hello, been doing a lot of reading this year on notions of the transcendent, platonic space, ontology, identity, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. i got a lot of it out of my system with this essay.
some of you will have read that already, in which case you may have noticed the issue that it’s sprawling and long. so i’m also converting it into a series of shorter posts, splitting the chapters up.
if you enjoy the parts, you can already go and read the whole thing in the link above. but also note that this series will be the director’s cut, so is an extra 3k words or so on the whole.
will post the 6 parts over the next three weeks or so, in between fresh standalone posts. enjoy and thanks for the support as always.
0.
Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486, Florence):
I once read that Abdala the Saracen, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!”
However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions, all the explanations given for the magnificence of human nature failed to convince me: that man is the intermediary between creatures, close to the gods, master of all the lower creatures, with the sharpness of his senses, the acuity of his reason, and the brilliance of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the nodal point between eternity and time, and, as the Persians say, the intimate bond or marriage song of the world, just a little lower than angels as David tells us.
I concede that these are magnificent reasons, but they do not seem to go to the heart of the matter. For, if these are all the reasons we can come up with, why should we not admire angels more than we do ourselves?
After thinking a long time, I have figured out why man is the most fortunate of all creatures and as a result worthy of the highest admiration and earning his rank on the chain of being. God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe, built this home, this universe we see all around us. The expanse above the heavens he decorated with Intelligences, the spheres of heaven with living, eternal souls. However, when the work was finished, the Great Artisan desired that there be some creature to think on the plan of his great work, and love its infinite beauty, and stand in awe at its immenseness.
Therefore, when all was finished, He began to think about the creation of man. But he had no Archetype from which to fashion some new child, nor did the universe contain a single place from which the whole of creation might be surveyed.
Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature, who would receive nothing proper to himself, shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature.
He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose.
To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts.
And to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”
I.
From the halls of the Vatican comes Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter on ‘safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence’. At eighty-two dense pages, it feels like it’s pushing the definition of ‘letter’ to its very limit.
We begin with question one: why is the Pope writing about AI at all?
To which he responds:
Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good.
Today, however, we find ourselves facing a new situation. The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination: “Never has humanity had such power over itself.”
Sounds important. But beyond Amanda Askell’s document asking Claude to be nice and not kill Anthropic employees, what are we talking about in practice?
Leo fears AI will entrench a world where a handful of private actors control the data, infrastructure, and algorithms that quietly govern everyone’s lives. All the while the costs (lost jobs, surveillance, automated war, eroded truth) fall on the weakest as accountability dissolves into “the machine.”
Before I get a chance to tap the sign, he does acknowledge that AI is really only the latest datapoint on a consistent trend graph through the modern era, where efficiency rules all and systems get prioritised over people. Moloch, essentially.
Leo’s concern is that we need to find a way for human dignity to remain central, which is … quite fair. People have had to spend much of technological modernity in psychological catch-up mode. It’s turned out that meaning.md isn’t a skill in the same way health and wealth are. Arguments that AI somehow reverses that rather than accelerates it come with a lot more ‘if’ statements.
So to get us closer to finding our dignity again, Pope Leo moves onto the specific problems that require solutions:
In light of the principles of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the digital transformation invites us to (1) rediscover truth as a common good, (2) to protect the dignity of work and (3) to safeguard freedom against all forms of dependence and commercialization.
And this is where things go a bit downhill.
First up, the maintenance of truth:
Those who control digital platforms and means of communication have a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination and to present a particular vision of reality as desirable. Such power should be constantly guided by the pursuit of truth and respect for human dignity.
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We must therefore promote an ecology of communication … this requires a strengthening of intermediary organizations, serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction.
Even though living in the timeline where the Pope is arguing about AI progress in a coherent manner is weird in itself, what gets much weirder is how the Pope has seemingly also become a beacon of vague technocratic dabbled-with-socialism-in-college ‘limitations and future research’ type activism.
I saw Zvi disagree with a lot of the ideas in this letter on ideological grounds. I care about that a bit less. My issue here is this is the writing of a man not living in reality.
He was able to correctly identify a system incentivising itself into the erosion of all human values, but now he thinks that’s a system you can coax into acting better? “We must therefore promote an ecology of communication”. To who? The wind?
This is a common issue with any thinking that emphasises some type of ‘strengthening organisations’ i.e. it assumes someone is in charge. Put it this way, not only is Dario Amodei more powerful than Donald Trump, but systematised incentives are a hell of a lot more powerful than Dario Amodei.
The reality that Leo is pretending not to live in is that nature of collective truth simply will change as a result of this technology. The challenge for someone interested in human wellbeing is to work out how we thrive in a world where you cannot tell whether the things you see or hear actually happened. Or whether any of the people you encounter via technology actually exist. How does meaning operate in that environment?
Denying that that’s the real question, to me, seems naive.
But things manage to get even worse when Leo starts talking about human purpose and jobs, beginning with one of the most unique appeals to authority you’ll see in an argument all year:
Saint John Paul II recognized that unemployment is a grave evil. Indeed, when it reaches massive proportions, it becomes a true social calamity that especially requires the State to exercise responsibility.
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The protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule.
…
New collaborative efforts are needed among political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community in order to develop rapidly adequate shared regulations and protections... without bold decisions, the prospect of greater poverty and inequality looms large, which would leave many individuals marginalized, and surrounded by the machines that have replaced them.
In essence, if AI threatens jobs, we should force to economy to play by our rules and keep people in those jobs anyway. God strike me down if you must but that seems like a terrible idea to me. Hope my agents know how to speak Mandarin.
But again, the exasperating part is just the fact that this is simply so unrealistic. Even thinking that governments will respond to job displacement with any degree of acuity is a bit of a non-starter in itself.
Not to mention that this is where his faulty arguments about AI capabilities cause him issues in his philosophy, because this is simply failing to take improvement seriously. Prioritising the unemployed is all well and good, but what if there is a model that really can do a white-collar workers job better than them at 10x the speed? What if we have models that are more intelligent than us in every way? Will they play dumb and allow us to continue to serve stakeholder interest in the name of retaining dignity?
Obviously that will not happen, but if it did that would be terrible too. Sure, there is dignity and purpose in employment, but ask me again when my 7am alarm goes off if I’m happy we haven’t passed my 9-5 to a much more capable agent and I might just reconsider what I think a dignified existence might be. I totally empathise with the suspicion that current AI leaders aren’t directly aiming for prosperous post-labour life for all, but shouldn’t that be the direction that Leo wants the state to help nudge them in? Or is he really suggesting God gave man life so he could toil away for a boss he probably hates for 50 years?
I started reading the papal letter with a degree of “oh this is a weird thing that might create some interesting discourse, maybe even raise awareness for the better” but by the end I actually felt a bit nauseous.
It is true that we are collectively facing some of the hardest questions for human meaning we have ever faced, and that the nature of what it is to be a human will massively change in our lifetime. There isn’t really anyone at the wheel. Yet at this time of need, you turn to the spiritual leader of the West, the institution that claims to hold the keys of why we are even on this planet, and this is what he has to offer.
So my real point isn’t just that his arguments are flawed. I think there might be something much much stranger going on here.
See, someone else once wrote about preserving the dignity of man, around five hundred years ago. But that message was nothing like this one. It emphasised the real magic of humanity being able to redefine itself. To understand we are built out of something greater than we can comprehend, and that we can reach towards it.
And the period that followed saw humans advance across all fronts at once. Art, science, architecture, literacy, technology, commerce, thought. Funnily enough, the papacy even funded a great amount of it.
Which makes you wonder what’s changed. How come when we are on the frontier of metamorphosis this time around, the Pope would rather everything stop in place than move us forward on the timeline, and to take us closer to something beyond the types of suffering we currently know? Why does he not seem to … believe in anything bigger than this?
Something’s missing here. If I was a Christian, I’d say it was God himself. But I’m not, yet I feel an absence nevertheless.
And I would be lying if I said this was an unfamiliar feeling. The truth is I notice something missing all the time. When I hear leaders speak. When I walk around cities. When I watch the latest big media thing. It’s all a little flat.
It reminds of how Simon Sarris once wrote that today we “make few metaphorical cathedrals, and the reason may stem from this: A lack of tradition leaves us lopsided. Without traditions it is still easy for us to form opinions, but difficult to form convictions.” His point was that rationalism drives progress as we know it, but excessive rationalism leaves us with a world disenchanted. Very few things get done for the sake of creating something awe-inspiring. Very few things are coming from somewhere.
He mentions metaphorical cathedrals, but what about literal ones?
I watched the ceremony of the completion of the Sagrada Familia a few weeks ago. It was cathartic, inspiring. And a weird case study. A true anachronism. Something arriving in the modern era with a purpose from a different time entirely. And it really sticks out. Which is interesting.
What’s the equivalent today of the Sagrada Familia being planned in the 19th century? And why that design? Why so grand while being so detailed, why so unlike any other cathedral that already existed? Why does something tell me that today’s church would vote for the 70% version that would take a quarter of the time? When Gaudi’s towers spiral out of the top towards the sky, what is he reaching for? What do you call that urge?
It reminds me of Sheehan Quirke’s video about ugly buildings, where he notes something that really bugs at you when you live in a city like London. Namely, the erosion of detail as you go through modern history. If a bin, lamppost, letterbox, doorframe, window, toilets, bus stop was built between your grandparents and now, it’s probably monocolour, flat, and boring. Design not considered at all. Yet London also offers all of those same things from deeper into our cultural past, and they’re all weirdly interesting.
And the point is that it didn’t used to feel so weird to for us to collectively act in that way. If you wanted to spend more money and time on making the stone above a door into a vague symbolic pattern just to make it more cool, no one would question if it was worth it. What’s that about?
It seems to me that the feeling I get when I hear Pope Leo speak about the future of humanity is quite close to the feeling I get when I look at boring lampposts. Not just that they’re missing something, but that they’re part of a culture where they don’t even stop to question if they could be missing something.
You could say the thing absent is beauty, or ambition, but that doesn’t quite fit either. It’s more the thing that makes you want to create something beautiful. It’s the substance that the feeling of being taken by something beautiful is made of. In fact, it’s the place that it takes you, isn’t it?
And while we do things externally to get there, 200 year cathedral constructions projects for one, what’s curious is that you’re going somewhere internally. And when you go it feels more real than real, more true than true. Like something is really happening.
Yet at the time in our species where we stare down the end of truth and purpose as we know it, and you think it might be advantageous to explore something greater than that, we find ourselves in a culture where not even the Pope knows where to turn.
The soft, acceptable version of the question I’m getting at is something like ‘what if efficiency got in the way of flourishing, and we could be happier?’
But truthfully, I want to talk about something trickier. Not God, at least not in the Christian sense. But whatever that psychological space is. And where it is.
I mean … what if we aren’t really talking in metaphors, or feelings? When we speak about great art, design, ambition, progress, all giving you the sense of connecting to something more, what if that sense is right? What if that feeling is there for a reason? What if something else really is going on here?
When Gaudi’s towers spiral out of the roof of the Sagrada Familia, reaching towards something we can’t comprehend, what if there is something reaching back? What if that’s why he received the urge to do that in the first place?
What if we turned that off somehow?
This is exactly what I want to read, excellent piece. Thank you for this.