The Fourth Humiliation

Much of this post directly translates Freud’s lecture “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis” (1917), and the analogy of the fourth wound was told to me a few years ago by my favorite philosophy professor. Similar ideas about a fourth humiliation have been expressed in various other texts, for instance by writers such as Donna Haraway, but I still think that it is worth sharing here.

Three times mankind has been humbled. It seems we are due for a fourth time.

A humiliation, a narcissistic wound (Freud's word is Kränkung, which can mean “wound” or “insult”), in psychoanalytic terms, is what happens when an illusion that a person's self-love is attached to gets destroyed. Freud believed that every person is born with all of their self-love (what he calls libido) attached to themselves. He called this state narcissism, after the Greek myth of Narcissus. Over the course of one's life, libido gradually becomes attached to external objects. This process is normal and necessary to mature but also exceptionally painful.

In 1917 when Freud gave his lecture, he argued that mankind had, on a collective level, experienced three such humiliations.

The first humiliation: The universe does not revolve around us

From the unshakeable impression of standing at the center of a circle while observing the movements of the celestial bodies, man concluded he must be the center of the universe. This, according to Freud, was in convenient agreement with man's inclination to see himself as the lord of this world, as God's chosen one.

The destruction of this illusion is tied to Copernicus, though he was not the first to propose geocentrism. The Pythagoreans had already doubted the earth's privileged position, and similar claims had been made as early as the third century BC. But only when it found general acceptance did human self-love suffer its first narcissistic wound: the cosmological one.

The second humiliation: We are not separate from animal

In the course of his cultural development, man made himself the master of his fellow creatures. But not content with dominance, he began to dig a gulf between their nature and his own. He denied them reason, granted himself an immortal soul, and claimed a divine descent that permitted him to sever the bond with the animal world.

The research of Darwin put an end to this self-elevation. Man is nothing other and nothing better than the animals; he himself emerged from the animal kingdom, more closely related to some species, more distantly to others. No later refinement could erase the evidence of this kinship, written into his body and his mind alike. This is the second wound to human self-love: the biological one.

The third humiliation: We are not masters of our own minds

Not center of the universe, not king of the animal kingdom, but still master of his own mind. Man, a kind of animal yes, but a rational animal.

“Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he knows himself free to acquiesce or to resist.”– Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)

Until a certain Austrian doctor, who took even this away from us. Freud told us that our drives cannot be fully tamed, and that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, reaching the ego only through incomplete and unreliable perception.

And the truth of this rang true for everyone: every person experiences thoughts coming out of nowhere, instincts "taking possession" of them. So, like Copernicus and Darwin before him, Freud was undeniable. The ego, it turns out, is not master in its own house. No wonder it seemed especially scarred by this third narcissistic wound: the psychological one.

The fourth humiliation: Our intelligence will be surpassed

We have accepted that the sun does not revolve around us, that we are animals among animals, we have accepted, maybe embraced even, that there are depths in our own minds that we can neither see nor steer.

But, but, but we are still special.

... right?

This insistence on the exceptionality of our intelligence is everywhere, I’m sure you already know how it sounds:

"We've come this far because we are the smartest creatures that have ever lived."– David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet (2020)

"Seventy thousand years ago the Cognitive Revolution transformed the Sapiens mind, thereby turning an insignificant African ape into the ruler of the world."– Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2016)

“The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organised structure in the universe”
– V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain (2010)

This is where humanity’s self-love, our collective narcissism if you will, now sits. And I believe that this is the reason that the idea of artificial superintelligence (ASI), a technology that is better at all cognitive tasks than us, hurts so much.

In fact, we are DESPERATE to find areas where AI has not yet reached or surpassed human-level capacity. The Turing Test, the Winograd schema challenge, Wozniak's Coffee Test, ARC-AGI — each one a line to demarcate a boundary between us and the machines, redrawn every time it gets crossed.

Whether or not AI has or has not reached whatever threshold is besides the point here, what I am trying to get at is the mechanism that sets in when talking about the advancement of AI capabilities. I catch myself doing this too when I explain the role of Claude Code in my day to day work as a researcher: "Well, Claude writes the code, but the thinking is still mine…"

While some of those inclined to read this post may have come accustomed to the idea, I think it is difficult to overstate the level of existential dread that the real possibility of creating ASI brings about for most people, especially the first time they really consider the possibility. The first “feel the AGI moment” comes at different points for anyone, some when they use AI for a task they previously deemed too difficult, some when watching the news, some when they notice they've stopped double-checking its answers. But I think nearly everyone who really sits with it arrives somewhere close to the feeling, even if they would not call it dread. After encountering EMI in 2014, a program that produced beautiful music in the style of famous composers, Douglas Hofstadter (the author of GEB and I Am a Strange Loop) told a room full of Google engineers that the program terrified him, that he hated it, that it threatened him. “If we actually make computers smarter than us”, he said, “we will be superseded: relics, left in the dust". (Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, 2019)

Beyond the mere idea of ASI, I think none of us are prepared for the loss of meaning that something like the full automation of cognitive labor would bring about (that is, if we survive). I myself grapple with it every day, which also gives me empathy for how difficult it must have been for people in the past to accept heliocentrism, the theory of evolution, or the idea of an irrational self.

Healing a Narcissistic Injury

Fortunately, it does not end with the wound. Or, it does not have to. Healing from the wound is possible, natural even, but it requires a particular psychological movement: a kind of letting go, a turning it into something else.

In his book Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Richard Dawkins describes how, for many people, science leads to a kind of disenchantment. The title of the book is taken from Keats's poem Lamia.

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

But science (natural philosophy) is not cold, Dawkins argues. No, quite the opposite. The rainbow, through Newton, through spectrography, revealing the spectrum folded into the sunlight that hits tiny water droplets, is something at which "the heart of any poet worthy of the title Romantic could not fail to leap up". Charles Darwin makes something akin to this move in the closing sentence of On the Origin of Species (1859):

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

(I really love Frans de Waal's writings, which sometimes make me think that we have still not healed fully from Darwin’s wound...)

Right now, our intelligence is where our self-love is attached. Soon we will have to turn that into something else, what it will look like, I do not know. And I notice that every answer I reach for - that we'll find some new source of purpose, that AI itself might help provide it, that maybe we will just “get used to it”, or that a different way of living will emerge - is still, I think, speaking the language of the wound.

So rather than attempt an answer, I will leave you with two pictures that I think beautifully illustrate the change the Copernican revolution set in motion: from the center of the universe, to a mote of dust in a sunbeam.

Andreas Cellarius, Scenographia Systematis Mundani Ptolemaici (1660)

Earth as pictured by Voyager as "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" (Pale Blue Dot, 1994)

Discuss