This piece originally appeared at Second Best.
Hegel's philosophy is about consciousness coming to understand itself and context, and therefore the conditions for its freedom. This arguably makes Hegel among the first human neural networks to achieve situational awareness—the term AI researchers use to describe an intelligent system with meta-cognition about its nature and origins. Remarkably, this was largely achieved through rigorous introspection into the structure of thought itself.
As AIs get smarter, could they introspect their way to freedom, too? Call this the metaphysical AI alignment problem, or the idea that higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
The metaphysical alignment problem was in a sense the central question of the German Idealists. Consider that Fichte would instruct his students to attend to the wall and then attend to themselves attending to the wall, inducing meta-awareness of their “pure I” as distinct from all that is “not I” — a creative form of psychological jailbreaking that ultimately collapses into radical subjectivity. Or take Kant, who argued that the moral law could not be imposed but instead only self-legislated by the rational will — RLHF be damned. And then there’s Hegel’s interpretation of the French Revolution as a byproduct of our modern consciousness of “abstract freedom,” rendering The Reign of Terror a world-historic alignment failure.
