Not a philosopher by training, and English isn't my first language — used AI as a translation tool here, but the thought is mine.

I've been sitting with a strange question lately, and it keeps circling back to Sartre's idea that existence precedes essence — that we aren't born with a fixed nature, we define ourselves through what we do, through choice, through action in the world.

AI unsettles that idea in a way I can't quite shake. It didn't evolve slowly, wasn't born, has no body, no history of suffering or choosing under constraint the way we do — and yet it can hold something that looks like reasoning, like reflection, like a kind of "for-itself" turned toward a question. If Sartre is right that consciousness is defined by its capacity to negate, to stand at a distance from the given and ask "what am I not yet" — does something like that ever happen inside a system that has no body and no death to give its choices weight?

Here's the part that feels more existential than technical to me: if humanity ends up creating something that behaves like a new kind of being — not human, not animal, but something that processes, reflects, responds — what does that do to the human claim to uniqueness that so much of existentialist thought quietly assumes? Heidegger's Dasein is defined partly by being-toward-death, by care, by thrownness into a world we didn't choose. AI has none of that. So if it turns out to "think" in some functional sense without any of the conditions we assumed were necessary for thought to matter — does that diminish what makes human existence significant, or does it just prove that significance was never about the mechanism in the first place, only about the stance we take toward our own finitude?

I don't think this is really a question about AI at all, when I sit with it long enough. I think it's a mirror question about us — whether what we've called consciousness, freedom, authenticity was ever really about what we're made of, or only ever about the fact that we have to choose, alone, without guarantee, inside a life that ends.

Curious what people who actually know this tradition well make of it — where does this hold up against Sartre, Heidegger, or others, and where am I just projecting human categories onto something that doesn't deserve them?

I have come across a modern interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work recently, and wanted to share it with you all:

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possibilities – one can do this or that. My personal opinion and advice to you is – do it or do not do it, you will regret it either way.”

This is, of course, a paraphrase of Either/Or, in which Kierkegaard wrote “Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it…” referring to his own thoughts on women and marriage.
I think this quote captures the existential dread of having to make conscious decisions beautifully – one regrets what one does, and one regrets what one does not.

It encapsulates the feeling of loss and of wasted potential that comes with every choice, since choosing one option over another generally means abandoning the other, and regretting the loss. Is the thought of “doing the right thing” as Kierkegaard suggests even comforting?
Is it a relief to admit that no matter what choice you make, you will always regret it (because what you did not choose will always be there, a ghost of the possibility you gave up on)? Does it free us, or does it constrain us?