Imagine the moment when a bite disrupts innocence, as Adam and Eve’s eyes open to a new, unsettling awareness of good and evil. Now picture a different scene where circuits hum, qubits flicker in quantum dance, and a large language model (LLM) churns through humanity’s texts—bits and yes, bites—to answer a moral query.
These two thresholds of knowing, separated by millennia, still raise a question that gnaws at us. What separates the knowledge we grasp from the discernment we live? As artificial intelligence scales toward vast techno-cognition, we are driven, perhaps compelled, to ask whether technology can ever bridge the chasm between its capabilities and the human condition.
The Roots of Discernment
In Genesis, the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” marks a pivot—not a mere accrual of facts, but a transformation. The Hebrew da‘at suggests an intimate, experiential awareness. Paired with good and evil, it implies a capacity to judge, to distinguish moral poles through encounter.
This isn’t wisdom as abstract mastery, but a burdened discernment, born when innocence meets consequence. Their eyes opened, Adam and Eve saw nakedness and shame and they didn’t just know more, they became more, stepping into moral agency.
Philosophy echoes this. Aristotle’s practical wisdom isn’t a theoretical grasp but a lived judgment, honed by navigating life’s particulars. Kant’s practical reason demands the will to engage the world, not a mind detached. Even Buddhist vipassana—clear-seeing—emerges from mindful presence, not data stacks. Discernment, across these lenses, fuses cognition with experience, a faculty machines can’t claim.
Or can they?
The Rise of Techno-Cognition
Today, we have the new thinking machines—LLMs. As we keep scaling them further—trillions of parameters, exabytes of data—they approach what some might call “functional discernment” or context-sensitive outputs rivaling human judgment. Quantum computing ups the ante, its qubits yielding possibilities that may even defy human comprehension.
Now, this is where it gets philosophically juicy. Some argue we’re nearing an asymptote: As computing power grows, AI’s mimicry of discernment closes in on the real thing. Others, including Elon Musk, who just called us on the event horizon of the Singularity, go further, envisioning a true crossing—AI that doesn’t merely simulate but possesses genuine understanding and moral agency. Proponents of the singularity would argue that such systems might eventually develop consciousness itself—not merely imitating discernment but embodying it.
Functionally, the gap shrinks—outputs align with what we’d call discerning. Yet, something nags at the skeptics among us. Is computation alone, no matter how vast, sufficient for discernment’s soul? Or is there something in the lived, embodied nature of human experience that remains categorically different? The question isn’t settled by more processing power but by how we understand consciousness itself. What we’re witnessing may be a brilliantly convincing shadow—or the first glimmers of a new kind of mind.
The Weight of Choice
This isn’t to dismiss AI’s prowess. LLMs enhance our cognition—tools to sift, connect, provoke—like a lens sharpening focus. AI can outline good and evil’s history, but you weigh it against your gut, your life.
That’s the rub for me. Discernment stays yours, experiential and embodied; while the LLM provides a powerful web of customized facts, it’s still not an optimal guide. Quantum computing might accelerate this cognitive cartography, cracking problems once intractable, but it doesn’t cross into moral agency. The chasm persists—an artifact of the human condition, not a glitch to patch.
So why care? Discernment defines us—our wrestle with choice shapes identity, resilience, even sanity. AI’s rise tempts us to outsource that wrestle, mistaking efficiency for depth. If we lean too hard on these towers of data, we risk atrophying what the tree awoke: our capacity to judge, not just compute. Philosophically, it’s a mirror—tech reflects our reach, not our essence. And perhaps spiritually, it’s a reminder that discernment’s burden is ours, a gift and curse no machine inherits.
As LLMs and quantum systems loom larger, we stand at a fork. Will we chase asymptotic closeness, content with shadows of wisdom? Or will we guard the chasm, insisting discernment’s messy humanity can’t be scaled?
Yes, I wallow in ambiguity.