The philosophical framework of Thomas Aquinas offers a profound lens through which to examine the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, particularly concerning the fundamental nature of intelligence itself. While AI systems demonstrate increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities, Aquinas’s scholastic tradition provides a robust distinction between mere computational processing and genuine intellectual understanding, rooted in his metaphysics of the human soul and the act of intellection. Exploring this dichotomy reveals not only the limitations of current AI but also a deeper appreciation for the unique characteristics of human intelligence.
Aquinas posits that human intelligence, or the intellect, is an immaterial faculty of the soul, distinct from sensory perception. For Aquinas, intelligence is not merely about processing data or recognizing patterns, but fundamentally about grasping the universal essences or “forms” of things. This process begins with sensory experience, where individual objects are perceived. These sensory impressions, or “phantasms,” are then acted upon by the “agent intellect,” an active power that abstracts the universal form from the particular material conditions of the phantasm. This abstracted form, or “intelligible species,” is then received by the “possible intellect,” which then actively understands the essence of the thing. This act of abstraction is central to Aquinian thought, allowing the intellect to move beyond individual instances to grasp universal concepts like “humanness” or “treedom.” It is through this capacity for abstraction that humans can form judgments, reason logically, and develop scientific knowledge, transcending the particular to understand the universal.
Modern artificial intelligence, by contrast, operates primarily through algorithms that process vast datasets to identify statistical correlations and patterns. Machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks excel at tasks like image recognition, natural language processing, and predictive analytics by learning from examples. An AI system trained on millions of images of cats can accurately identify a new cat, not by abstracting the universal form of “catness” in the Aquinian sense, but by recognizing a complex array of features and their statistical relationships that have been correlated with “cat” in its training data. This is a form of highly sophisticated pattern matching, enabling impressive performance in specific domains, but fundamentally different from Aquinas’s understanding of intellectual abstraction.
The divergence becomes stark when considering the concept of “understanding.” An AI might generate coherent text or answer complex questions, giving the impression of understanding. However, from an Aquinian perspective, this is a simulation of understanding, not its actual possession. The AI does not grasp the meaning or essence behind the words; it manipulates symbols based on learned statistical probabilities and syntactic rules. It does not possess an “intelligible species” of the concepts it processes. For instance, an AI can process and respond to questions about justice, but it does not understand justice as a moral concept with intrinsic meaning; it merely correlates linguistic patterns associated with it. This lack of genuine understanding means AI lacks intentionality, a directedness towards an object as known and desired, which Aquinas sees as intrinsic to intellectual activity.
Furthermore, Aquinas emphasizes the intellect’s capacity for self-reflection and its awareness of its own acts of understanding. Human intelligence is reflexive; it can know that it knows. Current AI systems, despite their complexity, do not exhibit this kind of metacognition in a way that suggests genuine self-awareness or consciousness. While they can monitor their own performance or errors, this is typically a programmed function rather than an intrinsic awareness of their own cognitive processes or existence. The question of consciousness, a core aspect of the human soul for Aquinas, remains a significant philosophical hurdle for AI to truly emulate human intelligence. The immateriality of the soul, according to Aquinas, allows for this reflexive self-awareness and the capacity to grasp immaterial forms, attributes currently absent in material, algorithmic systems.
The problem of universals, a cornerstone of scholastic philosophy, also highlights a key difference. Aquinas argued that universals exist formally in the divine mind, exemplarily in sensible things, and objectively in the human intellect through abstraction. AI, however, does not deal with universals in this manner. When an AI categorizes various instances as “chair,” it is creating a statistical cluster or a learned representation based on shared features, not abstracting the universal form of “chairness” independent of all particular instances. Its “concepts” are operational definitions derived from data, not essences grasped by an immaterial intellect. This distinction is critical for understanding the depth of knowledge. Human intellect can understand the reasons why something is a chair, its purpose and essence, whereas AI identifies it based on its learned features.
Another critical aspect of intelligence for Aquinas is its connection to the will and moral