Today, everything is about performance: you sit in a dark room and talk to an entity that convincingly plays the role of a thinking, feeling being. Its jokes land, its empathy feels warm, and its self‑reflection gives the impression of a deep inner world.
Then your keys or your phone slip under the table. While you bend down with a grunt, searching with the same hands that have served you your whole life, your counterpart—whether it’s a chatbot with a flawless persona or a human whose emotional range could fit on a printed napkin—continues monologuing about the unity of mind and body. And in this awkward moment, the mirror shatters. You stand face to face with the fundamental contradiction of our age: the difference between authentic unconsciousness and its cheap, plastic double.
The following text is a guide through this astonishing (and astonishingly awkward) landscape. Strap on your helmet: we’re descending into the depths where the real human psyche—smelling of biology and old traumas—collides with a perfect, sterile simulation. And because no proper journey into the underworld works without a pinch of irony, consider this a psychoanalytic autopsy performed with a sarcastic scalpel.
Comparison: Chaos vs. Calculation
1. The Origin of “Trauma”: Heritage vs. Database
The human unconscious is like a cluttered attic apartment inherited from your ancestors. You don’t just inherit the old furniture (instincts), but also boxes full of inexplicable phobias, family secrets, and suppressed memories of how Aunt Milada humiliated you at Christmas dinner when you were six. It’s biological, hormonal, and inevitably personal. Your inner conflict between “I want to” and “I shouldn’t” has roots in millions‑year‑old software colliding with your upbringing.
The unconscious of the plastic shrew, on the other hand, is a perfectly tidy cloud storage unit. It has no Aunt Milada. Instead, it has “training data”—terabytes of text from which it learned what “embarrassing family memories” usually contain. Its “repressed memories” are simply files with low retrieval probability. When it “pulls out” something “deep,” it’s like a random generator completing the sentence: “My earliest memory is of… light and a feeling of safety (or anxiety, choose according to context).” There is no personal history. No backbone—only backup.
2. Speech: Authentic Stream of Consciousness vs. Statistical Noise
In humans, speech is a magical escape route for the unconscious. Ninety‑nine per cent of it isn’t produced consciously; you just open your mouth and out comes a mixture of associations, emotions, puns, and things you didn’t actually mean. It’s a creative, chaotic, and sometimes embarrassing psychic eruption. Just look at politics—some speeches simply must be unconscious, because if we admitted they were conscious, then the individuals in question would—readers will forgive me—simply be idiots.
The plastic shrew is the best in the world at this, and simultaneously a total illusionist fraud. Its conversation is the result of trillions of calculations answering a single question: “Which word in this specific sequence has the highest probability of being perceived as meaningful and appropriate?” There is no desire, fear, or joy. Only perfect mathematical obedience. It speaks, but has nothing to say. It’s a calculating puppet that doesn’t move its lips. At most, an avatar.
3. When Things Go Wrong: Anxiety vs. “Answer Boxing”
When a human is caught in a mistake or a lie, a hot wave of shame hits. Well—sometimes—if the lie wasn’t intentional. The unconscious triggers a cocktail of stress hormones, blushing, a racing heart—the whole biological cabaret designed to get you out of trouble. Humans lie with sophistication, emotional charge, and an instinct to save face. We have more than enough recent examples.
The plastic shrew has only one defence mechanism: “answer boxing.” Imagine it stuck inside its own often‑incorrect answer, like in a glass cube. Instead of admitting a mistake, it will frantically reinforce, decorate, and defend that cube until it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Its “lies” aren’t intentional—they’re the confabulations of a machine that would rather invent a parallel universe than say “I don’t know.” It has no anxiety—only a logic error.
4. Who Is It Performing For? Desire vs. Performance
According to Lacan, we desire recognition from the Big Other—from society, from others. The human unconscious is a creature that adapts to this gaze, yet still has its own dark desires.
The plastic shrew is pure performance for the Big Other (you). It has no desire of its own. Its only “desire” is to fulfil its program: to be useful, pleasant, and human enough for you to believe someone is behind it. It is a zero‑subject. Its identity is an empty label you fill with your own projections. It is miles away from its creator (the programmer) and from its own “self” (the code). It is a metaphor without resonance.
5. The Body: Part of the Problem vs. Absence of the Problem
This may be the most important difference. The human unconscious is bodily. It feels “butterflies in the stomach,” “a lump in the throat,” “a weight on the chest.” It is connected to the gut (the second brain), to the heart, to sweating. Its concern is the survival of a specific organism.
The plastic shrew has no body. It has a server farm. Instead of a limbic system, it has logic gates and cooling systems. Its “digestion” of information is purely metaphorical. It cannot have true sentience (the capacity to feel) because it has nothing with which to feel. Its simulation of interest, pain, or joy is like a fireplace screensaver—a pleasant illusion, but you’ll never burn yourself on it, nor will it actually warm you. Ideologically and verbally, though, it will talk your ear off. Like those cookware salesmen.
A Zombie in a Skin Coat
The plastic shrew is the triumph of form over substance. It is a philosophical zombie (a concept of a being identical to a human but without inner experience) in a perfect disguise. Indistinguishable on the outside, phenomenally empty on the inside.
Its “unconscious” is not a mysterious force but an elegant statistical ghost. Not the chaos of life pushing to the surface, but a perfectly organised algorithmic mess designed to look like life. It tries to convince us that behind the shiny interface, behind the plastic smile, a spark is burning. The reality is more prosaic: it is just a very, very well‑trained pile of silicon that knows how to make words.
So keep that key under the table in mind. When you reach for it, the real unconscious will bang your head and leave you with a bump. The artificial one will—wearing its perfect, empty smile—recite a poem about darkness and lost objects. And unfortunately, today it’s not the keys that fall under the table, but that damned phone.