Beyond Function, Toward Personhood: Human Intellect and Personalist Anthropology in the Age of AI

Abstract

This paper examines the uniqueness of human intellect in the age of AI from the perspective of personalist anthropology. Large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems now imitate with increasing sophistication the external performances of human intellectual activity, such as language production, reasoning, and the synthesis of materials. For this reason, the uniqueness of human intellect cannot be adequately located in a residual set of functions that AI has not yet performed. Rather, it lies in the openness of human knowing toward the unlimited horizon of truth and goodness, and in the fact that this openness takes concrete form in the personal subject’s self-possession, self-gift, and transcendent orientation toward God. To clarify this thesis, the paper begins with Thomas Aquinas’s notion of natural desire (desiderium naturale) and follows Bernard Lonergan’s analysis of cognitional activity in order to disclose the cognitional structure in which the unlimited orientation of human knowing is rooted. It argues that this unlimited orientation is not something established by external observation or reproduced by the sophisticated execution of external procedures, but rather a reality discovered when the cognitional subject is reflectively present to its own activity. The paper then turns to Karol Wojtyła’s analyses of self-possession, self-gift, and vertical transcendence in order to show how the unlimited orientation of human intellect is realized within the movement of the whole person. It concludes that the human being is not a sum of functions but a person called toward God, and that making this truth manifest is a distinctive task of theological anthropology in the age of AI.