The Synthetic Pharmakon: Reading Large Language Models and the Artificial Evolution of Memory through Plato’s Phaedrus

This talk reinvestigates Plato’s Phaedrus to show that our current anxieties about AI are not new or isolated tech-skepticism, but the latest step in a historical chain of cognitive media transitions spanning from writing to the printing press, the internet, and now automated text generation (cf. Wright's 2026 forthcoming article on the “Phaedrus Machine”). Grounded in the specific philological reality of the Greek text, we will explore how Socrates’s treatment of language as a pharmakon applied to the soul (270b) can exist both as a structural art (technē) or an external, debilitating crutch (227–228). By analyzing the myth of Theuth, we will examine how outsourcing thought to “foreign imprints" (allotriōn typōn, 275a), creates disembodied, "fatherless" texts (275d) that mimic life but can neither defend themselves nor answer direct questions. The talk will aim to map these ancient dynamics onto the algorithmic architectures of Large Language Models, showing how computational platforms accelerate the rapid, shallow growth of the Gardens of Adonis (276b) to produce a new class of deceptively wise users (doxosophoi, 275b). To deepen this cognitive inquiry, I will make brief excursions into the Theaetetus. By analyzing the Platonic Socrates’s metaphor of the “wax block” (kērinos ekmageion), I will demonstrate how LLM vector spaces mirror the fluid, "shaggy" memory structures that inevitably produce false belief and empty simulation (doxa). Drawing on media theorist Walter Ong, this talk challenges contemporary university pedagogy to reorient its practices around the demonstrable cognitive superiority of an internalized, dialectical memory.