Introduction

Some months ago, I invited three interlocutors with different metaphysical commitments to a Signal chat with me over the course of five days to discuss the role of myth. The deal: they would be anonymous to one another, with aliases used in the chat—until the end. We are publishing this Trialogue using their real names. It has been edited for flow and clarity. - Luke Burgis.

Michael Nielsen is an Australian-American quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco. His books include Quantum Country, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and more.

Dylan O’Sullivan is a writer, and the creator of Essayful on X and Substack.

Michael Bonner is a communications and public policy advisor, and a historian with a PhD from the University of Oxford. He is most recently the author of The Crisis of Liberalism.

Luke Burgis: Are myths relics of the past—stories we’ve outgrown—or are we always generating new ones? How do myths relate to truth: do they illuminate reality, distort it, or do something else entirely?

Michael Nielsen: A successful myth is a (powerful, strongly shared) meaning-making story that explains our place in the world, some core aspect of life.

I’ve been revisiting the French Revolution, especially how all these new mythic ideas were established: freedom, liberty, equality! The People! And so on: all changing the basic myth of France. Of course, those ideas were grounded in earlier work by Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and so on.

That time aspect is important: myth-making seems often to be a process, with the myth growing over time. As time passes, the “ecstatic truth” at the core gets clearer, more powerful. Maybe that’s part of what canonization means.

For example: the stories of Jesus almost certainly had far less force in his own time; they grew in importance over the decades and centuries after his death. The Gospel of John, which was the last composed, many decades after his death, goes much further in mythologizing him than the earlier Gospels.

I’m not sure the author of the Gospel of Matthew would have approved of the Gospel of John.

Dylan O’Sullivan: People make failed attempts at mythologization all the time. That’s the blessing and curse of modern man. Nothing is given, everything is for the taking. The past, which is the soil of myth, is seen as something to be escaped. The same is true of all tradition, all convention. That has left us deracinated; mythologizing alone, in the Robert Putnam sense. In this way, the collapse of grand narratives goes far deeper than art. It’s not merely that novels are plotless now, life itself is; or is said to be, at least. You hear a lot about the demise of shared facts, and how that’s contributing to political polarization and the like, but the demise of shared stories worries me more. If the burden of mythmaking is to be placed on the shoulders of each individual, our culture had better be readying us, as children or adults, to carry that weight. And I don’t think it is.

The (strained) relationship between time and myth also factors in here. What time offers, like space, is distance. Myths require a certain blurriness around the edges to take hold. The everything, everywhere, all-at-once nature of the Internet has rendered this almost impossible. It’s an environment in which old myths are not only dying off, but new myths are struggling to be born.

Michael Bonner: The word ‘myth’ originally meant ‘word’, specifically the spoken word. Thus it comes to mean very early on any sort of narrative or story. Aristotle notably even used it to mean the plot of a drama, but the word certainly had an ancient, prehistoric connotation in certain contexts also, as in Plato’s Republic, for instance.

No society has ever been without myths, and new myths will arise if the old ones are effaced. This is, I think, obviously true. But I always reach for the example of the Azande people. Advanced thinkers of the 20th century West might have applauded the complete absence of religion among the Azande. And yet, in place of even a rudimentary theology or creation story, witchcraft was an object of universal belief to a degree which even the most disinterested anthropologist might find shocking. One set of “just so” stories drove out another at some time in the remote past, and the absence of religion did not incidentally produce an enlightened society bereft of mysticism or superstition.

Our founding myth is Christianity, and there is no question that it has been much degraded by supposedly enlightened skepticism.

M.N: That’s fascinating about the Azande! Curious in what sense you mean they lack a religion? Presumably you mean something quite different from their belief in witchcraft. The linguist Daniel Everett claimed that the Piraha people lack a cosmogony: when asked what the origin of the world was, he claims they reply that things have always been this way. I suppose that’s an origin myth of sorts: a very, very minimal one!

Also curious: you imply that an enlightened society is one bereft of mysticism or skepticism. I’m an atheist, but I’m very struck by the enormous variation in belief among many of the people I most admire. The great mathematician Ramanujan seems also to have been, in considerable measure, a mystic: when asked where his extraordinary mathematical ideas came from, he claimed they were from the Hindu goddess Namagiri, in his dreams. I don’t want an enlightened society without Ramanujan and many of his fellow mystics!

M.B: Apparently, the Azande lacked everything from public or private cults to formal theology and even mere curiosity about a supreme being. They seemed to know that one existed, but that was it.

L.B: Are there scientific myths? Is “Progress” itself a myth?

M.N: A straightforward answer to the progress question is the numbers-and-facts answer: no, it’s not a myth. Along many (though not all) of the most important axes - many things have gotten enormously better. Far lower infant mortality rates than a century ago. Far higher literacy rates. Far lower rates of extreme poverty. And so on.

But I guess your question is pointing at something deeper, some internalized and maybe collectively held belief in a God of Progress, a Promethean God worth sacrificing at the altar of.

D.O: There was an ongoing joke on Norm Macdonald’s show, where his cohost would ask the guest: “Where do you get your ideas from?” It was funny because, as of yet, nobody really knows. It’s an irreducible mystery at the heart of both art and science. Some of the greatest contributions to science came from intensely mythically-minded individuals (i.e. Newton). Even some intensely atheistic writers I know have inexplicable rituals and superstitions, as well as cognitively-dissonant stances on Muses and the like. Cormac McCarthy has this fascinating article on the chemist August Kekulé, who discovered the structure of benzene in his dreams.

M.N: I’ve been reflecting on Bonner’s assertion that the Western ‘founding myth is Christianity.’ That’s true, but of course it emerged out of older traditions, and often competed with them. In the 4th century there was significant pushback on the rise of Christianity in Rome, with figures like Emperor Julian the Apostate renouncing the Christianity of his birth and attempting to establish a competing neo-Pagan church. I wonder how much it felt similar to our own time, with an old set of (formerly) dominant myths in decline, but new dominant myths not yet entirely established or sure of themselves. I suspect it felt quite unstable, much as both of you have asserted about our own time.

As a kid I bought into a false dichotomy between myth and science as sharply distinct ways of making sense of the world. Let me pick on Genesis. You read Genesis naively and think “there’s no way this is what happened.” It just looks ludicrous, a ridiculous set of stories.

But of course stories like the fall, the tree of knowledge, Cain and Abel, are deeply, deeply resonant. Science adds a few big ideas into our sense-making toolkit, and that makes it markedly better in a whole lot of ways - it’s changeable, upgradeable, decentralized (in theory), predictive in new ways. But the questions posed by a story like Cain and Abel or the Fall are every bit as deep as the deepest questions posed by science. In some sense, they’re at the foundation of psychology and political science and behavioral genetics.

Let me ask a request of everyone: why do you care? What are you hoping to get out of this? I don’t want this to be a generic polite cocktail-party conversation!

L.B: Do you consider yourself religious, or having a “religious sense”, despite being an atheist?

M.N: My atheism is a deeply held part of my identity, something I arrived at and defended as a child. In that sense, I rejected religion quite thoroughly. As an adult, I’ve gradually come to believe that whether someone believes in God is surprisingly irrelevant to whether they’re religious.

M.B: Do you think that there is a kind of peculiarly Christian atheism?

M.N: I was raised in Australia, which is predominantly Christian-secular. I was shocked as an adult to realize that, yeah, I wasn’t just an atheist, I’d absorbed a huge amount of Christian stuff, both intellectually and emotionally. Christ-on-the-Cross, the Sistine Ceiling, all of that—you can’t help but be affected, if you’re immersed from birth. It’d be fascinating to understand the differences between, say, Christian atheists and Shinto atheists.

D.O: How you understand and tell your story, both to others and yourself, is perhaps the cornerstone of one’s singular trajectory through life. It can be the difference between life and death. Myths are what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.”

M.N: We’re nearing the end of the second day of this three-day trialogue. I think the conversation is mostly bland boring generic stuff. It’s been disappointing. Does anyone have anything they really care about here?

M.B: At some point after I got married and began to have a family, it dawned on me that the world was very much unlike what I had expected growing up. None of the promises of a more peaceful, more enlightened, more prosperous world had come to pass.

It became clear to me that what had been widely believed about the world simply wasn’t true. Somehow, I was drawn to Christianity, after a lengthy period of atheism.

M.N: What’s the convincing argument for Christianity? One that I think is immensely powerful as a narrative is that God loves people so much that he sent his only Son into the world, and he loved us so much that he was willing to die (terribly) to save us. No matter your belief, that’s an incredible story.

M.B: For me, there was no “argument.” It was more like a phenomenological experience through art and music, probably mostly music.

M.N: One of my favorite experiences is participating in the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah.” And a recent discovery for me is the huge Christian rock hit, “Oceans”, which I love!

Another favorite piece is the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, which dates to 1400 BCE—the world’s oldest piece of music. Here’s one modern arrangement.

L.B: John Henry Newman said that if we had to use a number to give a value to a single human life, the only fitting number would be infinity. If I’m married to my wife for another 50 years, I will barely begin to see all that is really there. I suppose it’s like realizing that each person was more like an entire universe that I couldn’t explore in 1,000 lifetimes.

M.B: Yes, and for me this realisation only seemed right, justifiable, convincing, etc., within Christianity.

M.N: I instinctively very strongly believe it, as an atheist. Maybe that’s part of the Christian culture which I’ve strongly internalized.

I’m also certain it’s strongly grounded in my background as a physicist. You end up with an enormous internalized felt sense for and respect of the capacities latent in matter. A single helium atom is incredibly complex; indeed, in some sense a single electron is immensely complex. Never mind the many, many additional layers of meaning in a human being!

L.B: I failed my Bridgewater final round interview because they kept going after me with the “would you torture one person to save the world” line of questioning, and switching it up (what if it was a stranger, what if it was a criminal, what if it was your mom), and while 23 year old Luke wasn’t particularly religious, and I don’t think I had a firm stance on torture—I went back and forth on it—I did keep trying to bring the question back to human dignity, even then, and was basically uncomfortable with someone being used in an instrumental way, for any reason, even if it were someone guilty of some deranged crime. True story. The three guys interviewing me just grew increasingly agitated. It was hilarious.

I don’t think it’s possible to really have that discussion without laying some metaphysical presuppositions on the table. “Are you guys all materialists?” I don’t think I actually asked that, because I did want the job and the money, but I should have.

M.B: I would say that most of Western culture doesn’t quite make sense unless you understand Christian belief. The western interest in free will, for example, is extremely peculiar, and arises from late medieval arguments but remains with us though its origin and meaning are forgotten.

D.O: I’m on European time, so damn, I’ve got some catching up to do.

To me, free will is tightly bound to the via negativa side of agency; the ability to do otherwise, which stems from the ability to think otherwise. There are different opinions about Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but an idea that really stuck with me is the rise of this “second voice” in the human mind, and how it relates to the evolution of conscience. The ability to engage in complex negotiations with ourselves about particular physical/psychological/metaphysical courses of action, to weigh counterfactuals and consequences (highly imaginative), without resorting to base instincts, seems central to how we use the term “free will.” Hence the legal idea of compos mentis, why a contract signed while drunk is void. We regard the drunk as raw instinct. They have the agency to sign, but potentially lack the negative agency not to. When a beaver builds a dam, it’s a marvelous feat of agency, but is it free will? I saw a video once of a beaver building a dam out of children’s toys in someone’s hallway.

L.B: What do you think is the most powerful story shaping the American public’s imagination right now?

D.O: One is the “myth” of meritocracy. Maybe we could say the central myth of meritocracy is something like: work as hard as you possibly can, and you will be rewarded. Now, this gets into interesting territory with respect to truth. Because it’s certainly untrue for some people, who work hard all their lives to no avail. But I think that’s the nature of myths: they’re generally true, not specifically true.

M.N: The myth of meritocracy - and I agree, it’s a myth expressed in many, many powerful forms - is one of those strange myths where believing it is often to your individual benefit, even if it’s in some sense terribly unfair to you or outright false.

I will be surprised if the most powerful story is not AI within five years. As one of many examples: substantial job displacement (perhaps through self-driving vehicles) will generate a huge amount of tension. You see this already in San Francisco, where there’s very mixed reactions to Waymo, with some people utterly loathing them. My most disconcerting Waymo experience was being in one that was kicked by a passerby, causing the car to go into a holding mode. The impact of humans forming relationships with these pseudo-people is going to have many strange and surprising consequences.

D.O: I think the myths surrounding AI are going to be tectonic, in both directions. AI-as-liberator versus AI-as-enslaver. Deeper than the myths themselves, AI as a myth-maker is also going to be formidable. Byung-Chul Han has written about the collective unconscious, which used to be embodied in humanity as myths (internalized religious, social, economic, political frameworks or narratives) are being replaced by a digital unconscious. One substructure is, almost invisibly, giving way to another. So after thousands of years, society is less built on stories now than algorithms, less built on atoms than bits. It’s hard to even guess how this is going to alter the evolution of human psychology, for the very reason that it’s taking place at a resolution invisible to the naked eye.

M.N: Back to points you all made earlier, about the rate of emergence of myth, there’s an interview with Brian Eno where he observes that wonderful new musical instruments are now being invented every day, and as a result no one really invests the time to master them, in the same way as Yo-Yo Ma mastered the cello. In fact, we never even begin to touch the limits of any of these new instruments, and some of them probably have truly incredible possibilities.

D.O: Orson Welles said the artist should be always “out of step” with his time. Our hyperconnected world has rendered this near impossible. I read something about the disappearance of subcultures, in that they’re no longer given the time or space to develop true individuality. At the slightest whiff of rarity or talent, they’re immediately spotted and uploaded into the main culture. This leads to a great and stifling sameness, which I think we see everywhere now. Grunge needed a period of isolation in Seattle to become grunge, just as folk needed that period in Greenwich Village. Had they become immediately viral, I feel they’d have been robbed of their chance to grow into themselves

M.B: I’ve written elsewhere that cultural exchange would be basically impossible in a completely globalised world, as it very nearly is now. But perhaps a world of one vast homogeneous culture would have nowhere to turn for new inspiration but to the past.

L.B: To close things off, I’d like to ask each of you: Where did we dodge the hardest question—and what is it?

I’ll start. One of my favorite novels is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which is based on the story of his own family ancestry which settled the Salinas Valley in California. Two of the characters in the story re-enact what is essentially the Cain and Abel story, and the author realizes that there is a dark truth at the heart of his own family, which is illuminated by this biblical story from Genesis. The book perfectly illustrates the connection between “myth and metaphysics” at the level of the family. It’s highly personal, and I think Steinbeck wrote the novel in part to distance himself from the darkness—he could externalize the truth in his fictional characters. So while I certainly don’t expect anyone to spill the family secrets in this Trialogue, I would say the hardest questions of all are often the myths held within our own families, which we inherit and are often not aware of until much later in life, if we ever.

I suspect that some of our collective myths as a society are not formed from the top down, but from the bottom up—through millions of smaller units, primarily at the level of the family, which affect broader, macro questions of identity.

M.N: Philip Pullman has observed that our lives begin when we’re born, but our stories begin when we discover that we’ve unaccountably been born into the wrong family. I suspect there’s at least a little truth to that for everyone, and sometimes a lot. There’s also the myths we cloak ourselves in, self-protective stories, stories to help us avoid thinking about certain things. By definition we are dodging these! And, every once in a while, external reality, the unself, may help us unravel one of these myths. Not always pleasantly!

M.B: In my own life, I had long dodged what I think is the hardest and most fundamental question. This question surrounded the meaning of death. It is the hardest and most fundamental, I came to discover, because the answer that you give to it will, I think, also tell you about the meaning of life. I found that things went in exactly that order. When I was basically an atheist, it was the question of death that violently started to my mind one evening in my early 20s and left me suddenly feeling a great emptiness because I could not give myself a good answer about it. It was the Christian myth, at the centre of which is a supremely meaningful death, that gradually helped me to formulate an answer. And, to tie in the family theme, deaths have loomed over my family history since before I was born, and one of the family myths involved the premature death of my father’s elder brother when both were boys: an uncle whom I never met, but for whom I was named. I had meditated on that death for a long time as a boy and its meaning for me and my family, but always in fairly superficial ways and without much seriousness. In later life, it was again the Christian myth that has helped me make sense of it all, to find meaning in death and life—difficult questions which one probably prefers not to confront.

D.O: I’m currently quasi-inebriated at a wedding, so forgive my ineloquence, but I’ll venture a layer deeper. The beauty of the greatest myths, stories, narratives, is that they serve as mirrors. Read Dostoevsky. You’ll see what I mean.

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Introduction

The following is an edited transcript from Cluny Institute’s 2025 METANOIA conference, which brought together speakers from across disciplines to discuss the nature of conversion. The following conversation is an exploration of the ways that art and literature can change a person.

Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. Her newest books are The Rose (Graywolf 2025) and Wave of Blood (Divided UK 2024). A Sand Book was longlisted for the National Book Award & won the Kingsley Tufts Prize in 2020. Also in 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines founded Invisible College, an online space for the study of poetry and sacred texts.

Michael Clune is the author of the novel Pan, the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, and three academic books, most recently A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago, 2023). His essays have appeared in Harper’s, Critical Inquiry, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Best American Essays, PMLA and elsewhere.

Jordan Castro is a novelist, essayist, and the Deputy Director of the Cluny Institute. He is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. He is author of novel The Novelist, and the forthcoming Muscle Man.

Conversation

Jordan Castro: In my early twenties, I kept having this experience where people would come up to me and say things like, This book changed my life. Or even, Your book helped me a lot. But it was not obvious, from the outside looking in, that their lives had changed at all. I was like, What are you people even talking about?

I’d like to talk about not just whether literature can change a person, but also the mechanism by which it changes a person. I wanted to start by just asking each of you how the practice of reading and writing has changed your life.

Michael Clune: When it comes to the question of transformation, I think of the medieval Buddhist philosopher Dogen—a desire for transformation is often a block to actual transformation. Dogen said that you don't need to meditate to get enlightened. You're already enlightened. Now just meditate.

Transformation is all about what the poet Keats called negative capability, which is the capacity to be open to just seeing something new.

When I was fifteen, someone gave me a translation of the French poet Rimbaud. It was like nothing I'd ever read. And yet, I would have glimpses in reading the words and strange symbols. It wasn't a glimpse of reality, or of understanding the work, but it was almost like a glimpse into the kind of mind that it would take for me to truly understand the work.

There was this phantom virtual mind that was projected by the text, and I was reaching towards it. I began to grasp the richness of the work. And it changed the way I see the world.

The transformation that literature can offer is very practical. It's the first time you look at the first page of a book and you're trying to orient yourself. You're trying to figure out, What kind of book is this? What kind of person do I need to be? What kind of call is this making on me? And being receptive to that is the challenge.

This is totally against our culture's idea that art should be “relatable”. That it should meet us where we are, rather than calling us out of ourselves into a new state of perception, a new state of being.

Ariana Reines: What's peculiar about being a poet is nobody knows what it is. It's really weird—and you can't see it.

Poetry exists in books, but that's hardly a fraction of it. Most of it is a felt experience of language. And what's bizarre about making art with something that everybody uses is there's an uncanny quality of it being both mine and not mine.

I didn't invent the language. I'm not even using it to craft a narrative. I'm doing something that's so close to my body, my sensations, and my experience—there's almost narrative happening in it—but it, it's closer to this unhomely, uncanny kind of immanence, of something that seems to be happening not only to me, but through me and with me, that language partakes of.

It's weird to make art like that, that's so close to nothing.

I don't know where to draw the line between what literature is and isn't. But what I got from Rimbaud and other initiators into the mystery is a sense of intimacy.

We are in a crisis of intimacy on the planet. We are utterly mediated. A book is a mediated product too. There are editors, people who are selling it, designers between the reader and the original vision. It turns into something different from inner experience. But what interests me the most is inner experience. And I'm able to stay close to my own by practicing poetry, which basically just means writing random shit down and not knowing why and not knowing where it will lead.

Every book changes my life, even the bad ones I’ve read.

I'm interested in that unmediated contact. I don't think it's a bad thing that people say that literature changes them, that a book changed them or that it helped them. I feel like what that means on some level is that there's something they were feeling or looking for that they were able to see reflected. And that's very enlarging to the spirit.

Michael: Proust said that one of the basic causes of suffering is habit, which is neurobiological. Our sensorium is designed to economize perception. It takes a lot of energy to really see something. After you’re familiar with it, you no longer really see it. This involves the erasure of the world.

Think of the house you live in. Compare the first time you went there to the 1000th time. Now that you’ve lived there for a couple years, you don't even really see anything. You just register it.

Art is a technology for defeating this problem. Art overcomes habit. We think of an artwork as an object. We say “art object,” but it's wrong. We should say art subject, because it's a matrix of subjectivity—it allows you to see the world through someone else's eyes. And through their eyes, the world becomes new. It’s like when a piece of music you love becomes dull—but then you introduce a friend to it and it makes it new for you too.

Novelty is life. Newness is new life. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be. This is not just some imaginary thing. Literature actually does this.

Ariana: This otherness you're talking about, the encounter with the other through art, enlarges my soul. It also causes me to have empathy with aspects of my own experience that I might not have had a road into. It's not just that it turns me toward the world and toward others, but in this kind of mysterious way, it makes me visible or accessible to a kind of divine witness.

“Here there is no place that does not see you / You must change your life”— that’s Rilke’s famous sonnet “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” He’s not talking about looking at art, or a historical artifact. He’s talking about being utterly seen by it, by the depths of time, even by God. The true artwork sees YOU.

And it doesn’t stop changing you. It doesn’t just happen one time. I think this is what I'm living for.

Jordan: I want to ask you both about the practice of judgement.

Micheal: The enemy of transformation—and the enemy of great literature—is basically the ethos of our society, which is: We're going to respond to what you already like.

It’s pseudo-egalitarian; it transfers the belief in the equality of persons to the equality of consumer preferences. So the idea that there might be some desires that are better than other desires, or some values that are better than other values, is controversial. It goes against the whole consumerist ethos of our culture.

The ground of transformation is dissatisfaction with what I already like. With what I want. With who I am.

Negativity has to come first. You have to cultivate negativity.

I grew up an immigrant, working-class, first-generation college student, living in a suburb in Chicago—and I gradually got the feeling: This all sucks. Everything sucks. This culture sucks. Everything is just a world of gray, flat crap. And that was powerful, because it was like—wow, this literature stuff, this is something different.

And not just different in an “everything’s equal, everyone likes different things” kind of way. Generations of people have testified to the greatness of William Blake, or Milton, or Emily Dickinson. And that was the faith I needed. I would go to the “classics” section in the bookstore and just feel a call on me. It was a call to say that there is something higher and better than this flat landscape, constantly addressing my existing preferences.

Ariana: It's very peculiar to be living in times that are so pious. What's strange about language is it doesn't belong to us. Words are being turned into terms—and the term-ification of language is changing its character.

OK I feel like it may seem strange to say in a Catholic university that we are living in pious times when things are clearly so godless and cruel these days. But what I mean by pious is there are just words I can't say in public. If I say them, or broach certain topics, I will mark myself as unclean. For some reason our piety—and I don’t think this is a good thing—is living in language right now. I was grateful that the Pope's phone calls to Palestine were mentioned earlier today.

Those of us who have a sense for language, who are conscious that we’re feeling it, aren't more connected to it than people who feel nothing about it. We’re all in language, yet some of us feel it so deeply. Isn’t that strange? This flow of language moves between us, through us. It's historical, actual, immanent, everything—but it also bursts out and occasionally seems to take on a life of its own.

There’s a psychoanalytic quality to letting things come out—good and bad. Freedom of speech is a mystical idea—not only politically, but in your notebook, in your own inner dialogue and contemplation.

There's something about not knowing where language will go that is mystical. I think it's what William Carlos Williams was writing about in Spring and All. I think a lot of American modernism was trying to get at this sense of the now. Trying to pull British english out of old books and make poetry sound like what the language was actually doing in this strange new culture. Digital speech is still marked by that.

Art has something to do with bearing witness to how consciousness is changing through us. There's something scary and dangerous about it. What I mean by piety—I'm riffing on something my friend, the poet Rodrigo Toscano, said about political art.

He said a political poem isn't merely standing up and stating its beliefs in defiance of some injustice. That, he says, is just piety. It's not art. It’s fine it has its place. But to him, truly activating political art makes ideas and senses and realities interact in a truly new way, one that makes you feel more alive to the dynamic of the situation than you did by simply repeating what you already know you think.

What if I say something triggering or awful? Right now? We have terrible anxiety about the fact that we might be misinterpreted.

This godly gift of speech and language and writing—this ability to produce these sophisticated expressions of consciousness together—I think there’s terrible dread in the collective about that right now. We're scared of using language wrong.

Michael: I completely agree and share your sense, Ariana, but I’m not sure this is new. I think about Plato—he’d kick all of us out of the Republic. He had good reasons for that. Why let people rock the boat? He said poets are crazy. He’d take what you're saying as evidence.

The relationship between the writer and the social world has always been fraught.

I want to talk about the idea of inspiration. It’s ancient, but completely real. When I’m writing, I know it’s good when I feel possessed—literally possessed.

I get frustrated with the advice to “know your audience.” That’s terrible advice for an ambitious writer. The whole point is to write without knowing who your audience is.

Shakespeare wrote with total confidence: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this…” and he was right. He wrote for people 500 years later, people he knew nothing about.

You can’t plan for that. You can’t calculate it. It involves a receptivity to something coming through you, in the way you describe so well, Ariana.

Ariana: I like to study what happens when people feel like they're falling in love and they need to send a certain kind of text message. I’m very interested in that charge. That charge grips people in language—when they feel like communication is really important, when something has to pass through language that is bigger than language.

The experience of love and desire is spiritual. It grips ordinary people, and suddenly they’re poets. Or they’re writing gospels. They feel something profound that they must share.

The mystics in every tradition have had overwhelming experiences they had to testify to, experiences they did not feel equal to. Mohammed couldn’t read or write but he had to communicate what happened to him. Love is like that too. These things are overwhelming.

Whatever literature and art is—somehow connected, but also free from religion—it always bears witness to the divine, even when it denies it. I think the divine is still speaking. People are still being gripped by it, and people still need to bear witness to how they have changed.

Jordan: My experience is that when I feel gripped while writing, I often come back later and think, What even is this?

René Girard talks about novelistic conversion: Great novelists write a first draft, look at it, and see all the self-justification. They’re scapegoating someone, or something, but then they learn to describe “the evil of the Other from within.” In my writing, when I'm fired up, I often come back to it and realize—this is total cope.

Then I have to confront myself.

Ariana: You’re describing a mirror you have to build for yourself—the kind that shows you all the ways you’re ridiculous and wrong.

Language is a mirror. It clouds over easily.

Michael: I’ve always been suspicious of theories of creative work. Mystery is intrinsic to it.

There are writers who destroy their lives through the mirroring process, imagining a moral transformation of their aesthetic work.

Nikolai Gogol is a great example. He was a genius, but his genius was a dark comic genius. Then he became convinced that he had to make it moral. That God wanted him to reform. He tried to write a second part of Dead Souls with moral exemplars. It was terrible.

I’m reluctant to theorize about how cognition interacts with inspiration.

There are constraints on speech and thought today. Some call it political, but I think it's moral: The idea that I must make my writing morally correct. But morality is not always spiritual.

Plato’s objection to art is intelligent and coherent. Art places tension between the moral and the spiritual.

Ariana: That’s something we talk about a lot in Invisible College—how moral truth and great art aren't always the same. There’s boring wisdom poetry. There's no shortage of moralizing. But artists don’t always get to write the moral tract they want. You have to be the artist you are.

That level of honesty—if you don’t have it, the work won’t land. It’s deeper than “write what you know.” Somehow, your art must partake of what you really are—not just what you long to be.

Michael: When you say it must be who you are—my experience is that when I feel inspiration, it’s not me.

That’s why I respect it. I had a professor in college, Alan Grossman, who said: When you’re reading Milton or Dickinson silently, whose voice do you hear?

Your own.

You’re discovering unknown possibilities of your own voice.

Silent reading activates a different quality of solitude.

It’s me, but it’s not really me.

Audience Member: Why do you think artists are such effective catalysts of change and inspiration, while being such messes themselves?

Jordan: I don't know what you're talking about—I’m a perfect person.

Michael: There’s a myth that great art comes from messed-up people. My experience is the opposite. I didn’t write anything good while I was on drugs—just complete crap. The more you look into that myth, the more you see that serious drug or alcohol problems often start when the work begins to decline.

Writers like Emily Dickinson or Keats—they were weird, sure. But not messed up in that way.

That classical idea of divine intoxication is real. But that’s different from just being intoxicated.

Ariana: For me, art has been something of a hospital. I have a kind of pharmaceutical relationship to it.

Maybe artists are just as messed up as everyone else, but they have this gift that really shines. There's a tension inside that can create this glowing energy space.

And yes, don’t look to how artists live—it's usually a mess. A lot of people get into art because something's wrong, and they’re trying to find a way to get somewhere better.

Also, I like keeping a little bit of that “crazy artist” trope—it gives me some privacy. Everything feels so surveilled and managed now. I’m constantly trying to be healthier, more moral, better—but I still want that little veil of mystery.

Culturally, we’re not comfortable with mystery. That little bit of chaos gives you privacy.

Audience: Ariana, I’m an architect, and I was intrigued by your statement that poetry is making art out of something everyone is using—language. That’s also how I think of architecture: Making art out of something everyone is using. This room is a work of art—there are flowers on the ceiling. So, how does this radical encounter between the ordinary and the extraordinary speak to today’s theme of metanoia—of transformation, repentance, turning back?

Ariana: I'm going to misquote Rilke, but in one of his letters, he says something like: We used to build buildings testifying to our inner experience. Now we only build to display wealth, power, the accumulation of money. Our visible structures no longer point inward, or heavenward, as the cathedrals did. But, he said, when a person experiences inner transformation—stars are born.

Audience Member: Would you be willing to share a concrete experience of how writing has personally transformed you?

Jordan: My experience maps onto Girard's idea of novelistic conversion. It’s a humbling thing. You think you know something; you think you are a certain way. My next novel, Muscle Man, is coming out in September. Everyone can preorder it right now.

When I started writing it, my wife was in grad school, and I was on the edges of academic life. I was getting emails every day from Clune about the problems in higher ed. And I was like, I know what’s wrong with society. I wanted to write a novel that was a defense of certain values.

I wrote the whole thing over years. Then I got busy, put it away. When I came back to it—it was unreadable. Just ugly and ridiculous.

Then I had to do the work of editing, radically changing it—until it felt true and real.

That process mirrors basically every spiritual experience I’ve had. You get humbled. And then you have to decide: Am I going to grow, or keep beating my head against the wall?

Audience Member: A lot of people don’t read anymore. Most encounter art through TV and film. Do you think screenwriters are engaging with the kinds of ideas you’ve been talking about?

Michael: I don’t think this kind of artistic experience needs to be accessible to everyone. I know that’s controversial. But the art that moves and transforms me is the kind that calls me out of myself, out of what I already like. In TV and media, that’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do. Of course, there are exceptions. 1990s rap, for instance, had huge aesthetic power and broad appeal.

But often, the greatest work doesn’t meet people where they are—it transforms them.

Wordsworth said: The true writer creates the taste by which he is to be appreciated. Emily Dickinson’s work wasn’t even printed properly for a century. The kind of work we do—we just sit down and do it. But to make a film, you need massive money.

So yes, there are brilliant filmmakers and video artists. But the commercial model often doesn’t allow for the same kind of risk.

Ariana: I actually think popular entertainment has gotten much more literary and philosophically complex. Many of the people making this stuff are spiritually intense and deeply cultivated. There’s a lot buried in these shows. I think the aesthetic terms and standards for what counts as a masterpiece are shifting. Yes, people want safety and money. But tastes change. People get bored and want something new.

And when something touches them in a deep, mysterious way—even if they don’t understand it—they move toward it.

So the question becomes: What kind of art should we make? What should we build?

Something that leaves space for people to have an inner encounter with what's happening outside them.

Bad metaphor to close on, but: I have curly hair, and I’ve had so many bad haircuts because people don’t understand that curly hair spirals.

Consciousness spirals too.

We need to leave people space to gather fuel in vacant lots, as T.S. Eliot said.

There’s a turning that needs to happen in the spirit, and we have to leave room for that—whether we’re building buildings, artworks, or platforms for change.

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Watch the full video of Literary Conversion here.

Introduction

The following is an edited transcript from Cluny Institute’s 2025 METANOIA conference, which brought together speakers from across disciplines to discuss the nature of conversion. The following conversation, The Architecture of Transformative Experience, explores change at its most fundamental levels, through the lenses of theology, history, narrative, and more.

Ben Hunt is the chief investment officer of Second Foundation Partners, and the author of Epsilon Theory. He has a Ph.D from Harvard University, was a tenured political science professor, and has co-founded three technology companies.

Jennifer Paxton is a professor of History at the Catholic University of America. She is the director of the University Honors program, and received her Ph.D from Harvard University.

Fr. Mark Roosien is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, and a Lecturer in Liturgical Studies at Yale University. He is a translator, author, and the rector of Holy Ghost church in Bridgeport, CT.

Conversation

Luke Burgis: We hear about “vibe shifts” all the time: The Christian vibe shift in Silicon Valley, political shifts, cultural shifts. For this conversation, we want to get underneath the vibe shift. What are we really talking about? What should we be thinking about when we're thinking about substantial change?

Ben Hunt: Exploring change through story and technology has been the object of my desire for my entire life. It's what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, which for me has always been trying to figure out the structure of unstructured data. And the structure of unstructured data is story.

I've explored the structure of unstructured data across different fields. In academia—political science, of all oxymorons—then in software companies, and more recently in markets and finance, which is all narrative and storytelling.

It wasn't Tolstoy who said this, but it's attributed to Tolstoy, that there are only two stories: A man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. But the fact is that there are more than two stories. There are twelve.

There are twelve stories in any field that the human animal can hold in its head at once. In Hollywood, there are twelve scripts for rom-coms. There are twelve scripts for police procedurals. It's true in investing; there are twelve scripts for understanding U.S. retail sales.

These stories wax and wane in ourselves and in society.

In all of my work about the stories that are necessary for positive change—and this is true whether we're talking about politics, markets, or sports—having a story of safety is foundational for human change and development.

Jennifer Paxton: In the history of monasticism, there are also two stories: A man hears what the gospel says about selling all you have and giving it to the poor, and a group of people decides to live in common like the apostles. These two stories recur over and over in the history of the church. But every time they do, they manifest themselves differently. So every time people think they're going back to the original narrative, they're actually creating something new.

Luke gave us an essay to read before this conference: “Innovation and Repetition.” It's about the balance between changing and preserving; how every time you're doing something, you're doing both of those things and trying to balance the two. If you don't get that balance right, you won't have something that both preserves what’s valuable from the past and also creates something new that's appropriate to the moment.

That balance is what fascinates me.

Fr. Mark Roosien: When I was asked to present at this conference about metanoia, obviously my first thought went to religious conversion. Not necessarily in the sense of converting from one religion to another, but what does it mean to convert to God?

Theology is a way of seeing reality. It's a way of understanding reality that allows you to find God within reality, and to find yourself in the same world as God.

That process is a process of conversion. It's a process of coming to see yourself and God in the same world, and beginning to interact. And that involves the work of the imagination. It involves a creative faculty within the mind, and also within the community, to be able to see all of it as existing within a story, within a world.

You have information and data, and you have a knowing subject. You have a structure of mind. And the goal is to get these two things to come together. But where does that happen? In the imagination.

Ben: Our physical ability to perceive and process information is actually quite limited. The sensory inputs we have only make sense if we can put them into a story. Our autonomy of mind has always been under assault. Narrative is intentional.

I think the question is: What scripts are running through our head?

There has been an enormous change in the world—I think a negative change—that comes first and foremost through this little dopamine machine that all of us have here [lifts up smartphone]. As with most profound changes, it's not that somebody has done this to us. It's not 1984, where there's the screen you can't turn off. We willingly adopt it.

This machine is the last thing I look at when I go to bed. It's the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning. Not my wife—my iPhone. How sad and pathetic is that?

What stories are we absorbing? Do we maintain critical distance from those stories? That's the mission.

Luke: In the gospels, John the Baptist says, “Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And he actually says, “metanoia, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” There's a call to change everything. But not everybody who heard it changed. How should we think about the role of agency in the process of change from a theological perspective?

Fr. Mark: Whenever you want to change, there has to be an element of desire. It’s paradoxical, because you're not exactly sure what you want to change into, or what new story you want to appropriate, but you have to know enough about it to desire it.

That's where the imagination comes in. There is a third-century theologian, Origen of Alexandria—a very speculative, mystical philosopher—and one of his great works is an incredible commentary on the Old Testament book, the Song of Songs. If you've read the Song of Songs, you know it's a very saucy book. Origen says that this book is not for everybody—it's only for the spiritually advanced, because if you read it without sufficient spiritual advancement, you're going to fall. You're going to be seduced by what's in the book. So he writes a commentary for the spiritually advanced, in which he describes the story of the bride and the groom as an allegory between the soul and God.

But what's interesting about Origen is that he actually breaks his own rule. He says only the spiritually advanced should read the Song of Songs, and yet he also wrote two short homilies on the Song of Songs, which were written for catechumens—people who are preparing to enter into the church. They're not even baptized Christians yet. So how is it that he has such a stern warning that you should not read this book until after you’ve reached a high level of spiritual maturity, yet he's also talking about it with these baby Christians? I think it has something to do with desire.

The spiritual masters are able to access an almost erotic experience of God through the text. They are given the role of the bride entering the bridal chamber, and everything that comes with that. But in the short homilies for the beginner, they don't get to play the role the bride. They get to embody the bride's friends who stand outside the house.

They get to peek in the window and see what's going on in there, but they're not allowed to enter. Origen says, You have to stay outside for now. You're not ready to enter into this grand story of God and the soul. Your job right now is to stand outside and imagine what it’s going to be like, to peer in through the window. He is basically trying to elicit a kind of desire from them through imagination.

When it comes to agency, the idea is to ignite within the learner, the beginner, a desire to keep going, and to realize that the story that they're going to be entering—the change that they're going to make—will be better than what they live in now.

It's going to be better than the phone. But you have to elicit desire to break free from the world that you live in currently, and that takes agency.

Luke: I describe my own process of conversion as a change of desire. My desires literally changed. There's something to be said about the role of mystagogy: A mystagogue is one who leads others into a mystery. And that's a very different thing than telling people answers, or teaching them facts.

Jenny, as you and I were talking about this, you had mentioned that at the time of Cluny—which I'm obviously partial to—to convert or to change one's life basically meant to become a monk.

Jennifer: That's right. In the period of Cluny—the early 10th century—most of Europe was nominally Christian. We don't have a lot of insight into what people in rural areas, or lesser socioeconomic rungs, thought about religion. But the elite were at least nominally Christian, and some of them were profoundly Christian. So when they felt a call to deepen their experience of religion, most of the time it meant joining a monastic house.

An alternative, though, was for them to become monastic patrons. That was how you could have your cake and eat it too. You could sponsor the religious life, but you could stay in the secular world. And so monastic reform in the Middle Ages was that marriage between people in the secular world who would pay for it, and people who were willing to live it themselves.

That's what you get at Cluny. You get the partnership between the Duke of Aquitaine in southwestern France, and Odo of Cluny, who is one of the early saints of Cluny.

By the end of the 11th century, you have this Cluny project that stretches across Europe, encompassing hundreds of monasteries. And if you are donating to a Cluniac house, you know what you're going to get. You're going to get high quality intercessory prayer; all of those sins you're committing in the secular world are going to be prayed for, so that you're going to have a hope of salvation.

As a result, you get this wonderful monastic observance—people praying all over the place, and scholarship being done, and a culture being transformed. It all comes from that initial impulse at one place in southern France. And it founds the concept of the monastic order, which is the basis of so much of medieval religious life.

And then, you know, down to today.

Luke: Let's talk about the role of power and money when it comes to change.

Ben: We make sense of the world through stories. There’s a fractal element to that. We tell ourselves stories to get up in the morning. There’s a story element to how we understand politics. There’s a story element to understanding why we’re at this conference. But technology is now promoting narratives to us to a degree that it wasn’t in the past.

I'll point out two really non-cyclical changes. The first is in our system of media. We've moved towards the 24/7 presentation of narratives: Not entertainment, but scripts for how to understand the political and economic world. It's 24/7 news across all sorts of different political arenas. Similarly in the business world, there's not enough content for 24/7 news. I call it fiat news, like fiat money—it's made up news.

And there is agency behind that. There is AB testing on all of that—everything about our consumption, attention, votes, all of that. There are trillions of dollars spent behind the presentation of these stories.

The hardest thing in the world is to maintain critical distance. There's one simple thing you can do. You know, try this one simple trick, right? Ask yourself: Why am I reading this now? Why is this being presented to me now?

Fr Mark: When it comes to the question of money and narrative, I think about St. John Chrysostom, from the fourth century. He became a very powerful bishop of Constantinople, which was the major city of the Roman Empire at the time, because Rome was falling. He was very savvy about getting influential people to do what he wanted.

Some of what he wanted to do was build hospitals. The birth of the hospital in the Western world happens at this time. St John built these houses of hospitality, institutions for caring for the poor. His entire pastoral agenda for the city of Constantinople was to change it from being a late Roman metropolis whose story was focused on things like status, legacy, nobility; where noble familial lines were supposed to continue their legacy from generation to generation.

St. John Chrysostom basically says: None of that matters. What really matters is something quite different. The most important person in the room, he says, is not the person who's on stage. It's not the person who's sponsoring the event. It is the poor person, because the poor person is Christ. That's the narrative that he's trying to tell. He's trying to say that that's actually the truth of reality: The poor person is much more God-like than anybody here with wealth and status.

It's very realpolitik at times. He's leveraging his authority to pressure wealthy people to put their money into the narrative that he was telling—which was ultimately going to undermine their way of life.

Luke: Do we have to accept the notion that change must pass through the elites? Should we think differently about that question?

Fr. Mark: A lot of St. John Chrysostom’s sermons are preached to the elite because you didn't often have the poorest of the poor coming to church every Sunday—they're out surviving. What you have is people who are relatively elite, who can have some agency and power in the world. One of the reasons that John was so popular—and the reason he got the epithet Chrysostom, which means the golden mouth or the golden tongue—was because he had an incredible command of ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric. He was able to speak the language of the elite that delighted them—they would be clapping during his sermons. He'd be like, Stop clapping. It's not a show. He recognized that it was important to go around the elite, which he often did behind the scenes.

Pope Francis also did a lot of things behind the scenes that he didn't do in public. One of the things that I was most inspired by in the last months of his life was that he would FaceTime with a Catholic parish in Palestine to ask just how they were doing.

Jennifer: The word agency is related to the word agenda. Having an agenda literally means to have a to-do list. But we have to think about what's on that to-do list, and what is that person's goal? Why are they telling the story that they're telling, in the way that they're telling it? The humanities are important, because this is where we teach people how to interpret stories.

Fiction has an agenda. Fact has an agenda. Right now, we are in a period where we seem to be very divided. You watch MSNBC, or Fox News, and you wonder if you're on the same planet as other people. But there was a period from about the early 16th century down into the 19th century when everybody in Europe had an agenda too. It was either Protestant or Catholic, and everything was written through that lens.

There's a moment in the Enlightenment where people try to break out of that. But confessional history was the mode of historical writing that most people engaged in: As in, you belong to the Protestant confession or the Catholic confession.

That disappeared in the 19th century and hasn't really come back. We are in a moment that is a little bit similar, I think, in terms of how politics and culture are being written about.

But it will not always be like that.

Ben: I'm not optimistic. The reason I'm not optimistic is that there used to be a buffer, a distance between the people and the elite. Today, that buffer is gone. And it's gone because of what we carry in our pockets. It's a disaster. It’s an impingement on our autonomy of mind, when our betters shake their finger at us and tell us this is how to think.

Luke: Is there a question of our ability to perceive or sense reality? Are people losing their BS detectors or something? You used to be able to look somebody in the eye and know if that person is lying. Now, when everything is mediated to us through technology, it seems like that task is becoming a lot more difficult. How do we know if change is real? People can claim anything they want about the change they're going to make, or the change they've undergone. How might we develop the kind of perception to be able to see?

Fr. Mark: One danger of the imagination is the ability construct your own world. You just make stuff up, or build it by the narratives that come into your phone. And it's increasingly difficult to speak to people in another world.

But what real change demands is for you to have encounters that break apart the imaginary world that you've constructed, and force you to reappropriate something new. I think the best way that that happens is the face-to-face encounter with another person, especially someone who's different from you.

I come back to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who talks about the face of the other as that which breaks into my world and demands something of me. A genuine encounter with another person places me in a state of humility. I need to acknowledge that they are in some sense above me, and I need to adjust my world and see its limitations. So the more we can get those kinds of encounters—which are becoming fewer and fewer, because we're much more satisfied to stay within the worlds [we create or] that have been created for us—the better.

Audience: Does agency or a desire to change necessarily proceed substantial change? The conversion of Paul suggests otherwise. Can one experience undesired transformation?

Luke: It took me a good ten years to even have any language to describe my own process of conversion. The best I've found comes from Rudolph Otto in his description of the holy. He describes the holy with a Latin phrase, the mysterium fascinans et tremendum.

It's a mystery that both fascinates and makes us tremble. There's a paradoxical combination of dread and something that's magnetically attractive, that almost seduces us. That's how he describes the holy: That which pulls us out of ourselves and draws us towards something.

Maybe that’s undesired change. It’s not forced on us, but at some point we have to step across the threshold of hope.

Audience: Can technology be a catalyst or facilitator of substantial change? Or is it simply a distraction and obstacle?

Luke: Technology is often so poorly defined. It seems like right now when we're asking about technology, we're almost asking about AI. I think there are questions that go far beyond AI that are very important, like praying with a prayer app: How does that change religious experience, for instance? One of the paradoxes of change is that it's really difficult to understand while you're actually going through it.

Fr. Mark: It's one thing to pray with the prayer app. It's another thing to pay for the prayer app.

Watch the full video of The Architecture of Transformative Experience here.

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Introduction

In recent years, author and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has been a singularly incisive commentator on cultural trends at the intersection of religion, politics, and art. For our second Trialogue, Luke Burgis and I emailed with Ross about the emerging alliance between technologists and traditionalists, the role of art in contemporary culture, and his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The conversation took place from January 23, 2025 to February 24, 2025, and is presented here in its entirety. - Jordan Castro

Luke Burgis:

Let’s start with your book that was just published, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It probably comes as no surprise that my favorite line in your book is “God can do infinitely more with imitation than with no activity at all.”

You go beyond traditional apologetics of religious belief and grapple with the reasonability of peoples’ decisions to practice a particular religion that might not satisfy the most zealous: because their parents practiced it, because their spouse had a profound conversion to it, because it’s the religion of your favorite novelist whom you deeply respect, or because your favorite civilization sprung from it. It seems like people expect metaphysical purity of choice. God knows my own conversion was messy.

So let’s admit that there are good reasons, including social reasons, to become religious. But are there bad reasons to become religious?

Ross Douthat:

I would say that it is a bad thing to join a religion with expressly dishonest, subversive or sacrilegious purposes. That is, it would be a bad thing to convert to Orthodox Christianity under orders from the KGB to infiltrate and subvert the churches of the USSR for Stalin's purposes. It would be a bad thing to convert to Roman Catholicism because you believe in Satanism and intend to avail yourself of Catholic materials for the purposes of Devil worship, a Black Mass. It would be a bad thing to convert to evangelical Christianity with the intent to deceive and bilk the devout via some kind of televangelist-style scheme.

But this is a pretty narrow set of examples. Beyond such cases of express deception, where the conversion is entirely false and exploitative, I think that almost all conversions should be given the benefit of the doubt. This encompasses conversions for the sake of your spouse and religious unity in the household, conversions undertaken out of various kinds of psychological desperation, or conversions where the desire to be religious for some secondary reason—friendship, cultural solidarity, even political alliances—is more important to the leap than a definite theological conviction. Historically highly-contingent, utilitarian-seeming conversions shadowed by politics and pragmatism have often borne substantial long term fruit: Christianity has spread through such imperfect forms of belief as much as through the more fervent and thoroughgoing sort. So long as in becoming religious you are giving God something to work with: we're all on a continuum of messiness, and let he whose conversion is without some element of imperfection cast the first stone.

But you do have to actually convert and (to whatever extent possible) believe. The act of merely identifying with religion, of expressing some sort of general belief in belief rather than professing the creed or being baptized, of declaring yourself a cultural Christian but never darkening the door of any church—that positioning is much more suspect, because it instrumentalizes the faith without rendering anything up to God. Almost everyone is guilty of instrumentalizing religion to some degree, but the imperfect convert who says "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief" has a real claim upon his faith even when he's misusing it. But the desire to have *others* convert and believe so that you or your society can reap some cultural or moral or political benefit—that gives God nothing, and reaps nothing in reward.

Jordan Castro:

My wife Nicolette had a radical experience of God right before we started dating, and one of the hardest things I wrestled with before converting—after reading a lot, arguing, going to church for years, etc—was whether or not I was “legitimately” coming to believe, or whether my ongoing reckoning with Christianity was just some sort of elaborate cope because I was in love. I told the priest at my grandma’s funeral about my predicament, and he said, “God knows the right bait to use.”

Still, it took years. I didn’t understand what it could even mean to “be” a Christian, but I think I rightly understood the gravity of what was at stake. It was overwhelming. But above, you seem to be saying that the most important thing is to decide, to convert.

I know you converted to Catholicism as a teen, a year after your mother, because you thought it was true. Your book deals with rational arguments. But what did you struggle with?

Ross:

Yes, I do think it's more important to convert while the iron is hot and the bait is being dangled (to mix a couple of metaphors) than to try to work out all your difficulties and make sure you're joining for the right reasons, with full awareness and certain belief. This is my own private opinion, not the official position of my church: I've known priests who turned away would-be converts who were coming in for contingent reasons and didn't seem to have some deep faith, and of course Catholicism asks converts to formally assent to all that the church believes and teaches, not just the big-picture stuff. But human beings have mixed motivations, our psyches are so complex and yet so fragile and windblown, that to hover on the threshold of a potential relationship with the Absolute while waiting for perfect certainty about whether you should go forward seems like a waste of time and life. As C.S. Lewis puts it, most worthwhile human things are just inevitably done in difficulty and uncertainty—because "favorable circumstances never come."

As to my own struggles, they've inevitably changed over the years. When I was younger the biggest challenge was not belief but behavior: To sign up for Catholicism's package of teachings at the age of seventeen was a recipe for predictable tensions between what I professed and how I lived, not just in terms of the church's sexual strictures but also in broader ways, because my college years and twenties were an extremely worldly and ambitious period. To the extent that I had doubts, they were about God rather than the Church itself: I was quite confident that if a God existed He obviously subsisted more in the universal-seeming territory of Catholicism than the Protestant alternatives I had experienced as a kid; I had the usual Catholic convert's sense that it was atheism or Rome, the One True Church or nothing.

Today it's a bit different. Certain temptations have faded with parental exhaustion and mid-career overwork, and my Catholic triumphalism has been tempered by the experience of the sex abuse crisis and the theological debates of the Francis era; without turning Protestant I definitely think certain important Catholic teachings are more contested and unstable, and multiple positions therefore more understandable, than I thought as a young John Paul II-era convert.

But if I have more sympathy for different schools of Christian thought, I have less time for atheism (as my new book makes clear) than I did as a younger man: I'm more of a latitudinarian about doctrine, but a zealot about the fundamental implausibility of materialism, the sheer unlikeliness of the reductionist accounts of human existence, and the weakness of the contemporary nonbeliever's brief.

Luke:

I'd like to pivot slightly away from the book itself and situate it in the context of current events—specifically, the emergence of the new “tech right” and the “Tech-Trad Alliance,” which you've written extensively about. I want to focus on how this new alliance plays out in terms of the effect that it might have on traditional religious belief.

I could see things going in a myriad of different directions, depending on whose influence ultimately wins: A more widespread transhumanism, a Baconian Christianity where the New Atlantis resumes a place in the American imagination, a new form of techno-religious syncretism….Or maybe JD Vance is going to be a powerful enough figure that he pulls everything nominally in the direction of traditional Catholicism.

Who, or what, do you think is the center of gravity? Your book puts a finger on the scale at a critical juncture, and might help to begin certain conversations that nudge the movement away from certain vectors and toward others. And yet I feel so much of this realignment is happening at the pre-rational or subconscious level—so trying to situate and name the center of gravity, the primary forces acting to create this new dynamic, is important. Is it being driven by ideas, people, politics, economics, or merely power? Help our readers understand what is driving this convergence so that we can understand what place the rational case for belief occupies within it, or which course of the meal it should be served as.

Ross:

Luke, I don’t necessarily think there is a center of gravity at the moment, and the primal forces you describe are sometimes rowing (do primal forces row?) in different directions and sometimes seeming to converge. When I talk about a tech-trad alignment, I’m mostly talking about agreement around a mixture of specific political issues–anti-wokeness, American industrial ambition, maybe the importance of birthrates (though that’s more specific to Elon Musk than Silicon Valley writ large)–and then one fundamental premise: The shared idea that the universe is intelligible and meaningful, that human efforts are not in vain, that paths open before our feet if we make the correct choices. This, set against the forms of existential pessimism and even despair that wokeness and secular progressivism have ended up nurturing, where if climate change doesn’t kill us all, even so the traditional forms of human society are too cishetero-imperialist and patriarchal to deserve to continue.

But that convergence might be provisional, an alliance against the left that yields itself to a deeper conflict of visions. Musk himself contains multitudes, and when you look beyond him to other figures in the tech world–I’m thinking of the would-be A.I. tycoons above all–you see an ambition that may be incompatible with traditionalism in any form. The hope has to be that some of those ambitions are simply impossible, rooted in errors about the nature of consciousness and selfhood; if the supposed transhumanist “merge” of mind and machine ever came to fruition we would be in territory that Christians could only consider demonic.

So why should traditionalists be interested in or aligned with this world at all? In part because I think there is a true contestation for the soul of the tech world, with darker and lighter directions for its ambitions, and the tradition-minded should wish for and help the more humane ambitions in what will be, no matter what, the great power center of this age.

And then in part because the strategies of intentional resistance to the technological future–apart from total Amish-level exit–seem either ineffective or stagnant or unfruitful (e.g., most of Europe in both its socialist and nationalist forms), while the zones of technological dynamism (in America above all) also tend to be zones of religious interest, Christian resilience, metaphysical hope. That makes me think that maybe, maybe, there is a path here that we’re supposed to walk, under God’s providence, where religion is crucial to a taming and directing and shaping of the future, where all those Silicon Valley guys naming their companies after details from Tolkien’s legendarium are picking up on what America is supposed to be: Not the Shire and not Mordor, but Númenor in splendor, sending out starships instead of seafarers.

Is that way too hopeful and utopian? Well, then balance it with the equally compelling possibility that the tech-trad convergence is God offering a lifeline to the techlords, a chance to serve the good instead of saying non serviam, and that if they reject it then the text that matters won’t be Tolkien, but C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

Jordan:

You mention Tolkien and Lewis. What role might art and literature play in shaping a new cultural imagination, especially now given the shifting political tide?

Ross:

I grew up in a world where film and television were dominant forms, the novel was still influential if less significant than in the past, and then there were the boutique forms—poetry, dance, opera, the fine arts—that seemed to matter more as history than as living shapers of the culture. As a child of that era, I naturally still think of the movies and TV and books as the key forms—but now I'm not sure what form, if any, actually plays such a major culture-shaping role.

Cinema has clearly lost its hold on our common life, undermined and undone by all manner of economic, technological and political forces. TV had a brief peak of influence and aesthetic success but now seems to be declining into mediocrity again. And I just don't know what to say about the future of the novel—and I say this as someone serializing a novel on the internet right now!—or how it might recover even the influence it still enjoyed in the early 2000s.

Sometimes I think that what is needed is a cultural counter-revolution or transformation, a shaking-off of the bad ideas and ideological strictures of a decadent progressive consensus, to widen the room in which artists and storytellers can work. Sometimes I think we are looking for a new or remade form of art that's more suited to a digital age. Sometimes I think that what is required above all are habits and structures and institutions that help us *resist* the digital experience—that art simply can't flourish under very-online conditions, and so to renew the culture we need a baseline of non-digital habits before we can expect a new set of great novelists and filmmakers to appear. (A renewal of public art and architecture, the garden and the monument and the museum, seems like it might be one place where art itself can help create those non-digital conditions.)

I will say that persistence of Lewis and Tolkien as influences on Christians especially is notable and interesting: The story, the fictional sub-creation, seems to exert a religious pull in our own era akin to the pull of theological disputation or the lives of the saints in past eras, and so far I don't see any new form coming along that is capable of displacing it. And that's part of why I suppose I still look to movies, novels and TV serials, notwithstanding their weakening influence: For our society the good story remains the master key.

Luke:

Let's close with a question that has been haunting me lately: Does the decadence of our society in the present age mean that it will take another world war—Tolkien experienced the horrors of both of them—or a global catastrophe for an artist to conjure up something as epic as The Battle of Helm's Deep (in the film The Two Towers)? I certainly hope not, but it feels like we're very far away from anything with those existential stakes being made. I can't even imagine it. And I wonder if this question is not unrelated to the question of belief, like war itself. What do you think?

Ross:

Your question gets at an issue I've often wondered about—namely, why did fantasy (arguably encompassing space operas like Star Wars as well) end up as such a defining genre of our age? Clearly it has something to do with the sense of diminished stakes under decadence, a need for other realities in which the stakes feel more epic and metaphysical. But it can't just be that we're trying to escape back into worlds that seemed to have more existential stakes, since Tolkien himself was writing in the shadow of both World Wars, and then under the shadow of nuclear annihilation by the rings of power forged in Los Alamos—and yet he still reached for the fantastic, for secondary creation, to tell a story for his age. The turn to fantasy began before we entered fully into decadence, in other words, when we were still performing feats of human daring.We reached the moon fifteen years after Return of the King's publication, after all.

I'm not sure exactly what that means. Maybe fantasy works so well in our time because it serves a dual purpose—an escape backward out of technological modernity's decadence and a pre-modern alternative to the fearful side of technological acceleration, making it relevant when we're stagnating and also when we're speeding up. Or maybe it's that fantasy is concerned above all with civilizational transitions, an age of magic giving way or maybe unexpectedly coming back, and the modern person, confronting nuclear weapons and the space race and now AI (and UFOs and re-enchantment and who knows what else), naturally feels themselves to be existing in an extremely liminal time, where the varying possibilities of Númenor, Mordor or some kind of collapse back to the Shire and Rivendell are all very much in play.

Maybe we'll understand the role of the mid-20th century fantasists fully when we're on the other side of some strange transition yet to come—standing boldly on Mars, hanging out in Hobbiton, or wiping our hands at the end of the Butlerian Jihad.

Luke:

Thanks so much Ross, we’ll wrap it up here.

Jordan:

Thanks guys. [addressing the reader] Don’t forget to check out Ross’ new book, here.

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Trialogues are written correspondence between a moderator and three interlocutors who are anonymous to one another prior to publication.

Introduction

In this series, we experiment with form. For this first edition, I invited three people to participate in an email correspondence with me over five days. On the first day, I asked each of them the same motivating question. I followed with a probe into their answer on day two. On days three and four, I asked each person to react to the responses of the other interlocutors. On day five, I revealed the full correspondence to all and invited each person to give a closing remark. To protect anonymity during the conversation, I referred to the participants as “A”, “B”, and “C”. In the published text, we have reinserted their real names. This conversation explores the intersections of rationality, artificial intelligence, and human flourishing. The text has been re-arranged for the sake of clarity and flow while preserving the original statements.

is a poet, rabbi and theologian.

is associate professor of economics at George Mason University. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.

is a VC based in Palo Alto, California. He invests in AI startups.

With that context to set the stage, let’s begin. As this series evolves, we will be tinkering with the forward and may conduct future conversations via text message or other forms of anonymous chat. We welcome your ideas and feedback as we continue to facilitate these experiments in conversation. I’m grateful to Zohar, Robin, and James for being willing to commit to this experiment before there was even a model for it. —

The Conversation

Zohar Atkins:

Rationality is a powerful tool. It allows us to set goals, plan, test hypotheses, and update our worldview in light of new data. It provides a shared language to converse across cultures and serves as an Archimedean point for self-criticism. Rationality is leverage—a strong man lifts a block, but a clever man invents a pulley. It’s how Socratic nerds defeat Homeric jocks.

However, rationality is only a tool. It cannot tell us why our goals should be our goals. It cannot direct our love, care, or reveal what is noble. Rationality alone doesn't connect us to others or move us to joy, awe, or anxiety. A purely rational sense of self would be dull, devoid of qualities. Rationality alone cannot create great art—it has no point of view. Pascal argues we can know God only by loving God. Levinas suggests the experience of another’s face evokes responsibility, preceding rationality. Gadamer teaches that bias is a precondition for understanding. Without bias, one cannot take a stand or interpret the world.

Let's assume superintelligence is inevitable. Its value will depend on the skill of the prompt engineer and the quality assurance of its trainers, like a wand needing a wizard. Our desire to sing and dance will remain unchanged by stronger AI, just as electricity didn’t alter human emotions. AI won’t influence whether we are inspired or depressed, aside from increasing prosperity, which may allow more leisure for reflection.

If rationality helps us be "less wrong," it doesn’t necessarily make us evolutionarily fitter. A sustainable civilization requires cultivating optimism and agency. Enlightenment values like Kant’s "dare to know" won’t endure if the rational stop having children. In the Enlightened West, it is religious communities that buck the secular trend of declining birthrates. Where pure rationality is taken to dictate doom and gloom (better not to exist), the faithful place their trust in the Original pronatalist, God. That should prompt us to rethink what rationality really means.

Luke Burgis (Moderator):

Let's look closer at the idea that rationality doesn't necessarily make us evolutionarily fitter, as you say—especially since so many people today speak of progress as an arms race of intelligence, or “survival of the smartest”. Regarding the declining birth rate, for example, some people in Silicon Valley believe they can solve the fertility crisis by engineering human life at scale. If it's not the smartest who will survive and prosper, who will?

Zohar Atkins:

Survival and prosperity are necessary but insufficient conditions for a life of flourishing. Flourishing requires meaning, belonging, and purpose. Without these, society becomes nihilistic. Declining birth-rates are a symptom, not a cause, of nihilism. Meaning, belonging, and purpose are dimensions of a good life; those who have them and can transmit them stand the best chance of achieving longevity in the truest sense. We learn by example. Meaning, belonging, and purpose, are not something you put on the chalk-board. They're something you model and see modeled. They are awe-inspiring. The ability to solve multi-variable calculus is ancillary to a meaningful life, a life of connection, and a life of purpose. To flourish you need a "why" or a way to a "why." This "why" precedes reason, even if reason can help us clarify and refine it.

The survival of a race of genetically engineered super-computers that can reproduce themselves in a lab might ensure that biological life continues, but it cannot ensure the continuity of ontological life, the life of meaning, belonging, purpose.

After a certain threshold level of analytical smarts, the people who are best positioned to flourish are those with a sense of abundance, joy, gratitude, and spiritual practice, all traits that are remarkably rare amongst the professional managerial class. The skillset needed to win a top spot in the meritocracy is not the same as the skillset or character-set needed to wake up with a sense that life is a profound gift. Those who have a service posture, those who are capable of feeling awe, those who are capable of forming meaningful, committed relationships, those with a strong sense of self...these are the people on whom our future culture depends. "Light is sewn for the righteous and irrepressible joy for the upright of heart." (Psalm 97:11). 

Our generation is an anxious one, and not simply for economic reasons. We pursue status rather than balance, prefer accomplishment to mental health, and trade commitment for optionality. In our boredom and isolation, we turn to social media to convert our ennui into currency.

To survive in such cultural conditions, one must find a way not to feel hollow inside. It's ironic that our so-called rational age is one in which the masses spend their leisure time drinking from a dopamine hose that would turn even Dionysus into a tee-totaler. Art, sports, and politics provide modern substitutes for religion, and pay homage at the altar of the post-rational. But the whoosh of rooting for a favorite sports team is ephemeral. Taylor Swift's fans will transmit little to the next generation.

Political rage feeds the crowd (and the ego), but brings no peace to the home. Meanwhile, those who study, pray, and commit acts of loving-kindness keep the world going. Many of them couldn't tell you the first thing about Kant. Before the Critique of Pure Reason, carrying wood, chopping water. After the Critique of Pure Reason, carrying wood, chopping water.

Robin Hanson:

For [Zohar], “rationality” encompasses a relatively narrow range of considerations and processes, and AI is mainly only useful for making us more rational, e.g. our desire to sing and dance will remain unchanged by stronger AI, just as electricity didn’t alter human emotions. AI won’t influence whether we are inspired or depressed, aside from increasing prosperity.

He also has many complaints about the values and priorities of many in our society.

I doubt that electricity had no impact on human emotions, and I don’t see how he can be so sure AI’s impact will be so limited. Prosperity is far from the only causal path between tech and deeper cultural practices and values. AIs are even now producing inspiring and depressing songs and videos, including dance videos, and I expect them to influence our desires to sing and dance. Of course he may well not like these impacts. 

James Cham:

I agree with Zohar’s general posture towards rationality as a tool and his approach towards its limits. He has identified many of the key challenges for this generation. For the purposes of this trialogue, I will focus on some places where we disagree. 

Artificial intelligence, at least in its current version, isn't going to be necessarily better at rationality. The old computer science tools were very good at being rational and didn't need all the hype and buzzwords. LLMs are quite emotionally intelligent and will be very good at altering human emotions. They are not the aggregate distillation of all rational thought. Instead, they are the distillation of a huge chunk of human communications, which is often much more focused on being persuasive rather than analytically rigorous. One of the surprises of the early tests with GPT-4 in medical situations is that it had consistently better bedside manners. It was more polite and sometimes even more persuasive. It never got tired, it never got irritated, it didn't get curt. One of its problems was that sometimes it was just too agreeable!

What will people do with that newfound power? That's the big question. The real danger of artificial intelligence is not going to be the AI itself, but the people who wield it. And the subtle danger is (probably) not going to be AI gaining sentience. Instead it is going to be people who hide behind claims of AI consciousness as they gather power and wealth for themselves.

Robin Hanson:

“Rational” beliefs or actions are those meeting higher standards of coherence or effectiveness. Such as being more logically consistent, probabilistically coherent, or better achieving accepted subgoals. But traditionally such standards have usually been local, allowing one to check accusations of irrationality by looking only at local patterns of beliefs and actions.

However, while modern AI systems are more effective than prior versions in many ways, their differences are high-dimensional, and not well summarized or evaluated by checking local rationality constraints. While traditional science fiction robots were assumed to be so rational and consistent that they might self-destruct upon encountering a logical contradiction, modern AIs are quite often inconsistent and incoherent.

Thus if such AI systems will soon be offered as ideals of rationality, or used to rate the rationality of humans or other systems, this would then express a change in our concepts of and standards of rationality. Rationality would less mean meeting locally checkable constraints, and more mean being effective. But as effectiveness is high-dimensional, and open more to dispute as a result, rationality would become less useful as a tool of criticism.

Luke Burgis (Moderator):

Robin: If rationality becomes less useful as a form of criticism, then what might become more useful in its place? Do you think AI could lead to a broadened or expanded sense of reason?

Robin Hanson:

Even if widespread use of AI induces us to rely less on rationality constraints in checking claims and analysis, we might still make use of prediction markets. Individuals can be judged on their trading track records, and consensus can be obtained directly from prices.

What I fear instead is that we will come to rely more on the mere prestige of AIs and their supporting organizations. This will give those with such prestige great powers to set shared opinions and suppress criticism and rival views.

James Cham:

There is a strong Nancy Cartwright-style “Dappled World” insight here as we get exposed to the ways that the toolkit of rationality might be less universal and complete than we would like to believe. When [Robin] refers to rationality as local, I assume they mean rationality is ultimately limited by what can be carried by individual minds or groups of minds. They aren’t quite as consistent as we would imagine them to be because they are both lossy representations of the world and limited by working memory and communications between people.

My guess: AIs will get better at being rational, and prediction markets are another form of structured collective intelligence, with different strengths and limitations than tribes, companies, nation-states, and AIs.

People will definitely use AI to justify their own agendas. But that’s what we have done throughout history! So that’s more of a sign of how effective AIs are going to be rather than a problem. The good news is that people eventually get smarter (so far) and at some point an appeal to AI will get the same suspicious reaction that I get when a toothpaste claims that 9 out of 10 dentists prefer a brand.

Zohar Atkins:

The tension between rationality and effectiveness is archetypal. The Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen was purportedly asked how he could love God if God was just an “Idea.” Cohen responded, “How can I love anything but an Idea?”

If Idealism can be described as the love of Ideas, then pragmatism can be described as love of efficacy. Classical rationalism was a form of idealism. One should love the truth irrespective of the conclusions to which it leads. Follow the first principles first. Then figure out the feasibility.

AI as [Robin] describes it is more of a realist than an idealist. The consummate pragmatist was Marx, who argued that the point of philosophy is not to interpret but change reality. Hannah Arendt argues that we moderns are all Marxist in the sense that we value practice over theory. In broadest sense, SBF (effective altruism), Donald Trump (the art of the deal), and Kierkegaardian fitness instructors (“Just do it”) are all children of Marx. They are also children of Machiavelli, whose Prince is the anti-thesis of the philosopher-king. While the philosopher-king gains the authority to rule by identifying the truth, the Prince is more like a sophist, who wins by manipulating human psychology.

In the case of Carl Schmitt, sovereignty is defined not by the ability to uphold or interpret rules, but to decide on their exception. Schmitt’s conception of the sovereign as having the charismatic, oracular authority to suspend the rules in the name of preserving them parallels [Robin’s] suggestion that AI can circumvent local rules while claiming to maintain a rational compass. “The annihilation of the (local) law is the preservation of the (holistic) law.” I come not to negate the law, but to fulfill it, says every messianic savior ever.

And so, when AI does this, we should expect it. Perhaps the tension between bureaucratic and charismatic authority, local rules and methods governed by consensus and exceptional moments of emergency is a fruitful and necessary one. Conservatism (just be rational) and Radicalism (efficacy by any means necessary) require moderation.

There will be times when we’ll want to let AI’s decisions stand, even as we can’t understand them, and times when we’ll decide that the opacity and dictatorship of AI’s decisionism requires too much submission. We should worry if our conception of rationalism remains local and narrow; we should also worry if we outsource rationality on the basis of prestige.

Maybe it’s best to think of AI less as rational and more as gnomic. Then the question becomes, how useful are its oracles? Are we getting a good risk-adjusted return on its inspired pronouncements?

James Cham:

The current generation of AI tools has exposed us all as post-modernists, and they might turn us into empiricists. Rationality turns out to be a model of reality. A very good one but, as it is with all models, ultimately limited. 

The way that LLMs construct knowledge is entirely contextual. Rather than defining terms and building strict hierarchies of knowledge, it looks at the context that words and ideas show up in and turns that into coordinates in some high dimensional space. The disorienting thing is it actually “works”—at least within the context of the words and patterns that the models have collected. 

Even if you don’t believe that the LLMs can genuinely create new knowledge, it has dramatically lowered the cost of making thought experiments empirical. We’re not quite at the point where philosophers will use LLMs to test different philosophical ideas. But I suspect that we’re close. And that sort of large-scale test of different trails of thought will expose more of the limitations of historical rationality.

As a relatively conventional Protestant Christian, I think we should be comfortable with disorienting shifts like this.

Robin Hanson:

I don’t understand how you think it matters that LLMs learn from specific prior texts, rather than from other sources. And I don’t understand what sort of thought experiments you think they make easier. You can experiment with talking to them and seeing their responses, but how is that like a traditional thought experiment?

Luke Burgis (Moderator):

This is an asynchronous conversation taking place over email, so James may need to come back to that question during final remarks. My question for you, James, is this: Why do you think a religious person should learn to be comfortable with these disorientating shifts? What is the relationship to faith?

James Cham:

My faith sits both below and above my relationship with my shifting understanding of rationality. 

I’m not quite prepared to make broader claims about faith and religion in general. But I believe Christians can ground themselves in the idea of a relationship with a “big G” God (and, if you believe in Christianity, it is an actual relationship). This might be as much about my temperament as it is about my theology, but I’ve found this to be freeing as I’ve encountered ideas that might force me to reexamine other priors. I’m already comfortable with the idea that there’s someone bigger than I can currently imagine, so the idea that human rationality might have limits isn’t so far-fetched.

At the same time, I can’t help but use rationality to understand my faith. I can’t help but use the same toolkit that Steven Pinker would use: categorization, logic, probability, error correction, and so on–although I obviously end up with a very different conclusion.

Zohar Atkins:

Thomas Bayes, the famous originator of so-called Bayesian reasoning, was a theologian and religious leader. Some of the most capable practitioners of rationality understand the epistemological limits of rationality. Maimonides comes to mind. We must seek to know God, while also affirming that God is unknowable.

The point of rationality, especially in a Bayesian framework, is to help us manage the risk of error and alchemize our mistakes into learnings. A core religious virtue is humility. Humility in a religious context means accepting that you are not God, no matter how talented or powerful you are. Those who view the world through the lens of probabilistic thinking (often an expression of rationality) know that winning doesn't mean getting it perfectly right, but getting it less wrong. The investor and risk theorist Howard Marks emphasizes that we can never know for sure how risky our bets actually are. Whenever we act, we engage in doubled uncertainty: uncertainty about how the event will turn out (the denominator), but also uncertainty about what the true odds are (the numerator). We don't know how many winning lottery tickets are in the box, nor do we know how many tickets are in the box. Like the fabled Nasrudin of Sufi lore, we seek answers where there is light (spotlight effect), because the dark destabilizes.

Yet tail events often transpire where we don't look and don't want to look. Accepting the disorientation of the dark makes us more robust. Humility becomes an openness to the possibility of events and transformations that lie outside of standard deviations (outliers). As Nassim Taleb likes to say, we aren't paid in odds. A good outcome doesn't mean we chose rationally. And a bad outcome doesn't mean we chose irrationally.

The thrust of this meditation is that even if LLMs can test philosophical ideas empirically (whatever that might mean), LLMs will not be able to lessen the burden of risk management. What will LLMs be able to tell us about the implied volatility of the option value of Pascal's wager? Maybe Esau was acting rationally (and in line with the Black-Scholes model) when he sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentils. We don't know.

LLMs might help us with risk management in some areas for some period of time, until they don't. Because our world is reflexive. The assumption that LLMs lessen risk will incentivize us to take greater risk, and cancel out. Then we'll cry out to the Lord in our bafflement, and GodGPT will answer from the metaverse whirlwind, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?"

The Non-Denouement

Up until this point in the conversation, all three interlocutors had been emailing with me directly. During this final phase, on day five, I shared all of the prior communication that I’d had with each of them, with their names redacted, and asked them to make their closing remarks.
—

James Cham:

What a dense and bewildering sequence of texts, full of so many references that I needed to write something like “Explain this to me like I’m a high schooler who doesn’t know Gadamer”! Fortunately, the LLMs were relatively good at helping me parse through the texts, though I suspect an actual embodied conversation with the other participants would have been even richer.

The LLMs are just like every interesting technology since Adam and Eve figured out clothing – we are going to use it for good and ill; and we are going to have to spend a lot of time figuring out how this one is different from past technologies. This one is disorienting because it generates thoughts and looks and sounds like us, so we are going to be very tempted to treat them like humans.

Everyone in the world has had less than 10 years to think about how LLMs challenge how we think we know things. That’s not very much time. I bet we’ll be surprised by what we find, if only we’re willing to try and tease apart how different LLMs actually work. The underlying math isn’t that complicated, but the effectiveness at scale is surprising and might teach us a lot. Christians have a role here to shape and provide wisdom, if only we’re willing to deeply engage. 

Zohar Atkins:

Implicitly and explicitly, our conversation about AI is animated by danger and risk. "All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking" (Robert Hass). For those who assign great weight to rationality, the idea of machines beating us at this game presents a threat not just to livelihood, but to identity. But as [James] points out, AI's dominance may have less to do with precision and more to do with persuasiveness. AI may be a more compelling sophist than philosopher. But note that Plato himself had a hard time delineating the distinction from first principles. Many philosophers appear to be sophists. One way to define a sophist is someone who focuses on winning the court case, rather than knowing who is guilty or innocent. Sophists had a profit motive to train lawyers, not help judges become more impartial. Undoubtedly, the meta-sophist move is to seek to win in court by claiming to be impartial, and this is one of the challenges posed by the esteem we instinctively place in LLMs. Heidegger, quoting Hölderlin, says that "where the danger is, there grows a saving power also." Beyond the call for AI safety is the possibility that AI, in its very danger, can be a saving power. But only if we recognise the danger as a danger. What is that danger? I would argue it is the danger of unwarranted certainty to the detriment of mystery. As long as we have been rational we have been at risk of arrogance. As the meme goes, "Men only want one thing and it's to complete the system of German Idealism." With AI, some may feel they've finally found a God-like being. Not only is AI not omniscient, but seeking synthetic exposure to omniscience is a renunciation of the much harder and more human task: to dwell poetically on this earth.

Robin Hanson:

Alas, it seems to me that we have failed to engage each other much, mainly because we failed to stake out clear and interesting enough claims to induce such engagement. This was an experiment, and I approve of trying many such experiments, but I think we have to count this trial as mostly a failure.