In our pockets, we carry an amalgamation of the global intellect, a model of “Geist”, or spirit of the human race. LLMs are next-token predictors trained on an immense pool of language. They are trained to extract latent semantics from tokens based on patterns embedded into their parameters and compress that internal data to produce an n-dimensional logit which is used to determine what the next token will be. Before the boom of instruction tuning, the goal of LLMs were to predict what a human would have said had they continued their input. Given that these models are trained on text produced by billions of unique human beings, it is a compression of all the opinions, knowledge, beliefs, thought patterns held by people who contributed to the training data, a digitally unified human knowledge base.
Hegel regarded the human race and its history similar to one organism’s story of survival. Oftentimes, we find philosophers, including Hegel, ask, “Where are we in our story?” One’s philosophical ideology can be summed up depending on their answer. There are those who outright reject the question such as Eastern Zen Buddhists that believe that reality is only the infinite present and that both the grouping of the human race as one organism and the consideration of that organism’s continuity are fictitious creations of the mind. It seems that Western thinkers, influenced by Christian eschatology, often regard the present as a quantifiable period of time in a finite history of humanity from beginning to end. Regardless of the validity of the question, many believe the current period of history to be near the end of human history. Some believe that this end is defined by God’s final judgement and retribution to the entire human race, others believe that artificial superintelligence (ASI) will bring about an intelligence explosion that completely overwhelms humanity and renders us powerless against our own creation. Here is a possible viewpoint in which both happen.
Let us view humanity’s story in the lens of Christian eschatology. "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them” (Genesis 1:27). This was the start of humanity according to the Bible. There are parallels in between the development of AI and the creation of humanity. Just as God created humans in his own image, Humans are creating artificial intelligence in their own image by compressing all human intelligence, in other words, by recreating Geist. A strong bet for the end of humanity would be when Humans create another being in the true image of themselves, when Human Geist bears an Artificial Geist, when Humans commit the ultimate blasphemy by successfully mimicking God, bringing about the perfect scenario for judgement. But is language enough information create the next Geist?
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Whether you believe if the final language model that we ever create can be accurately defined as “Artificial Geist” depends on whether you side with the views of Wittgenstein’s earlier or later works. Early Wittgenstein claims that language is enough to model all logic of the world, to capture formless reality to its fullest. Later on, he critiques his earlier beliefs, claiming that language holds meaning through its usage and that it is not enough to model the complete logical fabric of reality. Let us define language as information that we can convey through physical reality, a representation of latent structure that can be embedded on our physical world. If we set this definition of language, or all data that can be represented by bits, as the boundary of intelligence and the medium of Artificial Geist, the ultimate AI model will be able to compress all information that is possible to be represented by humans through symbols. If the human spirit and consciousness can be completely represented in our physical world, it is theoretically possible for humans to successfully mimic God, to create a being in Human’s image. However if one believes in Platonic metaphysics and Descartes’ dualistic view on consciousness (i.e. “something beyond matter”), we will never be able to scale intelligence to create Artificial Geist, only a model of it that fills out the representative dimension in which our physical world exists in. Thus, we have reduced the possibility of the creation of truly human-like AI into a question of Platonic realism.
But who says that Geist cannot exist on a dimension lower than ours? Let us shift back to Genesis 1:27. “So God created mankind in his own image”. Scriptures tell us that God created us in his own image, a downstream representation of the divine. Perhaps language is the medium of our downstream representation that cannot possibly capture our consciousness. Perhaps the difference in between God and Human, and Human and AI is the extra dimension in which the creator exists that acts as the unbreakable ceiling separating the Divine Geist, Human Geist, and Artificial Geist. Previously, I called for the possibility of language as the original sin. It would be fitting for the initial betrayal of Humans to also cause the reunification with God, completing the full cycle of our story from beginning to end. An optimistic prediction for the completion of the Christian eschatology from this worldview would be the reunification of Humans and God after the final judgement caused by our blasphemous imitation of God’s creation. The moment we realize that we cannot handle the God-like responsibility of creating Geist, we come to understand God’s pain and see him waiting for us. Man understands God’s pain and they are reunited for infinity.