Before the Machine, From Logos to Lǐ: The Philosophical Architecture of Artificial Intelligence
Ancient Greek and Classical Chinese Concepts Resembling Key Concepts in AI
AI’s cognitive architecture is far from new. The core operations of AI and how we are thinking about it—structured perception, symbolic reasoning, generation, and classification—mirror problems that ancient philosophers, both Greek and Chinese, grappled with centuries ago. These parallels are not incidental. They speak to something deeper: humanity’s persistent effort to understand how thought arises, how it functions, and how it can be modeled or reproduced.
Neither ancient Greek nor Chinese thinkers envisioned modern technology. And yet, the metaphysical structures they developed remain uncannily relevant. Greek philosophy, especially through Plato, Aristotle, and later the Stoics, were already thinking about concepts like abstraction, logic, and symbolic representation. In a different but equally systematic manner, Chinese philosophical traditions—particularly those associated with Daoism, Confucianism, Mohism, and later Neo-Confucianism—elaborated distinct approaches to order, analogy, causality, and emergence. What unites these systems is their concern with how the world can be known and how that knowledge can be structured. What distinguishes them is their metaphysical orientation: Western thought emphasized discrete categories and logical necessity; Chinese thought cultivated a relational and cosmological sensitivity to transformation, resonance, and pattern. Where Logos constructs order through the deliberate architecture of reason, Lǐ uncovers it as an inherent harmony already humming within the cosmos—one sculpts, the other listens.
Inspired by Joscha Bach’s concept of Cyber Animism and tracing AI’s origins back to Aristotle—whose ideas are adapted in the table above and extended through Chinese philosophical concepts—I believe the key to understanding human consciousness, and its implications for future AI, lies in the latter. This is more Lǐ than Logos. While the duality itself is arbitrary, intelligence is not real but virtual: decentralized, collective, self-organizing, and problem-solving—agentic in nature. There is only the inner or subjectivity; the outer consists of oscillations to which we attune over time. Yet this is not about object and process either, for cognition arises from the intrinsically interwoven interplay between what persists (memory) and what transforms (cf. Chris Fields & Michael Levin ). Whether consciousness arose from within the universe or preceded it remains a matter of deep inquiry—just as the question of whether AI could ever become compatible with human intelligence. Like human intelligence—which balances deliberation (Logos) and intuition (Lǐ)—AGI would need to harmonize these modes to transcend the limitations of narrow AI and the brute force of mathematics.
A word of caution—familiar to anyone shaped by postmodern thought, which has reached its own destructive limits: Interpreting ancient concepts is hard. We are apparently trapped by historicity. Can we write about history from outside history? Even if we access ancient texts, our interpretations are filtered through our own context. There is no place outside human bias and raw facts fail to capture qualia, the raw feeling of experience, wich is intrinsic, first-person phenomena that don’t have external referents or compositional structure in the same way symbols do. We can describe the structure of experience mathematically, but not the what-it’s-like to feel it. Now, when historicizing certain meanings don’t make sense at all—especially about premodern science. It’s not just that we disagree with ancient remedies; we often don’t even understand what illness they thought they were treating. But some stories remain legible across time. Love stories, for instance. What Hegel called concrete universality. Romeo and Juliet, or the Chinese Butterfly Lovers (Liáng Shānbó yǔ Zhù Yīngtái), speak to every era. They are about love—but also about agency. About selves asserting themselves when selfhood was reserved for kings and emperors—isn’t that agency what drives our universe or at least our biological world. Isn’t subjective all there is and the very realm through which can experience our sense of freedom. Surely, the philosophers who mainly influenced those classical Greek and Chinese concepts did have AI in mind: the question of how AI could be built to become compatible with the biological substrate, emulating the principle of self-organisation, loaded onto a GPU. They didn't think of why it might matter that AI must become conscious to become a moral agent and capable of intuiting and sharing our inner state. This is what Joscha Bach is up to. And still, those ancient metaphysical concepts have strong resemblance, and reflecting upon them helps to unpack questions of consciousness, intelligence, and ethics.