Last Christmas I wrote about angels and AI, a report of the intellectual fruits of a seminar I taught on this subject. The formal title of the course — and of the essay — was “Angels, Demons, and Artificial Intelligence”, and, to be sure, we studied the questions in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae concerning the demons or fallen angels. We even heard a talk from a philosophy colleague on the nature of demonic possession.

Yet I had little to say in that essay about the demons, an omission that occasioned comment from some readers. Isn’t there something demonic about AI – or at least about the apocalyptic visions of evil super-intelligence peddled by even some AI industry figures and a range of other wannabe Cassandras? (A recent addition to this chorus is the arch-rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s co-authored book with the spectacularly absurd title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”, out this week and reviewed just today in TLS.) I mean to make up for this omission here.

The place to start is my observation that

As I argued, we stand in need not only of better philosophical arguments about the nature of intelligence, but also imaginative resources to push back on the computational theory of mind, which has become a kind of cultural default — a meme that insidiously begets many others.

But while angelic super-intelligence offers us a standard that we can use to scrutinize claims about the intelligence of — and the intellectual superiority of – LLMs, the relevance of the demons seems rather more remote.

I believe that the ways that demons have been thought to interact with and manipulate human beings can give us insight into the vulnerability of our intellectual lives, which are pressed against from every quarter by AI and related technologies, and help us see how we might go about pressing back in order to defend the worth and important of human intellectual endeavor.

The demons, in the traditional account presented by Aquinas, are simply those rebel angels who turned down God’s offer of friendship and happiness through him out of their fruitless but still powerful desire to be the source of their own glory and happiness, a decision they made as soon as they were created. I assigned my students Milton’s Paradise Lost to provide a richer narrative version of this basic account, while pointing out some of his theological departures from Aquinas, not least his striking insistence on the materiality of the angels and the demons alike.

While they are, according to Aquinas, intellectual and spiritual creatures, the influence of the demons on the material world is as varied as that of the angels. But the idea of demonic possession — the co-optation of the human body by one or more of these hostile intelligences — retains a special cultural significance. After all, among the most vivid of the Gospel stories are those of Jesus casting out demons and thereby healing their victims.

Cultural depictions of demonic assault and possession have been equally vivid, from St Teresa of Ávila’s account of spiritual warfare in her 16th century classic The Interior Castle down to movies such as The Exorcist and TV shows like Evil. These narratives reflect the uneasy place of demonic possession as a scripturally attested and theologically verified occurrence as well as a site of projection for cultural and political anxiety, worry over mental illness and other disorders of the mind, and the horror that the human body and its dysfunction can provoke in us.

There is a great deal one could say about each of these sources of anxiety, but I want to turn back to Aquinas’s own view of demons as, like angels, immaterial intelligences that can act on the material world.

Read it all in Cultured Opinion