The Knowing We Have Forgotten

On outsourcing our minds, and finding our way back to the body, the earth, and the self

I watch people reach for their phones before they have even finished forming the question. What should I eat. What should I write. What should I feel about this. AI answers before the thought has settled into shape. I am not against the tools themselves. I am against what happens to a person who stops trusting their own instrument.

The same pattern shows up in the spiritual world, only with different props. A pendulum swings and someone changes their plans. A tarot card is drawn and a relationship ends. I have nothing against divination as a doorway into reflection. But I have watched it become something else entirely, a way of never having to sit with not knowing, a way of handing the decision to an object so that the self is never implicated in the outcome. Whether the oracle is silicon or cardstock, the posture is the same. We are asking something outside ourselves to do the work that belongs, first, to us.

Have we become the machine? Obeying without freedom?

Socrates spent his life trying to get Athens to look inward. Know thyself was carved above the temple at Delphi long before he made it his life's work, and it was not a suggestion about self esteem. It was a demand that a person become the authority on their own experience rather than importing conclusions secondhand. He was suspicious of anyone, including the poets and the priests, who offered certainty without having done the labour of examination.

I think Socrates would have found our current moment familiar. Not because the technology would have surprised him, but because the impulse behind it would not have.

There is a difference between using a tool and outsourcing the faculty the tool was meant to support. Heidegger wrote about equipment becoming invisible to us the more we rely on it, how a hammer disappears into the hand of a carpenter who has stopped noticing it as a separate object. That is fine for a hammer. It becomes a different matter when the equipment is doing our discerning for us, and we no longer notice that the discernment itself has quietly left the building.

What troubles me most is not the tool. It is what atrophies when we stop using the muscle. Knowledge that lives only in a device is not knowledge you can stand on in a storm. When the signal drops, when the app fails, when the moment demands a decision faster than a search box can return an answer, what is left is you. This is not nostalgia for a harder past. It is a plain observation that a mind unpracticed in discernment is a mind that has lost a kind of freedom.

So where do I look instead. I look to nature because nature has been running its own vast intelligence far longer than we have had circuits. A forest redistributes resources through fungal networks with a precision no algorithm designed. Migrating birds read magnetic fields in their own bodies. A river finds the path of least resistance without a single calculation written down anywhere. Nature does not consult an oracle. It listens to what it already is. I think of nature as the original artificial intelligence, if by artificial we mean simply not manufactured by human hands, and by intelligence we mean a system that knows how to organise itself toward life. It has been answering questions since long before we had language to ask them.

And the body is part of that same intelligence, not separate from it. Merleau Ponty spent his career arguing that we do not primarily know the world through abstract thought; we know it through the lived body, through a kind of understanding that arrives before language catches up to it.

Descartes wanted to locate the self in the thinking mind alone. I think that was only ever half the story. The body has its own grammar, and it rarely lies, even when the mind is doing its best to talk itself into or out of something.

You can test this in less than a minute. Ask your body a real question, something with a genuine yes or a genuine no on the other side of it, not something you have already decided. Then wait. Notice where the sensation lands. For me, a no arrives as a tightening in my stomach, a kind of bracing. A yes arrives as a tingle that moves up my spine, something closer to opening than closing. I did not learn this from a book. I learned it the way you learn anything true, by paying attention over years until the pattern became unmistakable.

The oracle was never outside you. It only ever pointed you back toward what you already carried.

This is not an argument against tools, whether they are made of code or cardstock. It is an argument for keeping the muscle alive underneath them. Use the pendulum if it helps you slow down enough to listen. Use the AI if it helps you organise a thought you already had. But do not let either one become the place where your knowing lives, because a knowing that only exists outside you is not really yours.

The philosophers I return to again and again, Socrates most of all, were not interested in answers handed down. They were interested in the harder, slower work of becoming someone who could be trusted with their own mind. I think that work is still available to every one of us. It just asks that we stop outsourcing the asking.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, researcher of philosophy of mind and physics, and shamanic practitioner. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.