The Literate and the Learned: Education in the Age of AI

If we are educating a person we must educate that person. And unless we decide to go full-borg, no amount of skill in a machine will translate to skill in a person. If he doesn’t know in his mind, he does not know; he is not educated.

Knut Ekvall, The Reading Lesson, oil on canvas, ca. 1880–1905. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

“Education is the science of relations.”

-   Charlotte Mason

“ἀρχὴ παιδεύσεως ἡ τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐπίσκεψις.”

The study of words is the beginning of education.

-   Antisthenes, pupil of Socrates

A Map and a Story

What effect will LLMs have on education?[1] You may scroll through answers for days and come up empty; without knowing what education is, we cannot know what might change it, or how. Our modern world leaves that definition (like most definitions) up to the individual. But this is false ecumenism. To analogize to driving, in order to get somewhere we must know where we are, where we’re going, and the roads between. I intend to sketch exactly that, to show that even if an LLM alters the means of education, it can never alter its essence, for children are born persons and education is the science of relations. But first, please forgive a seemingly discursive but, I swear, relevant anecdote.

I have an uncle who is the very model of a modern early adopter. He pursues all that is new and shiny, anything that might solve a problem real or imagined. And one can hardly blame him, for he was one of those early computer programmers who paved our modern world. Entirely self-taught, he retired as head of all computer systems for the judiciary of his State. But to use technology is not necessarily to rely upon it, and yet my uncle does rely upon it, sometimes to hilarious result.

Circa 2005, he bought one of those early GPS devices, a Garmin. This could get him anywhere! And he needed it, because he could get lost in his hometown. Wanting to show off the new device, he plugged in the local Best Buy. We needed to get there for some now forgotten reason but did not know exactly the way to go. We just knew, as everyone did in those now forgotten days, that “we could probably figure it out.” 

But he worried we’d get lost, so he would take us with the Garmin! We followed him in our car and, as we rose upon an overpass, we saw the Best Buy off to our right. We expected him to take the next exit. He didn’t. We followed him still, for he had the new GPS. We thought we must have been wrong. Five minutes later, he pulled off the road into a dirt parking lot. “It got turned around,” he said, “but it sees it now.” So we followed him again and, again, we missed Best Buy. On the third pass, we took the exit and a right and arrived in the parking lot. My uncle arrived fifteen minutes later.

What Is AI?

 All us old-timers remember such mistakes and how common they were. Everyone (I doubt not) still experiences them sometimes, and this goes to the very nature of what an LLM is. We call it artificial intelligence, but it is not in any real sense intelligent. Instead, it’s an information compiler, far more sophisticated than an Excel spreadsheet or even a Google search but fundamentally no different than either. This can be a little hard to see, not just because it communicates with us in something approaching natural language but because our modern world has redefined “intelligence” to mean “information processing,” despite all wisdom literature in history warning against just such a mistake.[2]

In the beginning of his great double-volume work on Shakespeare published just after WWII, Harold Goddard chided us for our confusion: 

To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it. The subservience of so much of our science to invention is the proof of this. We want the facts for the practical use we can make of them. We want the tree for its lumber, not, as Thoreau did, to make an appointment with it as with a friend. We want uranium in order to make an atomic bomb, not for the mysterious quality that gave it its heavenly name.[3] When the intellect speaks, its instrument is a rational prose. The more unmistakable the meaning the better. (The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 11)

Years before Goddard, Chesterton made fun of this confusion in his newspaper columns:

Our generation professes to be scientific and particular about the things it says; but unfortunately it is never scientific and particular about the words in which it says them. It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else. If an astronomer is careless about words, one cannot help fancying that he may be careless about stars. (The Illustrated London News, April 4, 1908, quoted in The Soul of Wit by Dale Ahlquist)

And in our own time, Dr. Iain McGilchrist, British neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has tried to explain the same. On a podcast with Jonathan Pageau in late 2025, he said,

[O]ur society has drifted into an understanding, if you can even dignify it with the word, an understanding, of the world which is purely that of the left hemisphere, without the complicating and sophisticating and reality-orientating effect of the right hemisphere.[4] So there’s an easy, lazy, completely morally and intellectually bankrupt vision of the world which is that of reductive scientific materialism. That the world is made up of things. Those things are isolated from one another but can bump into one another, and they are basically meaningless, purposeless, valueless, and aimless.

And we see that same “reductive scientific materialism” in LLMs, this compiling up of Fact without any regard to philosophy or tangible reality, and we label that thing intelligent. It is not.[5]

Dr. McGilchrist says later in the same interview,

I see AI as not artificial intelligence but as artificial information processing, which it does exceptionally well. And that’s largely because of piggybacking off what humanity has given. It simply sucks it all up and, of course, because of electrical circuitry, it can bring things together very fast, but what it’s doing is simply parasitical on things it has heard—or not even heard because it can’t—but has acquired information that human beings have said or done. And of course it can mimic a response that a human being might make; in the eighteenth century there were already clunky, brazen-headed machines that would sort of speak, in a manner of speaking, and what’s really happened is that we’ve just taken this very, very much further. But it’s still the same thing.

A computer can process in minutes what would take a human hours, weeks, months, lifetimes to manage. But the machine doesn’t understands the data. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. He quotes Einstein:[6] “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Says Dr. McGilchrist, “[T]hat is where we’re at.”

Because of this, an LLM can make a metrically “correct” poem without ever being a poet or an explainer of poetry. To the extent it seems to understand a poem, it is in fact merely algorithmically rephrasing what real scholars, students, and amateurs have written about that poem.[7] So while it can tell you how or where Wildfred Owen interrupts the expected meter in his poem “Dolce et Decorum Est,” it will only be able to explain to you that Owen does this to disorient his reader as the subject of his poem is disoriented if scholar or amateur has set down that explanation in writing before.

Coleridge is reported to have said, “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order.”(Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge..., p. 76.) But how does one understand “best” if he cannot feel the poem? 

“Our society has inflicted upon itself systemic failure like a gunshot wound. Today we, most of us, believe that changing our words will change the shape of reality. Throughout history, they, almost all of them, knew that reality existed independent of us and by its pressure would change the shape of us.”

And that is fundamentally why an LLM cannot “think,” because its “thinking” is entirely notional. We discuss with each other through notions,[8] but we do not think that way. In his magnum opus, The Grammar of Assent, Cardinal St. John Henry Newman broke out the two types of “apprehension” we partake in during our lives. 

To apprehend notionally is to have breadth of mind, but to be shallow; to apprehend really is to be deep,[9]but to be narrow-minded. The latter is the conservative principle of knowledge, and the former the principle of its advancement. Without the apprehension of notions, we should for ever pace round one small circle of knowledge; without a firm hold upon things, we shall waste ourselves in vague speculations. (Chapter 3)

Educational philosopher Charlotte Mason argued the same in different words: “The universe of mind, as the universe of matter, is governed by unwritten laws of God; that the child cannot blow soap bubbles or think his flitting thoughts otherwise than in obedience to divine laws.” (Home Education, p. 39). Economist Thomas Sowell said it even more simply: “Think things, not words.” (Basic Economics). If “[t]o apprehend notionally” is only part of education, and the “shallow[er]” part, then what might it mean to “apprehend really” and how do we make it part of education?

How Are We Different?

Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances (and elsewhere) argued just this, that we have lost the relationship between words and things, and not because we don’t understand what words are but because we don’t understand what things are. Summarizing his work, literary critic and teacher Angelina Stanford said, “The real world is not inside of us; it’s outside of us.”[10] What Barfield is saying is exactly Sowell’s “Think things, not words”; thus it’s also Mason and Coleridge.

When an LLM sees the word “tree,”[11] it graphs how often that word appears alongside words like “leaf” or “walk” or “forest,” how seldom with “smell,” “blue,” or “Ginger Ale.” This is thinking words, thinking notionally. But when we see the word “tree,” we remember trees.[12] We remember the smell of damp earth, the shine of ever-blue sky, and, yes, perhaps we do remember Ginger Ale, if that’s what we shared with our father while he taught us how to build a treehouse and (inadvertently I’m sure) curse like a sailor.

Or imagine trying to describe a reality like the Trinity or God’s Eternal Love. There is a reason most Traditions call these aspects of religion “mysteries,” and why it can make good satire. The Catholic Church defines a mystery as “a supernatural truth, one that of its very nature lies above the finite intelligence.” As Ms. Stanford says about Adam and Eve, “When Genesis says that Adam ‘knew’ Eve, does it mean he comprehended her with his rational mind? He filled out a comprehension worksheet on Eve?” (Please do not ask me to fill out a comprehension worksheet on my wife.) “As soon as he writes his name on the top of the worksheet, you’re like ‘wrong, incorrect, you have failed the worksheet—try again.’” Adam did not fill out comprehension worksheets on his wife; he united with her, becoming (famously) “one flesh.” This is thinking things.

If you’re still a little confused about what “thinking things” means, it’s no wonder. The concept is hard, hard specifically because it is not notional and so cannot be systematically explained in words. But here’s another example. In the Anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (and spoiler alert for the first few episodes), two precocious young students of that world’s science-cum-magic system try to bring their mother back from the dead. They do this even though they know they shouldn’t. They do it because they’re young (around ten) and they are desperate. They’re grieving—of course they’re grieving. So they gather all the biological components of a person[13] and try to “transmute” her back to life. It goes horribly wrong, so wrong that one of them loses an arm and a leg; the other loses his entire body and only through the quick-thinking of his brother is saved from total destruction, though remains imprisoned in a suit of armor. To tie it together, thinking words (thinking notionally) is if we think a tree is its material substance; this can be very useful in understanding a tree, but it is not enough (“broad but shallow,” as Cardinal St. John Henry Newman said). Thinking things is remembering “tree” by feeling the tree against our skin, watching it grow, seeing its leaves fall, and breathing the sky above our head.

In this confusion, our society has inflicted upon itself systemic failure like a gunshot wound. Today we, most of us, believe that changing our words will change the shape of reality. Throughout history, they, almost all of them, knew that reality existed independent of us and by its pressure would change the shape of us. And our ancestors believed this while never discounting our ability to plow fields, build machines, dam rivers, irrigate crops, etc. Meanwhile, we moderns believe that words give us power to shape reality, and thus, to take the starkest example, we call men women and mutilation care.

This approach to language and its literature aims to turn us into badly performing LLMs, and it follows the path of I. A. Richards, who believed that (and tell me if this sounds familiar) words were used primarily for power and control. He believed this so much that his epigones wrote a book summarizing his ideas; they called it The Control of Language. Many and I hope most of those reading this have heard of the book, though perhaps not by name. This is “The Green Book” C. S. Lewis describes in The Abolition of Man. Its educational ideas are also what Lewis spent his academic career arguing against: “The whole school of critical thought which descends from Dr. Richards bears such deep marks of its anti-Christian origins that I question if it can ever be baptized.” (“Christianity and Culture” in Christian Reflections)

What I will call the “Richards Confusion” is why so many of us think Bob’s Big Book or a short tract on grain elevators will teach a child as much “Reading Comprehension” as will James Baldwin’s Fifty Famous People. If you don’t believe me, I accidentally ran my own little experiment for you. Just after Easter, I wrote on the site formally known as Twitter, “It’s not hard to get children interested in Shakespeare. Any child is interested in Shakespeare. All you have to do is read The Bard to him. But if you keep him on a diet of Captain Underpants or The Farting Dragon, he will, by ten, no longer be interested in Shakespeare.” The reactions were exemplary.[14]

One man (from a now deleted account) wrote, “I do not see a problem with a child being more interested in Dav Pilkey [author of Captain Underpants] than Shakespeare.” My favorite may be, “Retarded nonsense from a round goblin looking man… ALL [the books I read] made me love reading more and ALL of it had an appropriate time and place.” One woman wrote, “Keep children reading, in whatever form they’ll tolerate. Time spent in books will morph as their maturity does to a wider variety.” To this I said, “Keep children eating, in whatever form they’ll tolerate. That’s why I only give my children cotton candy and fruit loops.”[15]

Coleridge knew about such men. He wrote, 

A very slight knowledge of Music will enable anyone to detect discords in the exquisite harmonies of Haydn or Mozart; and Bentley has found more false grammar in the Paradise Lost than ever a poor boy was whipped for through all the forms of Eton or Westminster; but to know why the minor note is introduced into the major key, or the nominative case left to seek for its verb, requires an acquaintance with some preliminary steps of the Methodical scale, at the top of which sits the author, and at the bottom, the critic. (Treatise on Method, p. 32)

So if this critical approach is not the path, what is?

Ms. Stanford uses Aslan’s Death and Resurrection (spoiler alert) as an example. She says we do not understand the notion of Christ’s Death and Resurrection better for reading about Aslan’s, but we do understand its reality better. We apprehend it in our imaginations and thereby participate (imaginatively) in His Death and Resurrection, as any Christian might who does the Stations of the Cross or other like Lenten observance. It is, in fact, very much like the Lectio Divina, the practice of reading and meditating upon Scripture. Ms. Stanford says,

And this is why it is so important to reject ways of reading that insist on placing the experience of literature in the rational mind, testing comprehension, turning books into fodder for logical debate, or critical thinking skills, or discussion. Those are the teaching activities that stand between the child and the book. They block the door of that mystical experience.

Does this mean we do nothing? That’s it, we give up, all we can do is give the child a book and go home? Not in the slightest! But in teaching literature (or music, or anything), we must understand what we’re teaching. There’s a possibly apocryphal story of Beethoven. He played a concerto for a small number of his patron’s guests, and, after he was done, a young count asked him what the piece “meant.” For answer, Beethoven growled anger, bent back over the piano, and played the whole piece over again. Another possibly apocryphal story is about T. S. Eliot. A man came up to him at a party and wanted to know what one of his poems meant. He replied, “You want me to say it worse?”[16]

Flannery O’Connor made this point in more colorful language:

People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction… When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. (“Writing Short Stories,” Mystery and Manners)

And here’s Chesterton on the same (forgive me) theme:

Some people, for instance, think that Ghosts [by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen] is an argument against certain forms of married life. Of them it can only be said that if King Lear were written in modern times by a Norwegian they would think it an excellent argument against parents bringing up their own children. It never occurred to anyone in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries to regard King Lear as a controversial pamphlet against parents […] there is no moral to the story, except the monotonous “sunt lachrymae rerum.” (“Lunacy and Letters,” Daily News, May 18, 1907)

The “point” of reading Lear is to have an encounter with Lear, the “point” of Beethoven’s concerto or Eliot’s poem is to encounter them, to participate alongside the composer and previous generations in this mystical experience we call Literature; we encounter Christ’s Death and Resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the lives of those men and women in Fifty Famous People. That is why Captain Underpants or stories about grain elevators are not and cannot be the same. This also tells us how to teach well (but more on that anon).

Ms. Stanford interviewed Peter Hitchens for her podcast, and there he tells a story of Carol Service during Christmas. He says that while the King James Version (KJV) has largely been abolished from English churches, one service will have a child come up to read passages of the KJV before the hymns; “[The KJV] was written in a period before mass literacy so that it could be read aloud […] and the child is utterly unfamiliar with this language and has never seen it before, but you can see it run through him or her like fire.” 

Charlotte Mason said, “When they will see that words are consecrated as the vehicle of truth and are not to be carelessly tampered with in statement or mutilated in form” we must let the child encounter them and “[p]erhaps we should postpone parsing, for instance, until a child is accustomed to weigh sentences for their sense, should let them dally with figures of speech before we attempt minute analysis of sentences” (Towards a Philosophy of Education, “Chapter 9: The Way of the Reason”). 

This is where the proponents of LLMing education err. We are not meat-LLMs to have some of our functions offloaded onto more advanced software. If we do not confront children with education, they will remain ignorant. If we do, LLMs become all but superfluous. It’s not that LLMs are useless (I used them for this article, as a form of super-charged Google). As Dr. McGilchrist says, they are “artificial information processing” and often very accurate.

It’s my uncle and his GPS all over again. It’s not that the Garmin was never useful or accurate; if it had been even then as inaccurate as the Best Buy fiasco makes out, he never would have used it. But when these GPS devices do go wrong, the only way to correct the error is to have experience with roads and how they work. Even my by-then only couple years of experience driving was sufficient to correct the Garmin’s error. But that’s only because I had those two years and an invaluable habit of getting lost and finding my way again.

Towards a Philosophy of Education

There’s another GPS-inspired metaphor here. Even if the machine is always right (as the Spartans said, “If”), it still needs us to turn the car. And while for cars this may no longer be always true, in education it must be by definition. The moment the person stops needing to “turn the car” in education is the moment we’ve stopped educating. That’s axiomatic and yet also what the majority of schools seem to be doing; my own local public school is introducing LLMs into every grade of their (no longer accurately labeled) “education.” 

As Miss Mason wrote,

In the early days of a child’s life it makes little apparent difference whether we educate with a notion of filling a receptacle, inscribing a tablet, moulding plastic matter, or nourishing a life, but as a child grows we shall perceive that only those ideas which have fed his life, are taken into his being; all the rest is cast away or is, like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury. //Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas.[17] (Towards a Philosophy of Education, p. 108–09)

So this is how we teach children. Our job as teachers is not to encourage discussion or editorializing in our students. Our job is especially not to place a piece of software between our children’s eyes and reality. Our job is to clear the dross of modern life away so they can see their books and the world around them more clearly,[18] to give them crisper, clearer, cleverer sight so they can have better, fuller, and more profound encounters with reality. 

This is explicitly what C. S. Lewis was trying to do in Narnia. At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund that they will not return to Narnia. Crying, Lucy says:

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.

“Are — are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

(Chapter 16, “The Very End of the World”)

If you are hostile to the claims of Christianity, do not let it blind you to the underlying reality Lewis (whose books appeal to the religious and secular alike) describes here. When a man encounters reality in a book, he encounters it more fully in the world.

At this time, it is perfectly reasonable if a reader is all but shouting at his screen “but what about subjects other than literature!” I could be coy and say, “The title of the piece is ‘The Literate and the Learned,’ you had to know what you were getting into,” but in reality I employ literature as examples not because they are the most apposite to education but because they are the most available to me. I study literature, love literature, and try to write literature. But learning is not dependent on the subject learned but on the mind learning; to learn about learning literature is to learn about learning anything. Charlotte Mason wrote,

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life.––We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands upon us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders. (School Education, p. 170)

History buffs walk battlefields for it gives them a sense of the territory that ancient armies found themselves navigating. Architectural buffs stand inside the vault of Cathedrals or on Castle battlements so they can feel how these spaces work upon the minds and hearts of men. Science buffs hear the birds sing, watch berries grow and seed, observe the rainbow plumage of peacocks, the dun plumage of peahens, and they wonder how and they wonder why. They care to know the answers, and, if they care for the answer more than for the pride of being seen to know the answer, then they, through the miracle of the human mind, often discover Truth in all its (I’d say His) Glory.

Man would never have found himself capable of reaching outer space had he not first looked upon the stars and marveled at their patterned music. The advertising guru Rory Sutherland has “Rules of [Advertising] Alchemy,” and one of those is “The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience.”[19] As with advertising, so with family life, friends’ gossip, reading, lazing at the beach, driving across the country, indeed with anything at all—and so indeed with education.

Conclusion

Some people have a hard line against LLMs. That may even be you. After all, no LLM could ever guide you into its mind, for it has no mind. It cannot share the personal associations I have shared with you in this article (the Ginger Ale, the Garmin). And I haven’t even touched upon the Copyright issues (and I won’t). So if you have a hard line against LLMs, I do not blame you. But I do not share that hard line, as you already know. I’ve already said how I used an LLM for this article. I use one in my language study also. Absent the money to keep a teacher around twenty-four-seven, I use LLMs as a “second pair of eyes” on translation work. I find this useful in Ancient Greek and even more useful in Spanish.[20]

But my use of the LLMs would be not just use-less but actually harmful if I hadn’t a real, live teacher and a real book written by a real, live teacher to guide me. An example from the other week. I had the LLM look at a translation I made: κεκομήκαμεν σὺν τοῖς θεοῖς, εὕρετε τὴν εἰρήνην καὶ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς ἠνέγκατε τὴν χαράν.[21] It told me that I made a mistake with ἠνέγκατε, that it should be ἤνεγκατε.[22] But if you know Greek (and I don’t know it well, but I know it enough for this) you know that an accent can never be more than three syllables from the end of a word; ἠνέγκατε is the furthest back the accent could possibly go.

If I had not had the experience of apprehending Greek really, I would never understand what was wrong with the LLM’s notional apprehension of it, its notional correction of my translation.[23] Now, of course, the go-to argument against my laugh at LLMs here is, “It’s the worst it will ever be” (see also here, or here, or here); that is, even if LLMs now imperfectly translate, soon they will not just have the mechanics down flawlessly but surpass in eloquence the best human translators. And this will be true in every field of human endeavor.[24]

Even if the statement is itself true (and I rather doubt it), it fails as an argument in the sphere of education, and I hope the reasons are as clear as the waters of Delos after this article. In short, if we are educating a person we must educate that person. And unless we decide to go full-borg, no amount of skill in a machine will translate to skill in a person. If he doesn’t know in his mind, he does not know; he is not educated.

We have an example of how this works in the last paragraph. Back up in the last clause of the first sentence, there is a joke, a pun, that one would not get unless he knew Greek. The phrase was “as clear as the waters of Delos”; “clear” in Greek is δῆλος; the island of Delos is Δῆλος. It is in exactly these literary flourishes where one needs the language in his bones to apprehend the real meaning. Everything else is simply an imperfect retelling.[25]

A person is not all he can achieve, all he can produce. Perhaps the most sound criticism of “neoliberalism”[26]is that it conflates a man’s identity with what he can produce, and LLMs turn this confusion up to eleven. A man may have been able to “produce” an article like this one with an LLM, but he wouldn’t have been able to produce this article with an LLM. My own idiosyncratic take on the world, my particular set of associations, like my story about my uncle and his Garmin, my associating trees with ginger ale because that’s what my father and I always drank while we worked on projects in the forest, no LLM in the world could quite reproduce that. 

Now that certainly doesn’t mean this article is the best ever written, it doesn’t even mean it’s necessarily convincing, but it’s a real work of a real mind, really educated. And if we are to allow any hope for our own children to find a mathematical breakthrough, to make a scientific discovery, or to enjoy either, to paint a beautiful portrait, to design or decorate a comfortable home, or, in short, to contribute to or even understand a single object of our culture, then we must remember that however advanced an information processing system gets, it is not (definitionally) an education. LLMs are not the death of education; they certainly aren’t its savior; they are simply irrelevant to it. For an education is the science of relations worked out within a single mind.

Endnotes

[1] LLM stands for “Large Language Model,” and I shall be using that acronym instead of “AI” because, for reasons I will try to make clear, these machines are not actually intelligent.

[2] “Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.” Proverbs 26:12

[3] These remind me of that famous Tolkien line; in The Two Towers, he has Faramir (all the best of Gondor) say, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

[4] The left hemisphere he calls the information-processing, reason-finding hemisphere. See The Master and His Emissary for a fuller explanation.

[5] This is a graver mistake than most realize, for what is by its nature an object has re-established itself (or, rather, has been re-established by us) as an imagined subject, an imaginary friend with a will we cannot easily see. I’m reminded of Mr. Arthur Weasley: “‘Ginny!’ said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. ‘Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain. Why didn’t you show the diary to me, or your mother? A suspicious object like that, it was clearly full of Dark Magic—’” (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 18 “Dobby’s Reward”)

[6] Apocryphally, it looks like, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/18/intuitive-mind/

[7] Which is why there’s a worry about LLMs eating their own young, that is there’s a worry about what might happen when LLMs start recursively reporting as “fact” what other LLMs have generated, often mis-generated, about a subject.

[8] As education degrades, it is increasingly true that people think and argue through notions alone.

[9] By “really” Cardinal St. John Henry Newman means “in the real world,” not that “apprehend[ing] notionally” is fake.

[10] For much of this section, I will be relying on Ms. Stanford’s talk “The Abolition of Language and the Descent into Tyranny,” found here. As it’s not free, you will either have to trust me or fork over the $9.

[11] Well… it doesn’t see, for of course it can’t. Please do notice how every word we grasp at to describe education names a tactile reality.

[12] And do remember that Memory was the mother of the Muses.

[13] “Water—thirty-five liters; carbon—twenty kilograms; ammonia—forty liters; lime—fifteen kilograms; phosphorus—800 grams; salt—250 grams; saltpeter—100 grams; sulfur—eighty grams; fluorine—seven-point-five grams; iron—five grams; silicon—three grams; and a small amount of fifteen other elements… that is the material makeup of a single average adult human body, if you were to calculate it. Even though, through science we are able to know this much, there has never been a successful reported case of anyone actually transmuting a human body. Scientists have been researching what it is that is missing for several centuries now.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pCcx261t68

[14] That is, they serve wonderfully as examples.

[15] The most depressing of all were the perhaps bakers’ dozen who came into my mentions to tell me that Shakespeare was overrated. Of course, when a man tries to indict Shakespeare all he manages to do is to confess his own guilt; one does not judge but is judged by Shakespeare.

[16] This is not just an artsy-fartsy kinda thing. Dickens knew this, about science, when he gave us Sissy Jupe in the beginning of Hard Times. Mr. Gradgrind (and what a name!) starts questioning Miss Jupe (or “girl number twenty” as he calls her) about her father, who cares for horses: 

“‘Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. ‘Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!’
[…]
‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’

‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’”

[Chapter II “Murdering the Innocents”]

If we didn’t get the joke from the dialogue and action, we can get it from the chapter’s title (“Murdering the Innocents”). We come to see quite easily that Sissy Jupe knows what a horse is much better than Gradgrind, for she has lived among horses and loves them. He, meanwhile, is guilty of attempted murder, at least of her imagination (and he does almost cause the death of one of his students—but I shan’t spoil more, it’s a wonderful book and well worth a read).

[17] The word “idea” here may confuse more than illuminate. Indeed, it suggests the opposite of what she meant, for an “idea” to us is a decent synonym for a “notion.” But even in English, the word originally meant something more like “archetype” or “mental picture.” The word comes from Latin idea, which itself comes from Greek ἰδέα. (And you can tell how important it’s been by how little it has changed.) Ιδέα means something more like form (thus Platonic Ideas/Forms) or shape or reality. The very opposite of a “notion” in our modern conception. See https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=idea & https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=ἰδέα&la=greek#lexicon

[18] I say “modern life” here not because modern life is bad per se but because if we read books from other times, we will find ourselves confused if we stay frozen within our modern frame. For example, look to note 16 and how “idea” has changed. C. S. Lewis calls this the “dangerous sense” of words. (Studies in Words, “Introduction”) These are words whose definitions we think we know but we come to find have changed meanings over the centuries. Anyone who has read a work written before the nineteenth century has seen how words like “diverted,” “hussy,” “villain,” or “orgy” did not mean what they do now.

[19] From before even the first official page of his book Alchemy, Sutherland sets a tone in melodious harmony with my own: “Unfortunately, because reductionist logic has proved so reliable in the physical sciences, we now believe it must be applicable everywhere - even in the much messier field of human affairs. The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic - a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles. But what if this approach is wrong? What if, in our quest to recreate the certainty of the laws of physics, we are now too eager to impose the same consistency and certainty in fields where it has no place?” (Alchemy, xi). The only thing I’d add to this is a skepticism in the existence or usefulness of such logical certainty in the sciences themselves, a certainty that is still largely Newtonian in outlook despite Newtonian physics having been overturned at least twice in the real discipline of Physics.

[20] That’s because it is simply more accurate in Spanish. And this goes exactly to how LLMs aren’t really intelligent. They simply aggerate information and there are hundreds of thousands (if not hundreds of millions) of books, websites, videos, &c in Spanish whereas there are maybe a round thousand in Ancient Greek.

[21] This is my translation of, “With the gods’ help, you found peace and brought joy to yourselves.” 

[22] If you see no difference, the accent is a vowel earlier in the LLM’s correction.

[23] The reason the LLM corrected what was already correct was because in the first person singular conjugation of this word (that is, in the form found in the dictionary), the accent does go on that eta: ἤνεγκα. But the LLM did not connect this dictionary definition with the rule ‘no more than three syllables back’ for my translation of the second person plural ἠνέγκατε.

[24] At least intellectual human endeavor. No one is arguing AI is about to roof my house for me.

[25] If we go back to the previous paragraph about ἠνέγκατε we see this problem more deeply still. There is a nuance in the tense of that word which is impossible to translate into English. This is not because we’re not smart enough but because the meaning simply does not exist in English. ἠνέγκατε is in what we call the aorist aspect. A near cousin is the perfect ἐνηνόχατε. They are tenses of the same word (φέρω), they are in the same person (second-person plural), and both are most naturally translated into English as ‘you all have carried’ (or maybe just ‘you all carried’). But the aorist means ‘you all carried’ with no lingering implications on the present, while the perfect also means ‘you all carried’ but it implies lingering implications on the present. The difference is very hard to convey in English, but it would be something like this: in the aorist of ‘you have broken the window’ it simply conveys the fact of you breaking a window in the past with no further implications; the perfect ‘you have broken the window’ means that you broke the window (you horrible person, you) and that the window is still broken or perhaps the reason you’re now broke is because you broke the window and had to pay for it—some kind of implication like that.

[26] This is an example of where I used an LLM. I forgot the word for “neoliberalism” so instead of texting a friend, I put into the machine: “There’s a ‘type’ of capitalism with which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are associated” and it gave me “neoliberalism” as one of the possibilities. It was right. That was the word I was looking for. But I wouldn’t have been able to write that sentence if I hadn’t already known what neoliberalism was.