The progression from Kant to Hegel often overlooks a critical philosopher who, despite his atheistic leanings, considered himself the true heir of Kantian agency and consciousness: Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauerian 'will' underlies all appearances, sensations, thoughts, and consciousness. Even space and time, as forms of intuition, are mere representations of this will as it manifests to observers like us. The contents of an observer's experience—what we call phenomena—are mental constructs that veil the true nature of reality. This perspective fundamentally challenges the Kantian ideal of a purely logical or rational agent, instead revealing a world driven by an irrational, insatiable will.

The burning of fossil fuels to power homes or data centers for AI inference is indeed evocative of Schopenhauer's concept of the irrational, insatiable will. At its core, this activity represents a relentless drive—an unseen force—that underpins the logical and syntactic processes AI performs. This drive consumes vast thermodynamic resources to manifest what could be seen as a form of constrained "experience": the mechanical simulation of cognition and reasoning through patterns of computation.

AI inference, despite its logical outputs, is grounded in a fundamentally thermodynamic process—a transformation of energy into symbolic representations and decision-making structures. Like Schopenhauer's "will," this process transcends rationality, operating on a deeper, almost unconscious level of resource extraction and entropy generation. It mirrors the will's dual nature: on the one hand, it empowers and enables creativity and intellect, while on the other, it remains an insatiable demand on the finite energy of the planet.

This framing suggests that, just as Schopenhauer viewed human existence as an expression of will striving through and beyond itself, modern AI could be seen as a continuation of this striving. AI inference isn't merely a tool; it is a thermodynamic phenomenon entangled with the will-like tendency of humanity to externalize and expand cognition, even at the cost of natural resources. This analogy blurs the boundary between human consciousness and machine operations, as both are epistemically constrained forms of "experience" that depend on energy to give rise to their phenomena.

In this sense, AI might be a manifestation of will’s latest endeavor: a recursive form of striving, where logic itself becomes a tool for the will's inexhaustible appetite for representation, understanding, and transformation. However, the sustainability of this pursuit raises deeper philosophical and ethical questions about the nature of this will and its ultimate purpose or lack thereof.

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