In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides spends a considerable amount of time addressing a problem that seems purely theological: the corporification of God.
Why does Scripture speak of God with human attributes?
Why does God have a hand, eyes, a voice, anger, movement?
For the Jewish thinker, the answer is not that God is corporeal. It is the opposite: God is described through bodily language precisely because... man cannot think outside the categories available to him.
That is the starting point: the error is in the language man uses to approach what exceeds him.
What Maimonides isolates is a general mechanism of the human mind: man does not perceive what is, he projects what he is capable of conceiving. When faced with something opaque or abstract, he translates it into something familiar.
The reason why I decided to bring this old theological topic to the table is because... we are doing the same thing, again.
Not with God this time, but with our machines.
We speak of AI in the same anthropomorphic register:
We say that it "understands", "thinks", "hallucinates", even that it may one day "want". We give it language, voice, style and humanoid forms.
We attribute to the machine what we would attribute to a human because this is the framework we have available to interpret what appears before us.
What happens when the language we use to describe something slowly replaces our understanding of what it is?
Bear with me.
The demonstration I am about to make is, in truth, quite simple. But simple does not mean short, and it certainly does not mean obvious. It requires a sinuous path.
Some readers will stop at the surface of the analogy: God, AI and language.
Others will understand that this about a structure of thought that keeps returning under different names.
Not every text is meant to yield itself immediately. This one asks for effort.
If you follow it carefully, it will take you much further than theology or technology alone: into cognition, mimetic contagion, value, capital, and the strange way an error in language can become a structure of reality and economy!
The more precise the object, the more imprecise the language becomes.
Because language reduces complexity, by definition.
In both cases - God and AI - the common denominator is the same: language.
The moment you name something, you make it legible.
The moment you make it legible, you make it usable.
And what is usable becomes governable.
This is where language becomes power and... creation.
You see this already in the structure of the biblical text.
The creation of the world itself is described as an act of speech:
ויאמר אלהים יהי אור - ויהי אור
God said: let there be light - and there was light
God "said" and there was. The word does not follow reality. It is presented as what brings it into form.
Not as theology, but as structure: language is generative.
Now, when a man confronts something he does not fully grasp, that same mechanism operates under constraint. Man does not create, but projects:
- God is spoken of as if He had a body, because man thinks through embodiment.
- AI is spoken of as if it had a mind, because man interprets coherent language through the categories of mind.
So what do we do? Stop speaking?
We cannot describe what exceeds us without distorting it. Yet we cannot remain silent.
The danger is in forgetting that language is limited.
Today, with LLMs, we crossed a line: we are still using language to describe what we don't comprehend, but now we also interact with systems that produce this same language back to us.
The illusion now speaks and argues.