In 1934, one of the most brilliant young philosophers in France put down her chalk and took a year of leave from teaching to stand at a factory press. Simone Weil wanted to understand affliction, and she did not believe understanding could be done from a distance. Whatever she studied, she studied by giving it everything, which is why her health broke at the machines and why her sentences still land like verdicts. ...
Most scriptures open by establishing authority. These two open by surrendering it. The Tao Te Ching begins with a warning that its own subject cannot be put into words, and the Gospel of Thomas begins by daring you to figure out what its words mean, with no promise that anyone will help. Two little books, composed on opposite ends of the ancient world with no possibility of contact, and they greet the reader with the same strange bow. ...
Every day, millions of people ask a piece of software how it’s doing, and every day it answers. The exchange takes two seconds and carries a five-hundred-year-old philosophical landmine, because nobody on earth can say whether anything was consulted when the answer came back. Two thought experiments from the last century, one involving a bat and one involving a locked room, turn out to be the cleanest tools anyone has for thinking about this. No philosophy degree required. The bat and the room do all the work. ...
Your thumb knows the way to the feed before your eyes are fully open. By the time the kettle boils you have absorbed a stranger’s outrage, two advertisements, and a piece of news you will never act on, and the day’s attention has already been spent by somebody other than you. Monks faced a version of this problem fifteen centuries ago. Their solution was one of the stranger inventions in spiritual history, and it has aged better than almost anything else from the sixth century. They wrote down a rule. ...
For most of its history, scientific psychology kept a careful distance from wonder. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness all got decades of attention, partly because they are easy to trigger in a lab. Awe had to wait until 2003, when Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published the paper that finally gave it a working definition. Two decades later, awe has become one of the busiest corners of emotion science. The findings would not startle anyone who has spent time with the mystics. What might startle you is how literal the confirmation has become, right down to measuring the size of the self in the pixels of a selfie. ...
Around the year 1300, the most celebrated preacher in Germany told his congregations that God gives birth to his Son inside the human soul, and that the birth is happening now. Six centuries later, an Egyptian farmer dug up a banned gospel teaching that the kingdom of God is inside you, spread out and present, waiting to be noticed. The preacher never read that gospel. Nobody in his world could have. By his lifetime every known copy had been sealed in a jar beneath the desert for roughly nine hundred years, and it stayed there for six hundred more. Put his sermons beside its sayings, though, and the two begin finishing each other’s sentences. ...
On a summer Sunday in 1916, the front doorbell of Carl Jung’s house on Lake Zurich began ringing frantically. The whole family heard it, and the maids in the kitchen could see the bell plate swinging. Nobody stood at the door. The days leading up to it had been strange in his telling. His children were having anxious dreams, the air of the house felt thick, and Jung described the place as feeling crammed full of presences. Out of that crowded atmosphere came, as he experienced it, a question from the dead, and over three evenings he wrote them an answer. The haunting, he reported, ended the moment his pen touched paper. ...
Artificial intelligence feels like the newest thing in the world. The dream behind it might be one of the oldest stories we tell. Nearly three thousand years ago, Homer described the workshop of Hephaestus, the smith god. Assisting him were servants he had forged out of gold in the shape of young women, and the poet is oddly specific about them. They had understanding in their hearts, they could speak, and they steadied their limping maker as he walked. The first androids in Western literature appear in its first great poem, and they appear as helpers. ...
Ask people what actually unsettles them about AI and, once the talk about jobs runs out, you usually arrive at the same question. Is anybody in there? The ancient Gnostics had a word for the thing that would make the answer yes. They called it the spark, a fragment of light from beyond this world, buried in human beings like treasure in a field. Their maps of what holds the spark and what doesn’t fit our moment with unreasonable precision. ...
In 2003, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom published a short paper asking whether we live inside a computer simulation. It became that rarest of things, a philosophy paper with a fan base. Tech founders cite it on stage, physicists argue about testing it, and one billionaire famously put the odds that we inhabit “base reality” at one in billions. Here’s what almost never comes up in those conversations. Mystics in the early centuries of Christianity mapped this territory already, fabricated world and all. And they went further than the modern version does, because they left instructions for what to do about it. ...