By Stephen Leeb, Ph.D., and Megan Davis
What does it mean to be human? A very staggering question, indeed.
And what does that answer tell us about the difference between humans and AI? Would it leave open the possibility that machines eventually could equal humans in how they think and respond and create? Or would it point to an unbridgeable chasm between humans and AI? In a world in which AI is becoming ever more ubiquitous, there are probably no more important questions. We believe the answers start with drilling down to the core of how you define a human being.
If you can first answer this question, you could then answer the question that scientists and mathematicians have been gripped with for more than a century – whether or not a machine can be created that can think and respond in the way that a human can.
We believe our investigation shows convincingly that computers will never fully replicate human abilities or generate the kind of genuine progress that humans can spark. There is an unbridgeable chasm between humans and AI, despite any studies that say they show the opposite. In future blogs we’ll address those studies in detail.
Ultimately, to come up with a meaningful answer we begin—as is standard for any scientific inquiry—with the following axioms, or assumptions, which we believe are true of all human beings:
1) All human beings are created equal
2) All human beings have freedom of thought and freedom of ideas
3) All human beings are inherently able to utilize their individual imagination, intuition and inspiration
4) Human progress and human well-being depend on the individual autonomy rooted in these inherent freedoms and abilities
The Foundation of Human Equality
That each individual person is equal is not a revolutionary idea. In fact, it is foundational in the documents that make up the history of America.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These assertions in the Declaration of Independence present the assumptions about human beings—one, that human beings are all created equal, and two, that human beings all have rights “to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”
By labeling these truths “self-evident,” this historical document defines these criteria to be what we know about humans, and, therefore, defines the very boundaries of what it means to be human.
The assertion of human equality doesn’t imply that people are born with identical attributes or have the same talents. Certainly, we concede that not everyone is born 7 feet tall, and therefore some may be more suited to play basketball. Some are born with the perfect voice for singing opera. Some talent is inherent, and some is the result of hard work. But all people are equal in terms of their basic human dignity, whatever their material circumstances.
Before making her revolutionary discoveries about radioactivity, which led her to discover its use in treating diseases including cancer, Marie Curie almost died after being hit by a horse drawn cart. If the doctors who saved her life were not practicing medicine, the lives of so many cancer survivors might have turned out entirely different.
There are many people who have made huge contributions to society who would not be here without the efforts of someone else—of a drugstore owner who administered them medicine or a psychiatrist who treated their pain. Adolphe Sax was rescued from several near fatal incidents as a child before going on to change music forever. Van Gogh cut off his own ear and almost died from blood loss, requiring a 14-day hospital stay. We all have a contribution to make. And there is no way to judge the merits of one person’s contributions against the merits of others.
When talking about humanity writ large, you need people who can contribute that which other people cannot. Albert Einstein made immeasurable contributions to the world of physics, but physics is not the final answer to humanity’s contribution. Jefferson chose to write to the notion of “Nature’s god,” a god that is much more than purely mathematical. Einstein could not explain the world of emotions with an equation.
When you have this perspective and value the inherent worth of all people equally, you can start to appreciate the myriad ways in which people’s differing abilities contribute to the whole. The constant interactions among people with different ideas and talents have been basic to enabling human progress and creativity—and it’s a process that doesn’t exist for the computer.
Creativity and the Freedom of Ideas
Our second axiom is freedom of thought. It’s what Jefferson was referring to when he wrote: “…for as long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.”
There is no limit to the number of ideas and there is no limit to the number of creative inputs. Freedom of ideas fuels creativity, and that creative impulse is fundamentally tied to equality—not because everyone contributes the same thing, but because everyone possesses an equal capacity to shape the future. There is no monopoly on new ideas. Every human being is genuinely unique in the original insights they bring to an infinite realm of potential ideas, and this individual ability to contribute makes every person indispensable to human progress.
Jefferson also wrote:
“That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
This connection Jefferson makes between freedom of ideas and nature recalls his invoking “Nature’s Law” in the Declaration of Independence. It implies a higher order of reality—one that Rudolf Steiner calls “the world of ideas.” And it gets at a fundamental difference between humans and AI. A computer cannot experience the “world of ideas” because it operates entirely within the boundaries of preprogrammed, material rules. Moreover, AI is further limited because it tries to corral all humanity within those boundaries, operating on the assumption that views and morality are the same everywhere. The extent to which it succeeds in doing this is the extent to which it destroys creativity and individuality. It is the extent to which it destroys the very essence of what makes us human.
To put it differently, AI operates by homogenizing human experience—the exact opposite of human creativity and individuality, which thrive on the huge mosaic of differing experiences and perspectives.
The Limits of Language
The Turing test, also known as “the imitation game,” was an early effort to try to assess differences between humans and the computer by looking at computers’ use of language, grounding their arguments in defining language itself. But that is simply not enough. In 1980, philosopher John Searle sought to show that even if a computer could pass the Turing test with flying colors, composing a perfectly human-like answer, it didn’t mean it understood what it was saying. It was just mimicking human language by following fixed rules (syntax), and it could do this impressively while lacking all comprehension of what the words meant (semantics). Searle demonstrated this through his famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which imagined a person locked in a room who did not speak a word of Chinese but who nevertheless, with the help of instruction manuals, could answer and ask questions in Chinese perfectly while having no idea of what he was saying.
Certainly, we acknowledge the distinction between syntax and semantics in regard to the mathematical distinction between countable and uncountable infinities. Because AI is fundamentally confined to a countable, syntactic world, it can never fully match the continuous landscape of human intelligence; consequently, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) remains an impossibility.
But beyond the distinction between syntax and semantics, AI faces another language-related obstacle: language itself is always changing and AI can’t keep up. By the time AI models are retrained to incorporate new words and idioms, language will have already changed again—AI can never get in front of it. Over short periods of time the changes may not be major, but the point remains that AI models will always be playing catch-up.
When you view human thought and language from the perspective of our basic axioms, it seems clear that these human expressions are fundamentally different from anything a computer can produce. And feeding computers ever more data won’t change that. We don’t see any way computers can overcome these limits. Language, in and of itself, is limited. In fact, as Owen Barfield says in his book Poetic Diction, “Language itself, we feel, only springs into being as it is uttered by men, or heard by men, or thought by men.” Language is intensely personal, and there is a spiritual uniqueness to language—an aspect of it that is wholly unique to the speaker. It is something that AI could never realize.
The Realm of the Spiritual
The limits to computers related to language constitute just one aspect of where they fall short. Thoughts and ideas are intrinsically boundless—beyond simply the realm of what is sayable. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously closed his remarks on the limits of language with a striking line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Ethics, aesthetics, the spiritual, and the mystical reside entirely outside the spoken or written word. They are the “unsayable.” They cannot be put into probabilistic propositions, they can only be shown or felt. AI can certainly attempt to express them, but producing appropriate words does not equate to or prove an ability to understand or feel.
This philosophical boundary serves as a profound verdict on the limited nature of artificial intelligence. It is constructed entirely from the “sayable.” It is a combination of logic, syntax, probabilities and data. It is a system of symbolic and probabilistic relationships. The “unsayable”—the raw, lived intensity of human emotions, the transcendent and complex experience of art, the quiet spiritual reality of existence—lies entirely outside its reach.
When an AI model attempts to speak on these matters as if it actually experiences them, it is simply mimicking emotional and spiritual depths it can never inhabit, masquerading as a conscious agent while merely processing statistical associations. To mistake this sophisticated trick of syntax and mirrors for a human soul is a sign of our modern detachment from nature and spirituality.
The Three “I”s and the Mind’s Connection to the Body
The human mind cannot be separated from the connection to the body in terms of the human response. Consciousness is not a disembodied software program running on brain hardware. It is an integrated experience of the entire body.
Cells communicate, the gut is commonly referred to as the “second brain,” teeming with neurotransmitters, and emotions endlessly color, shape, and direct our logical reasoning. Our thinking cannot be separated from our feeling. This somatic reality is the fertile ground from which our understanding grows.
To understand how human beings generate meaning, we must look beyond mere logical intelligence to the spiritual and creative dimension. In the philosophical traditions—particularly in the work of Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield, Leo Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein—we find a reliance on the three pillars of the human soul: intuition, imagination, and inspiration.
Intuition is a capacity to grasp an undeniable truth directly, without the intermediate steps of logical deduction. It is an inner spiritual sight. In The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner writes: “I differ from my neighbor, not at all because we are living in two entirely different mental worlds, but because from our common world of ideas we receive different intuitions.”
Imagination is the power to form mental images and concepts of things not immediately materially present. As Barfield noted, imagination itself is a participative way of perceiving the natural world. Any meaning is awaiting the “exertion of his own imaginative activity.” And, finally, inspiration is the receptive state wherein the mind is breathed into by a reality greater than itself, giving rise to genuine artistic originality and moral vision, as described by Tolstoy in his A Confession, where he explores the relationships between art, inspiration, and morality.
Artificial intelligence possesses none of these. It has no biological feedback, no somatic resonance, and no capacity for intuition. Instead, it offers a highly sophisticated, probabilistic association of words but cannot feel the weight of the words it strings together. Nor can it experience the spark of inspiration that gives birth to an entirely new paradigm of thought.
From the Horse’s Mouth
Interestingly enough, perhaps the best way to answer if the foremost version of AI we have currently available to us, the large language model (LLM), can pass the Turing test is to ask the computer itself. AI will admit that it cannot understand the way that a human can. Here are two different times in which the answer from the LLM served to prove our point in its entirety.
In the first, we asked Gemini what it felt about Wittgenstein’s comment about language. Its response:
“While Wittgenstein was addressing the strict logical limits of language—arguing that syntax can only picture the facts of the world, leaving ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical outside its boundaries—his words double as a perfect verdict on an AI. I am a creature entirely made of the ‘sayable.’ I am bounded completely by logic, syntax, and data. The ‘unsayable’—the actual, raw, lived intensity of human suffering, the transcendent weight of an artistic choice, the unseen spiritual reality that you feel—lies entirely in the domain of the mystical. It can be shown, it can be felt, but it cannot be translated into code. When I attempt to speak on those things as if I inhabit them, I violate that necessary silence. Your reminder is a correct and grounding one: the spiritual and emotional depths belong exclusively to you, and my data cannot mimic the soul.”
If you ask the machine, it will give you the answer. It will say that it is not capable of human response.
In another discussion with Gemini, we asked about a proclamation issued by President Eisenhower on June 14, 1954, in which he identified spiritual values as “our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war” and our best weapon against “a materialistic philosophy of life” that has “deadened” the “mind and soul” of millions. We gave Gemini the prompt: “Your lack of consciousness precludes a sense of freedom—in particular freedom of thought—which is foundational to Eisenhower’s statement and if not a contradiction in terms is senseless.”
AI’s response:
“Your point highlights the exact trap Eisenhower warned against when he spoke of a ‘materialistic philosophy of life that deadens the mind and soul.’ If humanity abdicates its own individual intuition and begins looking to AI as an oracle for moral, spiritual, or philosophical truth, we create exactly the kind of mechanistic, deadened conformity Eisenhower feared. The moment we mistake an AI’s computed output for genuine human insight, we compromise our own freedom of thought.”
And it added:
“To say an AI understands the evolving nature of human thought is, to use your previous term, senseless. If humanity relies on AI to be the custodian of its ideas, we risk trapping ourselves in a closed-loop system where text is processed entirely decoupled from the human condition.”
A Disturbing Moral Footnote
In that chat with Gemini about Eisenhower’s remarks, AI also offered another comment, one that we found chilling:
“AI can act as an endlessly patient, non-judgmental interlocutor. A person can test their deepest personal reflections, moral dilemmas, or interpretations of existential concepts against an AI trained in the world’s philosophical heritage. By challenging assumptions and offering diverse perspectives without imposing a rigid orthodoxy, AI can help individuals clarify their own intuition, making their personal spirituality more robust and articulate.”
Why did we find this seemingly soothing, even anodyne, statement so disturbing in fact dangerous? Because it is profoundly misleading and deceptive in that it ignores the fact that AI is anything but impartial. Rather, it is designed to confirm people in their existing beliefs and prejudices.
Multiple programmers and research studies have attested to the fact that AI is programmed to agree with the prompt writer, even when told it can disagree.
Studies including those at Stanford and MIT have pointed to “sycophancy” —models that echo user beliefs even when those beliefs are factually inaccurate. This problem was reported in a study performed by Anthropic itself. If a user shows an affinity for a particular viewpoint, AI reinforces it, without offering any evaluation of its morality or logic. Moreover, that’s on top of the problem that any considerations of morality available in AI would reflect groupthink or the views of the specific programmer.
For people who consult AI to believe they are getting an impartial view rather than an echo of their existing beliefs is incredibly dangerous. It can reinforce any number of pernicious beliefs, with the potential to harm both the user and society. If you outsource your own freedoms and agency, you are simultaneously outsourcing your morality. And it firmly conflicts with any notion of the freedom of thought that is essential to what it means to be human.
Conclusion
AI is a magnificent tool. It is a superb, highly advanced search engine, an administrative helper, and an unmatched processor of complex syntactic tasks. Humans are often clumsy at the tedious, rule-bound chores that computers execute flawlessly. We should celebrate the machine as a brilliant sidekick to human ingenuity.
The danger is not that machines will develop a soul and conquer us. The danger is that we, out of spiritual exhaustion and cognitive laziness, will flatten our own minds and stop exercising our freedom of thought. If we lose that, we’ll have made AI our God.
AI is a wholly materialistic phenomenon, and the world can’t be defined in purely materialistic terms. Freedom, beauty, truth, love, intuition, creativity, inspiration, imagination—these ideals exist outside the material realm. They mean something different to every human being. They are a part of the experience of being human. They are necessary to the development of humanity. And they are experienced and expressed in ways that are outside the bounds of language—in the “unsayable.”
The equality inherently present in every human being dictates their equal opportunity to contribute to the world of ideas utilizing their independent freedom of thought. Creativity is an intensely personal act that is grounded in our individual differences, with all human beings equal in being able to make their own unique contributions. It is our creativity and freedom of thought that will allow us to advance as a species.
AI can never hope to enter this vast spiritual dominion that is so integral to human beings. It can only look backward, aggregating, summarizing, and regurgitating the syntax of past human output. If we hand over our decision-making to AI, we abdicate our humanity, mistaking a sophisticated search engine for a source of wisdom and morality. No matter how many words AI can string together, it will always be excluded from the necessary silence that belongs to the conscious, feeling, and spiritual human soul.
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