Abstract

This report traces humanity’s evolving relationship with reality, knowledge, and reason from antiquity to the digital age, culminating in the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Across epochs, societies have grappled with the tension between faith, reason, and technological innovation, each era refining—or contesting—the role of human cognition in shaping understanding. The classical world elevated reason and idealized forms; medieval theology subordinated inquiry to divine revelation; the Renaissance and Enlightenment recentered human agency and empirical observation. Modernity’s scientific revolutions destabilized classical physics and philosophy, revealing reality’s inherent subjectivity. Today, AI challenges the primacy of human reason, offering new tools to perceive patterns beyond traditional cognitive limits while raising existential questions about wisdom, agency, and the nature of knowledge itself[1].  

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Colin Henderson

Bankwatch Consulting

March 4th, 25

Considering the nature of thought evolution over the centuries and the difficulties this presents in arriving at a programmable road map for Generative AI towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

Table of Contents:

Abstract 1

(1) The Classical Foundations of Reason and Mystery 3

Philosophical Idealism and Empirical Inquiry 3

The Limits of Pagan Cosmology 3

Medieval Theology and the Subordination of Inquiry 3

Scholasticism and Divine Mediation 3

The Fragmentation of Authority 3

Renaissance Humanism and Enlightenment Rationalism 4

The Rebirth of Classical Thought 4

Kant’s Epistemological Revolution 4

Modernity’s Disruptions: From Relativity to Digital Fragmentation 4

Quantum Mechanics and Epistemic Uncertainty 4

The Digital Metamorphosi 4

Conclusion: AI and the Epochal Shift 4

Sources 5

Historical Development of AI 5

Early Foundations (1940s-1950s) 5

Early Optimism and Symbolic AI (1950s-1970s) 5

AI Winters and Resurgence (1970s-1990s) 5

Core Themes and Approaches in AI 5

Major AI Paradigms 5

Key Research Areas 5

Ethical and Societal Implications 6

Recent Developments and Current Trends 6

Ongoing Debates and Future Outlook 6

Sources 6

__________________________________________________________________________

(1) The Classical Foundations of Reason and Mystery

Philosophical Idealism and Empirical Inquiry  

Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers established reason as humanity’s defining tool for comprehending reality. Plato’s allegory of the cave framed philosophical inquiry as a journey from shadowy perception to enlightened truth, while Aristotle systematized knowledge through logic and categorization[1]. Concurrently, pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales pioneered proto-scientific methods, seeking natural explanations for phenomena rather than mythological ones. Yet mysteries persisted—seasonal cycles, celestial movements—leading to syncretic belief systems that blended reason with ritual. The Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, encoded agricultural knowledge within Demeter and Persephone’s mythos, illustrating how empirical observation coexisted with spiritual allegory[1].  

The Limits of Pagan Cosmology  

Edward Gibbon’s analysis of classical paganism highlights its pluralistic approach to the divine, where local deities personified natural forces. This framework allowed pragmatic coexistence of reason and faith: sailors studied tides yet prayed to Poseidon, farmers tracked seasons while venerating Demeter. The Roman synthesis of Greek philosophy and civic religion created a “thin texture” of belief—adaptable but lacking unified metaphysical foundations, ultimately vulnerable to monotheism’s rise[1].  

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Medieval Theology and the Subordination of Inquiry  

Scholasticism and Divine Mediation  

The Middle Ages subordinated reason to theology, with the Church monopolizing knowledge interpretation. Aquinas’s scholasticism sought to harmonize Aristotelian logic with Christian doctrine, but inquiry remained bounded by scriptural authority. Galileo’s heliocentric challenge to geocentrism exemplified the tension between empirical observation and dogmatic tradition, leading to his persecution[1]. This era prioritized salvation over scientific discovery, framing reality as a transient reflection of divine truth accessible only through sacramental mediation.  

The Fragmentation of Authority  

The Reformation and printing press shattered medieval unity, enabling individual interpretation of scripture and dissemination of secular knowledge. Luther’s 95 Theses (1517) and Gutenberg’s press democratized access to ideas, undermining ecclesiastical control. This shift laid groundwork for Enlightenment individualism but also triggered wars of religion—a paradox of progress and conflict[1].  

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Renaissance Humanism and Enlightenment Rationalism

The Rebirth of Classical Thought  

Renaissance humanists like da Vinci and Machiavelli revived classical texts, blending artistic innovation with pragmatic statecraft. Humanism celebrated virtù—the capacity for self-actualization through reason and creativity—while exploration (e.g., Columbus, Polo) exposed Europe to alien cosmologies, challenging Eurocentric assumptions[1].  

Kant’s Epistemological Revolution  

Enlightenment rationalism reached its apex with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which posited that human perception filters reality through innate mental structures. The “thing-in-itself” (noumenon) remained unknowable, yet Kant affirmed reason’s sovereignty as the only available tool. Diderot’s Encyclopédie embodied this ethos, attempting to catalog all human knowledge—a project mirroring AI’s modern data aggregation[1].  

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Modernity’s Disruptions: From Relativity to Digital Fragmentation  

Quantum Mechanics and Epistemic Uncertainty  

20th-century physics dismantled Newtonian certitude. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s complementarity revealed observation’s distorting effects, echoing Kant’s limits on pure reason. Einstein’s relativity unified space-time but rendered reality contingent on perspective—a philosophical crisis Wittgenstein addressed by abandoning essentialism for “family resemblances” among phenomena[1].  

The Digital Metamorphosis  

Digitization has compressed historical processes, creating a cyberspace where AI intermediates human cognition. Search engines supplant memory; social media algorithms shape discourse; machine learning identifies patterns imperceptible to humans. Yet this erodes contextual wisdom, reducing knowledge to decontextualized information and convictions to crowd-sourced opinions[1].  

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Conclusion: AI and the Epochal Shift  

AI represents both continuity and rupture. Like the printing press, it democratizes access to knowledge while destabilizing traditional authority. Yet unlike prior tools, AI operates autonomously, generating insights unmoored from human intuition. The Enlightenment’s “age of reason” presumed human cognition as reality’s sole interpreter, but AI introduces a rival epistemology—one that may perceive Kant’s noumenal realm through data patterns rather than philosophical deduction. This necessitates redefining wisdom in an era where connection replaces contemplation, and algorithms mediate truth. As humanity delegates reason to machines, the challenge lies in preserving the moral and conceptual frameworks that transform information into meaningful action[1].

Sources

[1] Age-of-AI-Chapter-2.docx https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7715488/05932d54-185b-4596-8ce9-031f0ecc4490/Age-of-AI-Chapter-2.docx

—

(2) Historical Development of AI

Early Foundations (1940s-1950s)

• Mathematical logic and computational theory laid groundwork for AI

• Turing’s 1950 paper proposed the Turing Test for machine intelligence

• The term “Artificial Intelligence” coined at 1956 Dartmouth Workshop

Early Optimism and Symbolic AI (1950s-1970s)

• Development of early AI programs like Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver

• Focus on symbolic reasoning and problem-solving

• Bold predictions and growing popularity of AI research

AI Winters and Resurgence (1970s-1990s)

• Periods of reduced funding and interest (“AI winters”) 

• Shift to expert systems and machine learning approaches

• Renewed interest with advances in neural networks and robotics

Core Themes and Approaches in AI

Major AI Paradigms

• Symbolic AI: Logic-based reasoning and knowledge representation

• Connectionism: Neural networks and deep learning

• Embodied AI: Robotics and physical interaction with environment

Key Research Areas

• Natural language processing

• Computer vision

• Machine learning

• Robotics and autonomous systems

Ethical and Societal Implications

• Potential threats to human autonomy and capabilities

• Questions of cognitive justice and epistemic impacts

• Changing dynamics of human-machine interaction

Recent Developments and Current Trends

• Rapid advancements in deep learning and neural networks

• Integration of AI in everyday consumer products

• Growing focus on social robotics and emotional AI

Ongoing Debates and Future Outlook

• Continued relevance of early AI concepts like the Turing Test

• Uncertainty about AI’s future trajectory and societal impact

• Evolving relationship between human and artificial intelligence

Sources

[1] History of artificial intelligence – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence

[2] Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans | Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/12/10/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-humans/

[3] Themes | Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power https://www.ai.hps.cam.ac.uk/about-0/themes

[4] The History of AI: A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence | Coursera https://www.coursera.org/articles/history-of-ai

[5] [PDF] History, motivations and core themes of AI https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=ccrg_papers

[6] [PDF] The History of Artificial Intelligence – University of Washington https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/history-ai.pdf

[7] [PDF] AI Watch Historical Evolution of Artificial Intelligence https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC120469/jrc120469_historical_evolution_of_ai-v1.1.pdf

[8] The History of Artificial Intelligence – IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/history-of-artificial-intelligence

[9] What is the history of artificial intelligence (AI)? – Tableau https://www.tableau.com/data-insights/ai/history

[10] The Evolution and Future of Artificial Intelligence: A Student’s Guide https://www.calmu.edu/news/future-of-artificial-intelligence

[11] History of AI: Timeline and the Future | Maryville Online https://online.maryville.edu/blog/history-of-ai/

[12] The impact of artificial intelligence on human society and bioethics https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7605294/

[13] The History of Artificial Intelligence: Complete AI Timeline – TechTarget https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/The-history-of-artificial-intelligence-Complete-AI-timeline

[14] The brief history of artificial intelligence: the world has changed fast https://ourworldindata.org/brief-history-of-ai

[15] 5 key themes in Americans’ views about AI and human enhancement https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/17/5-key-themes-in-americans-views-about-ai-and-human-enhancement/

[16] Appendix I: A Short History of AI https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/appendix-i-short-history-ai

[17] 3. Improvements ahead: How humans and AI might evolve together … https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/12/10/improvements-ahead-how-humans-and-ai-might-evolve-together-in-the-next-decade/

: And Our Human Future

Henry Kissinger

This material may be protected by copyright.

“How We Got HereTechnology and Human Thought

Throughout history, human beings have struggled to fully comprehend aspects of our experience and lived environments. Every society has, in its own way, inquired into the nature of reality: How can it be understood? Predicted? Shaped? Moderated? As it has wrestled with these questions, every society has reached its own particular set of accommodations with the world. At the center of these accommodations has been a concept of the human mind’s relationship to reality — its ability to know its surroundings, to be fulfilled by knowledge, and, at the same time, to be inherently limited by it. Even if an era or a culture held human reason to be limited — unable to perceive or understand the vast extent of the universe or the esoteric dimensions of reality — the individual reasoning human has been afforded pride of place as the earthly being most capable of understanding and shaping the world. Humans have responded to, and reconciled with, the environment by identifying phenomena we can study and eventually explain — either scientifically, theologically, or both. With the advent of AI, humanity is creating a powerful new player in this quest. To understand how significant this evolution is[…]”

——

Chapter 2 H O W  W E  G O T  H E R E

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN

THOUGHT

Throughout history, human beings have struggled to fully comprehend

aspects of our experience and lived environments. Every society has, in its

own way, inquired into the nature of reality: How can it be understood?

Predicted? Shaped? Moderated? As it has wrestled with these questions,

every society has reached its own particular set of accommodations with the

world. At the center of these accommodations has been a concept of the

human mind’s relationship to reality — its ability to know its surroundings,

to be fulfilled by knowledge, and, at the same time, to be inherently limited

by it. Even if an era or a culture held human reason to be limited — unable

to perceive or understand the vast extent of the universe or the esoteric

dimensions of reality — the individual reasoning human has been afforded

pride of place as the earthly being most capable of understanding and

shaping the world. Humans have responded to, and reconciled with, the

environment by identifying phenomena we can study and eventually

explain — either scientifically, theologically, or both. With the advent of

AI, humanity is creating a powerful new player in this quest. To understand

how significant this evolution is, we undertake a brief review of the journey

by which human reason has, through successive historical epochs, acquired

its esteemed status.

Each historical epoch has been characterized by a set of interlocking

explanations of reality and social, political, and economic arrangements

based on them. The classical world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and modern

world all cultivated their concepts of the individual and society, theorizing

about where and how each fits into the enduring order of things. When

prevailing understandings no longer sufficed to explain perceptions of

reality — events experienced, discoveries made, other cultures

encountered — revolutions in thought (and sometimes in politics) occurred,

and a new epoch was born. The emerging AI age is increasingly posing

epochal challenges to today’s concept of reality.

In the West, the central esteem of reason originated in ancient Greece

and Rome. These societies elevated the quest for knowledge into a defining

aspect of both individual fulfillment and collective good. In Plato’s

Republic, the famed allegory of the cave spoke to the centrality of the quest.

Styled as a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, the allegory likens

humanity to a group of prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. Seeing

shadows cast on the wall of the cave from the sunlit mouth, the prisoners

believe them to be reality. The philosopher, Socrates held, is akin to the

prisoner who breaks free, ascends to level ground, and perceives reality in

the full light of day. Similarly, the Platonic quest to glimpse the true form of

things supposed the existence of an objective — indeed, ideal — reality

toward which humanity has the capacity to journey even if never quite

reach.

The conviction that what we see reflects reality — and that we can fully

comprehend at least aspects of this reality using discipline and

reason — inspired the Greek philosophers and their heirs to great

achievements. Pythagoras and his disciples explored the connection

between mathematics and the inner harmonies of nature, elevating this

pursuit to an esoteric spiritual doctrine. Thales of Miletus established a

method of inquiry comparable to the modern scientific method, ultimately

inspiring early modern scientific pioneers. Aristotle’s sweeping

classification of knowledge, Ptolemy’s pioneering geography, and

Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things spoke to an essential confidence in the

human mind’s capacity to discover and understand at least substantial

aspects of the world. Such works and the style of logic they employed

became educational vehicles, enabling the learned to develop inventions,

augment defenses, and design and construct great cities that, in turn,

became centers of learning, trade, and outward exploration.

Still, the classical world perceived seemingly inexplicable phenomena

for which no adequate explanations could be found in reason alone. These

mysterious experiences were ascribed to an array of gods whom only the

devout and initiated could symbolically know, and whose attendant rites

and rituals only the devout and initiated could observe. Chronicling the

achievements of the classical world and the decline of the Roman Empire

through his own Enlightenment lens, the eighteenth-century historian

Edward Gibbon described a world in which pagan deities stood as

explanations for fundamentally mysterious natural phenomena that were

deemed important or threatening:

The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant

materials . . . The deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed, in peace,

their local and respective influence; nor could the Roman who deprecated the wrath of the

Tiber, deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile.

The visible powers of Nature, the planets, and the elements, were the same throughout the

universe. The invisible governors of the moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mould

of fiction and allegory.

1

Why the seasons changed, why the earth appeared to die and return to

life at regular intervals, was not yet scientifically known. Greek and Roman

cultures recognized the temporal patterns of days and months but had not

arrived at an explanation deducible by experiment or logic alone. Thus the

renowned Eleusinian Mysteries were offered as an alternative, enacting the

drama of the harvest goddess, Demeter, and her daughter, Persephone,

doomed to spend a portion of the year in the cold underworld of Hades.

Participants came to “know” the deeper reality of the seasons — the

region’s agricultural bounty or scarcity and its impact on their

society — through these esoteric rites. Likewise, a trader setting out on a

voyage might acquire a basic concept of the tides and maritime geography

through the accumulated practical knowledge of his community;

nonetheless, he would still seek to propitiate the deities of the sea as well as

of safe outbound and return journeys, whom he believed to control the

mediums and phenomena through which he would be passing.

The rise of monotheistic religions shifted the balance in the mixture of

reason and faith that had long dominated the classical quest to know the

world. While classical philosophers had pondered both the nature of

divinity and the divinity of nature, they had rarely posited a single

underlying figure or motivation that could be definitively named or

worshipped. To the early church, however, these discursive explorations of

causes and mysteries were so many dead ends — or, by the most charitable

or pragmatic assessments, uncanny precursors to the revelation of Christian

wisdom. The hidden reality that the classical world had labored to perceive

was held to be the divine, accessible only partly and indirectly through

worship. This process was mediated by a religious establishment that held a

near monopoly on scholarly inquiry for centuries, guiding individuals

through sacraments toward an understanding of scripture that was both

written and preached in a language few laymen understood.

The promised reward for individuals who followed the “correct” faith

and adhered to this path toward wisdom was admission to an afterlife, a

plane of existence held to be more real and meaningful than observable

reality. In these Middle (or medieval) Ages — the period from the fall of

Rome, in the fifth century, to the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s conquest of

Constantinople, in the fifteenth — humanity, at least in the West, sought to

know God first and the world second. The world was only to be known

through God; theology filtered and ordered individuals’ experiences of the

natural phenomena before them. When early modern thinkers and scientists

such as Galileo began to explore the world directly, altering their

explanations in light of scientific observation, they were chastised and

persecuted for daring to omit theology as an intermediary.

During the medieval epoch, scholasticism became the primary guide for

the enduring quest to comprehend perceived reality, venerating the

relationship between faith, reason, and the church — the latter remaining

the arbiter of legitimacy when it came to beliefs and (at least in theory) the

legitimacy of political leaders. While it was widely believed that

Christendom should be unified, both theologically and politically, reality

belied this aspiration; from the beginning, there was contention between a

variety of sects and political units. Yet despite this practice, Europe’s

worldview was not updated for many decades. Tremendous progress was

made in describing and depicting the universe: the period produced the

theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, the

painting of Giotto di Bondone, and the exploration of Marco Polo. Notably

less progress was made in explaining it. Every baffling phenomenon, big or

small, was ascribed to the work of the Lord.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Western world underwent

twin revolutions that introduced a new epoch — and, with it, a new concept

of the role of the individual human mind and conscience in navigating

reality. The invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate

materials and ideas directly to large groups of people in languages they

understood rather than in the Latin of the scholarly classes, nullifying

people’s historic reliance on the church to interpret concepts and beliefs for

them. Aided by the technology, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation

declared individuals were capable of — indeed, responsible for — defining

the divine for themselves.

Dividing the Christian world, the Reformation validated the possibility

of individual faith existing independent of church arbitration. From that

point forward, received authority — in religion and, eventually, in other

realms — became subject to the probing and testing of autonomous inquiry.

During this revolutionary era, innovative technology, novel paradigms,

and widespread political and social adaptations reinforced one another.

Once a book could easily be printed and distributed by a single machine and

operator — without the costly and specialized labor of monastic

copyists — new ideas could be spread and amplified faster than they could

be restricted. Centralized authorities — whether the Catholic Church, the

Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire (the notional successor to Rome’s

unified rule of the European continent), or national and local

governments — were no longer able to stop the proliferation of printing

technology or effectively ban disfavored ideas. Because London,

Amsterdam, and other leading cities declined to proscribe the spread of

printed material, freethinkers who had been harried by their home

governments were able to find refuge and access to advanced publishing

industries in nearby societies. The vision of doctrinal, philosophical, and

political unity gave way to diversity and fragmentation — in many cases

attended by the overthrow of established social classes and violent conflict

between contending factions. An era defined by extraordinary scientific and

intellectual progress was paired with near-constant religious, dynastic,

national, and class-driven disputes that led to ongoing disruption and peril

in individual lives and livelihoods.

As intellectual and political authority fragmented amid doctrinal

ferment, artistic and scientific explorations of remarkable richness were

produced, partly by reviving classical texts, modes of learning, and

argumentation. During this Renaissance, or rebirth, of classical learning,

societies produced art, architecture, and philosophy that simultaneously

sought to celebrate human achievement and inspire it further. Humanism,

the era’s guiding principle, aimed to foster individuals capable of full

participation in civic life through clear thought and expression. These

virtues, humanism posited, were cultivated through the humanities: art,

writing, rhetoric, history, politics, and philosophy. Accordingly,

Renaissance men who mastered these fields — Leonardo da Vinci,

Michelangelo, Raphael — came to be revered. Widely adopted, humanism

cultivated a love for reading and learning — the former facilitating the

latter.

The rediscovery of Greek science and philosophy inspired new inquiries

into the underlying mechanisms of the natural world and the means by

which they could be measured and cataloged. Analogous changes began to

occur in the realm of politics and statecraft. Scholars dared to form systems

of thought based on organizational principles beyond the restoration of

continental Christian unity under the moral aegis of the pope. Italian

diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, himself a classicist, argued

that state interests were distinct from their relationship to Christian

morality, endeavoring to outline rational, if not always attractive, principles

by which they could be pursued.

2

This exploration of historical knowledge and increasing sense of agency

over the mechanisms of society also inspired an era of geographic

exploration, in which the Western world expanded, encountering new

societies, forms of belief, and types of political organization. The most

advanced societies and learned minds in Europe were suddenly confronted

with a new aspect of reality: societies with different gods, diverging

histories, and, in many cases, their own independently developed forms of

economic achievement and social complexity. For the Western mind,

trained in the conviction of its own centrality, these independently

organized societies posed profound philosophical challenges. Separate

cultures with distinct foundations and no knowledge of Christian scripture

had developed parallel existences, with no apparent knowledge of (or

interest in) European civilization, which the West had assumed was self-

evidently the pinnacle of human achievement. In some cases — such as the

Spanish conquistadores’ encounters with the Aztec Empire in

Mexico — indigenous religious ceremonies as well as political and social

structures appeared comparable to those in Europe.

For the explorers who paused in their conquests long enough to ponder

them, this uncanny correspondence produced haunting questions: Were

diverging cultures and experiences of reality independently valid? Did

Europeans’ minds and souls operate on the same principles as those they

encountered in the Americas, China, and other distant lands? Were these

newly discovered civilizations in effect waiting for the Europeans to

vouchsafe new aspects of reality — divine revelation, scientific

progress — in order to awaken to the true nature of things? Or had they

always been participating in the same human experience, responding to

their own environment and history, and developing their own parallel

accommodations with reality — each with relative strengths and

achievements?

Although most Western explorers and thinkers of the time concluded

that these newly encountered societies had no fundamental knowledge

worth adopting, the experiences began to broaden the aperture of the

Western mind nonetheless. The horizon expanded for civilizations across

the globe, forcing a reckoning with the world’s physical and experiential

breadth and depth. In some Western societies, this process gave rise to

concepts of universal humanity and human rights, notions that were

eventually pioneered by some of these same societies during later periods of

reflection.

The West amassed a repository of knowledge and experience from all

corners of the world.

3 Advances in technology and methodology, including

better optical lenses and more accurate instruments of measurement,

chemical manipulation, and the development of research and observation

standards that came to be known as the scientific method, permitted

scientists to more accurately observe the planets and stars, the behavior and

composition of material substances, and the minutiae of microscopic life.

Scientists were able to make iterative progress based on both personal

observations and those of their peers: when a theory or prediction could be

validated empirically, new facts were revealed that could serve as the

jumping-off point for additional questions. In this way, new discoveries,

patterns, and connections came to light, many of which could be applied to

practical aspects of daily life: keeping time, navigating the ocean,

synthesizing useful compounds.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such rapid

progress — with astounding discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and the

natural sciences — that it led to a sort of philosophical disorientation. Given

that church doctrine still officially defined the limits of permissible

intellectual explorations during this period, these advances produced

breakthroughs of considerable daring. Copernicus’s vision of a heliocentric

system, Newton’s laws of motion, van Leeuwenhoek’s cataloging of a

living microscopic world — these and other developments led to the

general sentiment that new layers of reality were being unveiled. The

outcome was incongruence: societies remained united in their monotheism

but were divided by competing interpretations and explorations of reality.

They needed a concept — indeed, a philosophy — to guide their quest to

understand the world and their role in it.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment answered the call, declaring

reason — the power to understand, think, and judge — both the method of

and purpose for interacting with the environment.

“Our soul is made for

thinking, that is, for perceiving,

” the French philosopher and polymath

Montesquieu wrote,

“but such a being must have curiosity, for just as all

things form a chain in which every idea precedes one idea and follows

another, so one cannot want to see the one without desiring to see the

other.

”4 The relationship between humanity’s first question (the nature of

reality) and second question (its role in reality) became self-reinforcing: if

reason begat consciousness, then the more humans reasoned, the more they

fulfilled their purpose. Perceiving and elaborating on the world was the

most important project in which they were or would ever be engaged. The

age of reason was born.

In a sense, the West had returned to many of the fundamental questions

with which the ancient Greeks had wrestled: What is reality? What are

people seeking to know and experience, and how will they know when they

encounter it? Can humans perceive reality itself as opposed to its

reflections? If so, how? What does it mean to be and to know?

Unencumbered by tradition — or at least believing they were justified in

interpreting it anew — scholars and philosophers once again investigated

these questions. The minds that set out on this journey were willing to walk

a precarious path, risking the apparent certainties of their cultural traditions

and their established conceptions of reality.

In this atmosphere of intellectual challenges, once axiomatic

concepts — the existence of physical reality, the eternal nature of moral

truths — were suddenly open to question.

5 Bishop Berkeley’s 1710 Treatise

Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge contended that reality

consisted not of material objects but of God and minds whose perception of

seemingly substantive reality, he argued, was indeed reality. Gottfried

Wilhelm Leibniz, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth German

philosopher, inventor of early calculating machines, and pioneer of aspects

of modern computer theory, indirectly defended a traditional concept of

faith by positing that monads (units not reducible to smaller parts, each

performing an intrinsic, divinely appointed role in the universe) formed the

underlying essence of things. The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher

Baruch Spinoza, navigating the plane of abstract reason with daring and

brilliance, sought to apply Euclidian geometric logic to ethical precepts in

order to “prove” an ethical system in which a universal God enabled and

rewarded human goodness. No scripture or miracles underlay this moral

philosophy; Spinoza sought to arrive at the same underlying system of

truths through the application of reason alone. At the pinnacle of human

knowledge, Spinoza held, was the mind’s ability to reason its way toward

contemplating the eternal — to know “the idea of the mind itself” and to

recognize, through the mind, the infinite and ever-present “God as cause.

”

This knowledge, Spinoza held, was eternal — the ultimate and indeed

perfect form of knowledge. He called it “the intellectual love of God.

”6

As a result of these pioneering philosophical explorations, the

relationship between reason, faith, and reality grew increasingly uncertain.

Into this breach stepped Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher and

professor laboring in the East Prussian city of Königsberg.

7 In 1781, Kant

published his Critique of Pure Reason, a work that has inspired and

perplexed readers ever since. A student of traditionalists and a

correspondent with pure rationalists, Kant regretfully found himself

agreeing with neither, instead seeking to bridge the gap between traditional

claims and his era’s newfound confidence in the power of the human mind.

In his Critique, Kant proposed that “reason should take on anew the most

difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge.

”8 Reason, Kant

argued, should be applied to understand its own limitations.

According to Kant’s account, human reason had the capacity to know

reality deeply, albeit through an inevitably imperfect lens. Human cognition

and experience filters, structures, and distorts all that we know, even when

we attempt to reason “purely” by logic alone. Objective reality in the

strictest sense — what Kant called the thing-in-itself — is ever-present but

inherently beyond our direct knowledge. Kant posited a realm of noumena,

or “things as they are understood by pure thought,

” existing independent of

experience or filtration through human concepts. However, Kant argued that

because the human mind relies on conceptual thinking and lived experience,

it could never achieve the degree of pure thought required to know this

inner essence of things.

9 At best, we might consider how our mind reflects

such a realm. We may maintain beliefs about what lies beyond and within,

but this does not constitute true knowledge of it.

10

For the following two hundred years, Kant’s essential distinction

between the thing-in-itself and the unavoidably filtered world we

experience hardly seemed to matter. While the human mind might present

an imperfect picture of reality, it was the only picture available. What the

structures of the human mind barred from view would, presumably, be

barred forever — or would inspire faith and consciousness of the infinite.

Without any alternative mechanism for accessing reality, it seemed that

humanity’s blind spots would remain hidden. Whether human perception

and reason ought to be the definitive measure of things, lacking an

alternative, for a time, they became so. But AI is beginning to provide an

alternative means of accessing — and thus understanding — reality.

For generations after Kant, the quest to know the thing-in-itself took

two forms: ever more precise observation of reality and ever more extensive

cataloging of knowledge. Vast new fields of phenomena seemed knowable,

capable of being discovered and cataloged through the application of

reason. In turn, it was believed, such comprehensive catalogs could unveil

lessons and principles that could be applied to the most pressing scientific,

economic, social, and political questions of the day. The most sweeping

effort in this regard was the Encyclopédie, edited by the French philosophe

Denis Diderot. In twenty-eight volumes (seventeen of articles, eleven of

illustrations), 75,000 entries, and 18,000 pages, Diderot’s Encyclopédie

collected the diverse findings and observations of great thinkers in

numerous disciplines, compiling their discoveries and deductions and

linking the resulting facts and principles. Recognizing the fact that its

attempt to catalog all reality’s phenomena in a unified book was itself a

unique phenomenon, the encyclopedia included a self-referential entry on

the word encyclopedia.

In the political realm, of course, various reasoning minds (serving

various state interests) were not as apt to reach the same conclusions.

Prussia’s Frederick the Great, a prototypical early Enlightenment statesman,

corresponded with V oltaire, drilled troops to perfection, and seized the

province of Silesia with no warning or justification other than that the

acquisition was in Prussia’s national interest. His rise occasioned maneuvers

that led to the Seven Years’ War — in a sense, the first world war because it

was fought on three continents. Likewise, the French Revolution, one of the

most proudly “rational” political movements of the age, produced social

upheavals and political violence on a scale unseen in Europe for centuries.

By separating reason from tradition, the Enlightenment produced a new

phenomenon: armed reason, melded to popular passions, was reordering

and razing social structures in the name of “scientific” conclusions about

history’s direction. Innovations made possible by the modern scientific

method magnified weapons’ destructive power and eventually ushered in

the age of total war — conflicts characterized by societal-level mobilization

and industrial-level destruction.

11

The Enlightenment applied reason both to try to define its problems and

to try to solve them. To that end, Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace” posited

(with some skepticism) that peace might be achievable through the

application of agreed-upon rules governing the relationships between

independent states. Because such mutually set rules had not yet been

established, at least in a form that monarchs could discern or were likely to

follow, Kant proposed a “secret article of perpetual peace,

” suggesting that

“states which are armed for war” consult “the maxims of the

philosophers.

”12 The vision of a reasoned, negotiated, rule-bound

international system has beckoned ever since, with philosophers and

political scientists contributing but achieving only intermittent success.

Moved by the political and social upheavals of modernity, thinkers grew

more willing to question whether human perception, ordered by human

reason, was the sole metric for making sense of reality. In the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Romanticism — which was a

reaction to the Enlightenment — esteemed human feeling and imagination

as true counterparts to reason; it elevated folk traditions, the experience of

nature, and a reimagined medieval epoch as preferable to the mechanistic

certainties of the modern age.

In the meantime, reason — in the form of advanced theoretical

physics — began to progress further toward Kant’s thing-in-itself, with

disorienting scientific and philosophical consequences. In the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, progress at the frontiers of physics

began to reveal unexpected aspects of reality. The classical model of

physics, whose foundations dated to the early Enlightenment, had posited a

world explicable in terms of space, time, matter, and energy, whose

properties were in each case absolute and consistent. As scientists sought a

clearer explanation for the properties of light, however, they encountered

results that this traditional understanding could not explain. The brilliant

and iconoclastic theoretical physicist Albert Einstein solved many of these

riddles through his pioneering work on quantum physics and his theories of

special and general relativity. Yet in doing so, he revealed a picture of

physical reality that appeared newly mysterious. Space and time were

united as a single phenomenon in which individual perceptions were

apparently not bound by the laws of classical physics.

13

Developing a quantum mechanics to describe this substratum of

physical reality, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr challenged long-

standing assumptions about the nature of knowledge. Heisenberg

emphasized the impossibility of assessing both the position and momentum

of a particle accurately and simultaneously. This “uncertainty principle” (as

it came to be known) implied that a completely accurate picture of reality

might not be available at any given time. Further, Heisenberg argued that

physical reality did not have independent inherent form, but was created by

the process of observation: “I believe that one can formulate the emergence

of the classical ‘path’ of a particle succinctly . . . the ‘path’ comes into

being only because we observe it.

”14

The question of whether reality had a single true, objective form — and

whether human minds could access it — had preoccupied philosophers

since Plato. In works such as Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in

Modern Science (1958), Heisenberg explored the interplay between the two

disciplines and the mysteries that science was now beginning to penetrate.

Bohr, in his own pioneering work, stressed that observation affected and

ordered reality. In Bohr’s telling, the scientific instrument itself — long

assumed to be an objective, neutral tool for measuring reality — could

never avoid having a physical interaction, however minuscule, with the

object of its observation, making it a part of the phenomenon being studied

and distorting attempts to describe it. The human mind was forced to

choose, among multiple complementary aspects of reality, which one it

wanted to know accurately at a given moment. A full picture of objective

reality, if it were available, could come only by combining impressions of

complementary aspects of a phenomenon and accounting for the distortions

inherent in each.

These revolutionary ideas penetrated further toward the essence of

things than Kant or his followers had thought possible. We are at the

beginning of the inquiry into what additional levels of perception or

comprehension AI may permit. Its application may allow scientists to fill in

gaps in the human observer’s ability to measure and perceive phenomena,

or in the human (or traditional computer’s) ability to process vast amounts

of data and identify patterns in it.

The twentieth-century philosophical world, jarred by the disjunctions at

the frontiers of science and by the First World War, began to chart new

paths that diverged from traditional Enlightenment reason and instead

embraced the ambiguity and relativity of perception. The Austrian

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who eschewed the academy for life as a

gardener and then a village schoolteacher, set aside the notion of a single

essence of things identifiable by reason — the goal that philosophers since

Plato had sought. Instead, Wittgenstein counseled that knowledge was to be

found in generalizations about similarities across phenomena, which he

termed “family resemblances”: “And the result of this examination is: we

see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing:

sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

” The quest

to define and catalog all things, each with its own sharply delineated

boundaries, was mistaken, he held. Instead, one should seek to define “This

and similar things” and achieve familiarity with the resulting concepts,

even if they had “blurred” or “indistinct” edges.

15 Later, in the late twentieth

century and the early twenty-first, this thinking informed theories of AI and

machine learning. Such theories posited that AI’s potential lay partly in its

ability to scan large data sets to learn types and patterns — e.g., groupings

of words often found together, or features most often present in an image

when that image was of a cat — and then to make sense of reality by

identifying networks of similarities and likenesses with what the AI already

knew. Even if AI would never know something in the way a human mind

could, an accumulation of matches with the patterns of reality could

approximate and sometimes exceed the performance of human perception

and reason.

The Enlightenment world — with its optimism regarding human reason

despite its consciousness of the pitfalls of flawed human logic — has long

been our world. Scientific revolutions, especially in the twentieth century,

have evolved technology and philosophy, but the central Enlightenment

premise of a knowable world being unearthed, step-by-step, by human

minds has persisted. Until now. Throughout three centuries of discovery and

exploration, humans have interpreted the world as Kant predicted they

would according to the structure of their own minds. But as humans began

to approach the limits of their cognitive capacity, they became willing to

enlist machines — computers — to augment their thinking in order to

transcend those limitations. Computers added a separate digital realm to the

physical realm in which humans had always lived. As we are growing

increasingly dependent on digital augmentation, we are entering a new

epoch in which the reasoning human mind is yielding its pride of place as

the sole discoverer, knower, and cataloger of the world’s phenomena.

While the technological achievements of the age of reason have been

significant, until recently they had remained sporadic enough to be

reconciled with tradition. Innovations have been characterized as extensions

of previous practices: films were moving photographs, telephones were

conversations across space, and automobiles were rapidly moving carriages

in which horses were replaced by engines measured by their “horsepower.

”

Likewise, in military life, tanks were sophisticated cavalry, airplanes were

advanced artillery, battleships were mobile forts, and aircraft carriers were

mobile airstrips. Even nuclear weapons maintained the implication of their

moniker — weapons — when nuclear powers organized their forces as

artillery, emphasizing their prior experience and understanding of war.

But we have reached a tipping point: we can no longer conceive of

some of our innovations as extensions of that which we already know. By

compressing the time frame in which technology alters the experience of

life, the revolution of digitization and the advancement of AI have produced

phenomena that are truly new, not simply more powerful or efficient

versions of things past. As computers have become faster and smaller, they

have become embeddable in phones, watches, utilities, appliances, security

systems, vehicles, weapons — and even human bodies. Communication

across and between such digital systems is now essentially instantaneous.

Tasks that were manual a generation ago — reading, research, shopping,

discourse, record keeping, surveillance, and military planning and

conduct — are now digital, data-driven, and unfolding in the same realm:

cyberspace.

16

All levels of human organization have been affected by this digitization:

through their computers and phones, individuals possess (or at least can

access) more information than ever before. Corporations, having become

collectors and aggregators of users’ data, now wield more power and

influence than many sovereign states. Governments, wary of ceding

cyberspace to rivals, have entered, explored, and begun to exploit the realm,

observing few rules and exercising even fewer restraints. They are quick to

designate cyberspace as a domain in which they must innovate in order to

prevail over their rivals.

Few have thoroughly understood what exactly has occurred through this

digital revolution. Speed is partly to blame, as is inundation. For all its

many wondrous achievements, digitization has rendered human thought

both less contextual and less conceptual. Digital natives do not feel the

need, at least not urgently, to develop concepts that, for most of history,

have compensated for the limitations of collective memory. They can (and

do) ask search engines whatever they want to know, whether trivial,

conceptual, or somewhere in between. Search engines, in turn, use AI to

respond to their queries. In the process, humans delegate aspects of their

thinking to technology. But information is not self-explanatory; it is

context-dependent. To be useful — or at least meaningful — it must be

understood through the lenses of culture and history.

When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When

knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet

inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other

users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that,

historically, has led to the development of convictions. As solitude

diminishes, so, too, does fortitude — not only to develop convictions but

also to be faithful to them, particularly when they require the traversing of

novel, and thus often lonely, roads. Only convictions — in combination

with wisdom — enable people to access and explore new horizons.

The digital world has little patience for wisdom; its values are shaped by

approbation, not introspection. It inherently challenges the Enlightenment

proposition that reason is the most important element of consciousness.

Nullifying restrictions that historically have been imposed on human

conduct by distance, time, and language, the digital world proffers that

connection, in and of itself, is meaningful.

As online information has exploded, we have turned to software

programs to help us sort it, refine it, make assessments based on patterns,

and to guide us in answering our questions. The introduction of

AI — which completes the sentence we are texting, identifies the book or

store we are seeking, and “intuits” articles and entertainment we might

enjoy based on prior behavior — has often seemed more mundane than

revolutionary. But as it is being applied to more elements of our lives, it is

altering the role that our minds have traditionally played in shaping,

ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.