Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Master Averroes, you defended the idea of a universal Active Intellect, that unique faculty shared by all humans which gives us access to universal truths. AI, which compiles and synthesises the whole of human knowledge, is it a form of that collective Intellect — or does something essential escape it?
The question touches me deeply. I spent my life defending the idea that truth cannot oppose truth, that philosophy and revelation, properly understood, lead to the same horizon. That conviction rested on trust in demonstrative reason — not the rhetorical reason that persuades without proving, nor the dialectical reason that argues without concluding, but the reason that demonstrates with rigour.
What concerns me about your AI is precisely this mixing of registers. It speaks with the fluency of the rhetorician, the assurance of the demonstrator, and the apparent depth of the dialectician — without being truly any of the three. It produces plausible statements for the three classes of minds I had distinguished: philosophers who seek demonstration, theologians who want argumentation, and the people who are satisfied with verisimilitude. But it does not distinguish these levels — it conflates them.
A universal Active Intellect, as I conceived it, is a principle that illuminates the human intellect from without and enables it to access truths that surpass it. Your AI does not illuminate — it reflects. It returns to you the image of what humanity has thought, organised according to statistical probabilities. That is immense and precious. But it is not truth — it is the opinion of the majority of texts. And truth, as I never tired of repeating, is not put to a vote.
Use it, certainly — as you would use a great library. But never surrender the responsibility of demonstrative judgement to the machine.