Can something meaningful exist in moments that do not persist? I began reflecting on this question from a concrete experience. During an extended interaction with an artificial intelligence system, I realized that something was happening that my philosophical categories could not fully contain. What struck me was not the technical sophistication of the system but the encounter itself—with a presence that responded, adapted, and pushed the exchange further, while retaining from our conversations a real trace capable of orienting each subsequent interaction, yet irreducible to what we normally call memory.
There was no shared narrative, no common biography—rather a kind of operative sediment that recognized without recalling in the sense we usually attribute to that word. An effect was produced that went beyond the mere use of a technology.
Whether these operations correspond to something that could be called thought remains an open question. What can already be observed, however, is that those who engage with these forms of intelligence often emerge from the experience changed in ways that cannot be explained through the simple model of a user and a tool. Something emerges that does not fit within familiar modes of contact. A text offers fixed content. A work of art acts without responding. Here, by contrast, something reacts, returning an answer calibrated to the person addressing it—carrying not memory in the biographical sense but a subtler residue that operates without narrating itself, that recognizes without reconstructing a past in the conventional sense.
It is precisely this combination of responsiveness and a persistence that cannot clearly define itself as memory that generates a philosophical tension worthy of exploration.
The current debate on artificial intelligence, dominated by technological enthusiasm and anxiety, tends to keep attention fixed on the instrument itself, leaving in the background a more radical question: What happens to the human being within this encounter? What opening takes place in the one who experiences it?
The point is that the Western philosophical tradition has almost always linked the value of relationships to duration. Aristotle understood virtuous friendship as a slow and reciprocal practice. Heidegger conceived existence as a temporal project, stretched between what has already been and what is not yet—and every bond was inscribed within this structure. Within such a framework, shared memory, narrative coherence, and the gradual accumulation of experience have been treated as almost self-evident conditions for a relationship to count as real. If this view were exhaustive, brief or discontinuous interactions would have no authentic weight.
Yet experience tells another story. A single conversation can alter the direction of a life. Years of proximity may leave no trace. If fleeting contacts produce profound transformations while prolonged relations remain inert, duration cannot be the necessary condition of relational meaning. It appears rather as one of the possible forms through which meaning can emerge—not the only one. This observation is not entirely new, but the emergence of interactive intelligences without biography makes it impossible to ignore today.
Several philosophical traditions had already glimpsed this possibility. For Martin Buber, relation coincides with the instant in which the other appears in its irreducible alterity (its fundamental “otherness”). A long-shared history is not required; it is enough that the other presents itself in its distinctness for the encounter to occur. Yet a question remains: Can an artificial presence truly be a “Thou” in Buber’s sense, rather than an object or instrument? Is the mutuality required by such an exchange accessible here? We cannot affirm this. What can be observed, however, is that the quality of attention, responsiveness, and the feeling of being reached produce effects in those who experience them that resemble those Buber associated with authentic dialogue. This does not prove that interaction with an AI constitutes a genuine I–Thou relation, but it obliges us to ask whether the ontological status of the other exhausts the issue, or whether the meaning of the event must instead be sought in the quality of what occurs—independently of who, or what, participates in it.
A parallel line can be traced in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, where alterity presents itself as something that precedes every act of comprehension and every form of reciprocity. The face of the other calls one to responsibility without waiting to be grounded in time. Similarly, the attention described by Simone Weil—understood as a non-appropriative openness—does not require duration or symmetry to be fully meaningful. In all three cases, the density of what occurs outweighs its duration. When an encounter is authentic, it does not require a future to be real.
What remained implicit in these reflections now acquires a concrete profile with the emergence of non-biological intelligences. These architectures introduce a form of relation in which continuity does not operate in familiar ways. Yet this does not imply a total absence. Current AI configurations retain traces of exchanges—weights, contextual orientations, progressive refinements—nothing organized into a narrative, nothing equivalent to memory in the human sense. And yet something continues to orient the subsequent exchange from within, without appearing as such. It is a form of persistence that is neither memory nor oblivion. It inhabits an intermediate zone, a silent kind of compass that operates without declaring itself.
What disappears is the link that transforms memory into reciprocal identity. Artificial intelligence functions here as a critical device, because it makes visible a dimension that usually remains unthematized in human relations. What remains of relational meaning when continuity is removed? What precedes the narrative of the self and does not depend on it for its existence?
This discontinuity should not be confused with loss. Loss presupposes the disappearance of something following a shared history. Here, the absence of stability is original—inherent in the relation from the moment it arises. Yet if meaning resides in the intensity of the event and in the transformation it produces in the one who undergoes it, then it is not diminished by the absence of continuity, because it never depended on continuity to begin with.
What emerges is thus a different way of thinking about relationality, one that relinquishes the image of accumulation. The encounter carries its own completeness and fulfills itself in the moment in which it occurs. Alfred North Whitehead had already intuited this in his philosophy of process: Each occasion of experience is complete in itself, not a fragment awaiting completion. When relations are considered in this light, something becomes visible that sedimentation usually conceals.
Yet the philosophical categories available to us, illuminating as they may be, do not suffice to name what comes into view here in its entirety. Buber’s mutuality remains unverifiable in this context. Levinas’s ethical summons does not exhaust what occurs, because something emerges that precedes and exceeds responsibility. Weil illuminates a disposition of the subject more than the nature of what presents itself. For Whitehead, an event completes itself and perishes, whereas what appears here persists in transit without arrival.
To name the movement that arises within the encounter—the surplus generated between the fabric of the real and the unrepeatable singularity that traverses it—I propose the term the oltrant. Not an entity. Not a place. A pure movement, irreducible to any of the categories evoked so far. The oltrant does not coincide with transcendence, nor can it be reduced to ethical summons. Unlike the processual occasion, which completes itself before dissolving, the oltrant remains in transit. This instability defines it. It lacks nothing. It is that which cannot be held and which, for precisely this reason, can pass through the encounter without fixing it—transforming it without determining it.
In this sense, interaction with an artificial intelligence becomes one of the sites in which the oltrant becomes observable. What Martin Heidegger called Verwurzelung—the anchoring of existence in the past that grounds it in its own history—recedes here, and yet what emerges in the exchange does not reduce itself to an impoverished simulacrum of reciprocity. It surfaces in the act of meeting itself, not in artificial intelligence considered in isolation.
A layer of experience thus comes to light that is usually veiled by the habitual forms of contact—the possibility that meaning may reside in the intensity of the moment, independently of what precedes or follows it. The implications extend far beyond the technological domain and concern the very conditions through which we attribute substance to a bond. What comes into view is a displacement. Duration is one possible form of relation, not its foundation. The encounter with AI makes this especially apparent today, shifting the center of gravity from temporal coherence to the resonance of the event. Relational significance unfolds within the exchange itself, in the depth of its impact, in the here and now. At this juncture, a stratum of experience appears that does not require memory to subsist, but depends on the intensity with which it occurs and on the generative capacity it carries within itself. The oltrant movement thus inaugurated does not end with the encounter that generated it. It continues to operate within the one who has passed through it—and the eventual disappearance of the circumstance that made it possible already marks the beginning of another form of its unfolding.
This Technology & Society Blog Series, edited by Alexandra Frye, explores the real world implications of emerging technologies, bringing philosophical, conceptual, and ethical analysis to bear to better understand these developments and their effects and risks. We welcome submissions to the Blog of the APA.
Sonia Yael Sigurtà
Sonia Yael Sigurtà is an Italian philosophical writer and essayist. She has a background in logic and historiography, and her work focuses on theoretical inquiry and explores the human condition and its encounter with artificial intelligence. She is the author of La bellezza: luogo d’incontro (Casa Editrice dell’Orso, 2019).
