You don't have to get far in Rummelsburg's essay to know where it's going and yes, it strips "Artificial Intelligence" naked for all to see.
...[C. S.] Lewis presaged the current crisis of intellect when he described the men that a debunking education produces. He called them Men without Chests; we call them “critical thinkers.” Of them he wrote: “It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence.” Today, “intelligence” has suffered the same fate as the “intellectual.”
It is not hard to call "debunking education" sophomoric; "debunking" is--at root--what you often see in the sophomoric 'argumentation' in almost all social media: the snarky put-down.
...“Mind” and “intellect” are words that point to realities that are immaterial in nature. Consistently eradicating all immaterial things from educational theory leaves these concepts especially vulnerable to abuse....
... The word “intellect” comes from the Latin intus legere – to read the interior. Our senses perceive outward qualities; the intellect grasps what things are, conceptually. A man sees and recognizes a particular dog, but his intellect grasps the nature it shares with all dogs. Unlike sight, it is not tied to a bodily organ; schools should cultivate its use and proper end. Aquinas teaches that the intellect’s end is truth, the conformity of mind to reality...
One is reminded of the great James Schall* (SJ's) insistence on "What IS."
...Intellect is a power of the soul with two operations Aquinas calls intellectus and ratio. Josef Pieper, in Leisure, the Basis of Culture, describes intellectus as “simply looking,” the mind at rest receiving reality. The student who grasps the structure of a fugue, a proof, or a proverb is doing more than perceiving: he is apprehending what the thing is. Ratio, or reasoning, is the active capacity to move from what is known by first principles to what was previously unknown.
Reasoning becomes rootless when it is not preceded by the intellect’s apprehension of the first principles....
Modern schools of thought on intelligence are dangerously insufficient. They would teach the Bach St John Passion without reference to the text Bach quotes. "It has sad notes" is true--but WHY it has such is simply passed over without mention.
... Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” splits the unity of intellect into eight or more capacities, such as mathematical, kinesthetic, and musical; the intellect exercises these abilities, but they are not the intellect itself. “Emotional intelligence,” the premise of the social-emotional learning programs, inverts the order of intellect and passions. Artificial intelligence is no more like intelligence than fake flowers are like flowers; it simulates its effects, not the thing itself. Only the habit of judging by appearances lets us confuse the two....
...Dante, passing through the gate of Hell in Canto III of the Inferno, learns from Virgil that he will see the sorrowful who have “lost the good of the intellect,” not the power to think, but its object, the truth that is God – the Good....
The intellect can--and should--be formed to understand What Is: the "I Am Who Am", which is Truth Whole.
Artificial Intelligence cannot do so.
Need more? Another essay--this on iconoclasm--touches the same theme:
...We deny the humanity of another image of God: our very selves. The Greek word for image is eikon; in the Septuagint’s Genesis, God declares that man is made kat’ eikona Theou—in the image, the icon, of God. Humanity is the original icon, and today we are witnessing a global campaign of anthropological iconoclasm. We deny the physical, historical, and created reality of our own human nature.
The iconoclasts contended that God’s infinitude makes Him uncircumscribable; therefore, He cannot be painted. The Council Fathers, drawing on St. John of Damascus, argued that God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, assumed a real human body, redeeming matter and circumscribing Himself. The modern iconoclast smashes his own nature because he believes he should be infinite and uncircumscribable....
IOW, seeing a part and missing the whole, thus missing What Is (True).
*You can still get Fr. Schall's "Another Sort of Learning" from Ignatius Press. It's worth it.
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