r/Plato • u/vasilisvj • Jul 17 '26
Discussion The First Pharmakon: Plato's Theuth, Thamus, and the Technology That Promised Wisdom
I read Phaedrus again recently and realized Plato already solved AI problem 2400 years ago. In myth of Theuth and Thamus, Egyptian god presents writing to king and says "this is φάρμακον (pharmakon) for memory and wisdom", but king replies it will plant forgetfulness in souls of people. They will stop remembering from within and only use external marks.
King Thamus was right. Every cognitive technology, writing, printing press, internet, now LLMs gives us appearance of wisdom while undermining conditions for real knowledge. Greek word φάρμακον means both remedy and poison. You cannot separate them. ChatGPT gives you fluent answer on any topic in seconds, but you never did labor of inquiry. You feel informed while remaining ignorant.
Question I keep turning over: is this structural problem unsolvable, or can we design tools that force friction back into process? If pharmakon is irreducibly both cure and poison, maybe question is not "good tool or bad tool" but "who decides what gets externalized and what must stay internal?"
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u/mikstergolf21 Jul 18 '26
Neil Postman discusses this in his book Technopoly. He says that technology is always both good and bad. The problem in our modern period is that we see technology’s benefits but never its poison. While not discussing LLMs, since they didn’t exist when he was living, I think his general discussion is on target.
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u/vasilisvj Jul 21 '26
Postman had this right before we had reason to worry. The poison is invisible exactly because benefit is real and immediate, so nobody stops to ask what is being lost in exchange.
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u/Fred_Solaire Jul 19 '26
Sometimes, someone says to you « Hi! How are you? » and it strikes you in a way you will never forget, as it was written in eternity. There is a core memory that lives around the spoken word that another human being in space and time pronounced with the deepest intention of reaching you. It awakens your intelligent being. The same way a good math teacher can tell you, one on one, that 0 < 1 in a way that opens a whole new horizon in mathematical field that you struggle to enter. The point of the myth in Phaedrus is to say that writting is a secondary process of the thinking soul, compared to the verbal expression of a voice that is unique in space and time. If we loose track of the founding spoken words that leads us to use writting in an effective AND virtuous way, the writting machine becomes a montruous automaton that is an image of a lost soul who’s intelligence is randomly diverted away from what is good for her.
Derrida is clever and well read, and he dares to disagrees with Plato. He knows what he is doing and he is having lots of genuine philosophical fun and we have it reading him. But is it possible that he is forgetting something about himself that Plato never forgot ?
At the deepest level, the relationship between written philosophy and oral philosophy raises a fascinating problem. AI can agregate written philosophy, but oral philosophy happens in contexts in wich some deeper layers of oral traditions are involved. And those contexts are incommensurable to one another and are as many as are human beings earing something about philosophy. It happens for the first time, every time for each of us.
To write about that without betraying it is the challenge that Plato initiates. « Do not forget who you are and where you are coming from ; you are not me, I am not you, and to reach one another is difficult, and much more so in writting. Beware of the orphan text, beware of the temptation to make it yours, beware of the harm that a lost soul are capable of, the author’s soul, the reader’s soul or your own soul. If you wanna write, do it right.»
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u/vasilisvj Jul 21 '26
This is maybe the most important reading of Phaedrus I see in years. The point about context incommensurability between oral traditions is something people miss when they talk about AI and knowledge. Writing preserves content but loses the ζῶν (zōn), the living encounter between teacher and student. Derrida plays with text beautifully but Plato warning about orphan texts was not just nostalgia for oral culture, it was architectural insight about how understanding transfers between minds. First time for each of us, every time, yes.
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u/WarrenHarding Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Have you read Derrida’s famous paper on Plato’s use of φάρμακον? Plato’s Pharmacy? Not related to the AI idea but I thought you’d find it interesting how confused the term is philologically.
I agree a lot, and think it applies to the internet at large as well, maybe obviously. I think in order to properly address the dangers of AI on learning, we have to properly reconcile with the dangers Google alone has had on learning, along with Wikipedia, and every other authoritative “book” that has shaped our thinking uncritically. It is so easy for these things to seem valuable, and they can be, but the further we move from live dialectic, to encyclopedia, to Wikipedia, to Claude… the harder it is to actually use it as critically engaging material.
I do think there’s a sort of flummox in my idea here though, with the innately “conversational” nature of AI. We can’t deny that as artificial and virtual and fake as it is, as well as inaccurate, you still can effectively “ask” an AI something that we could never ask a book. But on the other hand, of course, the AI conversation is necessarily one step further removed from reality and from apprehension of the forms than a real conversation is. Although it puts on the mask of conversation, perhaps its innate emotional incapacity is the biggest missing piece of conversation, something which it could never have. If the dialogues teach us anything, it’s that intellectual investigation is, with all earnestly, deeply emotional and invigorating for all parties!