Plato on Noticing

What is it about?

There are many kinds of thinking discussed in Plato: intellectual intuition of eternal Forms, conceptual thought, opining, contemplating. But at the root of all kinds of thinking I argue, is the activity of mere noticing: the natural impulse of the soul to seek clarity and distinctness, to notice that sensible objects are always pointing beyond themselves toward the essence that makes them what they are. It's no surprise that this is a natural impulse of the soul, since to be a soul, for Plato, is to be something that always strives for a completeness that it never fully possesses.

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Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our friends in the sciences and in the new information technologies are assuring us that they are about to create an "artificial intelligence" equal to human intelligence, or maybe even a super-intelligence so much greater than our own that it will render us obsolete. AI models are already so uncanny, in fact, that we find ourselves asking whether they might not be conscious - whether they, too, might have a soul. But before we stamp an expiry date on our own intelligence and attribute a soul to a computerized prediction model, maybe we should hear what Plato had to say about these things. We could stand to learn a thing or two from him.