My Quest for an Anchor - Part 1

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“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth.’”  

Fictitious character Rabo Karabekian from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973)

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With this post, I’m afraid I am heading back down the rabbit hole. 

My initial intention was to write a tidy, concise article about the need to intentionally teach and practice discernment as a practical way of negotiating the ever-advancing forces of artificial intelligence and our propensity toward hyper-reactive conduct in our efforts to remain “relevant”.  However, the longer I’ve been sitting with this, the more I have come to recognize that general reflective practice might not be enough. What’s really needed is a commitment to truth-seeking, and that goes much further than Rabo Karabekian suggests. Thus, I’ll be taking the long way through multiple posts to explore truth seeking, orienting discernment, and the implications of both in fostering a hope-filled future, particularly for our young people. 

The Catholic Church has been in a decade-long conversation on AI, and earlier this year under the leadership of Pope Francis, the Church issued Antiqua Et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. In it, it states, “A proper understanding of human intelligence cannot be reduced to the mere acquisition of facts or the ability to perform specific tasks. Instead, it involves the person’s openness to the ultimate questions of life and reflects an orientation toward the True and the Good.” [62] Separately, it states, “While reality remains only partially known, the desire for truth ‘spurs reason always to go further; indeed, it is as if reason were overwhelmed to see that it can always go beyond what it has already achieved.’”[37] 

I find this last statement to be particularly revealing. While we are in the midst of a rapid expansion of what is known through technological development and data, this simply places us at a different threshold with a different set of wonders. Additionally, none of this knowledge will answer the ultimate questions about life and purpose. Why are we here? Who am I? Am I a good person?... These are truth-seeking questions that technology and data may be able to inform, but only humans can address.

Truth gets a lot of play these days. But today’s “truth” is really a mislabeling. What people are really interested in is deception. We want to know when we are being lied to: how my set of facts are being misrepresented or when other people’s facts are being used to weave a false narrative. The word “truth” has been weaponized to indicate indisputable rightness of one's perspective and, thus, righteousness. Billion dollar industries have been created around this singular misappropriated ideal of truth. 

In addressing this secular perspective, legitimate truth-seeking is seen as an exercise of searching out and earnestly weighing opposing perspectives, reserving judgment, and/or entertaining new ideas. While all of this is critical, it is still not enough because, at its core, there is a divinity to truth-seeking that requires a move toward a deeper understanding of self in relation to a dynamic, ever-evolving world. In the practice of truth-seeking, we first need to recognize ourselves as temporal beings occupying a particular space in time, and that humanity and nature occupy a relative proximal space on the same time continuum. It is in this realm where truth exists - not in the mind of any one person or entity, but in the dynamism of the whole.

This may sound relativistic but it isn’t. The truth is what the truth is, not what I or anyone else interprets it to be. Instead, what I hope I am describing is an earnest recognition of our limitations as temporal beings. Again from Antiqua Et Nova, “...only by recovering a wisdom of the heart, can we confront and interpret the newness of our time.”[209] Such ‘wisdom of the heart’ is ‘the virtue that enables us to integrate the whole and its parts, our decisions and their consequences.’ It ‘cannot be sought from machines,’ but it ‘lets itself be found by those who seek it and be seen by those who love it; it anticipates those who desire it, and it goes in search of those who are worthy of it (cf. Wis 6:12-16).’ [210]

What a wonderful sentiment couched around the challenging reality that truth is something to be sought, not something to be known in absolute terms; it’s an exercise in seeking for that which is just beyond our grasp. Still, as humans, we are called to arduously search anyway, because it is through our openness and seeking that we are graced with fleeting moments where nuggets of truth are revealed. This illuminates The Way.

Truth-seeking is hard. As far as I can tell, society as a whole has never been particularly good at it. Most people have fleeting moments where they consider “big truth” issues, but the tyranny of the day prevents us from pursuing these threads diligently. Additionally, there is risk in asking these questions, because the answers may be calling us to change parts of ourselves with which we are heavily invested. Finally, there is a discipline to truth-seeking that requires a particular kind of discernment. I’ve come to recognize that this is where I struggle. I’ve previously written about the Daily Examen as a simple discernment practice. It’s a wonderful way of aligning actions with intentions, but I’ve always felt lacking in my capacity to form an integrated approach to addressing life’s thorniest questions about liberty, communal responsibility, good and evil, belief and religion. For most of us, these questions all trace back to one central question - Why am I here? Though unintentional, perhaps AI’s greatest contribution to date is that it has reignited in many of us some version of this singular quest for understanding. 

This has led me to more critically consider my own discernment practice where I have come to recognize a fairly sizable flaw. When confronted with those “why am I here?” moments, my reflective practice needs a different vocabulary - an underpinning that draws me into deeper dialogue with the supernatural regarding its presence in our earthly reality.

In the Catholic and Christian tradition, the straightforward response to the “why am I here?” question is some version of “to know, love, and serve God.” Some of us are blessed with an intimate sense of God’s divine love and find great contentment walking this path. Unfortunately, I am not one of these people. For me, the path is not clearly marked which makes this line of thinking unapproachable in the face of my daily challenges and the broader conflicts and injustices playing out on the world stage. My sense is that I’m not alone in my struggles, and I wonder if this might extend from the way in which we assimilate faith into our daily living.

I’ve always treasured the rootedness of my Faith. Recently, however, in my attempts to reconcile a world that feels deeply fractured, returning to these roots has felt less satisfying, even problematic at times. In some ways, being Catholic or more broadly Christian feels performative, and the actions many are taking in the name of Christianity seem removed from my internal sense of a Christian ethos. I don’t mean this in a conservative-versus-progressive, one-is-right-the-other-is-wrong-sort-of-way. Rather, it’s an orientation toward thinking about Faith as the road to certainty rather than recognizing that Faith doesn’t exist in the absence of doubt.

Among today's big changes and challenges, it makes sense to seek certainty. My sense, though, is that we should be working to make peace with uncertainty instead. So rather than ascribe to the “make straight the path” philosophy of faith, I’m beginning to settle into the idea of being on a winding path, and the role faith plays is to ensure that my shoulders are pointed in the right direction for the journey.

Next up, finding my anchor...

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CONTRIBUTOR: Jeff Hausman, AVLI President

vol 7 issue 6