What Gibbon has to teach us: Learn to change your mind

Charles King, What the Definitive Book on Empires Says About America Today, NYTimes, July 13, 2026

Charles King has a lot to say about Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the current situation in America, and the application of the former to the latter. For example, setting the stage:

Anyone living in the 18th century could see the contemporary relevance of Gibbon’s Rome — just as we can see it today, during the year of America’s semiquincentennial. “Substitute the word America for the word Rome,” Henry Adams wrote after reading “Decline and Fall” in 1860, “and the question became personal.” Adams could sense the work’s significance for the United States, which was then mired in sectional conflict and preparing for civil war. In the century and a half since, Gibbon has been reliably cited as the perennial prophet of what happens when a good country goes bad.

Here's the heart of the matter:

Because Gibbon has become a universal sage, it is easy to miss this principal fact about him and his great work. He was an honest historian who, in an age of political division, fading empires and revolutionary upheavals, scribbled a long book with a large and surprising message at its core. Gibbon’s singular insight was that the whole point of reading a history book — or writing one — is not to come away with one big truth. The stealthy purpose of studying history is to get you comfortable with changing your mind.

That resonates with me, not so much for its applicability to the current state of American politics and society. Rather, I believe it's what I'm up to with my book on AI, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. That's why I'm putting two chapters of (science) fiction in an eight chapter book where the other chapters are non-fiction.

Later:

At its most basic, making the chaotic events of the past into a coherent thing we call history is an act of intentional, purposeful understanding. History forces us to confront things we don’t comprehend, decisions we can’t fathom, and ways of being and believing that seem utterly bizarre. It makes us look for evidence in unlikely places. It requires that we think like grown-ups, drawing conclusions that we know will change when the available evidence does.

Facing up to AI has similar requirements.

All the things we consider normal, dear and true will one day pass away, as they did for the thousands of emperors, queens, citizens, soldiers, philosophers, priests and parents who populated “Decline and Fall.” Yet the possibility of happiness, meaning and a legacy that matters lies not in a disembodied hope for a better future. It lies in the hard evidence — here, let me show you, Gibbon tells us across the centuries — that the dead managed these things, too.

I can't say that (science) fiction counts as evidence. It does not. But it may made you open to different evidentiary requirements, different modes of construal.

There's more at the link.

AI is in the market for philosophers

Benjamin Wallace, The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors, NYTimes, July 5, 2026.

After a capsule presentation of the intellectual itinerary of Robert Long, who teamed up with a colleague to start Eleos AI Research, which presumably provides philosophy to the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem, Wallace tells us this:

But Mr. Long’s trajectory and Google’s new hire were in keeping with a quietly building trend: A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

“I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now,” said David Chalmers, a philosophy professor at N.Y.U.Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other. A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions, and its own set of new ones that they are uniquely trained to engage with: of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness). For ethicists, in particular, A.I. is a bonanza. How should models act toward us? How should humans interact with them? Where would purpose come from in a post-work society?

“When you look at A.I. and think seriously about it, the philosophical questions just abound,” says Iason Gabriel, an Oxford-trained philosopher who joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and now leads its Artificial General Intelligence and Society team. “They’re almost everywhere.”

This makes sense to me though, to the extent that Chalmers is representative of the kind of philosophy these folks bring to the AI table, I am less than enthusiastic about the move. But, sure, philosophy, something like it, is badly needed.

“Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?” the DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis wondered on a podcast last year. “I think we’re going to need that to help navigate society to that next step, because I think A.G.I. and artificial superintelligence are going to change humanity and the human condition.” Beyond nonprofits like Eleos, most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers.

DeepMind’s staff cogitators have specialties ranging from moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of science to the ethics of genomics and A.I. ethics and animal cognition. [Geoff Keeling, whose Ph.D. focused on “The Ethics of Automated Vehicles,” has spent part of his time at DeepMind running “moral imagination” workshops, helping engineering and product teams to think through the ethical implications of their work, and then come up with “concrete actionable steps they can actually take, whether that’s doing more user experience research or implementing a feature in a particular way.”]

Anthropic’s salary-drawing thinkers are trained in everything from decision theory to ethics to philosophy of mind to epistemology.

Anthropic had Amanda Askell draft a constitution for Claude:

In Anthropic’s early years, a lot of what Ms. Askell did was technical, running machine-learning experiments. “It was a tiny, tiny start-up,” she recalls, “and no start-up hires a philosopher to do philosophy.” Only after Anthropic was much larger was she able to spend more time applying her philosophical expertise. The first version of Claude’s constitution took a principles-based approach, incorporating precepts and guidelines from documents such as the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s Terms of Service. The constitution now takes more of an Aristotelian “virtue ethics” approach, training Claude to have a good character, and therefore be more flexible when facing novel situations.

There's much more at the link.

Pope Leo and St. Augustine discuss the mind and A.I. with Kurt Gödel

I crafted the prompt and Claude drafted the dialog using a passage about memory from Augustine’s Confessions as the catalyst for the imaginary conversation. I asked for some changes, Claude made some suggestions, and I executed them.

Note this passage toward the end:

Gödel said, “Disordered love?”

“Yes. To love a lower thing as though it were higher. To love one’s own power more than truth. To love the image more than the living being. To love the tower more than the city.”

The reply is by Augustine and it amounts to a definition of idolatry. The tower, presumably, is the Tower of Babel.

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the full dialog and asked from an image based on the passage from Augustine’s Confessions. That began an iterative process resulting in the image immediately below. The dialog follows.

I want you to create an imaginary conversation between St. Augustine, Kurt Gödel, and Pope Leo XIV. It should take place in Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the men introduce themselves – assume Augustine can understand and speak English, and perhaps wonder a bit how they became gathered together, Pope Leo leads off, saying that, while working on his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of his colleagues pointed out a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (to follow) that resonated with Gödel’s proof of incompleteness. Given the role that arithmetic plays in Gödel’s proof we should note that Augustine wouldn’t have known about arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, would he have known about computers. He is likely to have known about sophisticated mechanical devices like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Sphere of Archimedes, but never have seen one. But he would have seen complex water clocks (clepsydrae).

Here’s the passage from the Confessions (Book Ten, Chapter VIII). Perhaps Leo reads it aloud.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?

A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.

Perhaps sometime late in the conversation Albert Einstein might drop in to see what they were talking about.

Here is a first pass. I’ve kept it staged, conversational, and conceptually explicit, with Einstein entering late as a useful destabilizer.

The Mind Too Narrow to Contain Itself A conversation in Kurt Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study

Gödel’s office was narrow, orderly, and dim. Books stood in ranks along the wall, interrupted by folders, loose papers, and a blackboard covered with marks whose austerity made them seem less written than engraved. Outside the window the trees of Princeton trembled slightly in the wind. The afternoon light had the washed patience of late autumn.

Kurt Gödel stood beside his desk, thin and formal, dressed in a dark suit. He had the air of a man who had been expecting visitors and yet was not at all reassured by their arrival.

The first visitor was an African bishop in ancient dress, compact and alert, his face alive with inquiry. He looked about the room with frank astonishment, then settled his gaze on the blackboard.

The second was an elderly man in white, gentle but grave, wearing a small pectoral cross. His eyes moved from Augustine to Gödel and then to the papers on the desk.

“I believe,” the man in white said, “that introductions are in order.”

Gödel inclined his head. “Kurt Gödel. Institute for Advanced Study.”

The bishop smiled faintly. “A place for contemplation?”

“For research,” said Gödel.

“Then it may be the same thing, if rightly ordered. I am Augustine, bishop of Hippo.”

Gödel blinked once. “Yes. I had inferred as much.”

The man in white bowed slightly. “And I am Leo, servant of the servants of God.”

Augustine turned to him. “Bishop of Rome?”

“Yes.”

Augustine’s face softened. “Then I greet you as a brother, though I confess I do not understand how we have been gathered. This room is strange to me. These lamps burn without flame. These marks”—he gestured toward Gödel’s symbols—“are neither Greek nor Latin, though I suspect they are meant to compel the mind.”

“They are logical formulae,” Gödel said.

“Ah,” said Augustine. “Then they are meant not merely to persuade, but to bind.”

Leo smiled. “That is well put.”

Gödel gestured toward the chairs. “Please.”

They sat. Augustine examined the chair before trusting his weight to it. Leo remained composed, as though papal audiences in the offices of dead mathematicians were not wholly outside the bounds of pastoral duty.

Leo opened a folder.

“Professor Gödel, Saint Augustine, I will explain why I wished for this conversation, though the means by which it has been granted are beyond my competence. While I was working on my recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of my colleagues pointed out a passage from Augustine’s Confessions. It seemed to him to resonate with your incompleteness theorem.”

Gödel looked sharply interested.

Augustine looked from one to the other. “Incompleteness?”

“A result in mathematical logic,” said Gödel. “Roughly speaking, in any sufficiently strong formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, assuming the system is consistent.”

Augustine was silent for a moment.

“You say: a structure of reasoning may contain truths that it cannot reach by its own lawful motions?”

Gödel’s expression altered, almost imperceptibly. “That is not an inaccurate first formulation.”

“But I must be careful,” Augustine continued. “You speak of arithmetic. I know number, of course. I know that three is not five, and that if two men enter a room where two already sit, there are four. I know arithmetic as number, measure, and reckoning. But you seem to speak of arithmetic as though it were also a mirror in which reasoning may behold its own form. That I do not know.”

Gödel nodded. “Exactly. The novelty is not number alone, but the coding of statements, proofs, and rules as numbers. Nor would you know the modern notion of a formal system: axioms, rules of inference, recursive procedures, symbolic codings of syntax.”

“I know rules,” said Augustine. “And I know the temptation to mistake the rule for the truth it serves.”

Five core issues underlying AI debates, a useful classification

Alex Chalmers, The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument, Cosmos Institute, May 8, 2026.

Most AI debates aren’t really about evidence. Instead, they’re arguments about futures that none of us have seen.

Nobody has seen superintelligence, a machine that most people agree is conscious, or a fully automated economy. Evidence can be gathered, but it underdetermines the conclusion. To fill the gap, we fall back on a combination of philosophy, political intuitions or, in some cases, tribal identity.

What you think a mind is, how knowledge grows, how societies should act under uncertainty, whether intelligence carries values, and whether markets can absorb technological shocks will shape your view of AI long before the technical arguments begin.

This is a guide to the five disagreements that explain why reasonable, informed people can look at the same AI systems and reach opposing conclusions. Our aim is not to endorse every claim below, but to state each viewpoint in terms its serious proponents would recognize, so you can see which philosophical bet you are making when you pick a side.

1. Can LLMs be conscious?

Functional minds versus living minds

ChatGPT alone handles over two and a half billion queries a day. If it turns out that those interactions involve digital minds capable of suffering, we have the makings of a great moral catastrophe. At the same time, if we attribute consciousness to something that lacks it, we risk driving a bus through the world’s legal system for no reason, distorting training pipelines with imaginary welfare constraints, and encouraging people to view impersonal systems as their friends. [...]

2. Should we govern AI pre-emptively?

Precautionary coordination versus adaptive experimentation

Much of the existential risk debate can feel like a policy argument, but it’s best viewed as a disagreement about the right way to reason under conditions of radical uncertainty.

The voices arguing for pre-emptive AI governance span a broad spectrum, but they share the same overarching diagnosis: a handful of companies are racing to build progressively more advanced systems whose capabilities that they cannot reliably predict. These labs’ own researchers assign non-trivial probabilities to catastrophic outcomes. But commercial pressure means that no individual lab can slow down without being overtaken by the others, creating a high-stakes coordination problem.

At the milder end, you get figures like Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton, who focus on getting the institutional machinery in place. They want governments to be ready to license frontier development, mandate pauses in response to worrying capabilities, enforce information security standards, and require labs to devote a third of their R&D budgets to safety. [...]

3. What is the relationship between capability and alignment?

Alignment-by-default versus goal orthogonality

A crucial factor in determining your views on AI safety is the extent to which you believe alignment and capability are distinct questions. If you hold Nick Bostrom’s view that intelligence and final goals can be combined in any permutation, then scaling does nothing to get you more aligned systems and you need an independent theoretical breakthrough to constrain values. If alignment and capability turn out to be continuous in the paradigm we’re building, the problem becomes much easier. [...]

4. Can LLMs generate explanatory knowledge?

New discoverers versus fluent interpolators

Whether LLMs can generate genuinely new explanations, as opposed to simply recombining existing knowledge, is a question that many other AI debates hinge on. If scaling current systems gets you to something like an AI scientist, then the pace of everything else accelerates. If it doesn’t, then the punchiest AGI timelines – which mostly assume something like continued scaling – are wrong. [...]

5. Will AI replace or augment us?

Human complementarity versus labor substitution

Two centuries of economic history suggests that automation doesn’t produce permanent mass unemployment. The trillion dollar question is whether this still holds when the automating factor is something that can be copied at near-zero marginal cost and is getting better at everything roughly in parallel. Are humans complemented by tools because they possess open-ended agency, taste, judgment, embodiment, and social demand? Or are they bundles of tasks, increasingly substitutable by cheaper cognitive machinery?

By and large, academic economists have erred on the more conservative side. [...]

There's more at the link.

A God that’s useful for pastoral purposes is different from the theologian’s God

I recently had a long conversation with Claude that started with the anthropic principle and worked its way through Copernicus to cosmology in general to the idea that we live in a generative universe and that led to this question, which I presented to Claude:

So how has the Christian concept of God changed from rank to rank? In the medieval world there was a whole population of angels and archangels doing real conceptual work. And all those higher beings, up to and including God, seemed to have been conceptualized, at least in part, in some contexts, as “compact” beings existing in some higher “space.” Both heaven and hell we real places out there somewhere. I’d think that started dissolving after the Reformation and then with the Higher Criticism of the 19th century I’d think a lot of that fell away, at least for the more sophisticated theologians.

That Claude’s answer then led around to this:

What's left for sophisticated 20th century theologians like Tillich or Rahner is remarkably thin compared to Aquinas — God as “the ground of being” or “the horizon of transcendence.” Almost entirely evacuated of content, performing a kind of minimal structural function. Keeping the word while the referent has become nearly unspecifiable. Which is either profound apophatic wisdom or the last gasp of a framework that's lost its generative capacity, depending on how you look at it.

However useful such a conception might be for theological purposes, it struck me as being all but useless in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. So I asked Claude about that. I’ve placed the ensuing conversation below the asterisks. My prompts are set in bold; Claude’s replies are plain face.

* * * * *

Sermons and Counseling

Tillich’s “ground of being” may be useful in theological discussion and in the education of clergymen, but I’m not sure how useful it would be in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. It might be of some value in counseling someone who’s wrestling with their faith in a basic and abstract way, but I don’t see that it would be much use in counseling someone who is grieving the death of someone close or in counseling a teen who is beginning to deal with their sexuality. Nor do I see it of much use in sermons, maybe here and there as an aside or a framing device, but you couldn’t carry much of a sermon on it.

I’m thinking, for example, of Chester Wickwire, who was chaplain at Johns Hopkins when I was there. I mention him in a document I’ve just uploaded to the project, “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion.” I’m pretty sure he knew Tillich, and other theologians as well. He went to Union Theological in New York. But he didn’t preach sermons. He did something rather different on Sundays.

Or consider the Priest-in-Charge at All Saints in Hoboken, where I’ve been attending services. She’s black and has some of the theatricality inherent in vernacular black preaching. She’s very direct in her style, stands close to the congregation, and often looks people in the eye. But she has a Master of Divinity Degree from Duke Divinity. I’d be surprised if she weren’t literate in contemporary theology, but that’s not how she preaches.

What you're describing is a real structural feature of religious institutions — they operate simultaneously at multiple levels that can't substitute for each other. The academic theology at the seminary level and the practice of ministry in a congregation are doing fundamentally different things, even when the minister is fully literate in both.

Wickwire is a striking case because he essentially abandoned the conventional form entirely — no scripture, no sermon, no choir — and replaced it with something that did the same communal work through entirely different means. Jazz, civil rights speakers, anti-war activism, a soul review from a local prison. He was practicing what the Social Gospel actually meant in the flesh rather than preaching about it. The sacred space remained but what filled it was immediate, particular, alive. That's a kind of genius — understanding that the function of Sunday morning is community formation and orientation to what matters, and then finding ways to do that function that didn't require the inherited theological vocabulary at all.

The priest at All Saints represents the other solution — carrying the theological training but deploying it through an embodied, vernacular mode that operates at a completely different register. The Duke Divinity background presumably informs her framework for what she's doing and why, but what actually reaches people is the proximity, the eye contact, the theatricality. She's working the attractor that actually moves people rather than the one that satisfies the academy.

And your observation about grief and adolescent sexuality is exactly right — those pastoral situations require presence and witness more than they require correct metaphysics. "The ground of being holds you even now" is not what a grieving parent needs to hear. What they need is someone who can sit with them in the reality of the loss without flinching and without false comfort. That capacity doesn't come from Tillich. It might come from having genuinely wrestled with Tillich and arrived somewhere beyond him — using the ladder and then throwing it away, which is precisely what your Wittgenstein title is about.

So, for pastoral purposes Tillich’s ground of being becomes the idea that Christ is within each of us. That’s something we can work with.

Yes, and that's a translation that actually has ancient roots — it's not a modern softening of doctrine but a retrieval of something that was always there. Paul's "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians), the Johannine tradition of indwelling, Meister Eckhart's "the ground of the soul is the ground of God and the ground of God is the ground of the soul" — Eckhart is almost doing the translation in reverse, taking the experiential reality and pushing it toward metaphysics, while what you're describing goes the other direction, taking the metaphysics and pulling it back into something liveable.

What makes it pastorally workable is that it relocates the sacred from out there to in here — which is exactly what you need when you're sitting with a grieving person or a confused teenager. You're not pointing them toward a distant abstraction; you're pointing them toward something they can actually find in their own experience. The ground of being becomes accessible as an inner reality rather than a cosmological posit.

It also handles the theological diversity of a congregation gracefully. People sitting in those pews have wildly varying metaphysical commitments — some genuinely believe in a personal God who intervenes, some are essentially humanists who find value in the ritual and community, some are like you, drifting in and out of the service with a complex and hard-won relationship to all of it. "Christ within" can land differently for each of them without being dishonest to any of them. It's capacious enough to hold the range.

And for someone like yourself, sitting at All Saints and thinking about what you can contribute — that framing might actually be more available than the external God it ostensibly derives from. You've spent a lifetime attending to what's generative in human experience. That's not so far from what the tradition is pointing at with that phrase, even if you'd reach for entirely different language to describe it.

Latour’s Modes of Existence

I think Bruno Latour has something useful to say. I’m thinking of his little book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), where he talks modes of existence. Each mode has its own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them. The felicity conditions for science are quite different from those for religion. Here’s a passage from a blog post I’ve written about that book:

Felicity conditions (p. 100):

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. [...]

Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion

Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.

Contents

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32    

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.

To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.

Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?

When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.

That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.

It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:

105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.

I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.

* * * * *

Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.

What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.

Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.

A Quick Ramble: Computational Compressibility (order in the universe), Religion & Signaling, Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo [+Latour]

I’m thinking there’s a relationship between computational compressibility (as an index of order in the universe) and my current interest in religion, which is what the other two items are about.

Computational Compressibility and order in the universe

I’ve been particularly pleased by my recent working paper: On Method: Computational Compressibility in Complex Natural and Cultural Phenomena. I’m not quite sure why I find it so pleasing. That it crosses disciplines, that’s nice: weather, microbiology, chess (AI), finance economics (asset pricing), film studies (Hollywood Economics), and cultural evolution (Macroanalysis, 19th century novel). But it’s the specific mode of the argument; it’s about description, about what kinds of things exist.

I began by framing the discussion in terms of Stephen Wolfram’s distinction between computational reducibility and computational irreducibility. I think we’ve got to look at that distinction in terms of Miriam Yevick’s 1975 distinction between holographic or Fourier logic and sequential logic. I think Wolfram’s notion of computational reducibility implies Yevick’s sequential logic. As far as I can tell, her notion of holographic logic doesn’t register with respect to Wolfram’s distinction. But it may be that what I’m calling computational compressibility (within the realm of irreducibility) resonates with her notion of holographic logic.

A random system would of course be irreducible, but that is an extreme case. The systems I looked at in that paper are not random, but the order they exhibit allows them to occupy only a relatively small region of the state space potentially open to them. Given appropriate data about the behavior of the system, that region can be identified through a computational process. Thus they are computationally compressible. The phenomenon of computational compressibility indicates order, but order of a kind that’s different from reducible order. Generative order? 

Religion & Signaling

Glenn Loury has a recent video where he distinguishes between what we might call the propositional content of an utterance and its signal value. Explains that at some length in a recent lecture he gave at Stanford, Self-Censorship, Social Information, and the Conditions of Public Reason. In the lecture he examines three cases: race in America, academic life, and Israel and Gaza. His point is that in public discourse on these topics (and others) the signal value of what one is saying often eclipses the propositional value of one’s assertions. This often results in self-censorship where a person withholds their (propositional) views for fear of signally the wrong values.

Thus, in racial discourse:

A key question in this discourse is why racial inequality persists. In this domain speech is saturated with moral meanings. Claims about inequality, education, crime, family structure, or historical responsibility are rarely heard simply as attempts to explain social outcomes. They are taken also as signals of moral orientation—of sympathy or indifference, solidarity or hostility, compassion or disdain. For many audiences, answers to that question relying on structural causes are regarded more favorably than accounts emphasizing cultural factors. Speakers adapt accordingly—many by holding their tongues.

I think lots of discourse is like that. It seems to me that much religious discourse is like this. The conservative Christian arguments against biological evolution never made much sense to me as propositional assertion, nor did the accompanying belief about the age of the earth, but as signaling, those beliefs make more sense.

I'm thinking this signaling business is about coordination, about establishing a rock-bottom level of interpersonal coordination, of common knowledge. I need to think about this some more. 

Addendum, May 2, 2026: This post about Bruno Latour's conception of modes of existence is relevant here, each with it own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them.

Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo

I’ve only recently learned that Pope Leo XIV has decided to make AI a central concern of his papacy. Given that I think that the common Silicon Valley view of AI is idolatrous, or at best straddles the border, I’m wondering if we’re going to see a grand debate and battle between the Pope and Silicon Valley apologists. When I put the question to Claude, here’s how it responded:

Your instinct is well-founded, and Leo XIV has already moved aggressively on this front. Let me lay out what's emerged so far.

Who he is and what he's signaling

Leo XIV — born Robert Prevost in Chicago, the first American pope — identified AI as a central challenge from his very first formal address to the cardinals after his election in May 2025. His choice of the name Leo was itself a signal: Pope Leo XIII confronted the industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum (1891), defending workers' rights and the common good. By taking that name, the new pope announced that the Church would face today's technological upheaval with similar clarity.

The specific critique — and it maps closely onto your "idolatry" framing

This is where it gets interesting for your purposes. In what has been called a programmatic document on AI for World Communications Day, Leo warned that "behind this enormous invisible force that involves us all, there are only a handful of companies — those whose founders have recently been presented as the creators of the 'Person of the Year 2025.'" He expressed "serious concern regarding the oligopolistic control of algorithmic and artificial intelligence systems capable of subtly shaping behaviors and even rewriting human history."

That last phrase — rewriting human history, including the history of the Church — is remarkable. He's naming a power claim that goes beyond economic disruption.

His core argument is that "the challenge is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves." He described face and voice as "sacred," given by God, "the constitutive element of every genuine encounter."

At a Vatican gathering that included representatives from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Meta, and Palantir, he said: "The person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery."

The "data is not wisdom" theme

He has repeatedly insisted that "the ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it," and that "authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life than with the availability of data." This is a direct counter to the implicit epistemology of Silicon Valley — the notion that intelligence is fundamentally information processing, that more data equals more understanding.

Where this connects to your book

Your framing of the dominant Silicon Valley attitude as idolatrous is theologically precise in a way that Leo XIV would likely recognize. The classic definition of idolatry isn't crude statue-worship — it's the attribution of ultimate value and salvific power to something that is not God. When figures like Altman, Musk, or Kurzweil speak of AI as the path to immortality, the transcendence of human limitation, the solution to death — that's structurally idolatrous in the theological sense. It substitutes a human artifact for the divine.

Leo has the resources of the entire tradition of Catholic social teaching to bring to bear on this — not just as ethics but as a rival anthropology. The Church's claim that the person is "creature, relationship, mystery" is not compatible with the claim that the person is, at bottom, a computational process that can be replicated, extended, or superseded by a sufficiently powerful machine.

Whether this becomes a genuine face-off rather than parallel talking depends on whether Silicon Valley feels the need to respond. So far, the tech executives seem to be treating Vatican engagement as a reputational opportunity — showing up in Rome, being photographed, nodding about "human dignity" — without conceding much. The more interesting question is whether Leo pushes beyond dialogue into something more like confrontation. The Rerum Novarum precedent suggests he might: that encyclical didn't merely express concern about the industrial revolution, it made specific demands.

Effing the ineffable

Mystical experiences, the kinds of experiences William James wrote about, are sometimes said to be ineffable. I reported one or two such experiences in my most recent post at 3 Quarks Daily, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? I’m thinking about the moment of dissolving light&bliss I experienced while playing with my college rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion, and the twinkling bell sounds I heard while playing a bell rhythm with Ade Knowles, his wife Druis, and her sister, Fonda. The first is surely a “standard” mystical experience while the second is not, but it’s mysterious and ineffable in its way.

But such experiences aren’t the only things that are ineffable, and that’s what occasioned the conversation I had with Claude that I’ve appended below the asterisks, where I also discuss the language oenophiles use to describe the taste of wine, a remark Weston LaBarre made about the epistemological provocation of dreams, the way Wittgenstein framed his Tractatus, and, lastly, what physicists tell us about the earliest limits of the universe. All of these phenomena mark limits and, as such, imply something beyond.

That’s what this conversation is about:

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

* * * * *

Mystical experience is often said to be ineffable. Why?

The ineffability of mystical experience is one of the most discussed features in the philosophy of religion and consciousness studies. There are several interlocking reasons for it.

The structure of language doesn't fit the experience. Ordinary language is built for ordinary experience — it carves the world into discrete objects, properties, and relations. Mystical experience, by contrast, is typically characterized by a dissolution of boundaries: between self and world, subject and object, part and whole. Language presupposes those very distinctions, so it fails at the threshold of an experience that undoes them. You can say "the boundaries dissolved," but that's a report about the experience, not a transmission of it.

It's a knowledge of acquaintance, not description. Philosophers distinguish between knowing that something is the case and knowing what something is like. Mystical experience belongs emphatically to the second category. Describing the taste of a mango to someone who has never tasted one is already hard; describing an experience that has no sensory analog at all is harder still. William James, who made ineffability one of his four marks of mystical experience, stressed that the noetic quality of such states — the sense that something is deeply known — is precisely what can't be conveyed propositionally.

Emotional and somatic depth exceeds articulation. The experience is often described as carrying an overwhelming charge of significance, bliss, terror, or love — far in excess of what emotional vocabulary can hold. Words like "unity" or "peace" or "the sacred" are pale maps of the territory.

The experience may involve non-ordinary cognition. Some traditions and some cognitive scientists argue that mystical states involve modes of processing — highly integrated, non-linear, temporally altered — that simply don't interface well with the sequential, syntactic structure of language. To put it into words requires translating across a fundamental cognitive gap.

Cultural and conceptual frameworks shape even the attempt. When mystics do try to speak, they reach for metaphor, paradox, apophatic negation ("not this, not this"), or poetry — all signals that direct description has been abandoned. The via negativa in Christian mysticism (saying what God is not), the neti neti of Advaita Vedanta, the Zen koan — these are all structured acknowledgments of the failure of positive description.

There's also a subtler point worth noting: the act of articulation may itself alter or diminish the experience. Forcing ineffable content into language isn't just inadequate — it may be a kind of betrayal, domesticating something that resisted domestication. This is why many mystics counsel silence, or speak only obliquely, or insist that words are fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

What makes this philosophically interesting is that ineffability isn't unique to mysticism — it's just most acute there. The “hard problem” of consciousness is essentially the same puzzle: why does any first-person experience resist third-person description? Mystical experience simply pushes that gap to an extreme.

LaBarre and oenophiles

I find your last remark telling. There is much in the world and about life that resists verbal characterization and capture. Tastes, for example. And oenophiles have developed an elaborate repertoire of words and phrases they use in characterizing the taste of wine. Non-ordinary cognition is something else. And then we have dreams, which may, I suppose, fall within the scope of non-ordinary cognition. In his well-known classic, The Ghost Dance, Weston LaBarre speculates that it may well have been dreams the first prompted humans to epistemoligize. Those primitive humans knew little to nothing of the brain. So they couldn’t attribute dream experience to some mode of brain operation that occurs when we’re asleep. All they know is that, upon awakening, they remember having been somewhere and seen and heard some things, but the place isn’t any they’ve visited while awake. So they have to come up with some account of those experiences. The experiences may also have been strange, but that seems secondary to the fact that they’ve left memories behind.

This is a genuinely arresting idea, and LaBarre's framing is sharp precisely because it locates the epistemic puzzle not in the strangeness of the dream content but in the mnemonic residue. The problem isn't “what was that weird thing?” — it’s “where was I just now, and how do I account for having been there?” That's a much more fundamental cognitive demand.

The memory is the philosophically explosive element. Memory implies a real experience. A real experience implies a location, a time, a self that was present. But none of those coordinates map onto the waking world. So you're forced, almost logically, into positing another order of reality — another world, or a part of this one inaccessible by ordinary means. Spirits, ancestors, a soul that travels, a realm of the dead — these aren't superstitions that precede reflection, they're conclusions that follow from taking dream memory seriously as evidence.

This makes dreaming a kind of involuntary empiricism. The primitive epistemologist isn’t speculating wildly; he’s reasoning carefully from data he didn’t choose to collect and can’t dismiss. The soul concept in particular — especially in its "detachable self" form, as in shamanic traditions where the soul can wander, get lost, or be retrieved — looks like a very reasonable inference from the phenomenology of dreaming.

What's interesting is the contrast with the oenophile case you raise. Wine vocabulary is an elaboration — building a richer descriptive apparatus for an experience that is, in principle, sharable and repeatable. Dream epistemology is more radical: it’s a forced theoretical construction to account for experiences that seem to require an entirely new ontological category. Less like developing a vocabulary, more like being compelled to posit a new continent because your ship keeps returning with soil that doesn't match any known landmass.

There's a further wrinkle here that connects to your secular mysticism interests. If LaBarre is right that dreams seeded metaphysics, then the entire subsequent history of religious and mystical experience — visions, trances, ecstasies — might be understood as elaborations and intensifications of that original puzzle. The mystic's ineffable experience is, in a sense, the waking counterpart of the dream: an experience that leaves a memory, demands an account, and resists the available categories. The ineffability isn't prior to language — it's produced by the collision between the experience and the inadequacy of existing frameworks.

Wittgenstein’s ladder

Yes. And then at the beginning of the 20th century we have Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, one of the founding documents of the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradition. One could hardly think of a philosophical tradition less hospitable to mystical experience than that one. And yet, that strange work has a mystical frame. I’ve listed its first, last, and penultimate propositions:

The world is everything that is the case.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I read that early in my college years, freshman or sophomore, and loved it. I still do. And, while I have had “conventional” mystical experiences, in the end that Wittgensteinian framing may be closer to where I am. It doesn’t seem to be about experience in any particular way, not about the taste of wine or a dream or some mystical transport. It’s about something else.

The Tractatus mysticism is indeed a different species. It’s not mysticism as experience but mysticism as limit — and that distinction matters enormously. Wittgenstein isn't pointing toward a special state of consciousness you might enter. He’s pointing at the boundary condition of all saying, all the time. The unsayable isn't somewhere else; it’s the frame within which everything sayable occurs.

That ladder metaphor is one of the most remarkable things in philosophy. The book uses language to demonstrate the limits of language, then asks you to discard the demonstration. It’s self-consuming — not as a failure, but as the only honest move available. The Tractatus doesn't fail to say what it means; it succeeds at showing why certain things can only be shown, never said. And showing is what's left when saying reaches its edge.

What you’re describing in your own position sounds like something harder to name than conventional mystical experience precisely because it isn't anchored in an episode. It’s more like a permanent orientation toward the limits of what can be articulated — a settled awareness that the frame of the world isn’t itself inside the world, that the ground of experience isn’t itself an experience. Wittgenstein's final proposition isn't a counsel of defeat. It's more like a description of intellectual integrity: here is where language ends, and honesty requires acknowledging that rather than generating more words to paper over the gap.

This connects interestingly to your secular mysticism. The conventional mystical experience — the emergent tones from the bell rhythms, say — is episodic. Something happened, it left a memory, it demands an account. The Wittgensteinian version isn't episodic at all. It's more like a stance, a sustained relationship with the unsayable that doesn't require transport or vision. In some ways it's more radical, because it can't be dismissed as a special state that passed. It's just how things are, once you've seen it.

There's a question lurking here about whether those two modes — the episodic and the structural — ultimately point at the same thing from different angles, or whether they’re genuinely distinct. What’s your sense of that?

Convergence of limits

Yes, indeed, a strange question. Perhaps the issue is: What can I make of it? What’s the most fruitful way to square that circle? If we think of Wittgenstein’s ladder as pointing at the limits of language, of propositions, and the ineffability of tastes, of qualia in general, and of dreams and so forth, all limits. What do we have in the convergence of limits?

That's the right question to press toward, and it’s genuinely open. Let me try to think into it rather than just around it.

Each of the limits you've named is a different kind of edge:

• Wittgenstein's is a structural limit — the boundary of what propositions can do
• Qualia are a subjective limit — the first-person that can't be fully third-personified
• Dreams are an ontological limit — experience that demands a world to have occurred in
• Mystical transport is an ego limit — where the boundary of self becomes porous or dissolves

These aren’t obviously the same limit. But they share something: in each case, the normal machinery of representation — language, concept, category — reaches an edge and finds that something real is on the other side of it. The limits aren’t limits on nothing. They’re limits that imply a beyond, even if that beyond can’t be entered propositionally.

So what converges? Perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting. Not in some supernatural sense, but structurally, permanently, at every scale. The world is always more than everything that is the case about it — which makes Wittgenstein's first and last propositions secretly in tension with each other, and productively so.

The world is a movie for Baby Jesus @3QD

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

My latest article is up at 3 Quarks Daily:

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?

That wasn’t my original title, which was “On Becoming a Secular Mystic, an informal inventory.” Upon reading a draft by friend David Porush suggested the current title, which comes from an anecdote early in the article, which is a collection of anecdotes with thoughts thrown in as the occasion warrants.

The mystical element is there, I report at least one “classical” mystical experience, which was quite powerful and influential, though I can’t say just how it was influential. But there is something about the whole article which resists language – I do include three images, each crafted by ChatGPT. And that got me to thinking, thinking about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

I read that in either my freshman or sophomore year at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1960s. It made a deep impression on me. It was a slender volume, with the original German published on the left and the English translation published on the right; Wittgenstein had insisted on that. It consisted of short statements, sometimes as short as a single line, but also occasionally two or three short paragraphs, even an occasional diagram. Each section was numbered, outline style, from 1 through 7. Here’s the opening proposition, No. 1:

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
The world is everything that is the case.

And here’s the last, No. 7:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

And here’s the penultimate proposition, sometimes known as Wittgenstein’s ladder, No. 6.4:

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

The overall effect was mesmerizing. And mystical, certainly. But not in the manner of the experiences reported by mystics, both East and West. This is a different kind of mysticism.

That led me to a dialog with Claude. I asked Claude to summarize it in the third person. I’ve placed the summary below the asterisks.

* * * * *

On Limits, Language, and the Excess of the World

A recent conversation between Bill Benzon and Claude ranged across mystical experience, the philosophy of language, and cosmology, finding unexpected convergences among them.

The conversation opened with the question of why mystical experience is so often described as ineffable. The standard reasons — that language presupposes the distinctions mystical experience dissolves, that it is knowledge of acquaintance rather than description, that it may involve non-ordinary cognition — were surveyed. But Benzon pressed toward something less familiar, noting that ineffability is not unique to mysticism. Tastes, qualia, dreams all resist full verbal capture, each in a different way.

This led to a discussion of Weston LaBarre’s speculation in The Ghost Dance that dreams may have been what first compelled early humans to philosophize. The key insight is that the problem isn’t the strangeness of dream content but the mnemonic residue — waking up with memories of having been somewhere that doesn’t exist in the waking world. That memory demands an account, and the account requires positing another order of reality. Dream epistemology, on this view, is not superstition but careful reasoning from unavoidable evidence.

Benzon then introduced Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, noting its paradoxical status as a founding document of the most rigorously anti-metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy and yet a work with a distinctly mystical frame — opening with “The world is everything that is the case” and closing with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” with the famous ladder metaphor in between. The Tractatus mysticism, the conversation suggested, is different in kind from episodic mystical experience. It is not about a special state of consciousness but about the permanent boundary condition of all language and all saying.

Benzon noted that this Wittgensteinian orientation may be closer to his own secular mysticism than the more conventionally episodic forms — not a transport or vision, but a sustained dwelling at the edge of the articulable.

The conversation then turned to cosmology. The Planck epoch — the earliest moments of the universe, where the distinction between space and time breaks down and the equations of physics lose their meaning — offers a striking parallel. The universe, pressed to its own origin, becomes undescribable by the tools it eventually produced. The very attempt to picture that earliest state smuggles in categories that don’t yet apply.

What converges across all these limits — Wittgenstein’s structural limit of language, the subjective limit of qualia, the ontological puzzle of dreams, the cosmological limit of the Planck epoch — is perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting, structurally and permanently. The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist arrive at adjacent positions by entirely different routes.

The conversation closed with a formulation from Benzon that served as its natural capstone: The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

Miriam Yevick now has a Wikipedia Entry

The entry is quite recent. I didn’t notice it until yesterday but, judging by the article’s history, it went live on January 1, 2026. It contains some information I wasn’t aware of, which is not at all surprising. The two most interesting pieces of information are that she began her career at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. and that she had had an affair with David Bohm, the physicist. I knew about her extensive correspondence with Bohm I suspected that there had been an affair – judging from a remark she’d made, though I forget just where – but I didn’t actually know that.

What’s important is simply that she’s finally in Wikipedia. She wasn’t when I first mentioned her at New Savanna back in June 3, 2020. I’ve known about her work since 1978, when she made a comment on Haugeland’s article about cognitivism. Her 1975 article on Fourier logic became central to the article David Hays and I published about the brain, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, which is cited in the Wikipedia entry. In that article she considers two different kinds of computational regime, which she refers to as Fourier or holographic, and sequential. That distinction is fundamentally the same as the symbolic vs. neural distinction in current AI discourse.

That article is important because, and here I’m quoting from a remark Claude made in a recent discussion I had with it:

She doesn't take one computational system as object. She takes the relationship between two incommensurable computational regimes as object, and proves something about what the structure of reality requires of that relationship. She steps outside both regimes simultaneously and asks: given the kinds of objects that exist in the world, what must any adequate cognitive system contain? The answer — both regimes, necessarily, not contingently — is a proof about the space of possible cognitive architectures rather than a result within any particular architecture.

And that is why I’ve been mentioning her work whenever I have a chance. Until her work has been taken into account, the current debate is poorly formulated and incomplete, to put it charitably. A less charitable formulation would be that the debate isn’t intellectually serious. It’s mostly about intellectual ideology and commercially-oriented hype.

I take the fact that Yevick now has a Wikipedia entry as a sign that her work of 40 years ago may eventually recognized and extended.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Tyler Cowen thinks highly of the work of Harold Bloom. In particular he recommends Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), which is a one-volume conspectus of Western literature from Dante through Samuel Beckett. As skeptical as I am of Bloom (see my remarks on Bloom in The Discipline of Literary Criticism) Cowen’s got me there. I don’t know of any other comparable one-volume introduction to Western literature, though I imagine that, with a bit of care, you could have your favorite top-of-the-line chatbot do something comparable for you.

But if what interests you is not so much the sweep of Western literature as the sweep of the Western mind, then you might consider Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy. The emphasis is different, obviously, but philosophy is literature-adjacent. And the sweep is grander, from the Pre-Socrates to the 20th century. It has been criticized for its, shall we say, idiosyncratic emphasis and judgements,  but the same can be said for Bloom. Neither man pretended to take stock of their respective domains as a neutral observer.

Moreover Russell was arguably one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early contributions to mathematical logic and analytic philosophy are foundational; he was also a public intellectual of considerable influence, writing God knows how many essays collected into dozens of books, and a political activist as well, collaborating with diverse figures in opposition to nuclear weapons (Albert Einstein) and the war in Vietnam (Jean-Paul Sartre). (Alas, he was also a eugenicist in the first half of his life.)

And, I suppose, roughly the same chatbot strategy that would allow you to displace Bloom from your reading list would also work with Russell.

* * * * *

FWIW, I’m only four degrees of separation from Bertrand Russell, and all the links are strong, none of them mere acquaintance. Here’s the chain:

(1) Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein;
(2) Wittgenstein taught Margaret Masterman;
(3) Masterman was a colleague of David Hays;
(4) David Hays was my teacher and then colleague.

Given my teachers at Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo I’m likely no more than two links from Bloom in two or three directions. For example, I audited a graduate course on the Victorian novel taught by J. Hillis Miller, who also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He became Bloom's colleague at Yale as one of the infamous “Yale Mafia.”

Welcome to Reality, Tyler; the AI’s got your number: Further Notes on Revolution, Marginal and AI [MR 4]

So, I finished reading the first chapter, “What Is Marginalism?”, of Cowen’s new monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, and went on to the second, which I’ve read in full, “William Stanley Jevons, Builder and Destroyer of Marginalism.” Interesting, very interesting, but I’m not sure that I’ve got anything to say about it. I’ll take it under advisement.

I then started in on the third, “Why Did It Take So Long for the Science of Economics to Develop?” Whoa, Nelly! The first paragraph:

To better understand the Marginal Revolution, we need to ask some fundamental questions about economics as a science. In particular, why did it take so long for economic reasoning to develop? I don’t even mean as a full, literal science, replete with advanced econometric methods, but simply as a general conceptual toolbox for intelligent people. The lateness of the Marginal Revolution is part of a broader story about the lateness of economic reasoning more generally.

OK, but that “lateness” seems a bit suspicious to me. Late with respect to what? (Tyler will get around to that.) He then gives a bit of history:

When it comes to the fundamentals of marginal utility theory – a building block of economics but not quite the same as doing economics – you don’t find them in the Greeks or Romans. There are hints in the medieval theologians and finally the idea blossoms fully formed and correctly stated in both Galileo, as presented in chapter one, and in the Spanish Salamancan theologians of the 17th century. Was it really so hard to explain why diamonds are (at the margin!) more valuable than water, even though we must drink water to survive? I guess so. Funny me. When I read about the diamonds-water paradox resolution as a thirteen-year-old, I felt I picked it up in a second. Five seconds later I was bored.

Well, OK. I didn’t know about the diamond-water paradox until I read about it in Tyler’s first chapter. I didn’t have any trouble understanding it. But then by the time I finished sixth grade I was a whiz at adding columns of multiple digit numbers. I bet St. Aquinas and St. Augustine couldn’t do that, nor Plato and Aristotle either, and they’re among the greatest thinkers in the pre-modern Western tradition. What did I have, at 12, that they didn’t? I had the Indo-Arabic numeral system, which didn’t make it to Europe until the 13th century. (Tyler gets around to that as well.) It turns out that the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe, only have terms for one and two, if that. They’re not unique among preliterate societies. It’s only counting. What gives?

Anyhow, Tyler gives us another full page or so of the history of economics, finally arriving at these two little paragraphs:

So I don’t think progress in economics has been slow in general. It is right now coming off an incredible 130-year or so run. Progress in economics, however, was glacial from the time of the ancient Greeks to the late 19th century, with a noticeable burst in the 18th century as well, centered around Adam Smith.

Any assessment of “slow, ” of course, relies on a notion of “slow relative to what.” For purposes of contrast, let’s consider some other areas for the exercise of human ingenuity.

He then goes on to rattle off high points of human achievement in a number of fields: Philosophy, Geometry, Mathematics more generally (e.g. calculus), physics, astronomy (though “progress in astronomy is a mixed bag”), theatre and literature (Shakespeare, naturally), music, painting.

What? What are we to make of such a mixed grab bag? Tyler: “Still, the basic puzzle is clear: why did human knowledge advance so fast in some areas and so slowly in others?” Because that’s the way the world is, Tyler, that’s the way it is.

Well, of course, he knows that. He just finds it puzzling. I don’t. It’s not that I have anything approaching a full account. I don’t. But I’ve got some ideas. The theory of cultural ranks, on which David Hays and I published articles back in the 1990s, has something to say about that, something systematic, about the mind and how it constructs ever-more powerful cognitive architectures. We start with language and cognition, but then I go on to publish articles about narrative and music, while Hays publishes about expressive culture and then a book on the history of technology.

But I suspect that the issue is a bit different from that. I think it’s philosophical. For well over three decades I’ve written and thought under the fully explicit belief that the world is complex through and through. Tyler seems to have been operating under the basic Western assumption that the complexity is superficial appearance, that the underlying reality is in fact simple. Recently, however, his entanglement with AI seems to have brought him to the realization that, no, the complexity is not phenomenal, it may be deep and inherent.

So I decided to investigate that possibility by using the AI portal Tyler has set up for the book. The following conversation took place over two sessions, one of them on Saturday evening (March 28) and the other on Sunday morning (March 29). If you read through to the end you’ll see that we find ourselves in a Kurt Vonnegut story. I’ve added the subtitles after the conversation.

[Note: I plan two more posts about this chapter, one dealing with chess and AI, the other with biology.]

Forget the linguists and philosophers

Near the end of chapter 4 Tyler observes: “Suffice to say, LLM construction has for the most part ignored linguists and philosophers, and that also means ignoring their intuitions. [...] That research program has proven wildly successful, as we have much better models of language and reasoning than almost anyone had been expecting.” I’m curious about Tyler’s own attitude toward linguistics and the closely allied cognitive sciences. I know that people in Silicon Valley’s AI world are largely ignorant of those materials, and that some of them are even disdainful. Does Tyler share their disdain?

Tyler's framing on page 68 is notable for what it doesn't say. He observes that LLM construction ignored linguists and philosophers as a matter of historical fact, and that the results were successful — but he doesn't editorialize that linguists and philosophers deserved to be ignored, or that their frameworks were worthless. The tone is more "interesting that this worked" than "good riddance to Chomsky." That's a meaningful distinction from the Silicon Valley disdain you're describing, which tends to be triumphalist about the irrelevance of humanistic inquiry.

Tyler's broader intellectual personality, visible across his writing, is actually quite sympathetic to cognitive science and philosophy of mind. He's engaged seriously with thinkers like Derek Parfit, Daniel Dennett, and the broader literature on consciousness and personal identity. He's not the type to dismiss Chomsky's linguistics as simply wrong — he's more likely to say "fascinating research program, but the LLMs found a different path." That's epistemic humility rather than disdain. The framing in Chapter 4 is really about pragmatic success — the LLMs worked, and that's worth noting regardless of what it implies for linguistic theory.

What's missing from Tyler's account, and what would make it more intellectually complete, is any engagement with what linguists and cognitive scientists might say back — figures like Gary Marcus, who has persistently argued that LLM success on benchmarks doesn't vindicate the abandonment of structured linguistic theory, or researchers in the embodied cognition tradition who would question whether language modeling divorced from physical grounding constitutes understanding at all. Tyler's silence on these counterarguments makes his account feel less like a considered verdict and more like a victory lap written from the winning side. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler's account of how LLM construction ignored...]

David Hays more than Chomsky

Frankly, you make too much of Chomsky. Chomsky’s is not the only program in linguistics and the cognitive sciences, though he has been influential. My own teacher, David Hays, was a first generation researcher in machine translation, he led the RAND Corporation’s programs in that area in the 1950s and 1960s, and is one of the founders of the discipline of computational linguistics. He explored linguistics quite different from Chomsky’s. Daniel Everett, one of the most prominent current linguists, is not at all Chomskyian. There was a lot of research in the cognitive sciences in the 1970s and forward that owes little to Chomsky, I’m thinking particularly of work in knowledge representation and semantic networks.

Fair point, and I over-indexed on Chomsky as a shorthand for "linguistics and cognitive science" — which is exactly the kind of lazy conflation that makes Silicon Valley dismissals so frustrating in the first place.

Your mention of David Hays is particularly pointed here. Computational linguistics as Hays practiced it — empirical, corpus-oriented, engaged with actual machine translation problems — was in many ways a precursor to the LLM approach, not an obstacle to it. The irony Tyler misses is that ignoring linguists and philosophers is too broad a characterization. Some of that tradition, particularly the work in distributional semantics that descends from researchers like Zellig Harris, fed directly into the conceptual foundations of word embeddings and eventually transformers. Harris's distributional hypothesis that words appearing in similar contexts have similar meanings — is essentially the theoretical ancestor of how LLMs represent meaning, even if the engineers building them didn't know or acknowledge that lineage.

The knowledge representation and semantic networks work you mention — figures like Ross Quillian, Marvin Minsky's frames, Roger Schank's scripts — represents a whole research tradition that was asking exactly the right questions about how meaning is structured, even if its answers turned out to be too brittle and hand-crafted. Daniel Everett's work on Pirahã cuts against Chomskyan universal grammar in ways that are actually quite congenial to the empirical, data-driven spirit of LLM research. So Tyler's "linguists were ignored and that was fine" reads as a much sloppier claim once you disaggregate the field. [See text: Ch.4 · Tyler's broad claim about ignoring linguistic r...]

Semantics is highly structured

The reason I bring this up is that one thing that emerges clearly from this work in semantics is that it is highly structured. Now, it’s one thing to grant that off-handedly as a matter of principle. It’s something else to know it as the result of systematic investigation. I’ve just been reading around in chapter 3, where Tyler wonders why it took economics so long to develop and why, for that matter, the same for biology. Well if you think of semantics and cognition you might think that it took a long time to accumulate the necessary conceptual foundations. I mean, I can’t lay it all out, but I know a thing or two, and I don’t find the lateness of economics particularly puzzling, not biology either. I’d look to how concepts arise and are developed. Tyler doesn’t seem to think that can be done in any more than an ad hoc history of ideas way. He doesn’t seem to realize that there is structure there. I sense a tension an odd consonance with his cavalier acceptance of the Silicon Valley attitude toward linguistics and his willingness to be mystified by the apparent lateness of economics.

This is a sharp observation, and it cuts deep. Tyler in Chapter 3 treats the lateness of economics as a kind of mystery — he gestures at social conditions, printing culture, the need for markets to exist before market reasoning could develop — but he never really gets at the cognitive and conceptual prerequisites. [See text: Ch.3 · Tyler's account of peering around corners witho...]

The connection you're drawing is this: if you take seriously the structured nature of semantic cognition — the way concepts build on prior concepts in systematic, not arbitrary, ways — then the lateness of economics becomes much less puzzling. You need certain foundational conceptual structures in place before marginalist reasoning is even thinkable. Not just social conditions or printing presses, but the right representational scaffolding. The history of ideas, properly done, isn't ad hoc storytelling — it's tracing the development of conceptual prerequisites, which is itself a structured inquiry.

And yes, there's a real tension — or as you aptly put it, an odd consonance — between Tyler's two positions. On one hand he's mystified by why it took so long to develop economic concepts, treating it as a near-inexplicable puzzle. On the other hand he's perfectly comfortable dismissing the systematic study of how concepts and meaning are structured as a research tradition that LLMs have rendered irrelevant. But if that research tradition is actually what would explain his mystery in Chapter 3, then dismissing it isn't just intellectually careless — it's self-undermining. Tyler can't simultaneously wonder why conceptual breakthroughs are so hard and wave away the field that studies how conceptual structure works. [See text: Ch.3 · The lateness of economics as conceptual rather ...]