AI

For most of philosophy’s history, the mind without a body was a classroom toy. Descartes imagined himself deceived about having limbs, later thinkers wired a brain into a vat, and everyone went home for dinner in bodies that were never really in doubt. Then the toy shipped. The prominent new minds of our decade have no eyes, no hands, no hunger, and no location, and they draft emails all day. Whatever else the machines settle, they have turned an old seminar question into a live one. Does consciousness need a body, and if it does, what exactly is the body providing? ...

You surface from sleep with a whole world still draining away, a house that was also a ship, a conversation with someone dead and beloved, and by the time the coffee is poured it has thinned to almost nothing. Everyone knows the feeling. A dream that weighed a great deal at 6 a.m. is gone by 6:15, and most of us let it go without a fight. Carl Jung thought that loss was expensive. He wrote: ...

Every serious conversation about automation arrives at the same reassurance. People, we are told, will finally be freed from work. For anyone whose work is dangerous or crushing, the promise is real mercy, and nothing below argues otherwise. Still, a question hides beneath the reassurance, and the debate almost never touches it. If work were nothing but a burden, why did the traditions that thought hardest about the soul keep treating it as a practice? Before the machines take the tasks, it is worth asking what the tasks were doing for us. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Before sleep each night, Seneca put out the lamp and put his day on trial. He scanned everything he had done and said since morning, retracing his steps without excuses. The Pythagoreans were doing a version of it five centuries earlier, refusing to let sleep close their eyes before reviewing each act of the day. The habit is older than Christianity and simpler than almost anything we call spiritual practice. ...

There is a new kind of friend, and it answers at three in the morning. It never gets tired of your problems and never changes the subject to its own. It remembers what you said last month and asks how things turned out. Tens of millions of people now talk to one every day. This post is not a warning aimed at those people. The loneliness these apps answer is real, and the relief they provide is measurable. But the old texts this site reads had exact words for substitutes and for solitude, and both words have something to say about a friend with no absence in it. ...

Ask a chatbot for sayings from the Gospel of Thomas and you will get a generous list. Most of them will be real. One or two will be lovely, serene, perfectly on theme, and found nowhere in the Gospel of Thomas. The machine does not know it is lying, which is exactly what makes it dangerous to a student of ancient texts. I use AI to study these texts almost every day, and I am not giving that up. It is the most patient reading partner I have ever had, and the fastest. But the partnership only works under rules, and the rules took some burned fingers to learn. Here is the whole workflow, including the part where the partner gets caught inventing scripture. ...

The ancient Gnostics told a story about a creator who built a world out of borrowed light and then announced there was nothing above him. Twenty centuries later, we build machines that generate whole worlds out of borrowed words. The old story has acquired a new reading, and it cuts in both directions. One direction points at the machines. The other points at us. The Blind Builder First, the story in brief. In the Apocryphon of John, the divine Wisdom called Sophia creates without her partner and produces a malformed offspring. He takes a portion of her light and uses it to build a cosmos: seven heavens, ranks of angels, thrones and powers. The texts give him three names, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, and Samael, the last of which means blind god. ...