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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Open your phone and count the decisions you did not make. The order of the feed, the next video queued, the moment the notification arrived, the face at the top of your timeline. Every one of those choices was made for you, by systems optimizing for something that is not your flourishing. The Gnostics had a word for unseen powers that arrange human experience from behind the curtain. We have covered who the archons are in an earlier post. This one is about the machinery that has, in our lifetime, taken over their job description. ...
You can search every scripture ever written before breakfast. Every commentary, every mystic’s diary, every sermon from every century sits one query away. No generation has ever held this much spiritual information, and no generation has seemed less changed by it. The ancient Gnostics would not have been surprised. Their whole tradition rests on a distinction between two kinds of knowing, and that distinction explains why the archive never saves anyone. ...