How AI and Information Overload Are Erasing Human Consciousness?

by Irshad Ahmad Mughal and Dr. Qurat ul Ain Rana

 The domination of human consciousness by artificial intelligence and the relentless overflow of information marks a profound existential crisis—one that thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre could not have fully anticipated but whose philosophical frameworks help us understand its depth. Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, sought to uncover the structures of consciousness, examining how humans experience and constitute meaning in the world. Sartre, the existentialist, emphasized radical freedom, arguing that humans are condemned to create their own essence through choice and action. Yet today, the very tools designed to extend human capability—AI, social media, and algorithmic systems—are reshaping consciousness itself, not as mere instruments but as forces that dictate perception, thought, and even identity.

Husserl warned of a growing detachment from the “life-world,” the immediate, lived experience that grounds human understanding. He feared that the abstract, mathematized models of science would alienate us from the richness of direct perception. In the digital age, this alienation has reached an extreme. Social media platforms, search engines, and AI-driven content do not merely mediate reality—they construct it. The constant stream of curated information, automated suggestions, and algorithmically determined feeds means that human intentionality—the active, directed engagement with the world—is increasingly outsourced. We no longer seek meaning; it is delivered to us, pre-processed by systems designed to capture attention rather than cultivate understanding.

Sartre’s existentialism, with its insistence on absolute freedom and responsibility, appears almost archaic in this context. If existence precedes essence, as Sartre claimed, then the essence of contemporary human existence is being rewritten by external systems that reduce choice to predictive analytics. When AI drafts our emails, recommends our next read, or even generates our art, the burden of decision-making is lifted—but so is the exercise of authentic freedom. Sartre’s concept of “bad faith,” the self-deception by which people evade responsibility, now manifests in our passive reliance on machines to think and act for us. We no longer anguish over possibilities; we accept the most convenient output, the path of least resistance carved out by algorithms.

Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology further illuminates this shift. He argued that technology does not merely serve human ends but transforms the way we perceive being itself. The digital age exemplifies his notion of “enframing,” where everything—including human thought—is reduced to calculable data, optimized for efficiency and control. AI does not just assist cognition; it redefines it, training us to think in terms of inputs and outputs rather than reflection and meaning. Social media platforms harvest attention as a resource, turning consciousness into a commodity. In this system, humans are no longer the agents of technological use but its raw material, shaped by the very tools they created.

The paradox of these technologies is that they were built to empower but now risk enslaving. A hammer extends the force of the arm but does not decide where to strike; AI, however, anticipates desires, predicts behaviors, and often makes decisions without human intervention. The more we integrate these systems into daily life, the more our cognitive and emotional processes adapt to their logic. The result is a subtle erosion of autonomy—not through overt coercion but through the seductive convenience of outsourcing thought. Herbert Marcuse’s warning about “technological rationality” becomes urgent here: when efficiency replaces critical engagement, humans become passive recipients of a system they no longer control.

If there is a way out of this crisis, it lies in reasserting the primacy of human consciousness over its digital intermediaries. This does not mean rejecting technology outright but resisting its tendency to dominate perception and choice. It requires conscious resistance to algorithmic determinism, deliberate engagement with unmediated experience, and a demand for ethical design that prioritizes human agency over automation. The existentialists believed in the irreducible freedom of the individual, but that freedom must now be reclaimed—not from fate or divine will, but from the very machines we built to serve us. The alternative is a world in which consciousness, once the seat of meaning and autonomy, becomes little more than a node in a vast, impersonal network of information control.

About the authors:

Irshad Ahmad Mughal and Dr. Qurat-ul-Ain Rana form a formidable intellectual partnership in contemporary Pakistani scholarship. Prof. Mughal, renowned for his Urdu translations of Paulo Freire’s revolutionary works and decades of teaching political philosophy at Punjab University, joins forces with Dr. Rana, an accomplished sociologist and social commentator whose razor-sharp analyses regularly grace Pakistan’s premier journals. Together, their collaborative writings for Pressenza weave rigorous academic insight with urgent social critique—bridging Western critical theory with South Asian realities to illuminate pathways for transformative change.”

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