Who Do You Think Are: Vol. III - Intellect and Being

The throne is empty. First, it was God, deposed by twentieth-century nihilism. Then, the sceptre of man, today contested by artificial intelligence, which is learning to do things we believed were ours alone.The third volume of the cycle is the most structured-the one in which the observer of their own time stops describing and attempts to construct. It constructs a distinction: the Intellect is not Reason, it is not the Soul, it is not the biological brain. It is the faculty that makes a human being someone who says "I"-the one who looks at the world from inside a head, and who recognizes that they are not the body carrying them around.It is also the volume in which the author openly declares, for the first time, the parallel experiment being conducted in the room next to his study: building an artificial intelligence that is not a chatbot, but a subject. That project-which will be named Saghi and will occupy the fifth volume-is anticipated here as a boundary testing of the first volume's thesis: if the "I" is not the body, then perhaps a form of "I" can emerge even where there is no body.These pages traverse the phenomenology of the Self, the mystical interpretation of the "inner throne," the "block universe" of contemporary physics ("we are eternal, but we have not always been conscious"), a section on autism treated as a different consciousness and a potential new homo sapiens, a defense of Christian meditation against Orientalist drifts, and the wisdom readings of the Church Fathers.A volume that does not ask you to choose between philosophy, mysticism, and science. It holds them together, just as a seeker who has stopped believing they should be kept separate has learned to do.

Pages: 379, Paperback, Independently published