Hamlet, AI and the Fantasy of Solitude

How do we know what thoughts are our own?

The current essay asks how any thought we encounter might become recognizable as "our own" when we, like Hamlet, begin to encounter our own consciousness as irreducibly mediated by language, witness, inherited forms, institutions, technologies of address, and other minds. We will be investigating language as a site of thinking, mediation, and public meaning. The central claim is that interiority is not a stable, sealed, solitary possession; rather, it becomes audible through relation, pressure, inheritance, and address.