I recently wrote a “rough draft” for a research paper that proposes to synthesize insights from medieval cosmology and philosophy with LLM architecture. Put differently, if we are attempting unpack the architecture of language models, having an “architecture of the human person” will present an interpretive grid.
This appears to be the common instinct—neuroscience or biology are referenced to explain the complex mechanisms of language models. However, what I am proposing differs in that I am seeking to interpret using metaphysical (literally “beyond-physical”) structures that sit above neuroscience and biology. This may read as a subtle move, but it is admittedly a hefty break from a neuroscientific interpretation that the noetic powers of the human person are produced by biofunctional parts, like the brain. Rather, I am holding to a boundary between the intellectual and the biofunctional parts—that the intellectual soul is the immaterial, non-spatial organizing, animating principle of the material (the biofunctional parts). Such a view requires, then, presenting an “architecture of the human person,” this precise interaction between the immaterial, intellectual soul and the material of the body—which can be called a philosophical anthropology. Specifically, I have followed the medieval, Neo-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology of Thomas Aquinas (died in 1274). From here on out when I say “philosophical anthropology” I am narrowly referring to Aquinas’ synthesis.
There two difficulties in this endeavor: metaphysics as a category has collapsed—in that it is not embraced at large—and, even if one were open to it as a category, it may seem esoteric and archaic. This post is not focused on answering the former difficulty, but rather in presenting an accessible philosophical anthropology to make what is being proposed more concrete. It is effectively a commentary on the interpretive grid I leveraged in the celestial-metaphysical-LLM synthesis presented in my recent paper.
The foundational concept to a philosophical anthropology is the soul. Aquinas defines the soul as “the first principle of life of those things which live.” Soul is Latin is animus, and so we living things may be called “animate” or “inanimate”—as having a soul, and as having not life. The soul is held to be immaterial (not corporeal). Life is made known by its effects: knowledge and/or movement. Now, “movement” is meant in the Aristotelian sense. It’s not the physical motion of particles, but the a self-initiated change toward and eng goal. The soul is the principle of these actions, and the body, and its biofunctional parts, are what are organized and animated—what are acted upon.
Note: This definition is broader than what defines a human soul. For Aristotle and Aquinas, plants, animals, and humans are all animated with self-initiated “movement” toward an end goal—thus, they are animated with life. Movement here is something broader than mere physical motion. Plant souls exhibit nutrition, growth, and reproduction as end goals. Animal souls exhibit these plus others—senses, appetites, and (in most cases) motion. Human should exhibit these movement as well as the powers of the intellect and the will. A rock, by contrast, doesn’t move itself toward an end; it is moved by an external agent. A rock is an example of a non-living thing—it being non-living because it doesn’t possess self-initiated movement. Non-living things, therefore, do not have a soul. In a word, plants, animals, and humans are are kinds of souls.
Specifically for humans, the soul is the intellectual principle, and is also called the mind or the intellect. It is not only immaterial, but also subsistent. Meaning, the soul can exist in itself apart from the body. “The body is necessary for the action of the intellect, not as its origin of action.” This must be so since the soul has operations/powers that transcend bodily organs. Namely, the soul has the intellectual powers of understanding and willing. In a word, having subsistent powers, the soul must be subsistent. Possessing operations that stand alone without the involvement a bodily organ, the soul of the human person—as a rational animal—is subsistent; the soul of animals is not subsistent because it is not rational—though they are animated with knowledge and movement. Hence, soul is a broader term that applies to all that has knowledge and movement.
Note: This is the key distinction that I employed to draw the limits of LLMs. LLMs, I theorize, have the ability to geometrically represent the images of real things present to our imagination. As we shall see, the imagination is animated by the soul—as is all of the body—but it is not an immaterial, subsistent operation of the soul. Therefore, I propose that LLMs cannot formally attain real knowledge, although they can functionally arrive at real knowledge by producing images from words and tracing images as we can do with our imagination. This is not reasoning as such, but a quasi-reasoning—like dreaming. However, LLMs are effectively getting very good at dreaming on demand—but not perfect which is why they “hallucinate.”
The human person is not a mere soul, but the composite of soul and body. Consider a marble statue: The statue does not exist independently from the material (the marble). The marble is not a statue, but the statue-shape is not found without marble (or some material). Hence, the marble statue is the form and the marble is the matter. Likewise, the intellectual soul is the form of the human person, and the body is the matter. The composite of rational soul and body is what defines a human person.
There are many powers which may emanate from a kind of soul, yet a general order to which these powers belong. Each set of powers map to a kind soul. Namely, there are intellectual powers (human soul); locomotive, appetitive, and sensitive powers (animal soul), and vegetative powers (plant soul). The human soul possesses all three orders of powers. It possesses all the powers of nutrition, growth, and reproduction belonging the order of the vegetative powers, and these act on the body to which the soul is united. It possesses all the powers belonging to the animal soul—the sensitive (perception), appetitive (desire, passion, pleasure & pain), and the locomotive (physical movement). Finally, it possesses the distinctly human powers which are the intellectual powers of understanding and willing. The human soul, therefore, is at the top of the hierarchy of living things—above both plants and animals by its very rationality.
So, where do LLMs belong? They are non-living things since they are acted upon and never self-initiating. They operate according to a design externally imposed. However, this is where it gets interesting—they can process information dynamically, generate novel outputs, simulate cognitive operations, and learn patterns from training.
LLMs are human artifacts that accidentally possess internal sense powers geometrically, and through these accidental, geometrical internal sense powers, they possess a quasi-yet-effective-reasoning.
In the next post, we unpack these internal sense powers to develop our philosophical anthropology and interpretive grid for apprehending language models.
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