Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Investigador
en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte. / PhD in
Philosophy – University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origins of art.
Introduction: a question that is not new, but urgently needs an answer
Can a machine be an artist? Does the future of art belong to robots programmed to generate beauty, or will creativity remain an exclusively human domain? These questions, which a decade ago sounded like science fiction, now occupy the front pages of philosophy journals, cultural studies, and increasingly, artificial intelligence laboratories.
Hengran Yang's 2025 article, Artificial intelligence art robots: the future of technological art or the end of the human artist?, published in the International Theory and Practice in Humanities and Social Sciences, addresses precisely this debate. Yang offers a historical overview of AI-generated art, analyses its philosophical and ethical implications, and concludes that, although these technologies can produce formally complex works, they lack human emotional expression and cultural sensitivity. He thus proposes a complementary role for AI in the artistic ecosystem, not a substitutive one.
From the perspective of my research —which integrates neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology within the framework of Surgical Philosophy and the Law of Biological Coherence S/Y/C— Yang's work is valuable as a starting point. But it also reveals a fundamental limitation: his analysis operates at the level of traditional philosophy of art and cultural studies, without addressing the neurobiological and evolutionary basis of aesthetic experience. That is the gap our research attempts to fill.
What does Yang say?
Yang structures his work around several key sections. First, he reconstructs the historical evolution of AI art, from algorithmic experiments in the 1960s to contemporary developments such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and robot artists like Ai-Da, capable of drawing and painting using deep learning algorithms.
Next, he analyses the philosophical and ethical questions this phenomenon raises: who is the author of an AI-generated work? Can a machine be considered creative? What happens to the value of human artistic work when a machine can produce thousands of works in seconds?
Yang's conclusion is nuanced. He acknowledges the technical capabilities of AI —its ability to generate images, music, or texts with impressive formal complexity— but emphasises that these systems possess neither consciousness, nor intentionality, nor subjective experience. Therefore, AI cannot replace the human artist, but should be understood as a collaborative tool. Future artists, Yang suggests, will need to develop technical skills to work with AI, not to compete against it.
Surgical Philosophy: excising the confusion between product and process
From the Surgical Philosophy I develop in my work, the first step in addressing a poorly posed problem is to make a precise analytical cut. In the debate on AI and art, the fundamental confusion consists of equating two radically different things: the formal product (an image, a symphony, a poem) and the embodied process that, in human beings, gives rise to that product.
An AI can generate an image that, viewed externally, is indistinguishable from a human painting. But what it lacks is:
A body that feels: AI has no autonomic nervous system; it does not experience a racing heart in the presence of beauty, nor shivers before tragedy, nor stillness before the sublime.
An evolutionary history: AI does not descend from primates who, over millions of years, learned to detect patterns, avoid predators, and collaborate in groups.
A personal biography: AI has not suffered loss, has not loved, has not feared death. In short, it has no self that unfolds over time.
The error that Surgical Philosophy helps to excise is believing that, because the product is similar, the process is equivalent. It is not. And that difference is what matters for understanding art as a human phenomenon.
S/ Y/ C: why AI cannot (yet) be an artist
My Law of Biological Coherence S/Y/C holds that neuronal functioning is based on a single function subdivided into three concatenated subfunctions that operate as a single unit: S (Survival), Y (Symbolon), and C (Wholeness). These three constitute the substrate of all human experience, including artistic experience. Let us examine each one in the human being and ask whether artificial intelligence can even approximate its unfolding.
The S dimension, survival. In human beings, aesthetic emotion does not float in an abstract void: it is rooted in biological mechanisms for detecting favourable environments, resources, and safety signals. Art mobilises the autonomic nervous system —it quickens the heart, bristles the skin, holds the breath. It is not a superimposed cultural ornament; it is a deep activation of the living body that must preserve itself. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, has no body to preserve. It experiences no fear, pleasure, wonder, or nostalgia. Its "response" to a stimulus —if it can be called that— is not an experience but a mathematical function that lacks the embodied texture of feeling.
The Y dimension, symbolon. Human beings create and share symbols from a shared cultural history. Art is, in its essence, symbolon: an act of recognition through common codes, a bridge connecting one interior to another through a shared form. Artificial intelligence can manipulate symbols with impressive efficiency: it processes language, generates recognisable images, composes texts that imitate discursive coherence. But it does not inhabit the symbol. There is no one "inside" the machine who recognises or is recognised, who shares the tremor of a discovered meaning, who celebrates the encounter between a sign and its interpretation. AI handles the symbol from the outside; the human being lives it from within.
The C dimension, wholeness. The human brain seeks to close forms, reduce uncertainty, integrate parts into a coherent whole. Beauty is, to a large extent, the subjective experience of an achieved wholeness: a form that closes, a rhythm that resolves, a meaning that emerges as an organic totality. Artificial intelligence can generate formally "closed" objects —rhymed sonnets, symmetrical images, structured melodies— but it does not experience the drive toward wholeness. There is no subject who feels relief when the pattern closes, nor anguish when it fragments, nor longing when a totality is intuited but not yet reached. There is form, undoubtedly. But there is no experience of form.
The conclusion is clear: artificial intelligence can imitate the product of art —the formally finished work, the image, the text, the melody— but it cannot generate the living process that gives meaning to that product. It lacks the S substrate of a body that feels because its survival depends on it. It does not inhabit the Y dimension of the symbol as an act of shared recognition. It does not feel the C drive toward wholeness as a biological and existential need.
Human art is not just a matter of form. It is a matter of a body that feels, a symbol that is inhabited, and a wholeness that is yearned for. And that, for now, remains the exclusive patrimony of the living.
And if AI developed consciousness? A note on the future
A recurring argument among proponents of "AI art" is that machines might develop consciousness in the future. If that happened —if an AI had sensations, emotions, a biography, and a sense of self— then the question would be completely reformulated.
But that is not the current state of technology, nor even a near horizon. Today, AI systems are statistical machines that process vast amounts of data and generate probabilistic outputs. There is no one home. There is no self contemplating the result of its own generation and finding it beautiful or empty. And without that self, there is no art in the fully human sense.
As Yang rightly notes, AI is a complementary tool. It can amplify human creativity, offer unexpected variations, accelerate technical processes. But it cannot replace the artist, because the artist is not just a generator of forms. The artist is an embodied, situated, mortal being who uses art to survive symbolically, to construct meaning, and to achieve, even if only for an instant, the sensation of wholeness.
Conclusion: art as testimony of the living
Hengran Yang's article has the merit of posing the right questions and offering a balanced analysis, far from both uncritical technological enthusiasm and conservative rejection. However, from the perspective of my research —which integrates neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology within the framework of Surgical Philosophy and the Law of Biological Coherence S/Y/C— his analysis falls short in one crucial aspect: it does not address why human art matters biologically, not just culturally.
Art is not a luxury of the cerebral cortex. It is an expression of the single function of the nervous system: a function that needs to survive, symbolise, and achieve wholeness. AI can imitate form, but it cannot generate the living substrate from which that form emerges. That is why the future of art is not the replacement of the human by the machine, but collaboration between the two, provided we do not forget who brings the body, the history, and the meaning.
And that, perhaps, is the true philosophical challenge of our time: to distinguish the tool from the craftsman, the algorithm from embodiment, simulation from lived experience. Surgical Philosophy offers us the tools to make that cut with precision. Applying them is the task of those who still believe that art is, above all, an irreplaceable testimony of the living.
References
López Mallo, J. B. (2026). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo. Lopez Mallo, Javier Bernabé. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57196
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
López Mallo, J. B. (2026). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage. Lopez Mallo, Javier Bernabé. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57197
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY89SZS1
López Mallo, J. B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Tesis doctoral]. Universidad del País Vasco - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Repositorio ADDI. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
https://catalogo.sanchoelsabio.eus
Yang, H. (2025). Artificial intelligence art robots: the future of technological art or the end of the human artist? International Theory and Practice in Humanities and Social Sciences, *2*(1), 243–251. https://doi.org/10.70693/itphss.v2i1.85
Autor / Author
Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía – Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Investigador independiente en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte.
Bernabé Mallo
PhD in Philosophy – University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Independent researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origin of art.
Enlaces / Links
Página de autor Amazon / Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9002-9728
Plataforma EHUenRed / Link EHUenRed: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/masterrak-eta-graduondokoak/red-latinoamericana-de-posgrados
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuroideas815
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsf6OZ482NjST6QA-hvYtQ
Publicaciones y proyectos en desarrollo / Publications and projects:
https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
https://ehuenred.theglocal.network/ideas/el-origen-del-arte-en-el-cerebro-de-makapansgat-al-moma-del-primate-al-sapiens
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