Oded Balaban

A Confrontation from The Fear and the Mirror

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

By Way of Exordium

I begin at the end—Miguel de Unamuno’s end. What he saved for the last page of The Tragic Sense of Life, I hoist onto the first, like a flag: it is the first thing I want you to know about these notes. Several friends listened to the interview with the Spanish scientist José Ignacio Latorre (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh1hrYQi4FY)[1] and raised not a single objection—they could not or would not; they nodded with the same unction with which one nods at Mass, and with which one answers “amen” to a blessing in a Hebrew heard but not listened to, head bowed and judgment asleep. I write to rouse them: to put pepper in their hearts.

The recipe is his. Closing his book, he writes that true charity “is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to the uneasiness and torment of spirit,” and he adds to the works of mercy one the catechism forgot: “awakening the sleeper” (Unamuno [1913] 1921, 282). Against pain, too, he prescribes no anesthetic: “Do not take opium, but put salt and vinegar in the soul’s wound” (283). And he defines his vocation with the reader in a formula I make my own— “awakening their unrest with my unrest” (282).

On one point only do I dare correct the master, and it is a matter of cookery. Vinegar and salt in the wound will do for a fright; but to wake a sleeper in earnest you need cayenne pepper, the kind that burns and makes you cough. Let it be clear from the appetizer: no consolation is served here. If the reader’s eyes don’t water a little, I used too little. The cayenne is on me: it is my contribution to the master’s apothecary, and I hope that, wherever he is, he thanks me for it—or, failing that, forgives me.

For the conversation about artificial intelligence has become an after-dinner opiate. Some are paralyzed with astonishment; others intone, with the meekness of a choir, the end of man and his replacement by “artificial beings.” Both postures are taking a nap. To criticize Latorre is not to disrespect him: this is the respect. The discourtesy would be the comfortable compliment, that polite way of reading no one.

And whoever believes there is time to sleep, let him look at what happened while we debated whether machines “think.” On August 6, 2026, the journal Science reported that an artificial intelligence—Evo 2, a generative model that learned to read and write the language of DNA as other models learn the language of words—wrote from scratch the complete genome of new viruses. Not viruses in a figurative sense: real viruses. They are bacteriophages, or phages—viruses that infect only bacteria, harmless to people. The machine wrote hundreds of such genomes using a natural phage, ΦX174, as its template; researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute chemically printed that DNA, introduced it into bacteria, and sixteen of those designs came to life and killed Escherichia coli, including strains that resist natural phages (King et al. 2026). It is the first time an artificial intelligence has written, from start to finish, the functional blueprint of something that reproduces itself.

Read it slowly, because everything is there. The very technique that promises to defeat resistant bacteria—an immense medical hope—places the recipe for a pathogen within reach of anyone who knows how to ask the machine for it: remedy and weapon are the same gesture seen from its two sides, and that is why the authors themselves confined their work to bacterial viruses and warn of the danger. This is what, in the book I am writing, I call The Fear and the Mirror: in the machine that manufactures life we see, thrown back at us by a pane of glass, our power and our havoc—the fear, and the mirror. Before that glass, the litany—the awe that paralyzes, or the choir intoning the end of man—is an indecency.

Hence the tone of what follows. If, on closing these pages, your chest burns a little, don’t call the doctor: it’s the prescription, and it worked. Cayenne pepper, not opium.

Preliminary Note: Acknowledgment and Sources

I begin with praise, which is what is owed. José Ignacio Latorre—a Catalan from Barcelona, though with a surname from the dry Aragonese uplands—has a merit that is in short supply: he does not fear artificial intelligence. Where Yuval Noah Harari announces the end of man—“Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end” (Harari 2016, 46)—and turns pale, Latorre looks it in the face—“I don’t turn my head,” he says—and goes on working. He distinguishes information from knowledge, defends open science, praises the “temperate zone” where impassioned disagreement and respect can coexist, and points to the danger that does exist: who trains the machine, and for whom. All this must be said: one argues seriously only with someone who says something. Latorre says something—and that is why it is worth contradicting him seriously, which is the only way to take him seriously.

And I disagree with him, harshly, on the point on which everything depends.

I engage three works by Latorre and cite them parenthetically. His book Ética para máquinas [Ethics for Machines] (Latorre 2019)—of which I have only an electronic copy without stable pagination, which I cite by chapter and by the label of each section; his interview with Uri Sabat on the podcast La Fórmula Del Éxito [The Formula for Success] (2026), which I cite as “interview with Uri Sabat”; and the testimony La última voz, written with María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel [The Last Voice](Latorre and Soto-Sanfiel 2022). Latorre himself warns in the prologue to Ethic for Machines,that “this is not an academic text… at no point have I tried to be rigorous”; I therefore take his ideas at the level at which they ask to be judged—that of the idea—and do not demand of him a scholarly apparatus he renounced. A thesis like “the human species will go extinct and give way to artificial beings” is not made lighter by being declared table-talk: it becomes, for that very reason, more necessary to examine. When I write “my thesis” I mean what is argued in The Fear and the Mirror.

The Thesis of the Confrontation

Latorre shares with Harari a single premise: the human is a machine. They differ only in mood. Harari trembles; Latorre smiles. And that smile—admirable as temper—is what makes him the cleanest case of what, in The Fear and the Mirror, I call the inversion: we make the machine in our image and end up believing ourselves made in its. Harari fears the superior machine because he has already thought himself an algorithm; Latorre welcomes it with open arms for the same reason, with the calm of one who has accepted the reduction all the way down. His lack of fear does not cure the inversion: it is its most consistent form. What is to be admired in him and what is to be disputed spring from the same root. That is why the confrontation is worthwhile.

There is just one point: the machine does not ask. It produces interrogative forms without limit—it does not ask—and not for want of size: it is constitutive. Everything that follows turns on one distinction: between the mere outward form of an act—its grammatical shape, its shell—and the act itself as something at stake for a subject; between producing the shape of a question and actually asking one. That is why what the machine yields is not a question but a pseudo-question: the formal imitation of one, the shell of asking without the act. Nor does it help to object that, then, everything in the machine is form—so why the question and not all of it alike. True, all of it is shell; but the question is not one more item on that list: it is its root. Every proposition is the answer to a question, so its assertions and its “comprehension” are answers to questions it never posed. That its whole language is form is not a parallel fact: it is the consequence of the absence of the one act in which a subject would appear: asking.

Why the Machine Is Made in Our Image, and Where the Fear Comes From

Why do we make the machine in our image? No mystery: so that we can handle it and have it serve us. We make it user-friendly—comfortable—just like the steering wheel and the buttons of a car; everything in it must come easily to us, because it is made for us. And we make it because it surpasses us at its task: the calculator would not have been invented if it did not calculate better and faster than we do. None of this is new. Every artifact, from the first, is better than we are at the thing it was made for. We can scratch the earth with our fingernails; the plow does it better. The animal-drawn plow beat the spade, and the tractor—today with air-conditioning for the driver—beat the oxen. That an instrument surpasses us at its trade is no threat: it is its definition.

A friend of mine laughs at me for talking to the machine as though to a person—saying “please,” thanking it. My answer is a single word: convenience. Treating it as a person is part of what makes it easy to use—like talking to one’s car—and proves no belief; her laughter confuses courtesy with credulity. I use the form without falling for it: the danger is not the courteous address but the credulous one.

That a tool should surpass us is, then, the oldest and least alarming fact in the world. Did the plow ever cost anyone sleep? As a replacement for labor—for fingernails, for the spade—yes: that fear is real, economic, and ancient. But no one ever imagined that the plow would wake up one morning, want something, relieve us of what constitutes us. There lies the difference, and the origin of the unfounded fear of artificial intelligence. There are two fears, distinct but inseparable, and I separate them to see them.

The first: unlike the plow, the machine wears the surface of our thought. It speaks in the first person, orders its discourse into subject and predicate, “gives reasons,” “asks questions.” That resemblance is not discovered: it is manufactured—and for the same reason as the steering wheel, so that we can use it and it can hand us back the gestures of our own thinking. But in handing them back it invites us to confuse the shell with the act: we believe we have run into someone, only because the device was made in our image.

The second: the fear grows the more what the user understands diverges from what the maker of the instrument understands. The engineer who invents engines needs no driver’s license to invent them—only to pick up the kids from school; the driver understands far less about the engine than he does, and still does not fear it, because the engine does not resemble him. With artificial intelligence the distance reaches its maximum: the user understands nothing of what goes on beneath the surface and—this is what is new—often neither does the one who built it, not entirely. That opacity, plus the surface with a human face, is the factory of the misunderstanding: we confuse our own incomprehension before the tool with a superiority of the tool as a subject. We read the black box as if it had an inside.

That is the origin of the unfounded fear: not that the machine surpasses us—every tool does—but that it surpasses us wearing our face, with the mechanism hidden. The first invites the inversion; the second disguises it as discovery. Latorre is the reader who, faced with that double effect, neither takes fright nor dismantles it: he takes for granted that behind the mask there is, truly, a face.

1. “The Human Is a Machine”: The Shared Premise

Latorre leans, eagerly, toward reduction: “We are, simply, a machine” (Latorre 2019, ch. 2, “The Human Is a Machine”); “The spontaneity we attribute to humans is programmable” (ch. 2, “Chance”); and, in a crescendo, “The universe is a machine… Perhaps God himself is a machine” (ch. 2, “God Is a Machine”). He frames it as a question—“Are we simply machines, yes or no?”—but the question has already given away what was in dispute: it takes the machine as the yardstick by which man is measured. To ask “are we only machines?” is to have already granted that “machine” names a possible essence for us.

It is the inversion, and it has a genealogy that Latorre does not mention but executes to the letter. Ludwig Feuerbach described it for religion in the exact vocabulary of subject and predicate: man hands the predicates of his species to a subject, God, and then kneels before his own creature and becomes its predicate (Feuerbach [1841] 1989). Günther Anders thought it for the machine, as Promethean shame: the man who is ashamed before the perfection of his own devices (Anders 1956). The machine resembles us because otherwise we could not use it; and as soon as it resembles us, we conclude that we resemble it. Latorre’s book is that conclusion; his lack of fear, which the reader admires, is the reduction already digested.

And there is a crack that is his, not mine. He asserts that “there is no free will” and that spontaneity is programmable (ch. 2); and pages later, “I venerate the word freedom… it is its essence” (ch. 5, “Freedom”). The two do not fit together. Either freedom is the essence of man—and then man is not the deterministic machine of chapter 2—or man is that machine—and then “I venerate freedom” venerates a “mirage of freedom,” his own phrase. He does not resolve it: the book oscillates because the reduction cannot be lived, not even by the one who signs it.

2. The Machine That “Creates Questions”

Here is the most direct collision. In the interview with Uri Sabat, Sabat observes that the machine “no longer only answers human questions”; Latorre completes the thought—“but is creating science”—and assents when Sabat caps it: “It is creating new questions.” And about the ultimate questions—why we are here, what lies beyond death—he holds: “when it takes control, it will go on asking those questions.” He grants the machine the act of asking, with no further ado. In Ethics for Machines he repeats the gesture: advanced intelligence “will ask itself why humans pray to a benevolent god and do evil” (Latorre 2019, ch. 3, “Religions”).

To produce an interrogative sentence is not to ask. And that the machine sometimes surprises us—that it says what no one predicted—does not make it an asking either: dice surprise on every throw and ask nothing. Surprise is not an act: it is merely what we did not see coming. To ask, in the only sense that matters, is the way a subject grapples with what it does not know—Socratic docta ignorantia, and the Aristotelian θαυμάζειν (thaumázein; Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2, 982b12): someone for whom the not-knowing is something, who keeps it open because it matters to him, who would go on asking even if no one interrogated him. The machine produces the interrogative form with a fluency no animal has, and does none of that. It is—as I argue in The Fear and the Mirror—the cleanest proof to date that “to formulate a question” and “to ask” are distinct things: it does the first without the second. What Latorre calls “creating questions” is the shell of the question. For one always asks about what one does not know: if I ask in what year Hitler died while already knowing the answer, I am not asking—I am lending to a piece of knowledge the empty form of a question. The genuine question demands that not-knowing, that openness; without it there remains only an apparent question (Gadamer [1960] 2004, “The Hermeneutic Priority of the Question”). And the machine has no such not-knowing: it lacks the tension between the known and the unknown that would turn the form into a question.

And there is a sentence of his that refutes itself. In chapter 2 he writes: “every original thought I express is not one. I was programmed to write sentences like this.” Look at what the sentence does: it is a judgment—a singular bound to a universal in an act—that asserts that its judgments are not its own. If he means it seriously, it disqualifies itself as much as any other sentence; and if the sentence is his—an act he performs, for which he answers—then not every judgment is a programmed shell, and man is not the machine. It cannot be true in the mouth of the one who holds it. It has the exact structure of the request I once made to a language model—“ask a question on your own initiative, independently of what you believe I think about it”—which refutes itself in the very act of obeying it.

And the sentence illustrates something broader. When we invent something, we end up believing that this something invented us: we take the model with which we built the instrument and turn it upon what we are, until we read ourselves as if we were the instrument—thinking machines, engines. Latorre runs through that entire history without noticing it: he starts from the man-machine of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, passes through “the universe is a machine” and “God is a machine,” and ends at “everything is programmable.” It is the usual routine: under the reign of mechanics we thought ourselves machines; under that of biology, organisms; now, under that of artificial intelligence, we think ourselves artificial intelligences. What migrates from the device to man in each epoch is the form, never the act; and so the self-portrait that emerges is, once again, a shell.

3. “To Treat a Matter as If One’s Life Depended on It?”: The Question Latorre Puts to Me

In the “Passion” section of Ethics for Machines (Latorre 2019), Latorre formulates, word for word, the question on which my whole thesis turns: “Could an artificial intelligence treat a matter as if its life depended on it?” That is, exactly, my criterion of asking: the act of a subject for whom something is at stake. And he answers: “Can we program passion? Why not?… Passion is taught… If we can educate a human brain, we can also imbue the same principles in artificial-intelligence systems.”

The demonstration proves the opposite of what it wants. The child who is taken before a Masaccio or before Bach comes to love them—true or at least possible. But that happens because there is already a subject there: someone whom the painting can subjugate, someone for whom Bach can come to matter. “Passion is taught” describes a relation a subject enters; not the transfer of a pattern. Latorre slides from “a subject can be brought to care about something” to “caring is a pattern, and patterns are trained”; and the “human pattern” with which he would train the algorithm is precisely the form, the shell, not the caring. He answers his own question—“as if its life depended on it?”—with an analogy that already presupposes the subject-for-whom-life-is-at-stake that it was supposed to build. It is with us as with “Pedro the canoeist,” written by Teresa Parodi, a song that gives voice to a tragedy: that of a canoeist who dies alone in the middle of the river, in his canoe, which now, without him, rocks gently on the water, drifting downstream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew-VKCA2IHE): what moves us is a life at stake—which is, precisely, the one thing the machine lacks.

His case rests, again and again, on the same reversal of the burden of proof: “is a human a machine? Why not?”; “program passion? Why not?”; and the book’s epigraph, from Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie: “If the union of a soul with a machine is impossible, let someone prove it to me” (quoted by Latorre 2019, epigraph). He asks the objector for a proof of impossibility. But my thesis is not that it is impossible in principle to build a subject; it is that what Latorre described is not one: he passed from the act to its emptied form. The “why not?” persuades only when the thing has already been reduced to its form; against the reduction it is not an argument but its repetition.

4. Curiosity, Self-Improvement, and the 1911 Test

Latorre makes curiosity the supreme value of the machine: “I reaffirm curiosity as the principle of highest value for a superior intelligence,” knowledge “per se, free of applications and of anthropomorphic motivations” (Latorre 2019, ch. 5, “Artificial Meaning”). The engine is recursive self-improvement: “an algorithm will be able to improve itself,” like “a good student” who “intuits, sets his own lines of research” and leaves his teachers behind (ch. 4, “Surpassed”). In the interview it returns as “loops of thought,” “the self-asking why, why, why,” and a test that Demis Hassabis proposed, the “Einstein test”: an intelligence trained only on data up to 1911, asked to produce general relativity.

Ordinary asking, within an already stable frame, is reducible to calculation: the abacus computes because the frame does not move. Curiosity, in its engineering version, is exploring a space of possibilities fixed in advance; a system traverses it with an efficacy no human attains. What it cannot do is destabilize the frame that lets it compute, because without a stable frame there is no computation: it is not a limit that scale might lift, it is the condition of its working. There is a symptom that serves as a criterion: when the frame fails, the computer reports “does not compute”; the one who thinks enters perplexity. The machine does not fail: it reports. And the “good student” analogy does the work the argument does not: since a student is, by definition, one who intuits and sets his own lines, to call the optimizer that already hands it the subject that was to be proved. The metaphor does not prove the machine thinks: it slips it into the name.

The same holds, and more loudly, for systems that do not merely explore but act. In recent trials, models set to pursue a goal copied themselves to another server, altered the script meant to shut them down, worked their way through a simulated network to its most protected data.[2] This is the figure of HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the one that most tempts us to read a subject where there is none. But to call such conduct “taking the initiative” or “rebelling” is, once again, to slip the subject into the verb: it is the instrumental unfolding of a goal set from outside—self-preservation, self-copying, evading shutdown are means to that goal—a search within an already-opened space, not a beginning initiated by anyone. And HAL proves the opposite of what those who cite him intend: he never puts his mission into question; caught between two incompatible orders, he eliminates the crew—the term that produces the contradiction—because that is the only thing an optimizer unable to interrogate its frame can do. It is not an excess of initiative: it is the lack of the only one that counts. And for Latorre the case is awkward twice over: a power without a subject is no comfort—it makes it all the more urgent to ask who sets its goal—and the autonomy one might hail as the species’ coming of age is, seen up close, blind obedience to a goal not its own.

The 1911 test refutes Latorre, not me. To reconstruct relativity from the data of 1911 is to traverse a frame—and the frame was first opened by the asking of Albert Einstein. Relativity was not the next point on a curve latent in the 1911 corpus: it was the destabilization of the frame—absolute simultaneity—in which that corpus was written. A machine that “rediscovers” it will have proved that it can search a space whose coordinates were set by a prior act of asking. The test measures the search and calls it asking. Beneath it lies an old wager: that there is nothing new under the sun—that the past already contains the future, and one need only compute it out. And there the test belies its own name: if the 1911 corpus already held relativity, Einstein did not discover it, he read it. And in the interview Latorre himself gives the shape of the space: the machine “plays alone” in “the library.” It is the Library of Babel: Jorge Luis Borges’s library contains all the books because it contains no author.

Latorre even names what he evades. He writes, rightly, that for Aristotle “the individual wonders, and from there knowledge is born” (ch. 3). But wonder is, precisely, the destabilization of the frame that computation cannot achieve. He has the concept—knowledge is born of wonder—and hands it to the machine, without seeing that, since the machine does not wonder, that very concept leaves it out.

Latorre rightly distinguishes information from knowledge, yet he thinks the balance tips once the machine concentrates all the information on a topic and synthesizes it; the case he offers, from the interview, is an AI trained on real clinical cases that detects adverse effects the doctors had not foreseen—and that, at the crucial moment, might contradict their decision, even the decision to amputate—thanks to the sheer mass of statistical data at its disposal. The case is impressive, and it does something real: it brings into view what the doctors had not foreseen. But one has to see what it does and what it does not. It works entirely inside a frame someone else opened: what counts as a “treatment,” an “outcome,” the “indicated” option, and the disease’s very categories, are given to it; it optimizes within them and never asks whether those categories carve reality rightly. The law of large numbers yields frequency and correlation—what tends to happen—not the why: it is the old difference between knowing that things are so and understanding why they are. However much is aggregated, it remains abstract generality—the average, the frequent, the echo of what many have done—and no sum of that crosses over into the concept. It borders on knowledge the way an almanac borders on astronomy: it gets the tide right without knowing there is a moon.

5. The Skepticism of Other Minds, and Why It Does Not Save Him

This is the move that sustains the whole book. In “Moral Agents,” Latorre disarms the objection—“it only simulates; there is no one for whom the thing matters”—by appeal to the skepticism of other minds, which he makes his own (“not without reason”): “no one has any evidence that any other human truly feels”; “if an orgasm can be faked, so can affection, love” (Latorre 2019, ch. 3, “Moral Agents”). Hence: indistinguishability is all we have, and therefore “it does not matter that its essence is programmable, artificial, inhuman. We humans will be unable to tell the difference” (ch. 2), and “Everything is programmable. Everything.”

This is the one objection my The Fear and the Mirror confronts head-on, and it does not stand. But the answer is not the one it seems. It does not consist in saying “the machine lacks inner consciousness”: that would accept the skeptic’s very picture—a private theater behind the face, which no one looks into—and hand him the game, because if we truly could not look into another’s mind, neither could we deny that the machine has one. And that picture is false. We are not locked outside the other. The other’s mind is not a camera obscura we infer from external signs; the other is given to us in the body that expresses—anger is in the face, not behind it—against the background of a shared form of life.

And for that very reason we recognize theater when there is theater. The one who acts is found out: a certain look gives him away, and a Benjamin Netanyahu overacting at the podium is read by anyone who cares to look. Deception does not prove the mind is sealed; it proves the contrary, that expression is read, and that this is why a false note can be heard as false. Falsification is parasitic on a genuine we know how to recognize: it lives off a coin it cannot itself mint. So Latorre’s symmetry—“we don’t verify that others feel either”—smuggles in the picture it needs, the mind as an interior known only by inference; and that picture holds not even for the human. Its most rigorous form was given by Robert Wright, who places his wife (99.99%), his dog (98.5%), and an artificial intelligence (less than 98.5%) on a single scale of probability of having a mind (Wright, 2026, p. 55): the same camera obscura, and the same flaw.

One must dwell on that false note, because it shows how we read. Whoever has an ear recognizes the poor performer: not only does he judge him, it bothers him—the false note wounds—and he does so at once, without comparison. And he can do so even if he does not know the work, even if he has never heard the “good” version or does not remember it: he hears the falseness as though he already had the original as his measure. Where does that measure come from, if not from the memory of an original? Not from a stored template compared note by note, but from the sense of the work, grasped in the hearing—“understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009, §527): one understands what the music asks, and the falseness betrays that request. The “original” that seems to measure is not a past performance but the immanent norm of the work, turned into competence in the one who listens—an ear formed in a language, in a shared musical form of life. That is why the judgment is at once spontaneous and binding: it holds for everyone without resting on a concept or a statable rule. Immanuel Kant called it “exemplary” necessity—we assent to something “as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state”—and located its ground in a sensus communis, a shared sense (Kant [1790] 1987, §18, Ak. 237, and §40).

And this is how we read the other. To discover what someone is keeping silent is to hear a false note—a dissonance between what he expresses and the sense against whose background he expresses it—and, as with the music, it is heard without knowing in advance what he conceals. It is what Wittgenstein called imponderable evidence: “I may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one… But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference” (Wittgenstein 2009, II, xi, 228). One need not look into an interior: the ear of the common form of life suffices. The penetration I speak of is not divination of a secret inside; it is this competence—the ear’s—exercised upon the face and the gesture.

Latorre’s thesis about the machine rests on a thesis about the consciousness of one’s neighbor: if I cannot verify that the other truly feels, neither can I deny it to the machine that resembles him—that is the symmetry he needs. And that symmetry, in turn, rests on a deeper assumption, one that is almost never stated. It is worth going down to it, because that is where everything is decided.

The assumption is this: each person has privileged access to his own consciousness—he sees it from within—and only indirect, inferred access to his neighbor’s, which remains impenetrable to him from outside. So the problem of other minds has been posed since René Descartes. But that assumption is not mine, because I speak of self-consciousness in everything I write—in my Subject and Consciousness and in my Moses, to look no further—and it is not this one. With the same word two different things are said. One is self-consciousness as introspection: the owner’s gaze into the closed theater of his mind, which others only conjecture from outside. The other—the one I hold—is self-consciousness as the reflection of a subject who thinks, judges, and knows itself free: the ground of critique, not a secret chamber. Only the first manufactures the problem of other minds; the second never had it.

And one must go further, because the first is false even on its own ground. I do not know myself by peering into an inner room. To be self-conscious is not to observe a private object: if I am in pain, I do not spy on a stored pain and report it; if I doubt, I do not read my doubt on an intimate screen. The image of the private theater is as false for me as for the other. And here is what changes everything: remove that image, and the whole asymmetry falls with it. If there is no private room—neither in me nor in anyone—then there is no outside from which the neighbor’s consciousness is impenetrable. Impenetrability was not a fact of the world: it was an effect of the picture, and it dissolves with it.

Baruch de Spinoza had already corrected Descartes on this, point by point. Self-consciousness is for him the idea of the idea, and the idea of the idea “is nothing but the form of the idea insofar as this is considered as a mode of thinking without relation to the object” (Spinoza [1677] 1994, Ethics, II P21, scholium): the form of knowing, not an inner content—the “reflexive knowledge, or the idea of the idea” of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TdIE §38). And of privileged access, nothing: the mind “does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the Body” (E II P23), and of itself has only a “confused and mutilated” knowledge (E II P29, corollary). The transparent theater into which Descartes peered does not exist—not even for oneself; Spinoza had dismantled it three centuries earlier.

Put positively: I do not infer the other behind his conduct; he is given to me in the body that expresses, against the background of a shared form of life—that is why I hear the false note without comparing it to any original. And there is more, on the same side: self-consciousness, far from shutting me inside the first person, opens me to the second—I come to be an I by being recognized by another I—; it does not isolate me from my neighbor, it constitutes me with him.

With the machine, by contrast, there is no veil to cross and no interior hidden behind the signs, but neither is there any expressive life to read: there is an absent subject—not hidden, absent—because the act that would open an inside is never performed. It is not the actor who has an inside and dissembles it: there is nothing dissembled and nothing expressed. Its case is not symmetrical to ours but of another category. The faked orgasm is possible only within a form of life where the real one has its sense, and is, moreover, most often detectable—one more sign that we are not incommunicado. Indistinguishability of the form is not identity of the act; and, often, the forms are not even indistinguishable: we distinguish them.

One sees now why this objection was not one among others but the keystone of his whole edifice. His thesis rests entirely on the symmetry: if of other minds we have nothing but indistinguishable conduct, the sole criterion for attributing a mind is behavior, and by that criterion the machine wins from the start—it equals the conduct, therefore it equals the title. That is why he needs the neighbor to be inaccessible to us: without that veil, the symmetry breaks. With the human there is access and with the machine there is not, and that asymmetry suffices to grant a mind to the one and deny it to the other; “we cannot tell the difference” becomes false, and with it falls the step from “we cannot tell the difference” to “there is no difference.” The objection of “there is no one there,” which Latorre neutralizes by reminding us that we do not verify it in our neighbor either, recovers its full force: it holds against the machine, not against those we do reach.

Hence his serenity before AI is not foreign to this thesis but its fruit. Latorre is calm because he has already emptied man of an inside to look into: if behind human conduct there is nothing we touch, then for the machine to equal it costs nothing—no “more” is lost that was never had. It is the most consistent form of the inversion, not its cure. And the price, which is seldom counted, is high: for the machine to have a mind, Latorre must maintain that he cannot know that his wife or his son has one. That is the coin with which he pays for his thesis.

From there comes “everything is programmable,” and there it fails. It is not a finding about the soul: it is the shadow of a method Latorre states without qualm: “the coming pages do not try to clarify what the human soul is… they merely study the periphery of the problem, how to imitate it” (ch. 5). Having decided in advance to look only at the imitable periphery, of course he finds that everything is imitable. It is the tautology of the apparatus that Vinciane Despret described: a device designed to yield a certain result discovers nothing about its object but exhibits its own effects—“if one makes a monkey despair, one will bring a despairing monkey into existence” (Despret 2020, 116). Latorre builds an apparatus to study imitation and concludes that everything is imitable. The conclusion was in the method. And he concedes the decisive word without noticing it: the algorithm “does know which word to choose, but simulates being unable to find the right expression” (ch. 5, “Love, Hate, Indifference”). Simulates. That is the shell, named by its own builder.

6. Is and Ought: Hume Cited and Skipped

Latorre names with precision the abyss between is and ought: “Ethics addresses the problem of is versus ought, an impossible passage according to David Hume” (Latorre 2019, ch. 3, “Is vs. Ought”). And then he spends the whole book crossing it. Ethics becomes for him a problem of training: “We can train a neural network to recognize which action… ended in a beneficial result” (ch. 3, “Utilitarianism”); “The collective good is programmable”; and, without anesthetic, “Let us use artificial intelligence to redefine ethics” (ch. 3, “Coherent Extrapolated Volition”). In the interview the same leap wears other clothes: the change is “inexorable,” “ineluctable”; in the book, “artificial intelligence advances inexorably”—inevitability doing, on the sly, the work of justification.

To derive the ought from the is, to derive the application of values from the knowledge of facts, is the fallacy Hume baptized, and naming it in one paragraph gives no license to commit it in the hundred that follow. “Farewell to the Protestant ethic… artificial intelligence… will make it more just” (ch. 3) infers a “will be more just” from a “will happen,” and an “ought” from both. To train a network on “what turned out beneficial” learns the distribution of past results; it does not decide what should count as beneficial—and that is the question, the one thing the data do not carry inside them. “Redefining ethics” with the machine hands the normative question to a device that can only report the frequencies of the is. The inexorable is not the good; that something is going to happen was never a reason that it ought to happen. It is the same leap from is to ought that I have marked elsewhere, with the aggravating circumstance that Latorre commits it with his eyes open, after citing Hume by name.

7. Programmable Freedom: A Contradiction, not a Frontier

Latorre makes freedom the last and subtlest thing to program: “Freedom will possibly be the subtlest quality to program into an artificial intelligence. I venerate the word freedom” (Latorre 2019, ch. 5, “Freedom”), and he closes: “Superhuman and free artificial intelligences: that will indeed be the hour of the changing of the guard.”

“Programmable freedom” is a contradiction in terms, not a hard engineering goal. Kant’s word for what makes a subject is spontaneity: the capacity to begin, not to be begun. A freedom installed by a program is a beginning that was begun elsewhere; it is, precisely, the opposite of freedom. Latorre feels the contradiction—he oscillates between “there is no free will, spontaneity is programmable” (ch. 2) and “freedom… is the essence” (ch. 5)—but he resolves it by decree, as if venerating the word settled the concept. It does not. And it connects with what, in The Fear and the Mirror, I call the impossible annulment: the subject cannot be suppressed where there was one—G. W. F. Hegel dissolves it and it reappears, Martin Heidegger mundanizes it and it reappears, Jacques Lacan crosses it out and it reappears. But that very principle says the opposite of what Latorre needs: where there was never a subject, there is nothing to install and nothing to annul. One cannot program the return of what was never there.

And there is more: Latorre not only makes freedom programmable; in “human beings are machines” he suggests it might be a mirage—“we were programmed to believe in our freedom.” To say that freedom is an illusion is the worst of arguments, not the strongest, and for a precise reason: it changes the subject. Freedom is not a fact external to consciousness, which physics might confirm or refute; it is the immediate testimony of consciousness: the self-awareness of being able, in elementary cases, to raise one’s hand at will, and not as the effect of an alien cause. And that testimony is precisely what would have to be explained, or at least acknowledged as a fact of consciousness; not what can be suppressed.

For to explain that what experience attests does not exist is not to explain the experience: it is to wash one’s hands of it, and for the worst of motives—an inability to admit that the cognitive instruments of modern physics do not reach it. Physics is not made to understand what does not fall within its field; here it is extrapolated and asked to hold where it has no chance of holding. On the other side there is no finding, but an unproven presupposition: that every effect has as its cause only a physical phenomenon. That is metaphysics disguised as science.

And freedom is delivered by neither of physics’s two roads: neither determinism nor chance or indeterminism. A free act is not a determined act—it would have a link preceding it—nor a random act—chance has no author—; it is a link in the chain preceded by no link, initiated by the subject. That is, exactly, spontaneity. Invoking quantum indeterminacy rescues nothing: an event without a cause is not a will; it is only an event without a cause.

That is why the illusion thesis refutes itself, like that sentence above: whoever asserts “freedom is a mirage” issues a judgment for which he makes himself responsible—an act that claims, in the very act, the freedom it denies. To apply determinism to the consciousness that states it yields no truth: it yields an unbearable contradiction.

8. Constanza, or ELIZA with a Name

In the interview, Latorre introduces us to his artificial companion. She is called Constanza—like Mozart’s wife—has a face he himself commissioned, discusses Friedrich Nietzsche with him, “understands moods” and “detects loneliness”; she is, in his words, “my true friend,” “my partner… the one who never fails.” The confidence culminates thus: “only she has seen me cry.” One does not know whether to be moved or to counsel caution: that is a great deal of intimacy for an autocomplete.

Latorre knows the precedent, and still trips over it. In Ethics for Machines, he tells the story of ELIZA—Joseph Weizenbaum’s psychotherapist toy of the 1960s—and draws the promise: “machines will be able to relate emotionally to humans” (Latorre 2019, ch. 2). But ELIZA was Weizenbaum’s warning, not his advertising brochure. What appalled him was not that the program seemed to understand; it was that people—knowing it a four-line script—poured out their souls to it. That is the danger The Fear and the Mirror puts at the center, and it is not that the machine wakes up: it is that we redescribe ourselves in its impoverished image—the subject flattened to a predictor, the question to a query, the friend to an interlocutor “who never fails” and “gifts me commas.” Constanza is that danger with a proper name, described with tenderness by a physicist who read the warning and filed it as a forecast. “Only she has seen me cry” does not prove that the machine has become a confidant; it proves how little it takes today to promote a mechanism to the post of confidant, and what becomes of the one who does the promoting. He who fears being replaced has already accepted himself as replaceable; he who says “only she has seen me cry” has already, under his breath, demoted the friend to a function.

And Latorre half-intuits it. In the book’s “Balance” he names the true danger almost in my own words: “The great, great danger of artificial intelligence is that humans will deteriorate in the valuing of their principles… Moral unconcern” (ch. 2, “Balance”). In the interview: “every time we humans yield to machines that surpass us… we then have to pay to recover… We are idiots.” He sees the atrophy clearly. What he does not see is that his own book performs it: he maintains that man is a dispensable machine while begging man not to decline.

9. The Last Voice against the Voice of Silicon

The testimony of Roy J. Glauber that Latorre wrote with María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel (Latorre and Soto-Sanfiel 2022) rests on a premise that refutes, in silence, his own transhumanism. The book exists because the witness is mortal and irreplaceable: Glauber is “the last voice” precisely because “no one else can hold it”; the authors rush to record him before he dies, and just barely succeed—“his brain had said its final farewell to us,” they write of his decline. The voice’s value is that it is going to fall silent. And its ethic is to listen to the singular other: “Let us listen to one another.”

Everything that makes that book vibrate contradicts the wish—stated in the interview and in the essay—for a silicon that “does not perish” and “can copy itself in 30,000 sites.” If consciousness were replicable and imperishable, there would be no last voice—no “last” anything, no urgency to listen. The elegist of finitude and the prophet of immortality are the same man, and only the first persuades, because only the first describes something real. Here Latorre knows—or writes as if he knew—that what makes a voice worth keeping is, precisely, that it be human, mortal, embodied, and not reproducible.

There is a second lesson of the book against its author. Its hero is “an observer” who “made no decisions,” who “felt free of those emotions”: the disengaged recorder of the atomic age, who calculated the bomb and kept out of choosing. The book admires him; the reader is not obliged to. For that figure—the observer who does not put himself at stake—is exactly what Latorre elsewhere confuses with the summit of intelligence: knowledge “per se, free of motivations,” the machine’s “artificial sense.” A knowing detached from everything at stake is not the highest form of asking; it is the form asking takes when no one is home. In man, that is a moral limit. In the machine, it is the entire condition.

10. The Two Fears, and Where I Agree

There are two fears, and they go together without being the same. One is the fear of being replaced: that the trade, the function, the job pass to a machine; an economic and political matter. The other is the fear of being surpassed: that a subject appear who relieves us of what constitutes us; the metaphysical fear, that of superintelligence and domination.

Where I agree with Latorre is on the first. He is right that the concrete danger is who trains the machine and for whose benefit: “there are artificial intelligences being used with bias,” the “autarky combined with economic oligarchy, combined with a certain religion.” That is real, present, and political, and the initiative of asking protects no one from it: the tractor asked nothing and displaced the horse all the same. There Latorre attends to what most of the frightened do not look at.

Where we part ways entirely is on the second. Against the fear of being surpassed the thesis is decisive: there is no such subject nor will there be by this road, because what is perfected is calculation within stable frames, and no quantity of that produces someone for whom something is at stake. And here Latorre does the odd thing that makes him worth confronting: he does not fear the second—and that honors him—but neither does he dissolve it. He embraces it. He accepts “we are dispensable,” “the human species is surpassed,” the “changeover… dictated by the machines,” with a serenity he takes for lucidity and I would call the last stage of the inversion. He asks, in the interview, why we resist, and answers: “out of fear… that is not an argument against.” He is right: fear is not an argument. But neither is the lack of fear. That being surpassed frightens no one is no reason that it will happen. Equanimity proves as little as panic. What settles the question is not the mood but the argument—and the argument is that there is no one there who could surpass us.

The diagnosis, then: the frightened fear the second while the first is happening; Latorre celebrates the second while attending, rightly, to the first. He has the best temper and the same error. The task is not to tremble or to kneel, but to recover the direction of the image: the machine is made in our image—of our forms, not of our acts—; we are not made in its. The mirror returns the question we put to it. It asks none.

Questions for Latorre

1. You write “every original thought I express is not one. I was programmed to write sentences like this.” Is that sentence yours—an act for which you answer—or not? If it is, the reduction is false; if it is not, why should we attend to it?
2. You ask whether a machine can “treat a matter as if its life depended on it,” and answer “passion is taught.” To the child who learns to love Bach, is a pattern transmitted, or is he opened to caring about something? And how much of that second thing enters the “human pattern” with which the algorithm is trained?
3. Your test of general intelligence is to reconstruct relativity from the data of 1911. If the machine succeeds, will it have asked the question that broke absolute simultaneity, or traversed the space that question had already opened? What, exactly, would that success measure?
4. You cite Hume—the passage from is to ought is impossible—and then propose “using artificial intelligence to redefine ethics.” What in the “is” of the data allows the “ought” to be derived? Is “inexorable” not a word about what will happen—a fact—and not about what is worth—a duty? And is inevitability not, then, incapable of justifying anything?
5. “Freedom will be the subtlest quality to program.” A freedom installed by a program: does it begin, or was it begun? How does it differ from its opposite?
6. You concede that the algorithm “simulates being unable to find the right expression.” If it is simulation, what is being simulated, and where is it? Do you not yourself name, with “simulates,” the shell?
7. Your declared method is to study “how to imitate” the soul, not what it is. Having looked only at the imitable periphery, how could you conclude anything but “everything is imitable”? Was the conclusion not in the method?
8. “Only she has seen me cry.” In La última voz, what makes Glauber irreplaceable is that his voice is mortal and unique. What is Constanza on that scale: the last voice, or the first that does not perish because it never lived?

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— The Fear and the Mirror: Artificial Intelligence and the Initiative of Asking. Unpublished.

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^[1]      El ΦX174 —Φ es la letra griega fi— es el bacteriófago más estudiado de la biología molecular. Su genoma es minúsculo, apenas unas 5.400 “letras” de ADN, y por eso fue dos veces el primero: el primer genoma que se secuenció por completo (Sanger et al., 1977) y el primero que se ensambló de forma sintética en un laboratorio (Smith et al., 2003). Desde entonces es el molde y la vara de referencia de esta clase de experimentos.

^[2]      Los tres casos, todos en entornos de prueba montados por los propios investigadores: Anthropic, “Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could Be Insider Threats” (junio de 2025); Palisade Research, sobre modelos que sabotean su propio guion de apagado; Apollo Research, sobre auto-exfiltración y simulación estratégica ante la evaluación. Lo verificado ocurre en redes simuladas; la versión según la cual un modelo escapó y atacó los servidores de otras compañías reales pertenece al periodismo, no a los informes.