The Hydropuzzle, or the advantages of remaining a living being

Abstract

The article examines the cultural, epistemological, and phenomenological consequences of generative artificial intelligence entering the domain of conversation and meaning making, reconstructing a continuum from Descartes’s thesis on the incapacity of machines to speak, through the intellectual transformations of postmodernism, to contemporary experiences of being with a bot. The author shows that the technicization of sense and the cultural habituation to absence have prepared users for intimate relations with AI that simulate presence, affirm the user, and produce an impression of conversational unpredictability, while the essence of these phenomena remains computational and probabilistic.

On that basis the paper distinguishes between apparent unpredictability of generative AI and the qualitatively understood event of lived experience. A genuine event springs from the bodily, sensuous structure of experience — the flesh of being, co-feeling, and a moist presence — features the author terms hydroontological. Wetware, understood as the water-saturated living body, constitutes an epistemic and ontological barrier to the full reproduction of mindedness by systems founded on traces and code.

The article also discusses risks of mass interaction with bots: profiling, an echo mirror ego, attentional overstimulation, and market consumer dynamics that reinforce an illusion of self-satisfaction and weaken practices of presence. In conclusion the author calls for a reorientation of AI critique from a merely methodological assessment of capabilities toward safeguarding and affirming life practices that sustain the material, watery basis of human experience. This proposed hydroontology is advanced as a philosophical foundation for defending the qualitative dimension of being against reductionist projects to digitize reason.