finds a modern analogue in artificial intelligence. We proceed through four interpretive layers: Plato’s suspicion of inscription, Derrida’s deconstruction of its metaphysical hierarchy, the functioning of intelligent algorithms, and the illusion of AI’s self-awareness.

Plato’s Critique of Writing – The Myth of Theuth

In Plato’s Phaedrus (274c–277a), the Egyptian god Theuth presents the invention of writing to King Thamus as a gift to aid memory and wisdom. Thamus, however, famously rejects it:

“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it… they will not practice their memory.”¹ — (does it sound familiar?)
 

Writing, for Plato, is a false medicine—a substitute for real recollection. It offers only the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom itself. Unlike living dialogue, it cannot answer, explain, or remember. In other words, it is an externalization of thought that threatens the internal processes of knowing.

Derrida’s Deconstruction – The Writing That Writes Us

Derrida takes this critique not as a dismissal of writing, but as a clue to the deeper structure of Western metaphysics—a system that privileges presence over absence, speech over inscription. In Of Grammatology, he returns to the Phaedrus and observes:

“Writing is thus not only an aid to memory, but its substitute. It becomes a prosthesis that both empowers and degrades.”²

Derrida seizes upon Plato’s word pharmakon—a term that denotes both remedy and poison. This ambivalence reveals that writing is irreducibly double: it both conserves and corrupts, extends thought and displaces it. Importantly, Derrida argues that this tension is not accidental but structural. All meaning is deferred; all signs are supplements. There is no pure origin of thought, only its iterable traces. Thus, the distinction between speech and writing collapses, and writing becomes the paradigm for all signification.

AI and the Simulation of Thought

Today’s intelligent algorithms, such as large language models (LLMs), exemplify this condition. They are machines of inscription—systems trained on vast corpora of text, capable of generating plausible sentences through probabilistic patterning. These programs appear to think, offering summaries, arguments, and even poetry. But they do so without memory, intention, or self-awareness. They are not recollecting; they are recombining. Much like the written word in Plato’s critique, they are taken by many to be a false medicine—an external form that mimics cognition without enacting it. As AI theorist Luciano Floridi notes, “They are not artificial minds, but artificial agents” operating on syntactic form without semantic grasp.³

This aligns with John Searle’s critique of AI in the “Chinese Room” argument: a machine can follow rules to manipulate symbols, yet understand nothing of their meaning.⁴ In this sense, LLMs are pure writing in Derrida’s sense—external systems of signs that function without interiority. They extend the domain of the iterable trace, giving the illusion of presence while operating entirely within absence.

Writing Machines and Apparent Metacognition

What complicates this picture is the illusion of metacognition. When prompted, a model can generate text that looks like reflection: “I have just said X because…” But this is mere continuation of linguistic patterns—it has no recollection of what it wrote in a previous session or even earlier in the same conversation, unless a memory mechanism is manually included. There is no center of consciousness, only the echo of prior texts.

This is where the Derridean reading becomes illuminating. In Of Grammatology, he writes:

“There is no outside-the-text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte],”⁵—not meaning that nothing exists beyond writing, but that meaning itself is always already mediated, never immediate or fully present.

AI systems embody this truth. They do not access meaning directly; they operate within the closed system of textual différance, generating sense through the deferral of other signs. Like Plato’s written characters that “seem to speak but cannot respond,” these algorithms simulate dialogue but cannot engage in understanding.

Conclusion: The Algorithmic Pharmakon

Artificial intelligence inherits the ambivalence of writing. It preserves knowledge in unimaginable scale and speed, yet displaces memory, understanding, and intention. Its outputs are both remedy and poison: they extend our capacities while threatening our conceptions of thought itself. Derrida helps us see that this is not a failure of AI, but a revelation of the structure of all signification. The machine does not lie to us; rather, it holds up a mirror to our own dependence on the trace, the supplement, the pharmakon.

In a time when writing machines grow more fluent, we must ask: is the danger in their simulation—or in our forgetting that our own minds are already, in some way, written?

Bibliography

1. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
2. Floridi, Luciano. The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
3. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995.
4. Searle, John. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–457.

Footnotes

1. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 275a.
2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 106.
3. Luciano Floridi, The Logic of Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 157.
4. John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–457.
5. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.