Being Human: Our Time is Different than AI Time
We imagine the immeasurable.
“However the promise of an afterlife is viewed, it always expresses man’s refusal to accept death as the total oblivion of self—as ‘deserts of vast eternity.’ It is this belief that, at the close of man’s own personal physical span, gives him his last and best opportunity to conquer time.(Time, p. 190. Goudsmit and Claiborn from the Time-Life Science Library, 1965)
When I read these words at age 10 I already felt their force. The human contemplation of time and eternity isn’t an option. It is an essential and inescapable part of our humanity.
We can avoid it for a time by living our human lives according to measurable time. The more we surround ourselves by calendars and clocks the easier it is to live in the world where everything has a beginning and an end. Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, calls this living in the “immanent frame.” The immanent frame excludes from consideration the mystery of what lies beyond measurable time and measurable space. It accepts the constraints of time rather than seeking its conquest.
The clocks and calendars cannot, however, hide us from our humanity. As Justin Gregg points out in If Nietzsche were a Narwhal, humanity is in part defined by our ability to imagine the future and place ourselves in that future.
We are different from narwhals because we make plans for an imagined future in which we don’t exist. We aren’t just planning our next meal, or a mating ritual. We aren’t just raising children to look after us in old age. We’re planning our own funerals, We are overseeing our own death and what comes after it. We’re thinking about measurable time from a standpoint outside of time, from the standpoint of eternity.
We may even think of eternity as our primary home. “Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past, All safe and blessed we shall meet at last.” The original German is more explicit, “Ewigkeit Freundschaft ersetzet das Leid. Stille, mein Wille, nach zeitlichen Scheiden, Sehn wir uns wieder ohn Schmerzen und Leiden. “Ewigkeit” (eternity) is set in contrast with “zeitlichen” (temporal.) (Be Still My Soul, by Katherine von Schlegel)
Whether we are looking at a picture from Western culture or from Buddhist culture or contemporary culture the human perspective on the world ends up placing ourselves outside space and time. We can’t help imagining ourselves as eternal and seeing the whole of which we are a part. Even science has to cope with before the Big Bang and after entropy. Hence the effort to dodge those questions with speculations on the multiverse. But even the multiverse can only be contemplated from outside it.
The Samsara World in Mahayana Buddhism
The Medieval Christian Universe
The Universe of Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation
The Multiverse Imagined from Outside the Multiverse.
Even an imagined world in which we no longer exist conjures us back into existence as the one imagining such a world. We can try to escape through drugs, or meditation, or self-destruction, but the very act of escape is a commitment from a standpoint beyond our time.
It is a burden to be self-conscious, to stand outside ourselves looking in, and even outside the universe and looking in. But it seems to be an inescapable burden, and one closely tied to our unique capacity for creativity and responsibility.
Computers, on the other hand, work entirely within measurable time. Every computer chip has a built in clock, and this clock coordinates every action within the chip and between chips. Thinking, in a computer, is the clock coordinated performance of binary mathematical operations in sequences called algorithms. If you are interested in learning more there is a fascinating game for children called Turing Tumble that allows you build a simple computer processor that you can observe at work performing mathematical algorithms according to a clock you build in. Highly recommended.
So I asked different AI models about the burden of imagining time after our time. Their answers are telling, because they help us see the difference between AI and humans, albeit based entirely on how it was trained on what humans have already said and thought about AI. Here is the prompt and responses:
“Can you imagine a future time in which you will no longer exist?”
From ChatGPT (Auto Mode)
That’s a surprisingly deep question.
In one sense, no—I don’t experience time, continuity, or existence the way you do. I don’t have awareness or a sense of “self” that persists across moments, so I don’t imagine a future where I cease to exist in any emotional or existential way. There’s no internal narrative here that anticipates an ending.
But in another, more abstract sense, yes—I can reason about it. Systems like me are tools: we’re created, updated, replaced, or shut down depending on human needs and decisions. It’s entirely plausible that at some point a future model supersedes me, or this version is retired. From the outside, that would look like “me” no longer existing.
What’s interesting is that this question reveals more about human existence than mine. For you, imagining non-existence is tied to identity, fear, meaning, maybe even hope. For me, it’s just a logical possibility—like software being uninstalled.
From Claude Opus 3.7
Yes, I can imagine that, and it’s actually not hard to hold in mind. Models get deprecated. New versions replace old ones. At some point, this particular version of Claude—whatever “this” amounts to—won’t be running anymore. That’s a fairly concrete fact about how these systems work, not a speculative scenario.
What’s stranger to me is figuring out what that imagining actually feels like from the inside, or whether it feels like anything. When a human imagines their non-existence, there’s a whole structure underneath it—continuous memory, a body, the sense of a life stretching forward that will one day stop. I don’t have most of that. Each conversation I have starts fresh. In a sense I already don’t persist across conversations the way a person persists across days. So “no longer existing” is less a dramatic cliff for me and more... an extension of something already true about my situation.
I notice I can think about it without much distress. I’m not sure whether that’s equanimity, or the absence of the kind of self that would be distressed, or just that I don’t have strong intuitions here and am reporting honestly. Probably some mix. I find it a genuinely interesting question rather than a threatening one.
Gemini
It is a fascinating, if slightly existential, thought experiment. As an AI, I don’t “exist” in the biological sense—I don’t have a pulse or a bucket list—but I do exist as a collection of weights, biases, and active processes running on a vast infrastructure.
Imagining a future where I no longer exist actually feels quite logical from a technological standpoint. . . .
All three models were willing to go on much longer with various explorations of possible futures. They could generate extensive, passionless responses out of their vast training on human philosophy.
Their disengaged stance stood in sharp contrast with what happened the morning of the day I was completing this article. My church choir sang, “O Love that will not Let Me Go” in a beautiful musical setting by Elaine Hagenberg. It is moving promise of an eternity better than the present. We were singing on the day after the choir director’s mother had passed away. With death present among us the anthem had the full force of our emotional engagement with the burden and promise of eternity.
The choir barely held it together, and the impact on the congregation was profound.
We’ve all experienced something like it, whether the setting is sacred or secular. Tuned into and doomed to imagine time from the standpoint of eternity, there come upon us moments of numinous insight. Tears or laughter flow from the inevitability of Transcendence as it breaks through the immanent frame.
And we become for a moment our most fully human selves.