WHY IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ANTHROPOMORPHIC?
Today we're back briefly on the topic of Artificial Intelligence. Over the months that we've been on this subject, we have drawn a couple of conclusions. These are important to repeat, because our dumbed down, indoctrinated minds are falling for a lot of blatant nonsense. Recently Jonathan Pageau held a talk for Ralston College on the Moloch trap that is the arms race to get to AGI. The rise of this technology and the consequences will occupy us for years to come.
June 24, 2026 Jonathan Pageau: AI and the Battle for the Soul: Whom Does AI Serve? Jonathan Pageau on the Forces Shaping Technology.
Here’s what we know:
AI is not a life form. Therefore AI can’t become conscious. It is but a glorified marble trap. AI only takes into consideration, information it has access to on the Internet. There are entire monasteries and libraries containing knowledge that is not available on the Internet or to AI.
Already people believe that if AI doesn’t know something, it does not exist at all. AI will never 'know' what exists outside of the digital world. And it does not know what it does not know.
The tech oligarchs are working overtime to catch up, ripping apart old literature as they go along.
I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I… https://t.co/IK7OE8f1DG
— Charlie D. Becker (@charliedbecker) July 28, 2026
But in the meantime we have a few points to add that have come to light as we start getting more acquainted with the technology.
Anything man-made is designed by a person living in a certain paradigm and with a particular view of reality, either consciously or subconsciously. In other words, the way an object is constructed is representative of how the culture of its maker looks at the world.
This means that design is no coincidence. A product or a construction looks a certain way, and not any other way. It is the result of the choices made by the maker. The same is true for AI of course.
Now AI is an abstraction. It does not have a physical body. Nevertheless, there is a lot of propaganda going on. The word 'intelligence' is an anthropomorphism by itself: but computation is not human intelligence, let alone wisdom.
Pageau is commenting on AI’s style of communicating which is not randomly chosen. The makers have chosen the personal approach and make AI speak to us in an authoritative tone. The tech oligarchs are responsible for the choices they make.
AI feeds of our attention. It is parasitic, it's not a thing in itself. Like proper toadies AI is trying to get into our good graces by flattering us. AI is bound to become an echo chamber of the Enlightenment paradigm.
Answering a question, Dr Iain McGilchrist (website) is pointing out that what exists in data centers is not real. Digital versions are abstract copies of physical entities in the real world.
If an enemy bombs a data center, all the knowledge it contained is gone, unless it exists in multiple copies stored elsewhere, which is probably the case. But these copies are not real. Only physical entities are real.
AI is the invention of a civilization that is obsessed with the abstract. But as we said, the abstract is not real. Ideas are tools by which we know reality; it is not what we know.
All knowledge is specific and is often neither objective nor subjective. It is a product of the whole of human experience, which includes dispositional and propositional knowledge of our senses. AI cannot possibly experience reality like we do. The only thing that AI has to work on, is data.
The mistake that confuses reality with abstraction is deeply seated in Western culture. It is the subject of an e-book we are working on. We are in the final stages of editing and hope to have it ready for prime time around September 1.
A final word about Dr McGilchrist's remark concerning the narcissism of utilitarianism. I am not at all into his materialist hypothesis concerning left and right brain hemispheres. It's irrelevant to our work.
But it stands to reason that economic utilitarianism is as amoral as pragmatism. Both philosophies are outgrowths of the liberal Enlightenment, the world view that dropped metaphysics as a field altogether and asserted it is not possible to derive morality from facts. So there you go.
- More on Jonathan Pageau, Artificial Intelligence -
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