Fourth Sunday of Advent

12-21-2025Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

Contemporary claims to machines having intelligence lie precisely in projecting out our own understanding capacities onto a machine. We talk about decisions and choice, but what we actually have is a sophisticated tool designed by humans. The machine does not understand; it mimics. It uses something called algorithms, a step-by-step set of instructions or rules to solve problems or complete tasks, somewhat like a recipe for a computer or for everyday life, ensuring a specific outcome every time. It's a clear, ordered sequence that tells you exactly what to do, from making toast to Google Search finding the best route. It is like a recipe. Follow the steps, you get a cake, a gourmet dish, or whatever.

Human intelligence uses body and soul. We learn through our five senses with the operation of our brains, but the understanding itself is spiritual embracing the reality around us. Man is able to think. Several things are involved in the conception of a thought or idea. In the first place, man must perceive something in the world about him. He must first perceive and form an image of something. He sees a plant, an animal, a building, a chair and so forth. But the image he perceives, for example, an auto—fits only one particular car of definite color, make and model. It does not fit all cars because it has characteristics or notes which other cars do not have. It is of singular application.

When an image of an auto has been formed, man has a power called the intellect which strips away from the image of “this” car all the notes which belong only to it. It removes the individual characteristics of this image or picture. The intellect loses sight of those things which make this car different from that car. It does not conceive of a car being of this particular color or make. It simply grasps what all cars must have to be called cars.

The object which the intellect conceives after stripping away the individualizing notes of an image is called a concept or an idea. This idea of an auto fits all autos of the past, present, and future. It is universally applicable to that class of things known as cars. And because an idea is universally applicable it is immaterial; it is not made up of parts; it cannot be seen or touched. Material things can be seen and touched because they are singular; representations of them are applicable to only one definite object. Since an idea is immaterial it must be conceived by a power which is of the same order. The intellect is an immaterial power. Being immaterial or devoid of parts, the intellect operates independently of the body. There is another solid reason for saying that man’s intellect is an immaterial power. It is the fact that it can reflect upon its own operations. It can turn its attention upon itself and analyze its own activities.

Reflection is impossible for a material organ, that is, for a faculty which is made up of parts. The eye is material and so cannot see itself seeing; the ear cannot hear itself hearing. But the intellect can know itself, thus proving that it is an immaterial power. Other indications of intellect being an immaterial power are man’s ability to speak and to progress, that is, to improve upon his own inventions. These activities involve the ability to form abstract ideas and to appreciate the relations between them after they are once formed.

What is the object of the intellect? What does it know? It does not merely consider the externals of a thing. It lays hold of the nature of an object, what it is. But for man to know a thing, that thing must have some sort of existence. If it exists, it has something that makes it what it is. People cannot form an idea from nothingness. Only God can bring things into existence from nothing. A thing which exists need not be material; it can be immaterial. Since human beings can directly or indirectly come to know all things, created and uncreated, finite and infinite, actual and possible, material and spiritual, the object of the intellect is what exists in general, whether it is composed of matter or purely spiritual.

What we call "learning" in so-called artificial intelligence means that the algorithms are being updated/changed optimizing performance. What someone makes is caused by the person who makes it, like any tool or instrument. Artificial intelligence, by its very nature, is not thinking; it implements functions; it optimizes with respect to specific objectives; not judging their effectiveness; it calculates probabilities; not discerning what is right or good, designed by its maker. The machine does not understand things that exist; it manipulates signs; it calculates correlations; it does not open itself to truth; it converts input into output according to patterns.

Attributing personality (remember Disney’s “Robby the Robot?)” to machines ultimately means confusing a useful tool with that of a human life and its reason for existing, confusing a thing with a person. From such a perspective, the human person risks appearing like one tool among others in a large informational system. AI is today the place where art, making things, in the strongest sense, is concentrated and amplified. In it, humans imprint themselves on the world through structures capable of modulating social processes, anticipating behaviors, filtering information, and distributing possibilities. This is an unprecedented extension of the use of a tool, in which the power to influence lives reaches such a level that it risks eclipsing, in the eyes of most, human thinking, deliberation and reflection in living life. This might be called the sin of the idolatry of technology.

The idol is always a limited reality elevated to the status of the reason for living, in a place that belongs only to God. When the algorithm is treated as a source of truth, as an unquestionable authority of decision, as an oracle that anticipates reality better than reality can be known through experience and reason, a true inversion of order occurs, the tail is wagging the dog. To pretend that machines "participate" in understanding in the same way as humans is to confuse a machine with a person. Artificial intelligence forces a choice: grasping the true notion of intelligence, recognizing that human thought cannot be reduced simply to manipulated information, or we embark on the path of a civilization in which the algorithm is elevated to the ultimate notion of intelligence, which again is like the tail wagging the dog.

Like any tool AI should be used for good according to the virtue of prudence, which is the virtue of making correct decisions according to what is good, true, and beautiful. Virtue helps see AI as an immensely powerful tool that, precisely for this reason, requires heightened human caution and virtue. Where this is lacking AI transforms itself from servant to master, from tool to idol, from an extension of human machine-making into a principle of power and control in the hands of a few. AI should be a tool that can amplify the human capacity for knowledge and action, without ever touching the personal core in which the human person, participating in truth and goodness, remains irreducibly greater than, and different from, any tool or machine.