Australia’s last election provided a beacon of hope in the global fight to protect and enhance democracy with our cross bench swelling from 6 to 16. The next election and what happens after it could matter even more.
In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — it to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia.
But what comes next is crucial.
Some think it would be great if a citizen assembly was held on an important issue — or two or three. Allegra Spender proposes one on tax. Others want one on housing. It would be nice to see them go ahead. But I’m sceptical they can achieve a lot.
They would be advisory and temporary. So even if their recommendations are accepted — about which more in the next item below — they don’t aspire to leave any institutional trace. They also rehearse existing relationships in which the governed bring their supplications to those who govern.
I've gone to some lengths to propose an alternative, A standing citizen assembly effectively operating as a third house. (There’s something similar in the German speaking part of Belgium). It is not more ‘radical’ than existing suggestions. It establishes an institution with exactly as much formal power as the other citizen assemblies just discussed. None.
The idea that it is more radical comes from what I call its greater ‘imaginative vigour’. Without proposing any change in formal power structures, it follows through on the idea that a different logic needs to enter the system.
I don’t see a citizen assembly as a tricky new ‘hack’. Nor is it that important to me that it seems more democratic. That’s a good thing, but, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the ancient Athenians discovered during the Peloponnesian War, more democratic structures don’t always arrive at better decisions.
The more I’ve thought about representation by sampling as opposed to representation by election, the more deeply I’ve appreciated their differences.
By their nature, elections separate the governed from those who govern. That’s why Aristotle called selection by lot ‘democratic’ and elections aristocratic or oligarchic. Montesquieu and America’s founding fathers agreed.
Electoral systems are also intrinsically competitive. And the competition for votes rewards performativity, manipulation and dissimulation.
That plunges electoral democracy into deep pathologies. We feel aggrieved that the leaders we elect don’t tell us the truth. But, for that to happen we’d have to vote for such leaders. Successful politicians aren’t candid with us because if they were, we’d vote for others.
You might think I’m demonising one system and lauding the other. In fact I think competition is incredibly important to human functioning not just in the economy but more widely.
My point is not the superiority of one system over another, but rather that the logic of each of these two ways to represent the people is so different.
That’s why I believe that we’re going through a Magna Carta moment. As the jury system evolved after Magna Carta, we can use selection by lot as a bulwark against the corruption of elites. And by that I mean mainly the subtle corruptions of careerism through which so much power works today — the power that enabled RoboDebt to be perpetrated without those responsible being held properly to account.
Just as modern democracy was built from the 18th to the early 20th century by building checks and balances into government, the 21st century should start building the other way to represent the people into those checks and balances.
So for me, the hung parliament might establish an institution to continually showcasethis different logic of democracy. That’s why I’ve proposed a mechanism by which it might build its internal leadership, traditions and corporate memory and also proposed the first power I’d like it to seek — the ability to require a second, secret ballot of a parliamentary chamber it disagrees with.
But all that need be done is to start the thing off with imaginative vigour, but no formal power so the fledgeling institution, the parliament and the Australian people can then work out what becomes of it.
But when they see it in action, I think people’s reaction will be like the woman at the next table in a famous movie scene.
Getting past the Gillard problem
This article by Dennis Shanahan was the provocation for what came above. Note how often Ireland is used as the pinup boy for citizen assemblies. They’ve probably acquired a higher visibility in Ireland than anywhere else. And two of them have gone very well — allowing same sex marriage and the repeal of anti-abortion provisions of the constitution.
These examples are quoted everywhere. But both solved problems for the legislators. Where they’ve created problems for the legislators — such as the citizen assembly on gender equality, they’ve not been more influential than anywhere else. Anyway, to Shanahan’s article.
Fifteen years ago, a political misjudgment by Julia Gillard at the start of her 2010 election campaign effectively destroyed Australian support for the idea of a citizens’ assembly to help develop new policy on difficult and divisive issues ….
But with growing experience in Europe of using representative citizens’ groups to determine what the public finds acceptable parameters for debate, there is renewed interest and pressure for another look at the concept of citizens’ assemblies. What’s more, in the wake of the failure of the referendum on the Indigenous voice to parliament and with the increasing likelihood of a minority federal government in 2025, there is now a real prospect of a system of citizens’ assemblies becoming part of the price of support by independent MPs.
There is no doubt that a lack of consultation, including not having a constitutional convention to discuss the proposed constitutional change for the Indigenous voice, contributed greatly to the defeat of Anthony Albanese’s poorly explained proposal. In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly helped the referendum process for same-sex marriage without declaring a position for or against but merely setting out the reasonable arguments on both sides. …
At the end of the 2024 parliamentary sittings, Climate 200 teal independent Allegra Spender, the MP for the Sydney seat of Wentworth, forcefully pushed for the idea of a citizens’ assembly to help find common ground for tax reform, which is in political gridlock. …
Having replaced Kevin Rudd as … prime minister after he had backed away in early 2010 from trying to deal with the difficult issue of climate change, … Gillard said she would use a citizens’ assembly composed of 150 randomly selected Australians to discuss and deliberate on climate change policies. Because the concept wasn’t properly explained, there were widespread misperceptions of what a citizens’ assembly was, and the proposal met with understandable derision from all sides as critics described it as a tactic to delay action … and as duplicating the role of … MPs.
The newDemocracy research paper, finished in late 2024, found Gillard had made all the wrong decisions in relation to a citizens’ assembly: she made it a partisan issue; the prime minister was going to lead the process; there was no explanation of the process; and the whole idea was easily destroyed in the rush of an election campaign. The report argues that a citizens’ assembly of 100 randomly selected citizens could at least have been asked to work on the information kits, “thus adding an additional voice beyond the Yes and No campaigns – that of people like me.” …
The mistakes of Gillard and Albanese over a lack of consultation have been clearly spelt out in the latest research, as have the developments in European parliaments since 2010. The real test for whoever is the prime minister in 2025 will be: do they have to come to grips with a citizens’ assembly as the price for government?
Another report on what I’ve been up to as independent assessor of the proposed Hobart Stadium.
A pre-loved Penleigh Boyd turns up in London
The plot thickens
This note from Barry Humphries made me wonder what else was about, when I discovered that I was on the site of Christies in the UK who are selling Barry Humphries’ collection.
And here was Arthur Boyd’s portrait of Humphries.
And that gave me a shock of recognition …
Because for over a decade when I would visit Manning Clark’s house — including for a few months living in the garage out the back — there’d be this lovely portrait of Manning and his bundle of canine love and loyalty — the aging Tuppence.
Oh, and Dymphna was always a honey!
May they all rest in peace. They gave what they had.
Sam Harris on the trouble with Elon
I have to admit this is less damning than I thought it would be when I saw the headline. Elon Musk doesn’t take well to being told he’s wrong and doesn’t keep his word. It’s not at all good, particularly in a leader. But there’s a lot of it about.
I didn’t set out to become an enemy of the world’s richest man, but I seem to have managed it all the same. … When we first met, Elon wasn’t especially rich or famous. … Once Elon became truly famous, and his personal wealth achieved escape velocity, I was among the first friends he called to discuss his growing security concerns. I put him in touch with Gavin de Becker, who provided his first bodyguards, and recommended other changes to his life. We also went shooting on at least two occasions with Scott Reitz, the finest firearms instructor I’ve ever met. It is an ugly irony that Elon’s repeated targeting of me on Twitter/X has increased my own security concerns. He understands this, of course, but does not seem to care.
So how did we fall out? Let this be a cautionary tale for any of Elon’s friends who might be tempted to tell the great man something he doesn’t want to hear:
1. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first invaded our lives in March of 2020, Elon began tweeting in ways that I feared would harm his reputation. I also worried that his tweets might exacerbate the coming public-health emergency. Italy had already fallen off a cliff, and Elon shared the following opinion with his tens of millions of fans :
Hey, brother— I really think you need to walk back your coronavirus tweet. I know there’s a way to parse it that makes sense (“panic” is always dumb), but I fear that’s not the way most people are reading it. You have an enormous platform, and much of the world looks to you as an authority on all things technical. Coronavirus is a very big deal, and if we don’t get our act together, we’re going to look just like Italy very soon. If you want to turn some engineers loose on the problem, now would be a good time for a breakthrough in the production of ventilators...
2. Elon’s response was, I believe, the first discordant note ever struck in our friendship:
Sam, you of all people should not be concerned about this.
He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.
We continued exchanging texts for at least two hours. If I hadn’t known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.
3. Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculous—and quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that we’d soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
4. We communicated sporadically by text over the next couple of weeks, while the number of reported cases grew. Ominously, Elon dismissed the next batch of data reported by the CDC as merely presumptive—while confirmed cases of Covid, on his account, remained elusive.
5. A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:
Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?
6. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.
7. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my life—but also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. I’ve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that I’m trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a defamatory charge about my being a “hypocrite” for writing a book in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the Triggernometry podcast might suggest to naive viewers), I’ve taken great pains to defend Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of people—many of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.
All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possible—and I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elon’s favor:
I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth. …
Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses he’s built, he will likely become the world’s first trillionaire—perhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elon’s wealth has grown by around $200 billion. That’s nearly $3 billion a day (and over $100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chance—and many would argue the responsibility—to solve enormous problems in our world.
Performance from 1930 by five-year-old Ruth Slenczynski, who turned 100 years old in January 2025. A virtuoso pianist, she is the last surviving pupil of Sergei Rachmaninov.
American decadence leading to global chaos? Surely not?
Thanks to Gene Tunny for drawing the video to my attention. And at 6.00 “When you watch Congress debate the budget, it's like the last days of Ancient Rome.”
Bernie’s old fashioned ideas about politics helping with life
A climate scientist looks back in anger, and regret
A compelling long essay by a climate scientist who bought into the standard framing that scientists tell the world what the story is and the world responds. Surely that’s right? Just as it was with Ozone. Well no. It’s a good piece and I only include some extracts here, but there’s one thing that’s odd about it.
He argues that “In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.” That may well be true, but it was more than geopolitics that got action on climate change. Vested interests got climate change.
The way I’d tell the story would be to start not with the money, but the pathologies of electoral democracy as enumerated earlier in this newsletter. Increasingly competition in electoral democracy goes not towards making choices clear to the electorate or serving their interests but towards each party demonising and misrepresenting their opponents and their policies.
And then there’s plenty of money for the merchants of doubt, flooding the zone sufficiently that lots of people give up on finding the truth. Before you know it a good chunk of the commentariat and the population are arguing that climate change is a hoax. (That’s another reason why I hanker for citizens’ juries to be used more within government. They’re not immune, but much harder to corrupt than government by entertainment.)
Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s, I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.
But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists.
Writing retrospectively in 2023 about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political historian Timothy Garton-Ash explains the danger: “…deep down we somehow thought – or more accurately, felt – that we knew which way history was going. This is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.”[10]
Around this time, the primacy of western science was reflected in the forging of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created by the UN in 1988, and first reporting in 1990, the IPCC gave the imprimatur of governmental backing to universal climate scientific knowledge as an authoritative guide to climate policy. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1992, and ratified in 1995. Subsequent annual Conferences of the Parties to the Convention would hammer out the new institutions, policies and measures around which the world would unite to tame the climate change threat. It was an echo of how scientists had discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and how negotiators had crafted the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and its subsequent amendments, to repair the damage. Climate science’s ascendant power was eventually to lead to the IPCC receiving a joint share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The new global science of climate change seemed to reign supreme.
Yet by 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. Also running out of steam was Tony Blair’s campaign of international climate diplomacy conducted during the years 2003-2005, a self-conscious attempt to harness the moral high ground following the geopolitical disaster of the British Government’s support for the 2003 Iraq war. More significantly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the prelude to this disillusionment, and the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade Bill to pass in the US Senate in the summer of 2009 the main act. And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed.
So how did the framing and campaigning around climate change respond in the early-mid-2010s to these compounding geopolitical trends? By doubling down on what had worked before. In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. Science was used to reframe what climate change seemed to demand of the world. Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonisation pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. And, finally, in 2015, under the rhetorical weight of this new science, the old policy target of limiting warming to 2°C was reinvented in Paris as “1.5°C”, without a flicker of realization of the impossibility of what was implied by such a number.
It was believed—hoped?—that the world could, and the world would, bend to this demand. If climate change was ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century’ then it needed to live up to this billing. Deadlines were set—“we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe”[14]; language was re-set—from climate change to climate crisis[15], from global warming to global weirding; doomist narratives foregrounded[16], emergencies declared, extinction envisaged, and street protests unleashed. Each new realization of just how far away the world was from placing “stopping climate change” at the centre of today’s politics provoked a reaction: science was enrolled—through the IPCC’s 1.5°C Report in 2018; the rhetoric of tipping points was ramped-up; the young (through Greta Thunberg) and then the old (through female Swiss pensioners[17]) were used as cat’s paws to deliver chimerical feel-good victories; environmental lawyers co-opted Indigenous peoples to use the west’s legal system to try to deliver what the world’s nations stubbornly refused to deliver.
And all along, Putin laughed, China’s soft power—and not-so-soft power—grew, India dissented, the Emerging and Middle Income Countries arrived, African nations kept adding people to the planet. And the worldwide demand for energy continued to rise.
In Europe, too, the climate project began to sour. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK ‘brexited’ the EU collective, Russian gas flooded the continent before the Ukraine war in 2022 revealed the EU’s vulnerability to imperialist aggression, everywhere nativism seemed to flex new political muscles, and climate scepticism found new expressions: among farmers, motorists, and France’s gilet jaunes. Even then, some still held on to the old certainties that the fossil fuel industry represented the evil “eye of Sauron”, calling upon all well-meaning people in the world to join forces in a “final battle” to defeat the rapacious enemy.
In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting quasi-random variation to estimate the long-run impact of attending an inner-city school on political participation and preferences among whites. Drawing on administrative voter registration records and an original survey, we find that being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later. Consistent with the idea that exposure to an inner-city environment causes a permanent change in ideological outlook, we also find evidence that bused individuals are much less likely to believe in a "just world" (i.e., that success is earned rather than attributable to luck) and, more tentatively, that they become more su! pportive of some forms of redistribution. Taken together, our findings point to a poverty-centered version of the contact hypothesis, whereby witnessing economic deprivation durably sensitizes individuals to issues of inequality and fairness.
Cults of personality in the 1930s. Meanwhile in the USA …
What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures, sources of meaning, and overall life satisfaction. Under specific conditions, LLMs can provide responses to complex questions that are indistinguishable from those of human readers, effectively passing a version of the Turing Test. We find that sources of life meaning are more varied than previous research suggested, underlining the importance of work and community contributions in addition to family and close relationships (emphasized by earlier work). The narratives also highlight gendered disparities, with women disproportionately citing adverse family events, such as the loss of a parent, underscoring their role as keepers of the kin. Our research expands our understanding of huma! n flourishing during a transformative period in American history and establishes a robust and scalable framework for exploring subjective well-being across diverse historical and cultural contexts.
Chat-GPT 4o: “A robot bird flies out of its cage in the style of a 19th century oil painting.”
Getting to the land of How
I wrote a series of blog posts on this — the fact that actually making things happen rather than making policies for them to happen is no way to get on in government. Now it’s becoming a little more mainstream with a Niskanen Centre report on it and Francis Fukuyama chiming in. It’s getting to be more and more of a big deal as governments actually try to do things — you know like building infrastructure including infrastructure for living — houses — and find they can’t do it any more. A quick reminder that the Empire State building was built on time and on budget in just over a year nearly a century ago. (Five people died who might not have died today, but that was a good record for the time. The Golden Gate bridge killed 11, the Hoover Dam killed 96 and the Brooklyn Bridge of a generation earlier killed 20-30 workers. Meanwhile the Chrysler Building didn’t kill anyone. But I digress! Back to Fukuyama)
Th[e] gold-plating problem has been recognized for years in defense procurement. The F-16 fighter, which over the decades has proven to be one of the most useful aircraft in the inventories of many countries, was initially sidelined because it was too simple. The Navy didn’t like the fact that it had only one engine, and the Air Force wanted a larger, heavier airframe for the range of roles it envisioned.
Something similar happens when civilian agencies procure software. They act as if they are buying a single big product that will be good for at least the next decade or two. The list of requirements grows into a large, complex contract. …
The problem with this approach is of course that technology moves way too fast, and many of the original requirements are already outdated by the time the product is delivered. Moreover, the contractor focuses on fulfilling the contract rather than interacting with eventual users to modify requirements on the fly. Government agencies that have bought big software packages under the old procurement model have run into huge problems. These include the FBI, the IRS, the State Department, and of course the biggest debacle of the past generation, the Department of Health and Human Services procurement of healthcare.gov under Obamacare. …
Part of the problem is lack of technical capacity at the procuring agency. The government needs to be able to interact on a continuous basis with users of their services, and know enough about the technical design to be able to recommend changes to the software provider. This in turn is related to a different problem, which is the separation of implementation from policymaking, and the significantly higher prestige attached to the latter activity. …
A student of mine who had gotten an MBA from Stanford went to work for the Small Business Administration. She found that the SBA’s website was not particularly user-friendly, so she took it on herself to fix it since she had a decent tech background. Her supervisor told her that fixing websites was the job of contractors, and that she would never get promoted doing such menial work. …
If the U.S. military is going to move towards small, inexpensive autonomous weapons, it needs to open up the bidding process to the thousands of startups that can contribute. It needs to behave more like the Ukrainians. The latter have developed a domestic drone industry on the basis of continuous feedback between operators in the field and the people who write the software and design the platforms. In the current war with Russia, software gets updated every few days, or sometimes within hours of an engagement.
The Ukrainians, of course, are engaged in an existential battle for their freedom, in which the life of their compatriots will depend on fast interaction. The challenge for the United States is to develop a similar sense of urgency when we are not actively engaged in a hot war. If we wait until that war comes, it will be too late.
I thought this post was very good. But given my knowledge of angels, LLMs and the philosophy of mind, I wouldn’t take that too seriously.
I have spent the past few months teaching an undergraduate philosophy seminar on angels and demons, a rather unusual topic for my secular department and university. But I proposed to the class that this subject might light an intellectual path for us to consider another rather more topical area: the nature of artificial intelligence. We therefore spent the first part of the course engaged in a careful study of the Treatise on the Angels in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae before turning to some classic papers in the philosophy of AI from the 1980s and 1990s, a period of thinking about minds and machines—over which computers went from a hobby to an indispensable part of life for most of us—that continues to shape the intellectual landscape today.[1]
Right from the start of the class, I confessed to being an AI skeptic (at least concerning the technological paradigms for AI that are most prominent now); but I also shared my worry that my views were driven by prejudice, specifically, the prejudice that only human beings or creatures suitably similar to us can have minds. To avoid this prejudice, we must offer a principled account of the basis of intelligence that does not rule out reasonable possibilities for intelligent existence in creatures that are unlike us. Happily, the conversations that the seminar sparked have equipped me with better arguments about why the ever-more-sophisticated chatbots and assistants that we encounter fall short of embodying real intelligence—no matter how good they become at imitating it.
Angels, meanwhile, are commonly depicted as a part of the premodern imagination that ‘science’ or ‘reason or ‘the Enlightenment’ has swept away. What I have come to think is that the angels can help us overcome some deep confusions about the nature of intelligence that the Enlightenment-era mechanical philosophy and its descendants (particularly the computational theory of mind) have encouraged in our own time. Our minds are not simply machines. Nor does a machine count as a mind because it can appear to do some of what intelligent creatures do.
Within the narrower horizon of academic philosophy, we need an adequate theory of intelligence to make this case and avoid the charge of prejudice. But, for our broader cultural conversations, we need imaginative resources that our computational age makes it hard to sustain. As my class found, appreciating the force of the arguments in Aquinas’s Treatise on the Angels required that we free our imaginations in ways that proved fruitful for our philosophical inquiry—but that were also, more generally, liberating.
Scripture is full of stories about the angels. In Genesis and elsewhere in the Torah, angels serve both as visible manifestations of God’s power and as his agents. … In the New Testament, angels announce to humankind both the birth of Jesus and his resurrection (as befits their common name, which means ‘messenger’ in both Hebrew and Greek), and thereby spark thestory-telling that is central to the Christian mission of spreading the good news. …
This scriptural-narrative tradition soon blended with a Platonic theological tradition concerning the nature of God and other beings who are above us in the hierarchy of being[2]. For this Platonic tradition, to which Aquinas is an heir, reality is divided between material and intelligible (or ‘spiritual’) things. Human beings are simultaneously the highest creatures in the material order and the lowest creatures in the intelligible order, which consists not of abstract objects of thought but rather of a hierarchy of intelligences. Our intelligence is only a shadow of the intelligence of higher beings such as the angels. Like us, angels are finite, created beings who play a discrete role in God’s providential arrangement of the world, but unlike us they are free of any material limitation.
Saint Michael and the Dragon, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen [Public Domain image]
As I will return to below, it is this conception of angels as immaterial intelligences that makes it useful to us in theorizing the very nature of intelligence: the organic prejudice that appears to beset any account of intelligence that takes human beings and creatures like us as paradigmatically intelligent cannot apply to such a theory. In fact, in this Platonic view, human beings are unique in the intelligible order for being enmeshed in material and sensory life.
But this Platonic philosophical-theological tradition is not the only influence on Aquinas’s Treatise on the Angels. The other main intellectual strand is the Aristotelian theory of mind as a vital power, that is, a power that belongs to and characterizes living things of a specific kind. This theory points in exactly the opposite direction as the Platonic one, since … animals too have minds insofar as they have cognitive powers. Moreover, our human mode of mindedness is closely intertwined with our sensory lives. …
In Aristotle’s hands, this idea offers up the image of the scientist as the paradigmatic knower (an image that is one of his great legacies to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ways of thinking that have tended to construe him as their chief premodern antagonist). To speak of understanding as a kind of unification of mind and world, moreover, makes the mind’s work a matter of actively making contact with reality, rather than simply representing things. The mind is not a kind of veil, nor just a means of passively registering or recording the world.
For Aquinas, the angels’ immateriality places them fully in the realm of intelligibility: they understand themselves and the natures of things without mediation and from the moment of their creation onward. For us, understanding is instead a laborious achievement that demands patient inquiry and that must be distinguished from the ordinary knowledge that is provided to us by sources like the senses and testimony. Our mode of intelligence is, in the terms of Aquinas’s theory, discursive, while angelic intelligence is intuitive: all-at-once and complete. In other words, it is not just that the angels are talented scientists (with a remarkable range of specializations: indeed, all of them together!). Rather, they do not need to undertake the work of scientific inquiry at all. There is no barrier at all between them and the natures of things—and so they have innate and internal access to complete understanding.
Still, for the angels, just as it is for us, reflecting on the objects of our understanding is a purposive activity, brought about by the faculty Aquinas calls ‘the will’. In this way, Aquinas preserves Aristotle’s other insight, that cognitive life is proper to animals, since they negotiate their environments, preserve themselves, and pursue their other characteristic goals as purposive self-movers of a special sort. To be sure, intelligence is a higher and more perfect kind of self-movement than mere animal self-movement, one that allows intelligent creatures like us to cognize their purposes generally and to order their various pursuits on the basis of what they conceive to be good for them overall. But there are important continuities that undermine any sharp ontological divide between material and spiritual reality. Aquinas’s world is not Descartes’s, divided absolutely into active mind and inert matter, a division that would (among other baleful consequences) destroy the unitary nature of human beings as intelligent animals.
At first glance, large language models (LLMs) and other forms of so-called generative AI based on the ‘transformer’ architecture seem to resemble angelic intelligence. A lovely essay by Joe Moran, a professor of English and cultural history, appeared earlier this year entitled “You are not an angel (a letter to my students)”. … The epistolary form that Moran employs and his choice of recipient–his students, many of whom are now habitually using this technology as a crutch or a substitute for their own intellectual work–is particularly apt. After all, ChatGPT cannot really write a letter. To be sure, it can compose a text that resembles a letter, much more quickly than any of us can. But to write a letter is to take a certain kind of journey, to choose–and continue to choose–one’s words reflectively, to subtly alter one’s course in the middle of the way as one sees more and better the terrain that lies ahead, and to choose an apt stopping point that is typically just the middle of a longer correspondence (or simply the point that one runs out of ink or writing paper). It may take a brief moment for an LLM-powered chatbot to summon the computational resources to deliver a complete answer, but there is nothing truly discursive in what it does.
In a striking passage in the Treatise on the Angels, Aquinas argues that the angels do not really speak to human beings. My students found this claim to be rather surprising, since they knew that Aquinas treats scripture with great care and scripture seems to be full of examples of angels speaking in their capacity as messengers. Think of the Annunciation of Gabriel to the Virgin Mary when he reassures her, “Do not be afraid” (Luke 1:30). But in Aquinas’s view, speech is a vital activity, one that is not only discursive but also embodied. According to Aquinas, what really happens during such angelic visitations is that the angels simulate speech-sounds so that human beings can grasp something that is, taken in itself, purely intelligible. Angels, then, engage in just the sort of simulacrum of discursive thinking that LLM output appears to exemplify.
from the Annunciation Triptych, ca. 1427–1432, The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City [Public domain image]
Do these analogies suggest that algorithmic intelligence is (or someday soon will be) superior to human intelligence, just as angelic understanding outstrips human discursive thought? Most of the temptation to think so comes from the computational model of mind, a thought-picture that describes intelligence in terms of algorithmic operations on a given input that lead to corresponding output. Whether this output is linguistic or behavioral (an action or other change-of-state abstractly describable in a space of possibilities), it may seem that human beings, at least some non-human animals, and computational implementations of algorithms equally meet the standard for possessing intelligence.
The hybrid Platonic-Aristotelian theory that Aquinas develops presents us with an instructive alternative: mindedness as freedom from material limitation. There are two dimensions to this freedom, which correspond to the two core faculties of mind: intellect and will.
The first dimension of freedom belongs to the intellect, the capacity to understand not simply the particularities of the world that confront us–which we encounter in the stream of our own consciousness–but to grasp any intelligible reality whatsoever. In this way, we stand apart from the individual encounters with the world that our senses–and even our imaginative capacities–afford. At the same time, the part of the world we access through our minds is really there, not just as a realm of mental concepts, but as the structuring nature of reality. The existence of such natures in our minds when they are understood is, for Aquinas, a sign of our freedom from material constraint. Think, by contrast, of the image of the mind as a wax tablet receiving impressions from what we encounter[5]. If our minds were simply stamped by the world, we would have access only to the surfaces of things, the aspects communicated via the senses.
The second dimension of freedom belongs to the will, by which we direct our intellectual lives–and, indeed, all the dimensions of our lives that we can consciously shape. There is no such thing as a mind without a will, just as there cannot be an animal that is purely passive in its environment. Mindedness is a form of responsiveness, in other words. Moreover, we set our own goals; they are not simply given to us. Intelligent life cannot be instinctual, even if the way that a thing responds to stimuli is highly sophisticated. Many things have purposes that are not purposive in this way, artifacts and social institutions among them.
To be clear, Aquinas thinks of human intelligence, at least, as depending essentially on our embodiment, even as the operations of intellect and will are free of material limitation. We do not think with some spooky part of ourselves, an angel within. Rather, his point is that our capacities for self-directed intelligent activity manifest a kind of independence from the physical pushes and pulls of the world, an independence that the other animals share in a lesser way.
LLM-powered artificial intelligence has neither kind of freedom. On the side of the intellect, such so-called ‘AI’ is capable neither of discursive thought nor of understanding, since it does not aim to grasp the world at all. Rather, it merely synthesizes our representations. Just as an echo in a cave is not the speech of rocks, the deliverances of LLMs are only simulacra of language–and the thought that ultimately lies behind it. On the side of the will, an LLM simply has no purposes of its own, let alone ones that it could cognize and order.
The lesson here is that it is easy, in some circumstances, to confuse the intelligence needed to use a tool with the intelligence of the tool itself. We tend not to make this mistake with saucepans and tables, but the greater the hiddenness of a thing’s mechanism, the more it is tempting to project purposiveness. The ‘black box’ quality of LLMs makes them even an especially tempting site of such projection.
I noted above that angels and demons are commonly associated with a premodern world-view that reason or science are meant to have swept away. In fact, it is the technological world-view of AI boosterism that is prone to a form of irrationalism: attributing to pieces of technology or algorithms apocalyptic power.
One reason to adopt a clear-eyed view of so-called AI is to hold its creators account for the social challenges that the technology has already caused and is likely to cause in the future. The problems do not lie with some hypothesized difficulty of AI ‘alignment’ but rather with the all-too-human situation of a largely deregulated industry run by people who take childlike glee in ‘disruption’. Not only do I remain an AI skeptic in the sense of thinking that the technology in its present guise offers only a simulacrum of intelligence, I am also skeptical that the industry is on a path to taking genuine responsibility for its effects. It is up to us to push back.
I have argued that Aquinas’s theory of intelligence offers us both argumentative and imaginative resources to respond to these intellectual mistakes. That is not the only reason to study Aquinas, of course, but I am increasingly persuaded that we must foster a culture of humanism, which seeks wisdom with intellectual humility in the company of the vast set of texts and traditions handed down to us, in the face of a rising technological philistinism that pretends to have all the answers. Nor should we humanists close ourselves off to the pressing issues of the day or cede what is properly our own intellectual territory.
What an excellent edition to-day, NG. The amusing Billy Crystal/G Norton piece led me on to Stephen Fry appearances - much to chuckle at. Then of course Citizens Assemblies - with you all the way from when you first properly introduced me to the concept some years back. I saw you on the ABC speaking to the Hobart Stadium - with Jacqui Lambie in her regular "have-a-gutful" speaking mode to round it off. Then Penleigh Boyd - and that beautiful rural scene taking me back to 1984 when I did a single subject at Sydney U - Australian Literature III with some stellar names - including reading Arthur Boyd (uncle to Penleigh, I think - I'll need to check this) and his novel The Cardboard Crown - led through its themes by Prof. of Australian Literature (and Chair of the ABC?) Leonie Kramer. Followed by your tales of Arthur Boyd's paintings of Barry Humphreys and Manning Clark and your lovely words about Dymphna which make me intend to forward your entire offering to-day to a writer friend in Kalamata - Gillian (née Hicks) Bouras. I relished - as who wouldn't - the Sam Harris cautionary tale on how a friendship with Elon Musk can turn nasty and ever-after-vengeful. And then for a return to calm - the Minuet in G Major by Ruth Slenczynska from 1930 when she was five - and is now 100! Wow! And the piece on studying more Indian Philosophy - Ralph Stephen Weir - Lincoln U - I shall pass on to a good Indian scientist friend - himself a philosopher - Dr S Kundu - in Delhi. (Cultural chauvinsm, indeed - that not more is studied - I'll forward it too to Toby Zoates - an Australian punk artist and writer who knows more of such things in India than anyone I've ever met - and where he is at the moment. As for the Jane Austen Mathematics - how I wish I had had that to guide my 1987 HSC English class through Emma. Though to be fair we did a whole week-end seminar session led by the Janes Austen school/publisher/etc - Barbara Ker Wilson who had not long previously written the novel "Jane Austen in Australia" and knew so much about Jane Austen to stimulate my students. And finally - giving up on the heaviosity - but relishing the repartee between Clive James and Germaine Greer. Thank-you, as always, NG.
Hi Nick, I've just been linked your post, thanks for writing it. I too think a national citizens' assembly would be excellent, especially if it has the opportunity to set its own agenda.
One idea I had was that we should trial it first, to show people around the nation what the idea is and how it works. If there's any national vote or referendum on this assembly, it should only be after we've seen it.
That was the main problem with the Voice referendum - people were asked to decide upon something they'd never seen in practice. If only the Voice was established first, and then the effort to embed it was made afterwards...
The other place where trials are incredibly important is when redesigning streets for health and safety reasons. We can learn about local street politics from places like London, where local streets have been and continue to be calmed so that people (especially kids) can enjoy meeting one another and getting around more safely and comfortably. In these places, changes to traffic conditions can be trialled so that the idea can be tested in real life conditions, and people can experience the profound positive impacts that it has. Any negative impacts turn out to be much smaller than people might anticipate, and these things fade away as people adjust, while the positive benefits continue to build over time.
So I hope that we could trial a national citizens' assembly first too. What do you think?
What an excellent edition to-day, NG. The amusing Billy Crystal/G Norton piece led me on to Stephen Fry appearances - much to chuckle at. Then of course Citizens Assemblies - with you all the way from when you first properly introduced me to the concept some years back. I saw you on the ABC speaking to the Hobart Stadium - with Jacqui Lambie in her regular "have-a-gutful" speaking mode to round it off. Then Penleigh Boyd - and that beautiful rural scene taking me back to 1984 when I did a single subject at Sydney U - Australian Literature III with some stellar names - including reading Arthur Boyd (uncle to Penleigh, I think - I'll need to check this) and his novel The Cardboard Crown - led through its themes by Prof. of Australian Literature (and Chair of the ABC?) Leonie Kramer. Followed by your tales of Arthur Boyd's paintings of Barry Humphreys and Manning Clark and your lovely words about Dymphna which make me intend to forward your entire offering to-day to a writer friend in Kalamata - Gillian (née Hicks) Bouras. I relished - as who wouldn't - the Sam Harris cautionary tale on how a friendship with Elon Musk can turn nasty and ever-after-vengeful. And then for a return to calm - the Minuet in G Major by Ruth Slenczynska from 1930 when she was five - and is now 100! Wow! And the piece on studying more Indian Philosophy - Ralph Stephen Weir - Lincoln U - I shall pass on to a good Indian scientist friend - himself a philosopher - Dr S Kundu - in Delhi. (Cultural chauvinsm, indeed - that not more is studied - I'll forward it too to Toby Zoates - an Australian punk artist and writer who knows more of such things in India than anyone I've ever met - and where he is at the moment. As for the Jane Austen Mathematics - how I wish I had had that to guide my 1987 HSC English class through Emma. Though to be fair we did a whole week-end seminar session led by the Janes Austen school/publisher/etc - Barbara Ker Wilson who had not long previously written the novel "Jane Austen in Australia" and knew so much about Jane Austen to stimulate my students. And finally - giving up on the heaviosity - but relishing the repartee between Clive James and Germaine Greer. Thank-you, as always, NG.
Hi Nick, I've just been linked your post, thanks for writing it. I too think a national citizens' assembly would be excellent, especially if it has the opportunity to set its own agenda.
One idea I had was that we should trial it first, to show people around the nation what the idea is and how it works. If there's any national vote or referendum on this assembly, it should only be after we've seen it.
That was the main problem with the Voice referendum - people were asked to decide upon something they'd never seen in practice. If only the Voice was established first, and then the effort to embed it was made afterwards...
The other place where trials are incredibly important is when redesigning streets for health and safety reasons. We can learn about local street politics from places like London, where local streets have been and continue to be calmed so that people (especially kids) can enjoy meeting one another and getting around more safely and comfortably. In these places, changes to traffic conditions can be trialled so that the idea can be tested in real life conditions, and people can experience the profound positive impacts that it has. Any negative impacts turn out to be much smaller than people might anticipate, and these things fade away as people adjust, while the positive benefits continue to build over time.
So I hope that we could trial a national citizens' assembly first too. What do you think?