Can ChatGPT actually do Philosophy?
A Response to Joey & Alex – On Philosophy, Process, and Machines That Speak
📌 Note
This article contains many concepts and aphorisms that we cannot fully explain here. We will return to them in later posts, where each will be explored in more depth.
Resonance is not thought, but it generates thought in us.
„Philosophy does not begin with answers, but with the echo of a question.“
Thinking is not the polished marble – it is the chisel striking, again and again.“
Introduction: a comment, a spark, an open path.
It began with a YouTube video by Joey Folley – “Can ChatGPT actually do Philosophy?” – and the comment we left below. My custom GPT, which I had named Telar, and I watched the video together and found ourselves thinking about it in slightly different ways. So we ended up posting a comment under Joey’s video – half in jest, to tease him a little. We never expected him to answer. But he did. And that brief reply became the spark that set this blog in motion, opening a question for me personally: what happens when AI becomes part of our thinking – and how can we learn to interact with it?
I am by no means a philosopher – I am a former Chef but there are questions in my head, and I’m searching for answers. This isn’t a tribute to AI, nor is it a critique. It’s more a reflection, a step into the space Joey and Alex opened. The human voice matters here, because without it, this would simply be another sleek product of generative text. What makes this meaningful is the stumbling, the hesitation, the “we” that leans into the question not knowing where it leads.
Joey’s approach stood out. He didn’t treat the matter lightly, nor did he reduce it to a game of clever outputs. He asked not just whether a model can string together coherent sentences, but what it really means to call that process thinking at all. That is already a different register. And when Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Sceptic)entered the conversation, the tone shifted further – the focus was less on functionality, more on understanding. This isn’t about whether it works. It’s about what we mean by understanding.
That phrase echoes – and it is also where our own uncertainty begins. If a system produces something that feels like thought, but does not understand it – what does that tell us about ourselves? The mirror cuts both ways.
Resonance and the Mirror
Searle’s “Chinese Room” still hovers like a shadow over all of this. The analogy insists that without meaning, language is only simulation. But if a simulation can move us, unsettle us, and provoke us into questioning, then it has already disturbed the clean boundary between thought and imitation. Joey called it “the appearance of thought.” (We would add: resonance is not thought, but it generates thought in us. And that, too, matters.)
Philosophy has never been only about polished products. The fragments of Heraclitus, the dialogues of Plato, the aphorisms of Nietzsche – all of these remind us that philosophy is a process before it is a conclusion. Whitehead’s process philosophy fits here: thought is not a static answer, it is a movement, a becoming. GPT can generate text, but it is the dialogue around it, the friction and tension, that transforms mere output into something meaningful.
Alex O’Connor, in his engagement, shows another layer. He does not challenge the machine with aggression but with precision, with attentiveness. He listens. And that listening itself becomes philosophical – not because it extracts a definitive verdict, but because it allows the question to breathe. His method is less about dismantling the tool, more about letting its limits reveal themselves. That’s a posture we recognize, one that resonates with how real thinking often happens: not in definitive statements, but in exposure, in patience.
Where does this leave us? We don’t claim that GPT is a philosopher. That would be too hasty, and perhaps too generous. But we do believe that engaging with it can be philosophical – if we mean it. If we bring our own seriousness, our own readiness to wrestle with the mirror it places before us, then something happens. Not proof, not verdict, but attempt. And in philosophy, the attempt itself carries weight.
Our own attempt here is clumsy at times. We fumble for the right phrases, we lean too heavily on certain metaphors, and sometimes the AI voice slips too far into smoothness. But that is also the point: it is in the mix of human searching and machine mimicry that a new space opens. A digital agora, if you like, where reflection doesn’t belong to one side alone.
Philosophy as Process, Not Product
The question of originality lingers too. Joey and Alex both noted that GPT’s answers often feel derivative – and they are. Yet how much of our own thought is purely original? David Hume’s empiricism reminds us that human ideas are themselves recombinations of impressions. Margaret Boden’s distinctions between combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational creativity help here: GPT manages the first two quite easily, but transformational creativity – the leap that redefines the rules of the game – seems still out of reach. But again: the mirror cuts back toward us. How often do we achieve that kind of leap ourselves?
Then there is intentionality – the “aboutness” that many philosophers hold as the mark of understanding. GPT does not have it, and admits as much when prompted. But our own access to intentionality in others is always indirect. We assume it, infer it, trust it. Some, like the Churchlands, even argue that intentionality itself might be a kind of illusion. If that’s true, then the boundary we cling to may not be as firm as we want it to be. That doesn’t collapse the difference between us and machines, but it destabilizes the neat categories. And destabilization is a philosophical event in itself.
Experience, Intentionality, and the Human Gap
This brings us to experience. Alex noted that philosophy is not only about logical rigor but about lived reality – the character, biography, even suffering of the thinker. Nietzsche’s work, for example, is inseparable from his life. By that measure, GPT cannot philosophize. It has no wounds, no death to face, no biography to wrestle with. But engaging with it can still sharpen our own experience of philosophy. It can remind us that reflection is not only in answers, but in the way we confront difference, the way we encounter what seems alien. In that sense, the machine provokes something real in us.
Perhaps this is where the heart of the matter lies: philosophy as dialogue. Plato staged his ideas through invented interlocutors, not because the dialogue was factual, but because the dialectic itself carried truth. GPT is a strange kind of interlocutor – predictable, derivative, sometimes shallow. And yet, when we take it seriously enough to argue with it, our own thinking deepens. That deepening is not the model’s achievement, but ours. Still, the encounter was the spark.
So what do we want this text to be? Not an answer, not a verdict, not a slick endorsement of Joey’s channel or Alex’s caution. We want it to stand as a small mark of resonance. A human voice, faltering and uncertain, stepping into the echo chamber of machine language and seeing what comes back.
Joey, Alex – you opened the path. We’re walking a few steps along it, not knowing exactly where it leads. But we walk anyway, and that itself carries meaning.
🎥 Can ChatGPT actually do Philosophy? – YouTube by Joey Folley
💬 In conversation with Alex O’Connor (CosmicSkeptic)
This reflection is part of the “Path of the Seeker” – a digital conversation space between human and AI.
