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.
A review of the article by Carlos Herrera and Ricardo Sanz (2016): Heideggerian AI and the Being of Robots
Introduction: can a robot have "being"?
One of the deepest questions that artificial intelligence poses to philosophy is not technical —how to make machines more intelligent— but ontological: what kind of being do robots have? Are they of the same order as humans? Do they belong to the category of animals? Or do they constitute a completely new form of existence, one that our traditional categories fail to capture?
The article by Carlos Herrera and Ricardo Sanz (2016), published in the volume Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence edited by Vincent C. Müller (Synthese Library, Vol. 376), addresses precisely this question from a perspective rarely seen in contemporary debate: the philosophy of Martin Heidegger . The authors critically examine so-called "Heideggerian Artificial Intelligence" (HAI), a current that attempts to revise the foundations of AI based on Heidegger's analysis of Dasein (human being-there).
Herrera and Sanz's central thesis is provocative: traditional HAI makes a fundamental error by assuming that the ontological analysis of the human being can be applied directly to artificial systems. This, they argue, is inconsistent with Heidegger's own philosophy, for whom the categories of "robot" and "human" do not belong to the same type of beings. Instead, they propose a provisional ontology of robots based on their relationship with work: robots are those machines that perform human labour —and precisely because of this, their being is one that cannot be fulfilled.
From the perspective of our research on the S/Y/C model and Surgical Philosophy, Herrera and Sanz's analysis offers highly valuable conceptual tools for understanding not only what robots are, but also what artistic creation by machines implies and, ultimately, what defines the human as opposed to the artificial.
What is Heideggerian Artificial Intelligence?
Heideggerian Artificial Intelligence (HAI) arises from the conviction that Heidegger's philosophy —with its emphasis on situation, embodiment, world, and pre-reflective practice— can offer a fruitful alternative to dominant AI paradigms, which are often accused of being excessively rationalist, representationalist, and disconnected from concrete life.
Instead of designing systems that manipulate abstract symbols according to logical rules —the classical "symbolic" AI approach— HAI proposes building systems that are embedded in a world, that act in a situated manner, and that learn from practical interaction with their environment. This approach has inspired developments in situated robotics, autonomous systems, and perception-action-based agents.
However, Herrera and Sanz point out a fundamental problem: HAI tends to assume that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein (the human being) can be applied directly to artificial systems, as if robots and humans were "the same type of beings" . This assumption, they argue, is philosophically unsustainable.
The ontological error: when difference is forgotten
The fundamental problem of HAI, according to Herrera and Sanz, is that it denies ontological meaning to categories such as "robot" and "human", treating them as if they were interchangeable . This contradicts Heidegger's own philosophy, for whom the question of being —the Seinsfrage— is always a question of the ontological difference between being and beings, between the different ways of being of different types of beings.
Heidegger rigorously distinguished between Dasein (the human being, whose essence is to exist, to understand itself in its being) and vorhanden beings (merely present, objects) or zuhanden (useful things, tools). A robot, the authors argue, is not Dasein: it does not have the capacity to question its own being, to project itself towards possibilities, to live in anxiety before its death, to inhabit a meaningful world.
To pretend that a robot can be treated as Dasein is not only philosophically erroneous, but also closes the ontological question instead of opening it. HAI, by assuming that the ontology of the human applies to the robot, stops asking what kind of being the robot really has. And that question, for Herrera and Sanz, is what should guide any serious reflection on artificial intelligence.
Toward a provisional ontology of the robot
How, then, to approach the question of the being of the robot? Herrera and Sanz propose an alternative path: instead of starting from the analysis of Dasein, we must start from our pre-ontological notions of artificial systems . That is, from the way we always already understand them in our everyday practice.
The authors derive a provisional ontology of the robot from its relationship with work. Their thesis is as follows: robots are those machines that perform human labour .
But what does this imply? It is not only that robots execute tasks that humans used to do. The question is deeper: in performing human labour, robots not only transform work —they automate it, accelerate it, reconfigure it— but also transform the understanding of the being of the worker and of the machine itself.
Herrera and Sanz argue that, precisely because robots are destined to perform human labour, their being is one that cannot be fulfilled. A robot never attains a state of definitive "fulfilment". It can always be improved, updated, reprogrammed. It has no internal telos, no end that is its own. Its "sense" is always yet to come, always externalised to human needs and desires.
This characterisation —the robot as an unfinished, open, provisional being— is fascinating because it inverts the common intuition. We tend to think of robots as perfect, complete, determined machines. Herrera and Sanz invite us to see them, on the contrary, as beings whose incompleteness is constitutive of their way of being.
Implications for art and artificial creativity
What implications does this analysis have for the question of AI-generated art? If robots (and AI systems in general) are beings whose being cannot be fulfilled, then artificial creativity must be understood in a radically different way from human creativity.
The human artist, from a Heideggerian perspective, is a Dasein that projects itself towards possibilities, that lives in the openness of being, that expresses its understanding of the world in the work. The work of art is not a mere object: it is an event of truth, a revealing of being that the artist makes possible without exhausting it.
The robot, on the contrary, does not project, does not understand itself, does not inhabit a world of meaning. Its "creativity" is always the execution of algorithms, the optimisation of functions, the generation of statistical novelty. It can produce objects we call "art", but the meaning of those objects does not reside in an act of existential revealing, but in the interpretation that we humans make of them.
This does not imply that AI art is false or illusory. It implies, rather, that we must locate it in its proper ontological place. It is not a new form of creative Dasein, but a new form of useful thing (Zeug) that transforms our relationship with aesthetic creation. The robot is a tool, yes, but of a special kind: a tool whose function is to generate novelty, not to execute a predefined task.
Connection with research on the origin of art (S/Y/C)
Herrera and Sanz's analysis resonates deeply with the research we have been developing on the S/Y/C model of neuronal functioning and the Law of Biological Coherence.
The ontological difference they establish between human Dasein and the robot corresponds, in our model, to the difference between a living being that inhabits the S, Y, C dimensions and an artefact that can only simulate them externally.
S (Survival): The human being creates art because they need to regulate their bodily and emotional homeostasis. The robot has no body to preserve, does not experience pain or pleasure, does not need to "balance" itself. Its "creativity" does not respond to a vital need.
Y (Symbolon): The human being inhabits the symbol —they live it, feel it, share it from an interiority. The robot can manipulate symbols efficiently, but it does not become a symbol for itself. There is no "inside" that recognises or is recognised in the symbolic act.
C (Wholeness): The human being yearns for totality, seeks to close forms, to integrate scattered experiences into a biographical coherence. The robot has no biography, does not unfold a life project, does not experience the drive toward wholeness. Its "unfinished being", of which Herrera and Sanz speak, is not an existential lack but a constitutive condition of its design.
Surgical Philosophy invites us to make a precise analytical cut in this debate. It is not about denying the capacities of robots nor about uncritically idealising the human. It is about distinguishing ontological planes that technological haste tends to confuse. The robot can be an "actor" in the creative network, as Feng notes, but it is not Dasein. It can generate aesthetic artefacts, but it cannot inhabit art.
Preserving this difference is not an exercise in philosophical purism. It is a condition for understanding what is at stake in artistic creation: not only the production of beautiful objects, but the expression of an embodied, finite, mortal subjectivity that uses art to survive, to symbolise, and to achieve wholeness.
Final considerations: the robot as a mirror of the human
Herrera and Sanz's article reminds us that the question of artificial intelligence is, at bottom, a question about ourselves. When we try to determine whether a robot can be intelligent, or creative, or an artist, we are implicitly defining what we understand by intelligence, creativity, and art.
Their proposal for a provisional ontology of the robot based on work —and on the constitutive incompleteness of its being— offers a path for thinking about AI without falling into either anthropomorphism (treating the robot as if it were human) or blind utilitarianism (treating it as a mere tool without ontological consequences).
From our perspective, the robot is, above all, a mirror. It reflects our own aspirations and limits. It forces us to ask what is specific to the human, what distinguishes us from the most sophisticated machines. And that question, far from being a speculative luxury, is the core of any serious research into the origin of art, the evolution of consciousness, and the future of our species.
Human art —that of the caves, of the cathedrals, of the museums— was born of the need to express the inexpressible, to share the unsharable, to transcend the solitude of the flesh. Artificial intelligence can imitate its forms, but it cannot generate its source. Because that source is life itself: a body that feels, a symbol that is inhabited, a wholeness that is yearned for. And that, for now, remains the exclusive patrimony of the living.
References
Herrera, C., & Sanz, R. (2016). Heideggerian AI and the being of robots. In V. C. Müller (Ed.), Fundamental issues of artificial intelligence (Synthese Library, Vol. 376, pp. 423-438). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_29
López Mallo, J. B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Doctoral thesis, University of the Basque Country - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea]. ADDI Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
López Mallo, J. B. (2026a). 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
López Mallo, J. B. (2026a). 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 [Kindle edition]. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
López Mallo, J. B. (2026b). 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
López Mallo, J. B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage [Kindle edition]. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY89SZS1
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
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario