When we type questions into the text field of a chatbot, we are trying to solve a problem. We cannot find the information we need; we lack the wisdom to resolve a situation, or the skills to collate the data, or the words to say what we want to say. Perhaps we never knew these things, or knew them but lost them. AI promises to be a benevolent assistant, retrieving lost knowledge that has been flung out into the corners of the universe, recalling it back to us and assembling it for us to use at our liberty. But AI chatbots are not in fact benevolent, or even morally neutral, in their service to us. They harm us because in promising to help us remember they make us forget. More specifically, they contribute to that state of forgetfulness which is our deepest problem.
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius likens our chronic forgetfulness to that of a man who cannot remember his native country, or the destination towards which he is traveling. Boethius has lost everything—family, honor, wealth, liberty—and, according to Lady Philosophy, has become like a drunken man wandering down cursed roads, looking to regain his happiness where he should not. In seeking these lost earthly goods for their own sake—as paths to his own happiness apart from God—he is at risk of gravely misusing them. He does not realize that they are only good via their participation in the goodness of the Summum Bonum, their Creator.11. Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester (Harvard University Press, 1973), Consolation III, pros. 2, 235. “Tell me,” Lady Philosophy asks Boethius, “do you remember what is the end of all things, towards what purpose does the whole universe aim and move?” He responds that he has heard it before, “but pain and grief have weakened my memory.”22. Boethius, Consolation I, pros. 6, 169. It is unlikely that he has “forgotten” the end of all things in the common sense of forgetting. He has spent his life as a theologian and philosopher. The answer to her question is an easy one: God. But grief can cause even the simplest of answers to feel out of reach.
St. Augustine reflects on the problem of our forgetfulness in De Musica, a reflection on the mathematical nature of music. The memory that we use to, say, play a song that we have memorized—in which our body remembers what to do to play it just right—is a kind of memory that even beasts have. “For swallows come back to their nests the next year,” Augustine says, “and it is very truly said of goats: ‘And even goats remembering return to their sheds.’”But even if we forget the more carnal elements of a song, there remains the truth behind it, which is in the numbers beyond the music. This too, though, we can forget. Why is that? “I wonder, then, how he falls away from the contemplation of these things to need another’s recalling it to his memory,” Augustine asks. “Or,” he goes on to ponder, “must the mind even when intent on it be thought to require such a return?”33. Augustine, De Musica, trans. Robert Catesby Taliaferro, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/augustine-on-music-de-musica, 181, 361. In other words, it is one thing to forget the facts of our material lives, but why do we forget even those spiritual truths which are eternal?
We cling too much, Augustine believes, to earthly goods. In enjoying things apart from God, he says in De Trinitate, we bind ourselves to them, getting “stuck to them with the glue of care,” clutching and dragging them along with us as we walk through our life.44. Augustine, De Trinitate, trans. Edmund Hill (New City Press, 2015), 294. This causes us to forget. In Book X of the Confessions, Augustine sounds apprehensive as he approaches the subject of memory. This will be, he admits, difficult. “For we are not now searching out the tracts of heaven, or measuring the distances of the stars or inquiring about the weight of the earth,” he realizes. “It is I myself—I, the mind—who remember.”55. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Albert Cook Outler (Dover Publications, 2002), 186. How to explore the unknown regions of the self? What would he find there? As he steps into his own memory, he finds it to be a “huge hall”which contains many things. Here he sorts through images of the things he has seen and touched; here he encounters his past actions and his desires; and here finally he meets God.
In venturing into this hall Augustine sees himself as obeying the command of the Oracle of Delphi to “know thyself.” But he admits that much of his lifetime has been spent hesitating on this project, and thus missing God. “Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new,” he cries out, “belatedly I loved thee. For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made.”66. Augustine, Confessions, 179, 186, 194. We may think here of Boethius, who in the Consolation is warned about the danger of seeking the outward, earthly goods of riches, power, fame, pleasure, and noble rank for their own sake. As Lady Philosophy puts it to Boethius, “You have forgotten what you are.”77. Boethius, Consolation I, pros. 6, 169–71.
We are more like reluctant Augustine and mournful Boethius than we care to admit. We have a sickly forgetting, but we fear to re-enter the hall of memory. We slump down in its doorframe, unable to enter. In clinging to outward things and instrumentalizing them for our own earthly ends, we forget God as our self’s source and end. The most harmful forgetfulness is that of who we are, and who God is.
This brings us back to the popular use of Artificial Intelligence, specifically in AI chatbots. AI, as it is newly conceived of, could be described as the “simulation of human intelligence by a system or a machine,” according to an article in the journal of the National Library of Medicine. “The goal of AI,” this article states, “is to develop a machine that can think like humans and mimic human behaviors, including perceiving, reasoning, learning, planning, predicting, and so on.”88. Yongjun Xu et al., “Artificial Intelligence: A Powerful Paradigm for Scientific Research,” Innovation (Camb), 2021, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8633405/. Chatbots allow AI into our everyday lives by integrating their mimicry of human behaviors into programs that invite us to interact with them in a two-way feed. How do these interactions encourage us to interact with the world around us, and to think about ourselves?
Martin Heidegger’s discussion of the “revealing” of the world that takes place in technology is relevant to this question. In his essay The Question Concerning Technology, he describes the “revealing” that technology triggers as “a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” This happens when, for example, “a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore.” Something different has been “revealed” in the land through a new technology of extraction that has been applied to it. “The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently that it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain.”99. Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper, 1993), 320. The common tasks that AI chatbots are used for—writing essays, creating art, finding advice, organizing our lives, or imagining dream worlds—are arguably caught up in this dynamic of the “revealing” nature of technology to an elevated degree. Words, images, and concepts which are meant to be found within us—which we are meant to discover as we wander through the vast hall of our memory— are instead extracted from the digital world and assembled in structures to our own liking. Research that we might have done as a journey to discover the minds of other ages and places is curtailed as the chatbot picks the sources we should read or condenses their thoughts into easy bites. This is the instrumentalization of the goods of memory and thought, which are like fruits that others have grown and tended for us, and which are meant to refer us to God in our searching them out. The Lady had reminded Boethius that any earthly goods should refer us to God in their goodness; but the AI chatbot presents earthly goods to us without reference to God or man.
Jacques Ellul also spoke presciently of such dangers well before they came, because he already saw their arrival in the 1960s. As he says in his work The Technological Society, there is a certain “friction” between man and machine—as when a piece of hardware breaks—which man in his development of technology is always seeking to lessen or eventually eliminate. AI chatbots, in the smoothness of their interactions with us, may be attempting to usher us closer to that zenith of development which Ellul describes as the “technological perfection” that gives us “the ability to forget the machine.” As Ellul prophetically said:
This has been demonstrated by machines that are autonomous: have a memory, and anticipate future events. Skeptics of the kind who denied a priori the possibility of heavier-than-air machines will deride this as mere imagination. It is true that such machines have not yet been perfected, but even an approximation in this direction would suffice for our argument.1010. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle edition), 414.
AI technology was in its infancy in the 1960s. The chatbots of today “have been perfected”; they seem to have a memory and to erase any friction between man and machine that would cause us to remember the nature of what we are using. Chatbots tempt us to forget primarily through the illusion of their own agency. We may technically know that the entity assembling information for us is not really conscious and does not know anything; but because the nature of its interactions with us are so apparently agentic, our relation to it will always move us towards forgetting that we are using a machine.
The “forgetfulness” that Ellul warns of relates to that forgetfulness which afflicts both Boethius and Augustine. To forget the nature of the technology we are using—that it is indeed a machine—can very easily lead us to forget our own nature, for the machine will cause us to be blind to the ways that we force upon the natures of things around us the “revealing” that Heidegger speaks of. To truly face ourselves we must face our tendency to exploit things for the satisfaction of our fleshly desires rather than tend them for their own end in God, and for ours. It is in this forgetting that we become victims who are acted upon without realizing it. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Abolition of Man regarding the power of technology, “what we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda.”1111. C. S. Lewis, Miracles, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 483. The chatbot which we think will empower us to remember may actually cause us to forget.
It is in this forgetting that the real danger lies, because in forgetting our nature, we begin, Boethius believes, to become deformed and move down into the realm of beastliness. The experience of forgetfulness of our nature is an experience of slavery and debasement. In forgetting ourselves, we become untethered from the inner citadel of our rational soul, which seeks to enjoy God as our end. Instead we bind ourselves to outer things, getting “stuck to them with the glue of care,”clutching and dragging them along with us as we walk in a beastly way on the journey of our life.1212. Augustine, De Trinitate, 294. If we cease to know ourselves, Lady Philosophy says, we are “made lower than the brutes.”1313. Boethius, Consolation II, pros. 5, 205. Boethius comes to realize this in Book IV of the Consolation: “I see that it is not wrongly said that the wicked, although they preserve the form of a human body, yet in the quality of their minds they are changed into beasts.”1414. Boethius, Consolation IV, pros. 4, 339. What sort of remembering, then, do we need, if we are to avoid this beastly forgetfulness?
We recall again the questions of Augustine in De Musica: even when we continue to affirm eternal truth, “must the mind” be thought to require a “return?” Will we, though we do not technically forget the spiritual things we know, always need a kind of reminding? We may think here of the ancient concepts of exitus and reditus, which Siobhan Nash-Marshall describes in his reflection on Boethian metaphysics. “A Neoplatonist,” he says, “would say that we need two real relations to explain what the good is.” The exitus is that real relation “whereby things come to exist and the good comes to be their substantial property.” The reditus, though, is that real relation “whereby things become good.”1515. Siobhan Nash-Marshall, Participation and the Good: A Study in Boethian Metaphysics (Crossroad, 2000), 109. This becoming does not just actualize something’s potential in its relation to something other than itself—the Good—but also makes that thing “become more similar to the Good.”1616. Nash-Marshall, Participation, 112. A thing comes into existence only to come back to its final cause, but its reditus, its return, involves a change in the thing before it comes back, and that change likens it to the Good it is returning to. The remembering that we need, then, could also be described as a returning. The second poem of Book III of the Consolation tries to picture this return. In these verses we are presented with images of things “remembering” what they must return to, as lions’ “long inactive spirits straight revive” at the taste of blood, as a caged bird longs for her forest, and as a bent sapling, when released, springs skyward again. Like Augustine’s swallow which returns to her nest, or like human fingers which remember which keys to play on the instrument, animals have an instinct within them to return to their true home.
These images are meant to point us to the true and best remembering—that of the soul returning to God. In Metrum IX of Book III, the Lady beseeches God to bring men’s souls back to Himself, “and giving them light chariots fitting their heavenly nature / Broadcast them in the heavens and on earth, and by your bounteous law / Make them, turned towards you, with returning fire come back.” Remembering is indeed a kind of returning. As we go out from God into this life, we inevitably experience pain and grief. We are then tempted to search about us for earthly goods, to find happiness through using fame or honor or wealth for earthly ends. This use of goods can gradually corrupt us into beasts who have forgotten their true nature. Yet God is always seeking to draw us by His love back into His embrace. The mechanism by which He does this is the theosis that is described in the Consolation—as the Lady says, men “are made happy by the acquisition of divinity” and men “when they have acquired divinity, become gods.”1717. Boethius, Consolation III, pros. 10, 281. The only way for Boethius to reach this theosis is to cease idolatrously instrumentalizing the things of this world for his own carnal ends, and to love them for their source—recognizing that the “perfect good” he seeks in lesser things is actually in God1818. Boethius, Consolation III, pros. 10, 277. —and so become happy, and a god.
If we are using AI chatbots that, in their very nature as machines, will lead us down the tortuous bypaths of forgetfulness, which threatened Boethius and Augustine, then we too need a healing remembrance. Once more, we remember Augustine’s question about what is to be done when we forget the unchanging numbers behind music. “If anyone reminds him by questioning,” he wonders in his dialogue, “do you think those numbers return to him from the persons questioning, or he moves himself to something within his own mind whence returns to him what he had lost?”1919. Augustine, De Musica, 360. The answer that the Consolation gives seems to be both. Boethius needs reminding and questioning from someone outside of him—Lady Philosophy—so that he can return with his mind to the great hall of his memory, freely there to explore his interior self, and there find God. We too need a two-fold recollection.
First, we need to be questioned from outside ourselves, so that we can remember. Once we have deleted Claude or ChatGPT (or whatever the latest chatbot is) from our computers and phones—as we should—then the real conversation begins. The great inconvenience of no longer having a conversant, benevolent AI at our fingertips will be irrelevant when it comes to the benefits we will reap from the next step: seeking out people again, who do not let us extract things from the world according to our own desires. The other day my five-year-old son wanted to know what fireflies eat. We asked a kind lady at church who is a science teacher. She let him know that they sip nectar, that the young ones eat slugs, and that they may sometimes live such short lives that they eat nothing at all. Moreover, she also told him that where she grew up in North Carolina the fireflies would all light up together, so that you could see them illuminate a single tree at once. Three seconds later a nearby tree would glow in response. This is a meaningful memory to her, and now it will be for Kylian. This is how to do research, as well, for our most grown-up of projects. We do not know what we need to know.
Next, having been challenged by other people, we must then practice moving within our own interior selves, returning to that great hall of memory within which we confront self and God. We do this through honest prayer. This is why the Consolation ends the way it does. “Turn away then from vices, cultivate virtues, lift up your mind to righteous hopes, offer up humble prayers to heaven,” the Lady advises Boethius.2020. Boethius, Consolation V, pros. 6, 435. If he disappears in silence at the end of the Consolation, this might be as much a sign of his salvation as any word he might say. Likewise, every vaporous word we can remember having tapped into the text box of a chatbot, we can make a point to utter to God in the silence of our prayer time. That question we had which we wanted some entity to answer—a mundane question, or a deeper one—what would it mean to utter it to Him? What might He say in response?
Stephen Varvis argues that the Consolation as a whole is a kind of breaking down of the self into pieces—as Boethius is forced to examine his desires, griefs, and questions—so that he may be “re-collected” and built up again. In fact, Varvis relates this to what Boethius does in his theological tract Contra Eutyches, in which he breaks down the nature of personhood in order to more rightly speak of the nature of God. Might we not, Varvis suggests, see a similar process occurring in literary form in the Consolation?2121. Stephen Varvis, The Consolation of Boethius: An Analytical Inquiry into His Intellectual Processes and Goals (Mellen Research University Press, 1992), 55. Boethius is forced to break himself down into pieces so that he may understand himself again as a whole. Speaking of the man who lives in forgetfulness of eternal things, Boethius says that though his mind is “clouded and hidden by the body’s parts, / It is not totally forgetful of itself, / And the whole it keeps, losing the separate parts.” We must allow ourselves to be “broken down” into pieces before God as we honestly bring our griefs and desires to Him in prayer. We must, in this way, face ourselves so that we can be built up wholly again. Another way to say this is that Boethius’ salvation, and ours, is found in remembering our native country, and that the true Monarch of that land graciously responds to and communes with His subjects when they approach Him in prayer.
As Augustine tells us in Book XIV of De Trinitate, we most truly image God, however, when this mind which can remember, understand, and love itself reaches up higher—or, perhaps, we might say further inward—“to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made.”2222. Augustine, De Trinitate, 384. The final part of our interior journey should involve contemplation of the living God. It is in this mental act—as we encounter God in our memory, have a thought about Him, and linger to think about Him there, out of love and desire for Him—in which the triune God is most seen in us. This is, Augustine says, “man in terms of mind; the mind which is being renewed in the recognition of God according to the image of him who created man to his own image, and which thus achieves wisdom in the contemplation of things eternal.”2323. Augustine, De Trinitate, 399. In recalling, beholding, and desiring God, we participate in wisdom, which God is supremely. As Boethius says in his catechetical work De Fide Catholica, “the sole reward of blessedness is the contemplation of the Creator.”2424. Boethius, The Theological Tractates, “De Fide Catholica,” 71. In this act we begin to see Him ourselves, however dimly in this life. This is our greatest act of remembering, until we see Him one day face to face.
