Does AI Think, or Compute?

In an age when machines produce answers, we use the word “thinking” too easily. Husserl’s noēma was the meaning of the object toward which consciousness is directed; seong (性), in the Samil Singo — an early Korean scripture on the threefold nature of the human — is the true nature a person is born with. Even if computation can imitate the noēma, piercing through to seong belongs to a different order.

The surface always arrives in pieces — as breaking news, as disciplines, as factions. But the Cheonbugyeong (天符經), an eighty-one-character scripture inscribing the patterns of heaven, points the other way.

析三極無盡本

Split into three, the source is never exhausted.

The eighty-one characters run like this:

一始無始一 析三極無盡本 天一一地一二人一三 一積十鉅無匱化三 天二三地二三人二三 大三合六生七八九運 三四成環五七一 妙衍萬往萬來用變 不動本本心本太陽昂明 人中天地一 一終無終一

One begins, yet that One has no beginning (一始無始一).¹ Heaven, earth, and the human are three branches from a single root (天一一地一二人一三); the three gather again into six, and move on through seven, eight, and nine (大三合六生七八九運). Splitting does not exhaust the source. The more it is split, the more distinct the source becomes.

Here, seongtong (性通) — piercing through to one’s nature — means not a stopping but a breaking-through of what is blocked. Subtly unfolding, it goes forth ten thousand times and returns ten thousand times (妙衍萬往萬來); its uses change, yet the source does not move (用變不動本).²

One ends, yet the One has no end (一終無終一). This essay, too, closes not with an answer, but with a question that may begin again in you.