Computer World
On Simulationism, Magnifica Humanitas, the Boghossian Report, Remainder Humanism, the Philosophy of History, and the Emerging Theology of Artificial Intelligence
Listen to our conversation on the Lapham’s Quarterly podcast, alongside D. Graham Burnett and Zena Hitz, on the familiar topic: “Whither the Humanities?”
And, if you are enjoying our work, please upgrade to a paid subscription. We really do need your support!
I.
It was always bold, impudent even, to insist that material substrates or elementary particles could have what it takes to anchor reality as such. Perhaps the greatest propaganda coup of scientific modernity has been to convince a good number of us that such a claim is nothing more than right common sense, while any hesitation to affirm it could only be a symptom of soft-headed superstition or unhinged irrationality. To this extent I have long been perplexed by those philosophers who defend or at least toy with simulationism, and who seem to relish the small frisson of transgression it so reliably delivers to them. The suggestion that reality is more “bit”-like than “it”-like, seems to be experienced by its defenders as a relatively safe venture into philosophical edgelordism, making the majority normie philosophers cling to their “its” that much more desperately. The problem is not only that “its” were never at all well-suited to the heavy role of anchoring reality —what exactly, tell us, shouts “Being!” about an atom or mote or corpuscle?—, but also that historically their tenure in that role was relatively brief… no, it might better be said, they were still pre-tenure, and therefore still easy to get rid of.
It may be not, as simulationists have supposed, that we are discovering the true nature of external reality about which we had been uniformly wrong throughout all previous history, but rather that simulationist theories themselves are the predictable downstream narrative echo of a much more important historical process, namely: that we are transitioning out of the 400-year-long reign of physics as Prima Scientia. And the throne, some reliable indices suggest, is being usurped by what is for now still a multidisciplinary field of inquiry perhaps best identified as “information science”. One significant sign of the shift, as I and others have noted, came in 2024 when the computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield won the Nobel Prize in physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” I am myself no specialist, but as far as I can tell this is a research program more concerned with bits than “its”.
Physics is not dead, but it can now be pursued, indeed its highest distinction can now be earned, in a way that effectively decouples from the “real” world of particles in motion, and even from the more abstract but still physical forces —“physical”, if only par courtoisie— that earlier generations of scientific practitioners would have taken for granted as by definition the exclusively appropriate domain of their various inquiries. And information science, though it is articulated in updated terms and is being applied in pursuit of unprecedented practical results, is not itself new. This is not even the first time it has been instaured as Prima Scientia. More than one school of thought in classical India took śabda or “speech” as the first principle and starting point for any rigorous study of reality. The grammarian Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī of circa 400 BCE is at once a straightforward manual of Sanskrit grammar, but also, by its author’s own lights, an elaboration of the elementary constituents or as it were the “particles” of reality — it just happens that these particles are linguistic and not material. And you will likely also know something of another ancient tradition that similarly placed the “Word” at the beginning of all things.
The naïve formulation of the simulation argument —entertained as a real possibility by David Chalmers in his Reality+ (2022; my review here), and earlier geeked-out upon by Elon Musk in the early aughts, under the influence of Nick Bostrom— suggests that what we call reality shares more in the nature of what we see in our VR goggles than in whatever external system of particles in motion had been envisioned, albeit with a long succession of updates, from Democritus through Einstein. It is of course not at all naïve to question the suitability of pebble-like or marble-like or billiard-ball-like entities for the role of reality-anchor —again, they only came to occupy this role in the relatively recent past, under very special circumstances—; the naïveté is rather to suppose that this questioning had been made uniquely possible by our new technologies, and that reality shared in the nature of these new technologies in particular, rather than in some more abstractly articulable nature that Pāṇini, say, or John the Apostle, might be no less well-positioned to appreciate than Bostrom or Chalmers.
A somewhat more compelling neighbor of the simulation argument holds that many natural processes are in their nature computational —chemical reactions, air turbulence, cell division—, and to this extent we would do better to think, as David H. Wolpert and Jan Korbel do, in terms of “constructed” and “non-constructed” computers, i.e., the computers we built, as opposed to the computational systems that abundantly preexist us in nature. I have previously said far too many times that it would be a strange historical coincidence if the nature of reality just happened to be one we had to wait for the arrival of Space Invaders and Pac-Man to be able to see. That is, it would be surprising indeed if the technologies that did so much to shape the adolescent minds of Musk, Bostrom, Chalmers, and I suppose of me too, just happened also to be the clavis for unlocking the nature of the universe. And I have often pointed out, at a historicizing octave that these other Gen-Xers seem innately unable to hear, that we’ve seen this all before — in the 17th century, notably, it was the horological art, with its vanguard technology of clockworks, that most insistently suggested itself as model and epitome of the cosmos.
Recently, however, it seems to me that I have not been nearly historicist enough. “The cosmos is a clockwork,” I’m inclined to say now, is true as far as it goes, to the extent that if you approach it like a clockwork you will find that you can do some pretty remarkable things that you couldn’t do back when you conceptualized it as a horse (see the Rig Veda) or as some unspecified animal (the Stoics), or according to some other organicist model of the sort that reigned almost universally —the minoritarian countercurrents of ancient atomism and related tendencies notwithstanding— in the natural philosophy of Europe, the Mediterranean, and South and East Asia, until the end of what is periodized in Europe as the Renaissance (and much later still in some of these regions). It was by declaring the universe to be most akin to a variety of human-made artifact that natural philosophers became sufficiently emboldened to suppose that they might come to have full-fledged “maker’s knowledge” of nature, and it is the possibility of this sort of knowledge that in turn has served since the 17th century as the primary engine of technological progress: nature transformed into and exploited as an instrument in pursuit of our human ends.
Eventually, unsurprisingly, these remarkable ends that the early moderns were able to achieve yielded up more impressive instruments still, a process that eventually displaces the clockwork-model of the cosmos as somewhat rusted and unreliable. When this happens, “The cosmos is a computer” will come to ring truer, for experts and commoners alike, and will possibly shape the way external reality is seen in the 21st century even more comprehensively than the clockwork image shaped the 17th. But if we wish to understand why this image is so compelling, we would do better not to suppose, as Bostrom et al. seem to have done, that it is because we are getting things uniquely and unprecedentedly right, but because the computer in fact is a far more impressive instrument than the clock. To be convinced of this, you need only to consider the fact that a computer is a clock — but only among the many other things it also is.
The claim “The cosmos is a computer” is then true, I am prepared to say, in the sense that it expresses the principle that validates your investigation of the natural world in information-theoretical terms, just like “The cosmos is a clockwork” had earlier licensed treating the world in mechanical-physical terms. And we’re finding that once we’re free to go ahead and investigate nature in this new way, remarkable results ensue — results so remarkable in fact that it becomes very hard not to affirm, as true, what is now the reigning metaphor of our age: that the world is a computer.
To say that it’s “just” a metaphor, or just a pragmatic concession, is to my mind to position oneself as a vigil-holder in wait of some imaginary gold standard of context-independent objective truth for which, despite Paul Boghossian et al.’s great expectation, I just don’t think it makes any sense to hold our breaths.
II.
My real purpose in the present essay, though you surely will not have discerned this yet, is to place Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in historical context. Before I get there however allow me to say a few words about this other document, more bull as it were than encyclical, on “the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences”, that at least in my own circles is currently generating comparable levels of buzz and consternation.
Boghossian et al. hope to preserve the august old model of humanistic inquiry as a variety of Wissenschaft. Yet they fail to see that the primary obstacle to doing so is not the sort of critical inquiry that denies any particular primacy to wissenschaftlich approaches, but rather the massively more significant historical fact that we have brought into the world machines that are by now largely capable of delivering positive “research results” in our place, with the result that so long as you go on conceiving humanistic inquiry essentially as the “STEM lite” production of results of this sort, you are inevitably going to find yourself practicing what Leif Weatherby has astutely called “remainder humanism”. You can still get your Ph.D. on Kafka or Lucretius or whatever, at least for now, but already you must prepare yourself for a life strung along on postdocs that are —if you’re lucky!— only distally related to Kafka or Lucretius, while your actual work-tasks in fact look more like low-end data-entry or data-management than like anything we would have recognized as “research” as recently as 15 years ago.
It’s true that the “critical humanists”, by which I mean all those who have adopted the approaches Boghossian et al. bemoan, have often served as useful idiots abetting the rise of our new machine-dominated epistemic regime. But this regime most certainly would have successfully installed itself even if every single humanities professor had continued working until the bitter end in the venerable spirit of the great 19th-century German philologists. Our 19th-century philologists sought to put their names as authors on the covers of great books; in the late 20th century many were jockeying to be the authors of books that in some way or other declared the death of the author (perhaps contained within a larger category of “Man”); and in the 21st century, either way, whether you had once hoped your own authorship might afford you a small slice of immortality, or whether you thought rather that language was speaking through you, a hole in being, an objet petit a or whatever (I don’t even know what that means): either way, I was saying, you got the death of the author, and the death of the author precisely in his devourment by the machines his work served to train.
Lacking anything new or urgent to say about AI, the authors of the report can only rehash social-media squabbles from the past decade, treating these as the problem itself rather than as symptoms of a vastly greater economic-technological problem that would be just as real even if no one had ever got the idea to decouple sex and gender. And what they propose as strategy to fight this symptom of the illness taken for the illness itself, is an utterly pedestrian theory of knowledge that itself seems borrowed from the dumber corners of the anti-woke rabble-rousing internet, according to which the supreme purpose of natural-scientific and humanistic inquiry, alike and indiscriminately, is to give an account of the way the world actually is in itself, independently of our passions and biases and all the other idols of tribe and marketplace. There is next to nothing, in their vision of what the humanities might yet be hoped to be, concerning ethical self-cultivation, or civic belonging, or discovery of meaning in tradition — no mention, in other words, of those things that are soon going to be the only possible anchor of any defense of the humanities any (human) purseholder will care to hear, when machines will have proven themselves capable of doing what’s left of the wissenschaftlich part, that is, the production of positive “research results” of the sort that our funding bodies love to see us humanists promising, and pretending, to deliver.
The report is in the end a power-move, asserting a YouTuber epistemology as if it were the established consensus of all right-thinking institutionally recognized scholars. But ironically, in its ignorance of the way discursive public power actually works in 2026, for better or worse, it misunderstands itself. It fails to see that as a public intervention it is really very little different from all the other posting that’s going on all around us. It is slightly more formal, in that it lists institutional affiliations and you have to click to open the pdf, at least in the versions I’ve seen, which then brings up a document on your screen with some skeuomorphic connection to what used to come to us printed out on 8 1/2 x 11’’ paper.
Yet it remains for all that but a dressed-up post, and as such an invitation to spoofing, dunking, ratio-ing, and whatever else predictably comes in the wake of such self-serious communications from essentially offline institutionalists taking up a position in a culture-war dynamic that younger and far-more-online generations have already learned by heart and observed playing itself out, over and over again, to exhaustion. They imagine they’re releasing an authoritative declaration to the effect that truth is objective, and that in spite of some unfortunate errancies over the past years our institutions are still on truth’s side. What they’re in fact doing is coming late to the culture wars, and taking up one obvious position within them that any veteran participant or observer knows how to read and to slot as fast as an industrial-pulliculturist at a conveyer belt knows how to sex the newborn chicks moving past him.
It is especially absurd to me that such a report should have been produced by a panel 40% of whose members are analytic philosophers, given that I have spent the last thirty years hearing from members of this malnourished tribe that they do not consider their field a part of the humanities at all. When I was an undergraduate at UC Davis the philosophy faculty was actively pressing the dean’s office to be relocated to the faculty of natural sciences and mathematics. While acknowledging that they weren’t quite that either, they insisted it was a closer fit than the faculty of social sciences and humanities. I can remember in grad school, too, a very smart classmate from Mexico who was working on Quine and who had dared, when giving a presentation in a seminar, to construct an example for his argument that involved the name of the author of À la recherche du temps perdu. He dared not even to talk about Proust, but only to use his name, and that was already enough for some guy in the question period, some know-nothing Michigander in Dockers, to get some laughs by pronouncing the same name as if it rhymed with joust.
That’s how you police the boundaries of analytic philosophy: if anyone arrives in its realm bearing the sort of basic knowledge of arts, culture, and literature that comes automatically with a basic education in Latin America, say, or in Europe or in many other parts of the world but decidedly not the United States, you can be sure they’ll be taught very quickly to hide that earlier Bildung in order to conform to the expectations of the dominant Anglo philosophical culture into which, tragically, they have sought to move. Rule Number 1 of that culture is that you must abandon your interest in culture, and how it works. That is for the mere humanists, from whom we analytic philosophers are something quite distinct. And yet, it turns out analytic philosophers are prepared to present themselves as humanists when an opportunity is presented to assert institutional power over the other implicitly inferior humanities departments.
The Boghossian report, on my reading, sounds almost a perfect echo of the recent report of the Democratic National Committee on its electoral failures in 2024. Both are issued by a caste of well-ensconced elders who seem really to have no idea of what the true material causes of their respective crises are. The DNC report avoids taking responsibility for the manifest rejection of its platform by a critical number of voters, instead laying blame on the epistemological fog generated by new media technologies. The Boghossian report rehashes a few old tweets from preening wokesters and determines that the greatest threat to humanistic education is “relativism”, lumping the great Hayden White, author of that singular masterpiece of historical self-consciousness that is Metahistory (1973), together with the naïvest teenager who ever took to Tumblr to question the fixity of gender identity. It treats constructivism as if it were nothing but an irresponsible and immature affectation, thought up only in the past years, rather than, in many of its expressions, a sophisticated theoretical model that is almost certainly the correct one in at least some domains of inquiry, and that has a venerable ancestry connecting it over the centuries to such philosophical positions as skepticism, nominalism, and phenomenalism.
We have thus already seen two cases —two of countless many pouring forth daily from the Anglosphere— where even a bit of historical consciousness would have helped greatly to avoid misconstruing a contemporary problem. Before simulationism, there was gnosticism; before standpoint epistemology, there was Protagoras. These things keep coming back, likely, because they’re kinda true. In the past, it was among the aims of humanistic self-cultivation to arrive at an intellectual sensibility where one could delight in tracing out the historical threads of just such “kinda true” things. Today, by contrast, we are so estranged from the humanistic tradition, we are such remainder humanists, that we imagine the only reason to follow these threads is to determine which of them is the correct one. Truly, we’re just as simple as switching circuits.
III.
I don’t speak publicly about my religious faith nearly as much as I might, and indeed as some others might like to see. There are at least three reasons for this. One is that when it comes to faith I am, as the Gospels instruct us to be, “as a little child”, and that means, among other things, that at least in this domain I am not especially articulate. I’m not a trained theologian or scriptural hermeneuticist or anything of the sort, and it certainly shows when I begin to hold forth in this domain. A second reason is that the majority of my readers are dyed-in-the-wool naturalists, and I love them and all the things they study and care about, all the black holes and nematodes and so on, and I really would like to keep our worldly conversations going. As one spiritual advisor told me, faith casts the attainments of the intellect in a new light, but it does not show them to have been nothing. I want to be more like Leibniz or Robert Boyle, and to follow the model of the “Christian virtuoso”, than like Nicolaus Steno, who imagined after his conversion that piety required him to stop dissecting sharks and so on. A third reason is that my faith is really the one thing in my life that I hope to preserve from algorithmic capture — I do not want my feeds to get clogged up with chatter that is Christian-themed in its focus but for all that just as worldly as the fitness advice and the empty political Sturm-und-Drang it accompanies.
Still, I find that personal reflection on the nature of faith, on the power of faith, sometimes modulates into reflection on what might best be described as the philosophy of history, which has long been a leitmotif of my public-facing lucubrations. So I would, in a preliminary way, implore my naturalist friends simply to accept that profound faith experiences are among the things that truly do happen to some people in our shared world, and to this extent you really do gotta reckon with them, to paraphrase Kant on metaphysics. Of course most of you are perfectly polite when hearing about these experiences from others, and will say things like “wow so honest”. But one always has the sense that there is less a real reckoning there than a pinched politeness, somewhat as when you show your surgery scars in a bathing suit on Instagram, and your reliable circle of same-status friends show up to say: “So beautiful!” This comparison might sound offensive, but I mean it. To offer your living body as a sacrifice (Romans 12:1) is a pretty significant operation, and what comes out the other end can easily appear deformed, by worldly standards, even if it cannot fail to come across as beautiful when observed under the lens of love.
But let me not pinch anyone, and seek to make only the sort of point, like Descartes in the Meditations, that might be compelling to you as a reasoner whether you’ve got faith or not. I have, after all, spent some time considering the possible worldly sources of the intensity of the conversion experience, and I have been convinced that these do bring us some considerable way in our effort to make sense of it.
So think, now, of just how obvious the rational-scientific and naturalistic view of the world has seemed to you since your earliest exposure to ambient authoritative knowledge. One common account of why it seems so obvious is that it is true: the world really is a system of elementary particles knocking each other around, and that, with some fine-tuning and amendments, is more or less it. The problem is that just a little bit of familiarity with the history of science reveals that things are not nearly so simple. For one thing, as already suggested, the broad transition of the present moment from physics to information science may prove at least as significant as the previous transition from vital forces and sympathies to classical mechanics. But if we find that we are still more or less convinced of our own historically unprecedented rationality, and confident in our ability to commit ourselves only to real entities and not to constructed or imaginary ones, this can only have something to do not with the state of our knowledge but with our place in a knowledge tradition that understands itself as correct by definition (a common weakness of what are more properly called faiths): to be a naturalist is in effect to affirm that whatever entities turn out to exist, they are ipso facto the stuff of nature and therefore I am committed to them. This does sound awfully tautological, but it’s not the specter of tautology that concerns me here. Rather, what I want to say is that modern scientific rationality really is a faith-like tradition, one we’ve all more or less inherited, and one that is robust enough to weather at least a certain number of updates to its core ontology.
I feel as if my own conversion, at least the worldly aspect of it, had much to do with a dawning awareness that modern scientific rationality emerged through rupture with a much older tradition, a tradition that likewise presented itself not as, or not only as, tradition, but as simple, incontrovertible, and exclusive truth. It is as if I suddenly found this older truth tradition obvious in a way that is similar to the obviousness of the tradition I was born into — similar, but much deeper. And the inherited knowledge of ambient authority was able then to come to appear as only a thin membrane stretched over a much thicker layer of finely aged intergenerational truth, truth that feels just as true as the love that made you. It’s something like finding the fine old wines behind all the bottles of swill, I suppose is all I’m saying. Shucks, my speech just ain’t up to this sublime subject yet.
Anyhow one of the really quite interesting discoveries I’ve made about Christianity since my conversion —and one that I think you will benefit from reflecting on yourself, whether you are able to do so from a faith-informed perspective or not— is that it offers a profoundly historicist account of human knowledge and its normative basis. No less than Hegel or Marx, the author of the Acts of the Apostles affirms plainly that truth itself unfolds in history. Most importantly, up until that precise moment of his writing, it had been enough for each ethnoreligious community to mind its own affairs, and for all but the Jews, who had Divine Law, to go on worshipping their idols and perceiving the nature of God but dimly through the works of the creation. From that moment on, by contrast, there was to be only one standard of truth, and it was to be affirmed in explicit, propositional form by everyone.
Thus in Acts we find Paul preaching at the Areopagus, affirming an almost proto-Spinozian, or at least proto-Augustinian and proto-Malebranchean, vision of all created beings as “living and moving and having [their] being [in God],” and even quoting a poetic hymn to Zeus, perhaps coming from Epimenides, to the effect that “we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). A few chapters prior Paul has affirmed that even when past generations of gentiles were “allowed to walk in their own ways,” still, “he did not leave them without witness,” since he gave them, Paul seems to wish to say, ample natural-theological evidence of his nature in “giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness” (Acts 14:15-17). But that low-level implicit knowledge is no longer going to cut it: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts:17-30).
Again, whether you recognize that command as binding on you or not, you must agree that this all marks a significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, as a shift, for better or worse, from a communitarian to a universalist standard of truth. This standard will be carried over, again for better or worse, across the next most significant moment in the history of planetary consciousness, with the arrival of scientific modernity and the emergence of the secular public sphere.
IV.
This more recent transition did not entirely destroy Christianity, though it did significantly reduce the ability of the church to rely on state power for its own preservation. Other than its almost comically tiny rump state in the heart of Rome, Catholicism today is mostly sustained by grass-roots initiatives: not by armed conquest or state persecution of religious minorities, but by bake-sales and crab-feeds, does the faith live on. The transition also, famously, created a significant rupture, arguably more significant than the East-West Schism of the 11th century or any prior to that, and one that, I believe, is crucial for any effort to make out the outlines of our own near-future — a near-future that will be largely shaped by emerging information technologies.
A remarkable recent survey showed that very few young Americans who are technically some variety of Protestant are keen to use that description of themselves; a surprising number of them do not even know what it means. One might conjecture that the historical life of Protestantism has been coextensive with the historical life of the book, as primary unit of circulation of information from the late 15th century to the early 21st. The signature anchor of Christian faith for millions of Protestant Christians, including all my own ancestors on both sides, was the physical copy of the Bible, in the relevant national language, by the bedside. And now, as books become ever less salient to social life in general, it is not so surprising to find that a religious orientation historically grounded in individual encounter with God sola scriptura (that’s ablative) is now mutating, perhaps speciating, into something new.
Whether or not there will be a post-Protestant, or post-post-Protestant Christianity that is “dematerialized” by the technologies of our day, in the same way our homework assignments and medical forms have been dematerialized, remains to be seen. But it does not seem far-fetched to expect that the current information revolution will create new ruptures in the history of the church at least as great as the one that accompanied, with just a bit of delay, the print revolution at the beginning of the modern period. And just as in that previous rupture the branching sect was the one that more vigorously centered the most significant object of the most recent information revolution —the book—, so too in the present it is likely that at least some new post-post-Protestant sects will distinguish themselves through the symbolic and practical centering of newer information technologies, especially AI.
Of course, this historical echo is not precise. For one thing, there already were books in antiquity — the Bible itself is full of book talk! But those first touched by Christian faith were not touched in book form, as it would much later make sense in the world of Martin Luther to expect a good number of Christians to be. And approaching the matter from the other direction one might also point out that the Bible is full of computations, as Isaac Newton is decidedly not celebrated today for having noted, and to that extent a future “computational Christianity”, like the past centuries of bibliocentric Christianity, might be thought of not so much as introducing something altogether new into the faith, as rather circling back to one of its earlier and long-neglected potentials.
Anyhow a broad split might be expected in which the post-post-Protestants emerge more clearly defined into the cultural landscape, as the eager adopters of the newest technological mediators of social reality, and the Catholics hang back a bit and sort of say: “Hmm, nah, we’re mostly gonna sit this one out too, and keep doing communion, both human and holy, in the oldest way we know.”
At least that’s the emerging landscape I thought I might soon see, upon reading Magnifica humanitas. And as for the suggestion that Claude had an artificial hand in producing that text —a suggestion I have both read on Substack, and, separately and privately, heard from someone very close to the source—, I say, fine if true. Please, magnificent self-contradicting humans, give the Pope a break. He’s got an awful lot on his plate, and his heart is in the right place and honestly Claude is just so fast…
*
We’re bleeding paid subscribers! If you enjoy our work please upgrade and help us to reverse this trend!
Gift subscriptions are another way to help!
So are shares!
