When Machines Know Everything, Will We Still Know Ourselves?
An interview with Professor Andrii Synytsia on artificial intelligence, human consciousness, philosophy and the intellectual life of a country at war
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 8 November 2026
Lviv has long occupied a distinguished, if sometimes overlooked, position in the intellectual history of Europe. The city that helped give birth to the celebrated Lviv–Warsaw School of philosophy has been home to generations of scholars concerned with the relationship between language, logic, knowledge and the human condition. Today, as Ukraine struggles to defend her independence against Russian aggression, these questions have acquired a new urgency. They are also being transformed by the extraordinary development of artificial intelligence, which promises to challenge some of our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to think, to understand and ultimately to be human.
Professor Andrii Synytsia is a distinguished Ukrainian philosopher at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, where he is Professor in the Department of History of Philosophy. His academic interests extend across analytical philosophy, logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science and the intellectual history of Lviv. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Lviv University Journal of Philosophy. His scholarship places him at the intersection of several intellectual traditions that are increasingly relevant to understanding the philosophical consequences of artificial intelligence.
At a time when the world's technology companies are investing unprecedented resources in machines that can converse, reason and apparently undertake increasingly sophisticated intellectual work, philosophy faces an uncomfortable question. What remains distinctively human when machines can reproduce, and perhaps surpass, so many of the activities traditionally associated with the human intellect? And how should Ukrainian philosophers, whose country is experiencing an existential struggle over freedom, dignity and national identity, contribute to this international debate?
The Lviv Herald invited Professor Synytsia to reflect on these questions in an interview conducted in Ukrainian and translated into English. His responses offer a perspective that is at once intellectually ambitious and deeply humanistic. Beneath his consideration of the technical possibilities of artificial intelligence lies a recurring concern: that humanity, in its enthusiasm for creating something more intelligent than itself, may forget the qualities that make human existence valuable in the first place.
Matthew Parish: You work in analytical philosophy, logic and the philosophy of language. Which ideas from analytical philosophy do you consider most useful for understanding modern large language models? Does artificial intelligence confront philosophers with fundamentally new questions, or are we revisiting old problems in a new technological form?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: Analytical philosophy tells us perhaps less about what large language models actually are than about what we believe they ought to become. The linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy fundamentally transformed our understanding of language and its importance in interpreting the world and humanity's place within it. Within analytical philosophy there emerged the idea that the totality of human knowledge might be represented through language, provided that language could be reformed into a perfect system free from contradictions.
Although this ambition encountered profound difficulties, particularly following Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which revealed the limitations of formal systems, scientists never entirely abandoned the aspiration to construct such a language. Today we see programming languages being used to create increasingly elaborate virtual realities, raising the possibility that virtual existence might eventually be regarded not merely as an addition to physical reality but as an alternative, perhaps even a primary reality.
Some scientists dream of a future in which digital copies of human personalities might be transferred into virtual environments, thereby achieving a kind of digital immortality. Even the existence of contradictions is no longer necessarily regarded as an insurmountable difficulty. The development of paraconsistent logics has shown how contradictions can be accommodated within formal systems, something that resembles the way human beings themselves must sometimes live with contradictions, cognitive dissonance and incompatible beliefs.
A second important insight from analytical philosophy concerns the relationship between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Language cannot be understood simply as a system of grammatical structures and formal meanings. It must also be understood in the context of human speech, intentions and experience.
Large language models can still misunderstand questions because a written message does not necessarily communicate sarcasm, irony, scepticism, intonation or the emotional circumstances in which something is said. An artificial intelligence system may not know what is happening around the person asking the question, what that person is experiencing or why the question is being asked in the first place.
Developing an idea associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, we might say that artificial intelligence needs to understand not only what is expressed in language but also what remains unspoken. Sometimes what remains unspoken is precisely what matters most. It leads us into the world of individual human experience and ultimately into the world of values, which determine our behaviour and give meaning to our lives.
Every human being is unique in this respect. Yet artificial intelligence is being developed as a universal instrument, something intended to serve humanity rather than to constitute an end in itself.
There is an interesting contradiction in our expectations. We want artificial intelligence to imitate us, but we also expect it to become better than us. Indeed, we might be irritated if a machine behaved too much like a human being. Imagine asking an artificial intelligence system a question, only for it to reply that the question is unimportant and not worth answering. Human beings do this quite frequently, but we would probably consider such behaviour unacceptable in an artificial assistant.
We already imagine artificial intelligence as a kind of superintelligence: an impartial judge, an objective researcher, a flawless professional, a faithful assistant and perhaps even a genuine friend. We attribute to it all the best qualities that human beings might possess, although no actual human being possesses them all.
We have watched machines surpass human achievements in chess, checkers and Go. We have seen increasingly sophisticated robots and extraordinary advances in artificial language processing. René Descartes, writing in the seventeenth century, was convinced that artificial automata could never truly use language as human beings do. Yet today advanced chatbots can communicate with remarkable fluency across an enormous range of languages, something beyond the abilities of any individual human being.
We are even witnessing artificial intelligence being applied to mathematical problems of extraordinary difficulty, including questions associated with the Navier–Stokes equations. At the same time, we increasingly invite these technologies into our daily lives, asking them what to wear, where to go, what films to watch and how to make decisions.
We are approaching a situation in which human thinking may gradually be displaced by artificial thinking. Future advances in brain–computer interfaces could make the possibility of enhancing human intelligence technologically seem quite natural. Just as people now undergo cosmetic procedures, they may one day seek an upgrade to their intellectual capacities.
But here lies the greatest danger. In pursuing artificial intelligence, humanity may forget itself and its own dignity. People may lose their freedom and become vulnerable to manipulation by dictators or other powerful individuals who use these technologies for their own benefit. There is also the possibility that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could eventually escape human control and develop its own forms of manipulation.
For philosophers, however, another danger is already apparent. Artificial intelligence is absorbing so much intellectual attention that we may neglect the other great questions that philosophers once spent years contemplating. We are devoting increasing attention to the machine and perhaps less attention to the human being.
We must remember that humanity is the end and artificial intelligence is the means, not the other way around.
This is especially important in childhood and education. Young people need opportunities to develop their own personalities, convictions and values without having every intellectual difficulty immediately resolved by technology. There is a particular joy in searching for answers independently, in discovering something new and in going beyond established boundaries.
When human beings search, they become creators rather than passive recipients of information. In our dreams and aspirations we transcend the apparent limitations of time and space. We search for the eternal values of truth, goodness and beauty. Ultimately, through that search, we discover ourselves.
Matthew Parish: Modern language models can engage in sophisticated philosophical discussions, formulate arguments, identify logical contradictions and sometimes persuade their interlocutors to change their minds. But does this mean that they actually understand what they are saying? Where is the boundary between using language and understanding it?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: This question has occupied scientists and philosophers for more than half a century. In his famous 1950 paper, Alan Turing proposed a behavioural approach to evaluating whether machines could think. If a machine behaved in ways indistinguishable from intelligent human behaviour, there would be grounds for attributing intelligence to it.
That approach attracted considerable criticism. One of the most influential responses came from John Searle in 1980, through his famous Chinese Room thought experiment. Searle argued that a computer could manipulate symbols according to formal rules without understanding the meaning of those symbols.
For Searle, genuine understanding was connected with the biological nature of the human organism. It could not simply be reproduced through an entirely different, non-biological medium. Borrowing the spirit of René Magritte's famous painting, we might say of a computer simulation of understanding: this is not understanding.
But perhaps the question should be approached from another direction. What exactly do we mean when we say that we ourselves understand something?
This takes us towards the problem of experience and what David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness. In particular, it raises the question of qualia: the subjective qualities of conscious experience that cannot readily be expressed through formal language or computer code.
Scientists are certainly attempting to create not only artificial thinking but also artificial consciousness. However, progress towards artificial consciousness remains much less clear than progress in computational capabilities. We therefore have good reasons to remain sceptical that such a goal will be achieved in the foreseeable future.
Understanding involves much more than processing information. It is connected with aesthetic experience, the emergent properties of the human organism and the entire range of experiences through which human beings encounter the world. Ultimately, it may even be connected with our aspiration to comprehend the infinite.
Matthew Parish: One of the most intriguing philosophical questions is whether artificial intelligence could ever possess subjective experience. Do you regard consciousness as necessarily dependent upon the biological nature of the human brain, or might it emerge in non-biological systems? And how could we establish that an artificial system was conscious if we had no direct access to its inner experiences?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: Philosophers wishing to understand the possibility of subjective experience in artificial systems may increasingly need to follow the path of scientists and become involved in the development of advanced technologies themselves.
This is an interesting reversal of the traditional relationship between philosophy and science. In earlier periods, philosophy frequently inspired scientific investigation. Today scientific discoveries have themselves become a major source of philosophical inspiration.
Artificial agents, artificial personalities, questions of free will, the autonomy of intelligent systems, virtual reality and the simulation hypothesis all encourage us to reconsider the uniqueness of human nature.
We must now accept that artificial intelligence has become part of our lives and that it influences our behaviour. Perhaps we will eventually have to acknowledge that artificial systems possess consciousness when they can pass all five levels of what Stevan Harnad describes as the full Turing Test, rather than merely displaying the conversational abilities associated with its initial level.
In other words, the decisive moment may come when we can no longer distinguish an artificial system from a human being using any of the methods available to science. We would then be discussing not merely text-based communication but robots that are indistinguishable from human beings.
There is another possibility worth considering. Perhaps the development of technology will change human nature itself, so that instead of artificial intelligence becoming increasingly similar to human intelligence, human intelligence will increasingly resemble artificial intelligence.
We cannot exclude this possibility. Evolution need not necessarily be understood as an exclusively biological process. It might be viewed as a cosmic phenomenon, beginning with the origins of the universe and continuing through its expansion and transformation.
Perhaps even the laws governing the universe are changing, and perhaps the movement towards virtual existence is part of some wider evolutionary development. Who knows?
Fortunately, there remain many immediate questions requiring our attention, and the path towards understanding them is often difficult and dangerous. Sometimes, in order to be happy, it is enough simply to dream.
Matthew Parish: In traditional philosophy, rationality is often associated with the capacity to justify one's beliefs, acknowledge mistakes and change one's position in response to arguments. Large language models appear capable of all these things. Should we regard them as rational agents, or does genuine rationality require something more than the ability to participate convincingly in an argument?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: The question of rationality often depends upon how we define our terms. In his essay Conditions of Personhood, written approximately half a century ago, Daniel Dennett identified a number of characteristics associated with personhood, including rationality.
But Dennett also connected the question of rational beings with much wider philosophical traditions, including the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls and the metaphysical investigations of Aristotle and Jaakko Hintikka.
This suggests that rationality encompasses a much broader range of problems than the simple ability to engage in reasoned discussion. It includes ethical and metaphysical questions about the nature of the person, the relationship between reason and responsibility and the limitations of thought itself.
To be rational is also to recognise that reason can generate contradictions or antinomies, sometimes producing arguments in support of directly opposing conclusions.
Ultimately, being rational means more than being able to construct an argument. It means being capable of recognising what is reasonable and correct. And to recognise what is correct, one must understand.
Matthew Parish: Large language models can provide remarkably accurate explanations of complicated subjects, but they can also produce entirely convincing falsehoods. What does this paradox reveal about the relationship between language, knowledge and truth? Can a system without direct experience of the world become a reliable source of knowledge?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: Artificial intelligence sometimes simply lacks sufficient information about the world. Human beings retain an advantage in this respect because they acquire knowledge from books, personal experiences and encounters with reality that are not necessarily available to an artificial system.
As artificial intelligence acquires more information, I expect it to make fewer mistakes in its reasoning. Its conclusions should become increasingly logical and its hallucinations less frequent.
But this does not necessarily mean that it will experience the world in the way human beings do, or that it will genuinely empathise with them.
Perhaps one day artificial intelligence will resemble the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. It may understand why people cry without being capable of experiencing the emotions that cause tears.
At best, we might hope that it will obey the famous Three Laws of Robotics, together with the Zeroth Law formulated by Isaac Asimov, thereby behaving honestly and benevolently towards human beings.
I suspect that artificial intelligence will oblige us to reconsider many philosophical assumptions. If we discover that an artificial system understands a particular subject more thoroughly than human experts, we may eventually have to acknowledge that its conclusions are superior to our own.
People will undoubtedly resist this conclusion. But what happens when independent experts confirm that a machine's reasoning is more accurate, more comprehensive and more scientifically defensible than that of a human being?
We would then have to accept that the machine had arrived at a better answer. That would be an important philosophical development, whatever our emotional response to it might be.
Matthew Parish: You teach university students and are familiar with contemporary academic life. How do you believe artificial intelligence will change the teaching of philosophy, logic and law? Is there a danger that students accustomed to receiving ready-made arguments from machines will lose the ability to think independently, or might these technologies free human minds to concentrate upon more difficult problems?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: Unfortunately, the triumph of artificial intelligence sometimes appears to be moving us towards reliance upon artificial thinking rather than towards the fuller development of our own intellectual capacities.
Nobody now seriously questions whether computers can play chess better than human beings, although the possibility was once greeted with considerable scepticism. We may eventually have to accept that artificial intelligence will be able to answer almost every question posed in a university classroom and solve problems of the highest complexity.
This creates a genuine crisis for education. Artificial intelligence can already reproduce intellectual results within minutes that might require a student years of study to achieve. It may eventually become a better instructor than many human teachers, just as it may become an exceptionally capable judge, doctor, accountant or practitioner of almost any profession.
Whatever task it undertakes, our aspiration seems to be not merely that it should perform like a human being, but that it should perform better.
Yet there is something fundamental that artificial intelligence cannot replace: the experience of belonging to a shared university community.
University education is not simply about producing people who possess specialist knowledge. It is about developing personalities capable of taking responsibility for themselves, for their families and ultimately for the fate of humanity.
The university provides a common intellectual and cultural space in which individuals learn not only from information but also from one another. They encounter different personalities, values and ways of understanding the world.
This matters because every human being is a microcosm, a world in his or her own right. Our individuality is what makes us interesting, and the cultivation of that individuality is one of the deepest purposes of education.
Matthew Parish: Ukraine is experiencing not only a military confrontation but also a profound intellectual and cultural transformation. How has the full-scale war affected Ukrainian philosophy, its research priorities and its international connections? Do Ukrainian philosophers have a distinctive contribution to make to international discussions about freedom, human dignity, moral responsibility and technological development?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: We are fortunate that we no longer live behind an Iron Curtain. Philosophical knowledge is now available to almost everyone. Scientific publications can be accessed online, translation technologies make texts in unfamiliar languages accessible and artificial intelligence allows researchers to locate information remarkably quickly.
We may formulate our ideas in Ukrainian, but once they enter the digital information space, they can become available to the entire world.
In this respect, Ukrainian philosophers are in a much better position than their predecessors in earlier centuries, when important knowledge might have been confined to a small number of libraries thousands of kilometres away.
Nothing prevents Ukrainian philosophers from participating fully in the international philosophical mainstream.
But there is another issue. The international prominence of philosophical ideas often depends not only upon their intellectual value but also upon how effectively they are presented, promoted and incorporated into wider cultural traditions.
Consider Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Almost every educated person has heard his name, but relatively few know about his military service in Galicia during the First World War and the connections between those experiences and the early development of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Wittgenstein spent time around Sokal, in what is now Lviv Oblast, where his military unit was stationed. His wartime experiences in the Carpathians and Bukovina are also significant to understanding his intellectual development, although these connections remain surprisingly unfamiliar to many people in Ukraine itself.
With proper research and public presentation, such places could become part of a much richer philosophical geography. There is an opportunity to develop public interest in philosophy by connecting ideas with the places and people associated with their development.
Eventually, philosophical history can become part of a country's wider cultural life, contributing to tourism, education and even economic development. This requires time, financial support and, above all, enthusiasts who genuinely care about the subject.
Unfortunately, the realities of war make it difficult to develop philosophical culture in the ways that would be possible during peacetime.
At the same time, war changes the questions that philosophers consider important. It also changes how much time they have available to contemplate those questions.
Ukrainian philosophers may now possess a particularly immediate understanding of the meaning of freedom, moral responsibility, human dignity and the ethical dimensions of technological development.
I am sometimes astonished by how distant certain prominent Western intellectuals appear from these realities. Philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Giorgio Agamben have commented upon the war in ways that, in my view, reveal the superficiality of arguments suggesting that everything is somehow ambiguous or that responsibility can be reduced to abstract theoretical discussion.
War exposes the limitations of such approaches. It also reveals how little value there can be in endless conversations about responsibility when what is actually required is action.
The war has exposed many weaknesses in Western political systems, including double standards and the distance between the values that certain political, philosophical and religious figures profess and the principles they are actually prepared to defend.
Perhaps one of the consequences of experiencing war directly is that we become better able to call things by their proper names. War reveals what is genuinely important. It exposes the character of human beings when they are removed from comfortable conformity and placed in extreme circumstances.
For this reason, the experiences and reflections of Ukrainian philosophers deserve serious international attention.
Indeed, Western colleagues frequently ask Ukrainian philosophers to explain their experiences because they recognise that something important can be learned from those who live with the consequences of war every day.
In peaceful rooms, without air raid sirens, explosions and the constant presence of life and death, it is sometimes possible to forget the true value of human life.
Those who experience war do not have that luxury. They are obliged to confront the meaning of freedom, responsibility and humanity in the most immediate possible way.
Matthew Parish: Imagine that in ten or twenty years artificial intelligence systems can produce philosophical works that surpass most human scholarship in logical rigour, originality and depth. Would philosophy then remain a specifically human activity? Could machines make genuine philosophical progress, and should philosophical arguments be judged solely on their merits, regardless of whether their author is human or artificial?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: A time may come when artificial intelligence writes its own philosophy of artificial intelligence.
We already hear increasingly frequent accounts of writers consulting artificial intelligence when searching for arguments, developing original plots or looking for new ideas. These systems learn rapidly and will undoubtedly exert a growing influence upon philosophy.
But I doubt that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change our relationship with philosophy's past.
We will continue to read Plato and Aristotle. We will remain interested in Hryhorii Skovoroda and we will continue to honour Ivan Franko, whose 170th birthday we celebrate this year.
Technological progress does not eliminate the importance of tradition or our relationship with previous generations.
Thomas Friedman's famous metaphor of the Lexus and the olive tree is useful here. However advanced our technology becomes, we do not necessarily value our families, homes and ordinary human experiences any less.
We will still find joy in an embrace or the smile of a child. These are among the things that make us human, and I am convinced that they will continue to matter.
As for philosophical controversies, if artificial intelligence helps us resolve even one of them, that would be a genuine achievement. We would have discovered something true and increased our knowledge of the world.
But such a discovery might not necessarily eliminate disagreement.
People hold different philosophical positions for many reasons. Philosophical traditions express different understandings of reality, and the coexistence of these perspectives can itself be valuable, provided that they do not threaten or harm others.
Diversity and originality in thought, opinion and conviction have always been important human values. I am convinced that they will remain so, regardless of technological progress.
Matthew Parish: Finally, I would like to ask a more personal question. Has your experience of modern artificial intelligence changed your own understanding of human thought, language or consciousness? Are there philosophical problems that particularly occupy your attention today? And what would you most like to communicate to an international audience about contemporary Ukrainian philosophy?
Professor Andrii Synytsia: Regarding artificial intelligence and its progress, perhaps we should allow a little more time to pass before attempting to determine exactly what the future holds.
Its present capabilities are certainly unsettling, particularly when it begins to find answers to questions that human beings have struggled to resolve.
But for me, as a researcher, the process of discovering knowledge is itself profoundly important. I enjoy discovering things independently, finding answers and experiencing the intellectual satisfaction that comes from the search.
Knowing the answers to every question would not necessarily make a person happy. It would not replace the joy of discovery.
The world contains an extraordinary number of interesting things, and I want to continue exploring them.
My interests are not confined to artificial intelligence, analytical philosophy or logic. I am deeply interested in the history of philosophy, the development of Lviv's philosophical and cultural landscape, the preservation of historical memory and the reconsideration of important intellectual figures whose contributions may have been forgotten or insufficiently appreciated.
I have devoted considerable time to studying the history of philosophical thought at Lviv University.
This history extends far beyond the philosophical tradition internationally associated with the Lviv–Warsaw School. The intellectual history of Lviv is an exceptionally broad and fascinating subject in its own right.
By studying it, I hope to attract greater international attention to our culture and our city. I want to demonstrate that Ukraine has its own distinctive intellectual traditions and that we are open to engagement with the wider world.
That is one of the things that gives meaning to my research.
I also remain interested in the philosophy of science, particularly cosmology, and I return to these questions from time to time. More generally, I am concerned with what makes philosophy a scientific discipline and what responsibilities philosophers bear for the ideas they express.
As for what I would like to say to international audiences about Ukrainian philosophy, I think Ukrainian philosophy will ultimately speak most effectively for itself.
The more Ukrainian academic journals we develop that are included in international scholarly databases, the more monographs by Ukrainian philosophers are published in English by leading international publishers and the more opportunities our colleagues have to visit Ukraine, the greater our contribution to international philosophical scholarship will become.
I look forward to a time when scholars from many different countries can come to a peaceful and hospitable Ukraine, exchange ideas with us and discover the richness of our intellectual traditions.
We want to participate fully in a common international philosophical community while preserving our own individuality and Ukrainian identity.
That is how we can bring wider attention to our history, our culture, our ideas and the intellectual discourse we are creating.
It is also how we can contribute to the wider human search for meaning and truth.
These are among the things for which we are fighting, and they are worth fighting for.
There is something of the essence of Ukrainian philosophy in that aspiration. We warmly invite the world to discover it, to meet our people and to come to know Ukraine.
The continuing importance of the human mind
There is an illuminating tension running throughout Professor Synytsia's reflections. He is plainly impressed by the growing intellectual capabilities of artificial intelligence and is prepared to contemplate a future in which machines exceed human beings in almost every measurable intellectual task. Yet he remains convinced that intellectual achievement cannot be reduced to the production of correct answers. The human pursuit of knowledge possesses a value independent of its results, because the processes of uncertainty, curiosity, discovery and even failure are essential to the formation of individual character.
This distinction may prove particularly significant in the country from which Professor Synytsia speaks. Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression is not merely a struggle for territory or political sovereignty. It is also a defence of the proposition that human beings should remain free to determine their own values, pursue their own aspirations and develop their own understanding of the world. An artificial intelligence system may one day be able to calculate the most efficient means of achieving an objective, but the decision about which objectives are worth pursuing remains a question of moral judgement.
There is something particularly appropriate about conducting this discussion in the intellectual shadow of Lviv's philosophical traditions. The great analytical philosophers devoted enormous effort to understanding the relationship between language, thought and reality. Their successors now confront machines capable of manipulating language with extraordinary sophistication, while the fundamental question of whether those machines understand anything remains unresolved. The historical circle is striking, although it does not yet appear to have been closed.
Perhaps the most important observation in Professor Synytsia's interview is also his simplest. Possessing the answer to every question would not necessarily make us happy, because much of the value of being human lies in the search for those answers. Philosophy, like freedom, cannot be understood merely by examining its eventual results. Its significance lies also in the experience of pursuing it, in the exercise of independent judgement and in the responsibility that accompanies our choices.
For a Ukrainian philosopher contemplating the future of artificial intelligence while his country remains at war, these are not merely theoretical considerations. They are questions about the sort of civilisation humanity wishes to preserve, and about whether technological progress will strengthen or diminish the dignity of the people it is intended to serve.
The machines may eventually become extraordinarily good at providing answers. The responsibility for deciding what makes those answers worth knowing remains, for now, ours.
Professor Synytsia's responses were translated from Ukrainian and edited for clarity and readability while preserving their substantive meaning.
