Details
You know the moment I mean. A thought arrives before you understand it — something at the edge, not quite yours yet, not quite formed. Someone says something and you don't just hear it, you find yourself changed by having heard it. A poem does something to you that you can't fully account for.
We don't have a good word for that anymore. We used to.
The Greeks called it syneidesis — knowing-with. Before "consciousness" and before "conscience" existed as separate concepts, this one word held them both: the ongoing capacity of seeing-with, of knowing-in-company with yourself and with others. Then a medieval copyist misread a few letters by candlelight, and a thousand years of moral philosophy quietly split the word in two. We handed consciousness to neuroscience, conscience to religion, and built machines in the gap.
This is a performed essay about what got lost in that split — and what it might look like to recover the with. I'll trace the word's strange history (including the scribal error that accidentally shaped Western moral thought), use AI as a contemporary case study in what happens when you optimize for knowing without knowing-with, and open and close with poems, because poems are one of the few places where syneidesis still lives undamaged in language.
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This event is part of the NYC Philosophy & Psychology Readers Conference 2026. For full details please visit: https://www.meetup.com/reading-philosophy/events/314020228/
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This room holds a maximum of 80 people seated or 148 people standing. It will be first come first served. If you cannot make it please update your RSVP to decline to allow others to use your space.
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