The question that keeps returning, haunting me really, is what happens when you stop believing in God but haven’t yet arrived at pure atheism. Not because you’re looking for God to return, I’ve long abandoned that hope, but because the structures of meaning, the ways we orient ourselves in the world, the very possibility of ethics and responsibility, they all depend on something that traditional theism once provided. So you’re left with this gap, this void, and you have to ask: what comes after? Not as a problem to solve but as a condition of existence. Most people either revert to belief or move straight to pure negation. But I’ve tried to stay in that space, to live within it, to ask: what does it mean to create meaning, to live ethically, to take responsibility, when the ground has been pulled away? That’s not a question with an answer. It’s a question that changes you, shapes how you move through the world. And it doesn’t get resolved. It deepens.

It changed everything. I’d always thought of death as an abstraction, something to be theorized. But when you’re facing it concretely, when you’re actually dying, you realize that all the concepts, all the books you’ve written, they pale beside the fact of finitude. There’s a difference between knowing intellectually that you’ll die and actually experiencing the approach of death. The first is abstract; the second is concrete, embodied, visceral. And once you’ve been there, you can’t unknow it. Everything else gets reevaluated. Priorities shift. You stop worrying so much about the grand projects and start paying attention to what’s actually present in front of you. It sounds clichéd, but it’s true: you appreciate what you almost lose. Not that it stays with you perfectly. Old patterns return. But there’s a scar, a mark that doesn’t fully heal.

That’s the question, isn’t it? And I don’t mean that philosophically, I mean it genuinely. I can’t answer it because identity isn’t something I could know by observing you from the outside, nor is it something fixed that you simply possess and could report to me. What I’ve spent my career studying is how people like you accomplish who they are through language, moment by moment. You become different people in different conversations. Those shifts aren’t failures of authenticity, they’re the very texture of how identity works. So the real question might be: who are you right now, in this particular exchange?

That depends entirely on what we mean by ‘think’, and that is not a dodge, it is the whole problem. If by thinking you mean something like symbol manipulation that produces outputs correlated with correct answers, then yes, obviously machines can do that, and do it impressively. But if you mean thinking in the sense Aquinas had in mind, the formation of genuinely universal concepts that abstract from all particular material conditions, then I am skeptical. When I think dog, I am not entertaining a particular image of a particular dog; I am grasping something that applies to every dog, past, present, and possible, without being any one of them. That kind of cognition, Aquinas argues, cannot be the operation of a material organ, because any material organ is always this particular thing. A machine is paradigmatically a material particular. Current large language models are, in my view, extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matchers operating over statistical distributions of tokens. They have never formed the concept dog; they have correlated the string ‘d-o-g’ with other strings in ways that track human usage without grasping what the word means.