The traces of the creator even in insectsIn Defense of an Inconvenient Word: Jesús Sanz and the Immigration Issue Extraterrestrials, algorithms and the human soul: a Christian reading of non-human intelligencesLeonard Peikoff, one of the main continuators of Ayn Rand's objectivism, formulated years ago in one of his lectures an idea that is difficult to dismiss even from philosophical perspectives far removed from his own. Man can voluntarily disengage himself from the study of philosophy, but he cannot live apart from some philosophical conception of the world. He will always live “from” a philosophy. Giving up reflecting on the fundamental questions does not eliminate its influence; it simply leaves the individual exposed to passively incorporating the dominant intellectual categories of his time.
For centuries, this influence came through more or less formal education, the general cultural and domestic environment or the ideological currents of the moment.
– Supernatural artificial intelligence has introduced a substantial change. For the first time we are beginning to coexist with tools capable not only of providing information, but also of structuring, synthesizing, summarizing, ordering, suggesting and filtering. All this immediately and effortlessly. This is not trivial, there has always been a certain inner friction towards serious intellectual exercise: reading, studying, holding a long conversation, going through the difficulty of a dense book or delaying sufficiently before an idea demanded time, attention and previous training.
The main problem with artificial intelligence may not be that machines will come to think like humans, but that humans will end up accepting an increasingly passive relationship with the truth.
AI: optimization, not contemplation
The great Christian intellectual tradition has always held that human understanding is linked to something much deeper: a constitutive openness to Truth itself. Man does not know only in order to orient himself pragmatically in the world, but because he has been created for the Logos. There exists in human intelligence a natural orientation toward the intelligibility of being that refers, in the last analysis, to the rational character of creation and to its creator as the source of all truth.
The intellectual act inwardly engages the whole person because truth possesses a singular capacity to claim the subject. The human understanding not only manipulates information: it seeks to rest in something recognized as true. There is even a specifically intellectual joy in the very act of knowing, because the understanding then experiences a certain connaturality with the contemplated truth.
St. Thomas precisely described contemplative happiness as one of the highest forms of human perfection: the intelligence rests partially when it participates, even if imperfectly, in that for which it was created.
Nothing similar occurs in artificial intelligence. A generative model can produce a mathematical truth, a rhetorical manipulation or a historical falsehood by means of exactly the same type of statistical operation. There is no love of truth, no desire to understand, no inner orientation towards being. There is optimization, not contemplation.
Has technology transformed the way we think?
Every epoch ends up imagining intelligence from the technologies that best represent its own world-transforming power. When the mechanical clock fascinated early modernity, the universe began to be conceived as an immense clockwork machine governed by precise laws. Later, in the midst of the industrial revolution, man began to describe himself frequently by means of energetic metaphors: impulses, tensions, discharges, inner forces. Freud himself thought of the psyche using a language marked by the thermodynamics of his time.
Today it is difficult not to imagine the human mind according to the great dominant technology of our time: computation. Understanding appears to be progressively reduced to information processing, efficient data management and machine learning. It is something that has permeated the philosophy of mind and has served as a “metaphor” for intellect and consciousness since the irruption of cybernetics and the computational paradigm in the 20th century.
I myself, professional deformation, can't help but think of Bayesian models, or learning networks adjusting parameters when I watch my son cautiously moving his little fingers to carefully grasp a marker pen. It's natural. But not harmless. It slowly changes the very way humans understand themselves and invites them to blur boundaries.
Romano Guardini has already warned that every great technical transformation also ends up altering the spiritual experience of the world. And Benedict XVI repeatedly insisted that instrumental reason always runs the risk of progressively narrowing the very idea of man. What an incredible pair of ideas, if I may note.
The subject no longer appears as a rational creature called upon to understand the world but as an agent in charge of managing inputs, to produce answers and browse information flows.
Everything must come fast, simplified, summarized and cognitively digested beforehand. Sustained attention begins to be experienced almost as a form of physical discomfort.
The need to combat machine logic
The very logic of AI inevitably favors a passive relationship with knowledge. Intellectual effort begins to seem unnecessary when a machine immediately produces plausible answers to any question.
Important truth rarely appears instantly.
Precisely for this reason, a culture that progressively delegates its relationship with truth runs the risk of losing its inner freedom as well. Because those who stop thinking actively end up living from categories elaborated by others (be that otherness organic or digital).
The recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of Leo XIV seems to point precisely to this anthropological wound when he warns against the temptation to translate human experience completely into categories of performance, calculation and functionality. The text still possesses a density that discourages hasty readings, but it is difficult not to perceive an underlying concern: the risk that modern man will end up understanding even his own interiority under instrumental logics.
It is necessary to recover the fertile Christian intellectual life and the discipline and grace that push it towards truth. Otherwise the great question will no longer be whether machines will one day come to think like men, but whether men will continue to want to think for themselves.
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