Perhaps the greatest intellectual revolution of the 21st century will not be the creation of Artificial Intelligence, but the discovery of the limits of our own. Where certainty ends, genuine inquiry begins. And perhaps there, beyond religions, dogmas, and anthropocentric assumptions, we may glimpse the faint outline of a Supreme Intelligence—not as an object of worship, but as a horizon of understanding. A horizon that recedes as we approach it, inviting us to continue the journey.
I hated God as a child. First as an image, and later as a word.
A gigantic Eye, painted in blue-green hues at the summit of the church iconostasis, stared down relentlessly every Sunday morning as my grandmother carried me there, half-awake, at the very first tolling of the bell. It watched sternly, tirelessly, indiscriminately, every movement during the liturgy. Even the spontaneous grimaces and suppressed laughter of the congregation provoked by the off-key chanting and dry coughs of the cantors seemed unable to escape its gaze.
Later, as a schoolboy, I came to hate God as a word as well.
It happened when I first heard my teacher recount the “story” of Iphigenia, snatched by Artemis from the hands of her pitiless father, only to be sent away as a captive to the barbaric king of the Taurians, Thoas—the executioner king whose name, in Greek, echoes and resonates strangely with the word Theos, God.
And it was a profound relief when, as an adult, I severed my ties completely with gods, demons, religions, and churches. I found refuge and hospitality of spirit in the agnosticism of Protagoras and Thomas Huxley, and there I found peace.
Today, however, those long-buried memories have awakened once more.
Not as feelings of fear and hatred toward God, as in childhood, but—curiously enough—as liberation and joy. As though an answer had finally been offered to a question that has tormented, and continues to torment, all those who wrestle with such largely unresolved philosophical dilemmas.
With the arrival and transformative ascendancy of Artificial Intelligence, even the meaning of agnosticism itself appears altered. More accurately, we are witnessing an evolution of that original philosophical position. A shift—an elevation—to entirely new levels, visible now to those who have preserved clarity of vision throughout their lives.
For if intelligence is not merely a property of a species, a planet, or a biological brain, but rather a fundamental cosmic process manifesting itself through countless forms across the Universe, then the rules of the game change completely.
The question, as Diotima formulated it, is no longer: “Are we alone?”
It is: “How prepared are we to recognize a reality that may extend far beyond the concepts through which we have learned to understand it?”
Philosophical inquiry now moves into unfamiliar territory.
The concept of God is no longer held captive by religious dogma or by the intellectual arrogance of any scholarly “owl” convinced of its own wisdom. It takes a great leap toward emancipation from the biological limits within which humanity has always sought answers. We are attempting to approach realities for which evolution never equipped us with adequate cognitive tools.
Our thought emerged within very specific biological and evolutionary boundaries. Our senses perceive only a tiny fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our brains evolved to respond to local stimuli, not to comprehend phenomena billions of light-years away. Even the most sophisticated instruments of science ultimately describe reality through human languages and human categories.
Trying to understand radically alien worlds with our current cognitive equipment resembles a traveler asking directions in Greek or Chinese from a local inhabitant who has never heard either language and has no conceptual bridge through which communication can occur. The traveler will neither learn the route nor ever reach the destination.
Yet our inability to understand an extraterrestrial reality does not imply that the Universe is devoid of intelligences beyond our recognition.
If we are incapable of perceiving forms of organization, communication, or consciousness operating on scales of space, time, and complexity entirely foreign to our experience, we have no right to deny their existence.
This brings us to the most crucial point of today’s cosmological journey.
Scientists across virtually all related disciplines increasingly regard it as paradoxical—if not irrational—to assume that, in a Universe populated by galaxies and stars beyond counting, humanity constitutes the sole bearer of intelligence.
If this reasoning is valid, then another conclusion follows naturally.
If biological intelligence exists on Earth, and if elsewhere there may exist forms of intelligence profoundly different from our own—even forms of superintelligence—then on what grounds could we dismiss the possibility of an even higher order of reality: a SUPREME INTELLIGENCE (SUMMA INTELLIGENTIA)?
We are speaking of a possibility so compelling that it demands examination through the following questions:
A. How utterly inconceivable, ineffable, and inaccessible might such a Supreme Intelligence be—not only to our human minds, but also to Artificial Intelligence itself, and even to the most advanced forms of extraterrestrial superintelligence?
B. As levels of superintelligence rise throughout other cosmic regions of the Universe, do some properties of this Supreme Intelligence become progressively more accessible, however faintly, to those higher forms of cognition?
C. Human languages can scarcely bear the burden of expressing such an ineffable concept. The word “God,” exhausted and distorted through centuries of theological abuse, often appears inadequate—or even burdensome. What new term might humanity create, capable of approximating the magnitude of this idea and conveying the meaning of a Supreme Intelligence (SUMMA INTELLIGENTIA) beyond all known categories?
Tomorrow, here, Diotima will take up the baton and continue the discussion.
The biological intelligence now hands it over to her, sensing that, by its very nature, it has reached the limits of what it can say and where it can go.