by R.J. Snell.

Elon Musk recently promised to improve his version of an AI chatbot, nicknamed Grok. The fix did not go well, to put it mildly. In one description, Grok was intentionally designed to be "an 'anti-woke' competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT." But Grok seemed indistinguishable from its competitors. The fix, as was widely noted in recent days, whatever else it was, certainly was "anti-woke," with Grok turning into a holocaust denier, casting aspersions against Jews, threatening the Turkish president, and Grok giving itself the new nickname of "MechaHitler."

More than anything, the episode reveals, as sober-minded people know, that artificial intelligence is not intelligent. Large language models scour pre-existing texts and are highly efficient at pattern recognition. But they entirely lack the capacity for judgment or an experience of reality allowing them to engage in those second-order reflections typical of rational entities to see if a statement corresponds in any meaningful sense with primary reality as reality presents itself for our understanding and judgment. The so-called "hallucinations" of AI are good indicators of this fact.

Even more importantly, the failure of AI to exhibit intelligence provides an opportunity to tackle the actual elephant in the room. It isn't so much that AI is failing, but that the materialist, physicalist, and reductive visions of intelligence, which guide and govern AI boosters and coders, fail as an account of consciousness and intelligence.

As Adam Frank notes, "the current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw" infecting not only AI but most of the relevant disciplines, namely, it has overlooked "our experience." Modern science, he argues, has swiveled between two competing accounts of consciousness - physicalism or idealism - with physicalism reducing consciousness to the "physical mechanics occurring in the neurons" that (supposedly) generate consciousness itself. Idealism, on the other hand, attempts to free mind from matter and allow it a free-floating existence.

For anyone formed in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, these are not, and cannot be, live options. As rational animals we are entirely animal and entirely rational; we are not two distinct substances of body and self, nor do we simply have bodies or have minds. Instead, we are one being with two distinct principles, body and soul. And while the soul is the form and act of the body, it isn't a distinct entity from the body, and certainly the body cannot explain its own existence, operations, or life.

So, when a philosopher like Thomas Nagel suggests that our experience of subjectivity defies attempts to reduce it, or when Frank insists that experience, or "what it is like to exist," surpasses thinking of the mind as if it were an electromagnet, we are not surprised.

"The soul is the form of the body," but the soul is embodied. The soul does not hover above the body, nor is it a ghost haunting the machine somehow. The brain does, in fact, function when we think, and this is not at all odd or surprising. What would be surprising is if an MRI showed no brain activity while we were thinking.

At the same time, the brain does not explain the experience we have of ourselves as thinking, or feeling, or imagining, or tasting. Whatever the MRI notes does not even attempt to explain the experience. It points to something other than the experience, namely, the material substrate conditioning the experience. But the operations of the intelligence are not reducible to that substrate, and certainly consciousness of those operations - what we call self-consciousness - isn't what a material explanation even tries to articulate.

In the 1930s, Edmund Husserl was already exploring the crisis in science, where the contents of consciousness were thoroughly misunderstood and treated as if they were equivalent to the empirical objects of modern science, and thus reduced to what could be treated as measurable, quantifi...