The deeper layers of AI.
I once had the thought that perhaps metaphysicians are the most capable and useful discipline to maximize or leverage Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. By extension, LLMs could be a natural sandbox for philosophers, or the deep contemplative type personalities to play with and help laymen understand what it is at a fundamental level, because they have a library of vocabulary, training, and creative abstraction for such tasks. Thus, the philosopher and the AI are natural allies; they are compatible in their inquiries because they dwell in such an abstract world that they can form a symbiotic relationship.
There is a striking idea I once encountered from a Gemini Deep Research inquiry—one that felt immediately and undeniably true, even though I had never heard it stated so plainly: the human project of artificial intelligence is, in many ways, a form of applied metaphysics. In other words, questions about the nature of reality have been transformed into engineering problems.
This perspective can be traced through the work of Warren McCulloch, a deeply interdisciplinary thinker. His lifelong question was deceptively simple:
“What is a number, that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number?”
At first glance, the question seems confusing, even paradoxical, not to mention self-referential. But its meaning begins to unfold with patience. McCulloch is really asking two intertwined questions: What is knowledge? And what is the knower? How can a physical system — a brain — grasp something abstract, like a number?
His path to this question is revealing. He did not begin with machines or mathematics, but with theology. Raised to become a minister, he was steeped in religious thought before turning toward mathematics and science. That shift did not erase his earlier concerns — it deepened them. His scientific work became another way of asking fundamentally philosophical questions.
McCulloch recognized an asymmetry in our understanding: we have some grasp of numbers, yet the mind that understands them remains largely opaque. The brain, in all its complexity, appears as a kind of black box. This is the epistemic limit — the boundary where neuroscience struggles to fully explain the very thing doing the explaining.
From this tension arises a natural question: if we do not fully understand the mind, can we nevertheless build something like it? A machine capable of thought?
McCulloch did not dismiss the possibility. He allowed that it might be achievable, but with an important caveat: such machines would extend human purposes rather than originate their own.
This ambition echoes a broader pattern in the history of mankind. As the philosopher Alan Watts once remarked when referencing man’s creation of the atomic bomb, “The trouble with intellectual people is that anything that can be done must be done.” The development of artificial intelligence reflects this impulse. Or as the philosopher Jason Jorjani would put it: A Promethean impulse, the drive toward forbidden knowledge and technics. It is an attempt to instantiate thought itself; to build a system that can not only compute, but in some sense “know,” or even “know how to know.”
Seen this way, artificial intelligence becomes more than a technical project. It is an effort to turn abstraction into mechanism, to translate philosophical questions into material systems — computers, algorithms, neural networks.
And this effort carries deep implications. It touches on enduring questions about the nature of reality, the structure of thought, and the relationship between creator and creation. Where theology once spoke of God making humans in His image, we now confront a new inversion: humans attempting to make machines in theirs.
Alan Turing offered a provocative response to the theological concern this raises. In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he suggested that there is no reason, in principle, that a machine could not possess a soul — if God so willed it. If divine power extends to granting souls to humans, it would be presumptuous to assume that machines are excluded.
This challenges a quiet assumption: that humans hold a monopoly on mind, or soul, or understanding. Artificial intelligence, then, is not just a technological frontier. It is a philosophical test of that assumption — a place where metaphysics, theology, mysticism, and engineering converge.
Some sources inspired:
Gemini – direct access to Google AI
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