Project Vision 21

Contemporary German philosopher Richard David Precht stated some years ago that the question is no longer “Who am I?” but rather “How many am I?”—a statement that, much like Walt Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes,” does not point to any pathological condition needing treatment, but rather to an existential condition not grounded in the traditional idea of a closed-off, monadic “self.”

In fact, throughout our lives, each of us is many selves, as life itself constantly changes and transforms us—something quite clear when we move from childhood to adolescence and eventually to old age. But beyond being many successively, in today’s world, we are also many simultaneously, because reality is no longer just one—it is many.

This was expressed in a recent interview by another contemporary German philosopher, Markus Gabriel, who stated not only that “Reality is not one; it is many,” but also that “What’s unreal is thinking there’s only one way to understand what exists.” This is not about a fragmented reality, but rather a reality so complex that it requires multiple approaches to comprehend it.

Gabriel argues that we cannot reduce the whole of reality to “our mental structures” or “cultural narratives,” emphasizing instead that reality must be accessed through a “plural vision” that includes “different fields of knowledge,” such as science, ethics, art, and politics. These are all “autonomous spheres of meaning,” all real, but not always compatible.

For Gabriel, assuming “there’s only one way to understand what exists” is an act of intellectual arrogance that (I would add) also reveals an intolerance of different perspectives.

Now, at this very moment in human history, to this multiplicity of selves and realities we must add the rise of “non-things,” as discussed by another philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, who claims that “non-things break the world.” Specifically, “Today, we are transitioning from the era of things to the era of non-things. It is information, not things, that determines the world we live in.”

According to Han, we live in a world that is “increasingly intangible, clouded, and spectral,” where nothing truly stabilizes human life. That’s why, he says, we live in a constant state of precariousness. Among these intangible “non-things” that shape our world are, most prominently, social media and artificial intelligence.

The situation becomes even more complex because these “non-things” (which we cannot touch, taste, or weigh), such as AI, represent—according to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Geoffrey Hinton and other experts—a serious possibility for the extinction of humanity. And while many disagree with that view, most agree we must approach superintelligent AI with caution.

For instance, Spanish paleontologist and archaeologist Eudald Carbonell claims that “technology will turn us into transhumans” before the end of this century—a time by which, he says, there may be as many as eight different humanities (or “para-species”), some of the fully biological and others fully digital humans.

The key unanswered question remains: How many am I, among so many human identities and realities of things and non-things?