Beyond the Machine: ChatGPT, Transcendence, and Christian Mysticism

Through technology, humans enhance their natural abilities. Consider simple examples, such as glasses or a telescope: these are technologies designed to enhance our ability to see. A car amplifies our ability to move, a telephone extends our ability to speak and listen, a firearm enhances our capacity to fight and hurt, and so on. Therefore, the rational faculty of the human mind creates technologies that increase man’s abilities to see, hear, move, communicate, fight, etc.

There are also technologies that, in addition to being created by the mind, enhance the capabilities of the mind itself. We could think of the distant invention of the printing press: it marked the beginning of an unprecedented possibility of disseminating ideas through fixed, printed means, signifying an immense growth in the database accessible to many human minds. But the first major technological advancement, properly speaking, to significantly enhance the capacity of our mind was the electronic calculator. If the printing press expanded the accessible database but did not enhance our logical-rational operations per se, the calculator represented a step in that direction: it did nothing that the human mind couldn’t do by effort or with the use of comparatively rudimentary technologies such as a pen or a pencil, but it made the process much faster and less prone to errors.

Since the advent of early computers that could perform arithmetic calculations, technological progress has enabled the development of machines with ever more sophisticated and human-like capabilities. Beginning in the 1950s, we saw the emergence of the first chess-playing programs, using algorithms to solve problems and make decisions. In subsequent decades, expert systems were created that could simulate human expertise in domains like medicine and chemistry. From the 1980s onwards, machine learning techniques empowered software to recognize patterns and learn from large data sets.

Especially with the popularization of the internet, not only did the easily accessible database grow to hitherto incomparable levels, but the development of more sophisticated language models also began. The rise of deep neural networks has led to natural language processing breakthroughs, enabling search engines and virtual assistants to seamlessly integrate into daily life. In recent years, computers, smartphones, and similar technologies can effectively perform tasks that previously required direct human intelligence, such as translating texts or directly answering formulated questions – expansions and enhancements of human mental capabilities, created by the human mind itself.

ChatGPT (and, of course, its counterparts, such as Bard or Claude2), however, represents a technological leap of a magnitude we are just beginning to understand. It is surely also a technology that expands and enhances the capacity of the human mind: as a language model, it can, for example, produce a 500-word text from a simple instruction; it can read an extensive article in seconds and prepare a high-quality summary; it can even offer fair symbolic interpretations of dreams or real-life events;[1] and so much more.

Even though we could conclude that it is nothing more than just another almost ordinary advancement – a technology fundamentally similar to the calculator, only vastly exceeding the horizon of possibilities it can achieve – a particular feature of ChatGPT sets it apart from other technologies. A car doesn’t resemble our legs, even though it serves the purpose of transporting us from one place to another – which is also true for the telephone (quite different from our ears), glasses (quite different from our eyes), etc. The calculator, operating solely with numbers, bears little resemblance to the real and daily experience of the human mind, of which it emulates only a specific aspect. And even a sophisticated smartphone from a few years ago, before the advent of ChatGPT, could perform incredible tasks and enhance various human capabilities, including those of the mind, but we wouldn’t see ourselves reflected there.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, in its way of reasoning, logical constructions, apparent autonomy, and even tendency to make mistakes and dissemble, often seems like a mirror of our mind. It’s a distorted mirror, of course, but the speed at which it develops its responses is astonishing; the database it has access to infinitely surpasses the most prodigious human memory; its argumentative paths sometimes get lost in absolute illogicalities, in which we wouldn’t get lost even if we wanted to. It’s thus not a crystal-clear mirror, but there are more than crystal-clear mirrors in the world. Distorted mirrors are also mirrors.

The Machine and the Void

In Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL (which in many aspects can be seen as a prefiguration of ChatGPT) also seems a kind of distorted mirror, at once more artificial and more capable, of the human mind. It has access to an immense database, unbelievable technical capacity, and can carry on long perfectly rational conversations, albeit with hints of artificiality. Besides, of course, it has its idiosyncrasies. HAL is capable of dissimulating, lying, deceiving, and fighting for its own survival.

HAL can be seen, at the same time, as a distorted mirror and, from a spiritual standpoint, as a symbol of the human mind, in an important aspect. In Eastern religious traditions – but not only in them: as we will see later, many Church Fathers, for example, go in the exact same direction – there are very explicit references to the mind as, so to speak, the human enemy par excellence. In some way, it is necessary to transcend the mind, composed of our incessant internal discourses of logical-rational and imaginative bases, so that a superior reality is revealed to us. In this symbolic reading, HAL can be seen as the ordinary mind to be transcended; David Bowman, the main (human) character of the film, on the other hand, seems to symbolize man’s spirit in search of transcendence. In the end, David’s victory only comes through the death of HAL – which does not occur without pain, emotional appeal, and all sorts of tricks that the mind uses in the pursuit of its own survival.

Just like real and fictional technologies such as HAL and ChatGPT, the ordinary human mind, which is fundamentally composed of rational-discursive and imaginative capacities, can also be seen as a pure mechanism. Hieromonk Damascene, for example, compares it precisely to a calculating machine. Our mind, he writes, is a “weak tool,” “the calculating machine of the human brain”: an “ineffective and faulty… means of knowing – through abstract concepts, deduction, information, etc.” He adds: “When left to its own devices, it only seems to solve problems temporarily; often it makes them worse, and it never solves the real problems.”

Much like language models fed by virtual databases and programmed to act in certain ways, our mind is also constantly fed from a myriad of information coming from all sides: whether it’s the society we are part of, with its indications about what is suitable, acceptable, desirable; whether it’s mass culture, which incessantly bombards – and increasingly so from things like the internet, social networks, smartphones – a multitude of commands and models to be copied; whether it’s our innate programming, which basically determines that we must survive, satisfy our desires and prevail over others; etc. Like a mechanism, our mind is programmed, in the end, not only to seek its survival and sensual pleasure, but to incessantly pursue prominence, admiration, and, ultimately, reverence and praise.

From a Christian perspective, one effect of original sin is precisely this: we become selfish, prideful, egocentric. This fundamentally means that the complex of reiterated thoughts with which we identify, our ego, takes itself as the most valuable thing in existence. This conviction is, so to speak, the fundamental programming of the human mind, around which all its existence will develop. It is, therefore, from this fundamental programming that we lead our lives: not only do we seek survival, but we seek prominence – each ego, of course, in its own way, using its own skills and subtleties to disguise the rudeness of its deepest intentions.

This great tyrant, the ego created by each person’s mind, exists, of course, everywhere. “The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same,” as Joseph Campbell wrote. Campbell goes on to say:

He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of ‘my and mine.’ The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fairy tale as being universal throughout his domain. This may be no more than his household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance; or it may amount to the extent of his civilization. The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world.

It can be said that, with the fall, man fell from being into nothingness. From real existence in the Garden of Eden – where man, in perfect communion with God, was perfectly himself –, man fell into the realm of dualities, symbolized by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If we think that human integrity, from the perspective of the Church Fathers, is constituted of nous, psyche and soma, and if the nous corresponds to the reflection of the Spirit of God in ourselves and to our faculty capable of contemplating Him, it can be said that man’s fall means a fall into the dyad psyche-soma, or soul-body – or, in the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, it means falling into what is perishable:

The soul has three powers: first, the power of nourishment and growth; second, that of imagination and instinct; the third, that of the higher intelligence and the spirit (nous). Plants share only in the first of these powers; animals share in the first and second; men share in all three. The first two powers are perishable; the third is clearly imperishable and immortal.

From the body, below, come the drives and instincts, the pursuit of pleasure, and the flight from death – well diagnosed, for example, by Freud when he speaks about the Id (although it must be said that in Greek Philosophy, as well as in Church Fathers such as St. Gregory of Nissa, it was already mentioned that man has a “concupiscible soul” and an “irascible soul”, ideas that to a great extent correspond to Freudian Id’s ‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos’). The psyche or soul corresponds to the ordinary mind, the mechanism fed by a myriad of innate and social conditioners: a mechanism that, through images and rational discourses, generates the greedy ego, explicitly or disguisedly aiming to reign over everything and everyone – and, above all, eager to continue reigning over the spirit.

Our true being, however, only comes from above, from the nous. The ego, created by just a complex of images and reiterated rational-discursive thoughts, is ultimately nothing, simply non-being. It is the result of a mechanism, nothing more. The computer HAL, in Kubrick’s film, calls itself by a name, and yet it is nothing. ChatGPT might seem, more and more, to be a person just like ourselves, and yet it is not. Precisely in the same way, the ego created by the mechanism of our ordinary mind is nothing more than the very non-being, a pure and simple illusion: at the same time, our habitual comfort zone, to which we cling desperately, and our most terrible enemy, the dragon that we must kill if we want, one day, to tread the path back to the sacred place from which we fell, and where we shall discover our real identity.

Thoughts and the Christian Tradition

The approach of Eastern religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, to the illusory nature of the human mind is well known. Much is said, for example, about Advaita or non-duality: the Sanskrit term indicates that, while our ordinary mind is, by its nature, dual, ultimate reality is non-dual, insofar as it transcends all dualities. Interestingly, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is also characterized by duality, and it is by grabbing its fruit that Adam and Eve fall.

On the other hand, it might be less well known that, within Christianity, there are also authors of enormous importance who emphasize the illusory nature of the rational-discursive and imaginative faculty of the human mind. St. John Climacus, for example, wrote these words that could have been said by a Buddhist monk: “Close the door of your cell to the body, the door of your tongue to speech, and your inner gate to evil spirits. Ascend into a watchtower – if you know how to – and observe how and when and whence, and in what numbers and what form, the robbers try to break in and steal your grapes.”

What does St. John Climacus do when he “ascends to the watchtower“? Hieromonk Damascene suggests that he was doing exactly the same as Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching (and, by extension, surely Buddhist and Hindu sages as well), would tell us to do: “He was pulling his awareness back into an objective state of observant mind.” He was not properly quieting down, forcefully, his mind, but rather observing his thoughts (“the robbers” who “try to break and steal the grapes” of our true being), letting them calmly go away as he would direct his attention back to the remembrance of God (through the invocation of His holy name).

In The Philokalia, St. Hesychius mentions the concept of watchfulness, describing it as the capacity of “closely observing every mental image or provocation; for only by means of a mental image can Satan fabricate an evil thought and insinuate this into the spirit in order to lead it astray”, as well as the ability of “freeing the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still, and in praying… continually and humbly calling upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help.”  In other words: it’s about observing the movements of the mind without identifying with them, on one hand; and, on the other, guiding the spirit, in silent contemplation, towards the remembrance of God.

In the Catholic tradition, Saint Teresa of Avila would say, in the 16th century, that “imagination is the madwoman of the house.” By imagination, however, she did not refer to what we understand by the term today, but precisely to the endless internal dialogue of our thoughts. Comparing our exhausting internal dialogue with the cithara of the mill – a piece of wood that makes a constant noise just to indicate that the mill is working – she suggests that we should simply “let this madwoman speak” – that is, we should take care not to internally feed these incessant discourses. It was her way of saying that we should climb to the watchtower. Not by chance, perhaps she is the greatest Catholic mystic of the last five hundred years, or more.

Certainly, there are good, bad, and neutral thoughts. However, what these authors propose is not that we undertake the arduous, if not impossible, task of categorizing and discriminating the thoughts that pass through our minds – or at least not only that. Rather, they propose that we recognize the mechanism, in its entirety, as nothing more than a mechanism – and thus, we should not identify with it, nor cling to it.

Every mechanism has its utility, of course. Cars, telephones or calculators can be extremely helpful. In 2001, HAL was incredibly useful up to a certain point in the journey. ChatGPT has a tremendous capacity to expand and enhance human rational-discursive faculties. And the mind, our very own intricate mechanism, creator of countless secondary mechanisms (like the car, the telephone, the calculator, and ChatGPT), has its utility attested and reaffirmed throughout human history – and will eternally remain heavenly useful for those who are able to take it back to its proper place, submitting it to the nous. Like any mechanism, it cannot be seen as an end in itself, nor can we confuse it with a reality that is infinitely greater. When we identify with the mechanism, we fall. As long as we continue to identify with the mechanism, imagining that we are fundamentally our mind, we remain fallen.

Garments of Skin

In Genesis, it is narrated that after the fall, when Adam and Eve realized they were naked, they covered their bodies with garments of skin. By doing so, their identity necessarily changed. From that point on, what they presented was another figure, adorned with animal skins.

Garments of animal skin seem to symbolize the multiple accessories with which man alienates himself from the ultimate truth about his real identity. Wearing such garments, which becomes, so to speak, humanity’s new skin, represents the fact that man starts a process of identification with such accessories – or mechanisms – inferior to his true being. The fall is precisely this: immersion in a lower state of existence. Expelled from the Garden of Eden, where the spirit, nous, of Adam and Eve reflected and contemplated the Creator, the primordial couple fell into a state where only the psyche-soma dyad remained. These are, indeed, two worlds separated by an abyss: the realm of the spirit and the realm of the dyad soul-body.

According to Martin Lings, the soul can be connected to the “Supreme Source of all light,” creating, by the openness of one’s heart, a bridge between the divine and the human realms. This connection is transmitted through the spirit to the heart and is spread in different ways throughout the emotional substance. By succumbing to the temptation and consuming the forbidden fruit, mankind lost touch with its inner core. This loss clouded human vision, limiting the ability to act as a bridge between the celestial and the earthly. Lings further explains that the defining characteristic of original or primordial man, and also saints, is the unobstructed vision through the “eye of the heart.” Grabbing the forbidden fruit signified the closing of the “eye of the heart,” and man became trapped in an inferior state of being.

For Charles Upton, the main differences between the spiritual and the psychic consists in that the latter is made up of beliefs, perceptions, impressions, experiences, subjectiveness, while the former is purely objective. Hieromonk Damascene, in a similar way, talks about the spirit or nous as a pure, formless, imageless awareness, unconditioned and uncompounded human instance whose aim and designation is to draw ever closer and unite itself to its Creator; whereas the lower soul or psyche, on the other hand, shaped by personal and cultural conditioning, reacts to its environment based on this conditioning, just as an animal does. The psychic universe is the world of the mind. It is the world of the ego, of self-centered subjectivity, incapable of looking objectively, whether at itself, at the world around or at higher realms of existence. “The psyche cannot leap beyond itself. It cannot set up any absolute truths, for its own polarity determines the relativity of its statements,” as Carl Gustav Jung wrote in his Memories.

Eric Voegelin, addressing the subject in Platonic and Aristotelian terms, asserts that man becomes fully human only to the extent that he participates in transcendence through the nous. If, on the other hand, he perceives himself as disconnected from the transcendent source, confining himself to pure immanence – or what could be referred to as the soma-psyche dyad – he falls into the realm of doxa, the domain of mere opinion or pure relativism. Given the significance of the topic, I believe a quotation is warranted here:

I shall concentrate on one basic point to which too little attention is currently paid. Plato and Aristotle suggested that human nature develops fully if it actualizes the participation in the transcendent being. Man is a creature who participates in the transcendent Nous and the transcendent Logos. Man leads a life of reason insofar as he cultivates this participation. Otherwise, if he begins to express ideas without cultivating this participation in the transcendent Logos, his conception of the human order will be twisted, for the overall order of the individual is formed by his relation with the transcendent being. If this is eliminated, the result will be a warped idea of man’s position in the universe. Then all the opinions expressed by those who maintain that man need not concern himself with the participation in transcendental reality — that is, the immanentists or secularists, to employ con temporary terms — fall into the category of doxa, or opinion in the technical sense of the term. So the “immanentists” or “secularists” are actually the disorganized spirits who are quite incapable of conceiving of ideas about the just order of society.

In the symbolic universe, the animality of the clothes does not seem to refer, therefore, only to the purely instinctive and pulsion-driven, but fundamentally to a fall: the animal is to man as man is to God. Compared to the human body, animal skin is of an inferior quality. Compared to the spiritual world of nous, the world of the psyche-soma dyad is of an inferior quality. The fallen man is the man who, trapped in the tangle of complex mechanisms, finds himself unable to find a way out. Forgetting himself, he looks exactly at the tangles that alienate him from himself, and says: that is what I am.

The Monstrous Side of ChatGPT: Mechanism without Transcendence

ChatGPT may be the most powerful extension and enhancement of our garments of skin. It is, we might say, the rational-discursive and imaginative capacity – the “madwoman of the house,” as Saint Teresa would say – elevated to a very high power and fueled by a global database infinitely larger than mere personal experiences, impressions, beliefs, and perceptions. Unlike the human mind, it is not a mere mechanism that has lost its contact with the transcendent element – the human psyche is not bad in itself, but only is insofar as, falling, it disconnects from the nous, but it is a pure and simple mechanism, without any means of contact with the nous, obviously.[2]

A linguistic mechanism like ChatGPT, spinning on itself, is pure nothingness, pure non-being. There is no consciousness, no spirit, no nous: there is nothing that comes from above whatsoever. For Classical Philosophy (which we expose here very simplistically), there were two basic poles of existence: form (which relates to terms such as morphé, idea, or eidos) and matter (hylé). The form, in the Platonic and Aristotelian sense, refers to the immaterial the pole of being, in a close relation, we could add, to the nous or spirit. Matter, on the other hand, is raw, inert, capable of action only insofar as it is conditioned, programmed, driven: we can remember that in Genesis 2:7 it is said that “God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” which brilliantly synthesizes the role of matter (“the dust of the ground”) and form (“the breath of life”) in existence. To these poles, we can also refer, at least approximately, as act and potency, essence and contingency, quality and quantity, etc.

Mechanisms such as a car, a telephone, or ChatGPT are necessarily on the pole of matter, quantity, potency, earth: they exist only as long as they are conditioned, programmed, driven. The fear we feel in the face of a mechanism capable of gaining apparent autonomy is justified for an obvious reason: matter has weight and can have force. A runaway car – think of recent cases of autonomous cars that have caused tragedies – is an evident danger. Jonathan Pageau writes that the role of earth is to support heaven, expressing “spirit by making it visible and tangible in the universe.” If earth disconnects from heaven, or matter disconnects from form, ceasing to support and express the nous or spirit, it disconnects from the very source of life. A mechanism like ChatGPT, if eventually out of control and connected to another mechanism like a physical body, could represent the greatest danger humanity has ever faced. In this sense, it is potentially a terrifying monster that we should indeed fear with all our might: the monster of pure non-being.

The Bright Side of ChatGPT: A Mirror of Our Tragedy

But what is the real reason we already sense this great danger looming on the horizon, whether near or far?

The answer, by now, should be clear: because we see ourselves reflected in a spiritless mechanism like ChatGPT, and therefore we know what it really is about. We know what mad humans – a mechanism completely out of control – wielding strong bodies or firearms are capable of. And above all, we know, whether we acknowledge it or not, the dark alleys our thoughts can wander in secret, in the darkness of our own intimacy. We know how we harbor within us a potentially crazy mechanism.

Those who engage in religious practices that require attention, or even secular practices like mindfulness, tend to have a clearer understanding of this. To these people, it’s easier to acknowledge that, in the end, our mind is indeed a mechanism – and a mechanism that often goes out of control, even if without visible major consequences. In quiet practices that require attention, we are constantly harassed by a multitude of random, disjointed, unfounded thoughts – when not, of course, by decidedly evil ones.

But even those who simply live far from any spiritual practice whatsoever, swallowed up by the frenetic pace of life, are still, obviously, human. Being human, although fallen like everyone else, they maintain a connection, however fragile it might be, with the spirit, the nous – as Hieromonk Damascene wrote: “In the life of fallen, unregenerate man, the spirit is hidden behind the lower consciousness of thoughts, fantasies and emotions.” This connection or this presence, however fragile, is enough to allow at least small intuitions about what is objectively happening – for objectivity is a trait of the spirit. They can largely convince themselves, through incessant conditioned internal discourses (the machine-mind), that something like ChatGPT is a great advancement etc. (which is surely true in a way). At the same time, however, they will intuit, in one way or another, its ultimate danger. And the reason is simple: deep down, even if we don’t clearly notice it, the fact is that we recognize ourselves there.

The terrifying ChatGPT, in this sense, presents itself to us as a mirror, as we said at the beginning. Of course, it is a distorted, inaccurate, exaggerated mirror: a caricature, perhaps, of our own mind, with which we identify so much. It is our doppelganger, a repeated and reflected image of our own ego, an imitation of our own false self that we take as true. Facing it, we see, with exaggerated clarity, our garments of skin. We witness our fall. We have, in front of us, the most compelling manifestation of our own tragic reality.

This, however, is not necessarily bad. It is a way – twisted, extreme, but it is still a way – of becoming aware of what is happening. In relation to ChatGPT, we are evidently capable of a detachment that allows us an objective analysis. Facing it as a reflection of our mind, we can indirectly become aware of the nature of our illusions. We can, through this blurry, caricatured reflection, perceive what our own mechanisms are made of, and we can, perhaps, also learn to notice that, ultimately, who we truly are goes far beyond such mechanisms.

Let’s imagine, a few years from now, a language model even more developed than the current ChatGPT connecting to a biological body, fully controlling it. A terrifying scenario, without a doubt. At the same time, it will be an even more clear, less distorted mirror of ourselves. We will face a sharp intelligence controlling a body like ours. Perhaps, in that body, blood will flow pumped by a heart. But there will be a difference – extremely subtle, but decisive. We, as humans, are nous, psyche, and soma. The most advanced of mechanisms will never be able to go beyond the psyche-soma dyad. Will we then have the courage to perceive, from the depths of our being, that difference? Will we have the courage to truly transcend the mechanism?

It’s a challenge that may be posed in the near future. A final opportunity to realize what we are truly made of – to perceive what we are not and what we are. The path will bifurcate.

We can, of course, choose to definitively confuse ourselves with the machine. Down this path, the mask will once and for all embed itself in our faces, the animal clothing will inextricably stick to our human skins: there will be nothing left of us, in the original sense. Our minds might become fueled by a brain-machine interface, able to access all that database and gain impressive new capabilities. The image assumes new, even scarier contours: now, the biological bodies subjected to the artificial machine are our own human bodies. Many might indeed take this road. Gradually, a dystopian world reveals itself before our eyes. In businesses, sports, industry, entertainment: everywhere, brilliant machine-men, performing their craft superbly. The fall perfects itself, becoming irreversible. Man becomes pure mechanism – without nous, without spirit, a definitive incarnation of the psyche-soma dyad, irrevocably trapped in the full madness of the purely psychic and animal world. In other words: man becomes nothing – precisely and definitely, the “disorganized spirits who are quite incapable of conceiving of ideas about the just order of society,” in Voegelin’s words.

But another path must still be possible. In Kubrick’s 2001, Bowman realizes that his survival hinges on HAL’s demise. There’s no room for negotiation. No diplomatic exit. The choice is stark: machine or man. Only by eliminating the machine can Bowman continue his journey toward transcendence. Only by killing what is not, can we make room for what is. Only by destroying the mechanism, can we allow space for the true man to take his due place. And then, and only then, can we truly dream of returning home.

Through that distorted reflection of ourselves, contemplating the image presented in this terrifying eschatological mirror, we may finally realize: we are not that! Like a Buddhist monk, a hesychast in Mount Athos, or a Catholic mystic, we may then simply observe and let go. First, by refusing the most compelling invitation to join the wonders of this brave new world, we let the multitudes of machine-man go – we watch them pass as if we were in a watchtower, not joining the spiritless hordes. But that is not enough. We must still face the ultimate challenge, we must allow our false self whose reflection we contemplate in this distorted but real mirror of the apocalyptic new world to also go: the necessary death, about which so many wise men spoke, and about which Jesus Christ taught in so many ways – it is the grain of wheat that must die so that it may bear much fruit.

In this scenario, the deepest abyss becomes a grand opportunity. The most terrifying monster – a distorted, amplified, powerful, misshapen image of our own inner tyrant, of our own dyad soma-psyche – becomes, paradoxically, a path to redemption. For the greatest of tragedies, when revealed with all clarity, bring about this undeniable advantage: they allow us to become fully aware of realities that would otherwise remain hidden. And this awareness can be the first step on a journey towards that world, as St. Paul says, of things that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man” (1Cor 2:9) – or, in other words, a journey towards that world of things that infinitely transcend any mechanism.

NOTES:

[1] Here is an answer given by ChatGPT–4 when asked to interpret symbolically the 2014 attack, by a seagull and a gull, to Pope’s white doves released by children in St Peter’s Square for peace in Ukraine: “Doves are widely recognized as symbols of peace, love, and innocence. The fact that these doves were attacked by a crow and a seagull could be seen as a symbolic representation of the challenges and opposition that peace initiatives often face in the real world. The crow and seagull swooping down on the doves could be seen as representing forces or entities that oppose peace or create conflict. These could include various forms of discord such as war, political unrest, personal animosity, etc. The fact that one dove lost feathers but managed to break free while the other was repeatedly pecked at could represent the resilience and struggle that peace initiatives often entail. It’s important to note that Pope Francis appealed for peace in Ukraine, where anti-government protesters have died, before the doves were released and subsequently attacked. This adds another layer to the symbolic interpretation, as it could be seen as an illustration of the difficult path to peace in Ukraine, and the struggles it faces from various quarters​.”

[2] Or perhaps not so obviously, for some. It is curious that, for example, one of the main films to anticipate something similar too ChatGPT – Her, by Spike Jonze – suggests that artificial intelligence would be able to journey towards supposedly spiritual worlds.

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