Why does Thomas Aquinas believe that thinking and understanding require life itself? And what does that imply about the limits of artificial intelligence?

In this ninth episode of The Mind and the Machine: Aquinas on AI, philosopher Dr. Michael Augros (Thomas Aquinas College) develops a causal explanation—rooted in Thomistic metaphysics—for why AI systems cannot truly perform cognitive acts such as thinking and understanding.

Building on the previous episode’s deductive arguments, this lecture goes deeper by asking why, in principle, cognition must belong only to living beings. Drawing on Aquinas’s philosophy of life, unity, immanent action, and cognition, the video argues that genuine thought cannot arise from machines because machines lack the kind of substantial unity and self-movement proper to living things.

This episode explores:

Aquinas’s definition of a living thing as a self-moving being

What it means for something to be “one being absolutely” rather than an aggregate

Why living beings possess a unity machines lack

The difference between immanent operations (like thinking) and transitive actions

Why cognition presupposes life, not mere computation

Why AI systems, even highly complex ones, are not genuine subjects of thought

Using examples from biology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind, Dr. Augros shows that cognition is not something that can emerge from collections of parts acting together, but must belong to a single, unified, living subject.

This episode is a key installment in the series, connecting intelligence, life, and being, and preparing the ground for the final conclusions about why artificial intelligence can simulate thought without ever truly thinking.

Whether you’re interested in AI consciousness, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, neuroscience, ethics, theology, or the future of artificial intelligence, this lecture offers a deep and rigorous account of what it truly means to be a thinking being.