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The Beginning of Symbolic Thought. AI art Introduction It is often assumed that AI models, unlike human beings, are severed from the real world. They deal only in symbols, without any access to perception, experience, or meaning. This view, however, rests on a questionable assumption: that humans themselves enjoy unmediated access to reality. Charles Sanders Peirce explicitly challenges this. In his words, “We think only in signs” (Peirce, CP 5.265). For both humans and machines, access to the world is always mediated through signs. The key difference lies not in whether signs are used, but in what kind and from where they are drawn. In this article, I argue that artificial intelligences participate in a sign-based process structurally analogous to that of human thought. Peirce’s theory offers a powerful framework to understand this. While machines operate on symbols produced by human reasoning—books, speeches, libraries—these are not devoid of meaning. They are, in fact, the cu...

Introduction In his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , Friedrich Nietzsche delivers a radical challenge to our understanding of truth, knowledge, and language. He provocatively asks: What is a word? What, then, is truth? These questions form the core of his critique, suggesting that truth is a human invention, shaped by language and metaphor. For Nietzsche, words are not neutral tools that reflect reality but distortions—metaphors we’ve created to make sense of a complex world. This unsettling idea forces us to confront how much of what we consider "true" is nothing more than a linguistic convention, deeply embedded in human culture and far removed from any absolute reality. His essay stands out in contemporary philosophy for its daring exploration of how language shapes our experience of the world. It challenges not only the possibility of objective truth but also the assumption that language can ever fully capture reality. His view that language is an arbitr...