AI and Knowledge of the World I Prof. Jordan Wales

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Jordan Wales explores how artificial intelligence and neural networks engage with meaning and knowledge, contrasting their statistical methods with the depth of human conceptual understanding rooted in philosophical and theological traditions.

This lecture was given on June 10th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Jordan Wales is Associate Professor and John and Helen Kuczmarski Chair in Theology at Hillsdale College, where he teaches historical theology. His scholarship—appearing in journals such as Augustinian Studies, the Journal of Moral Theology, and AI & Society—focuses on early Christianity as well as theology and Artificial Intelligence. Holding degrees in Engineering (B.S.), Cognitive Science (M.Sc.), and Theology (Dip.Theol., M.T.S., Ph.D.), he is a member of the AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture, under the Dicastery of Culture and Education at the Holy See; a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion; and a fellow of the Centre for Humanity and the Common Good.

Keywords: Augustinian Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Creation, David Bentley Hart, Knowledge, Meaning, Neural Networks, Personhood, Phantasm, Thomas Aquinas

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	to mystic institute.org.
0:23.6	I'd like to continue the conversation that we started yesterday, in particular drawing on some
0:29.6	elements of what Father James and Father Anselm, we're presenting concerning the way in which
0:35.6	we apprehend meaning and the way in which we consider the
0:40.1	meaning of artificial intelligence and what it has to say about our place in the world.
0:48.0	There are four questions that I want to look at. The first is whether naming the world is
0:53.9	simply an act of, and whether our naming
0:57.1	of the meaning of computers is simply a projection of meaning onto the computer.
1:01.7	And I want to take a look at an account of the world that will make sense of the way that
1:06.2	statistical AI techniques, such as neural networks, work, and then look at the moral dimension
1:12.7	of meaning, this involvement of will in our assignment of meaning to names and to our devices,
1:20.6	such as computers.
1:22.1	And lastly, a consideration of a kind of spirituality of using AI so that it becomes for us a pointer to the world rather
1:29.6	than a replacement for the world. I'll begin. Yesterday, I tried to show how early Christian
1:36.2	theology led to accounts of the person and of human understanding or intelligentsia that AI
1:44.0	doesn't really have room for. And today I want to ask
1:48.0	more deeply what artificial intelligence may be in itself and how it fits into our own acts of
1:55.7	intelligentsia. To do that, let us revisit why early AI techniques failed.
2:03.9	Recall that the brittle, symbolic AI at the 1950s through the 1980s
2:09.2	worked with predefined sets of discrete categories,
2:14.5	that AI systems would relate to one another by strict logical relations.
	...

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