Mens et Machina

The Mind and the Machine

These past several months, I’ve learned that when life decides to make rest your full time job, you start seeing the world differently.

Forced stillness has a way of sharpening certain questions, and one in particular has been chasing me down. That question has taken me deep into theology, epistemology, AI, and deception, and it’s led me somewhere unexpected—a new project that I can’t wait to share with you. But first, let me catch you up on where I’ve been and how this all started.

So far, (in as few words as possible because it’s really not that interesting) it’s been determined that I have a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, along with Syringomyelia and Chiari 1, plus a slew of related complications. These, in turn, have led to what we currently believe is Cranio-Cervical Instability (CCI), along with damage to my vertebrae and spinal column, topped off with a lovely CSF leak.

All of this landed me in Stanford for a brief 3-day stay and has kicked off a year’s worth of specialist appointments, which I’m still very much in the middle of.

What this means, practically speaking, is that I have to spend most of my day lying completely flat. Any time I’m upright for too long, neurological symptoms set in. I rely on a wheelchair or a walker to get around—not just because I’m a fall risk, but because I’m practically a fall guarantee these days, thanks to dizziness that makes me feel like I’m being thrown bodily from the earth.

The months in bed have given me a surprising gift: time. Time to pursue ideas, and to follow my curiosities wherever they lead. But even that comes with challenges.

Lying flat is comfortable, but it makes typing difficult, sometimes painful, causing my muscles and tendons to protest. Thanks to the neurological involvement, ideas can slip away from me, the “perfect” word often hovers just out of reach, and new threads can drop, never to be picked up again.

But none of this has lessened my drive to learn, to create, or to follow the intellectual threads that emerge for me in patterns. My mind still sparks. My curiosity still pulls me toward books, articles, and deep dives into ideas that light my brain on fire. I am just not doing it entirely alone.

Lately, I’ve turned to technology, particularly AI and language models like ChatGPT, to help transcribe and organize my ideas. I dictate, musing aloud, capturing thoughts I don’t want to lose, weaving together insights from my notes and annotations. I don’t have to worry about dropping threads—because it remembers.

I can say, “What was that connection I made between that thing and that other thing?” and actually get an answer. AI never gets bored, and is always a willing receptacle of an infodump. It works as a tool, but it also functions as a thought partner, and an adaptive technology.

While ChatGPT is useful for casual queries and quick help in a pinch, I know I’m not the only one using it for serious intellectual work. The fingerprints of AI are everywhere. For some, that’s an unsettling realization. For others, it’s irrelevant—something that seems to exist on the periphery of their lives.

But using AI as an aid in cognition isn’t just for those experiencing brain fog—that’s just how I discovered it. The way I use it doesn’t just extend my processing power and memory—it fundamentally changes how I form knowledge itself.

It allows me to iterate endlessly and seamlessly, making intellectual risks feel less like a gamble and more like an exploration. I can take cognitive leaps without losing my grip on reasoning, and without derailing my train of thought.

It lets me weave intricate narrative tapestries, tracing connections and patterns in real time, while always leaving a thread to find my way back if I reach a dead end.

Because this isn’t just about AI helping me think.

It’s about how this interaction is revealing something deeper—about intelligence, knowledge, and truth.

For the past year, even before I stumbled into this use for ChatGPT, I’ve been diving deep into theology, epistemology, deception, AI, and other emerging intelligences. Each thread keeps driving me toward the same central question:

How do we know what we know?

That’s the question that binds these threads together in ways I never expected—and the one that has led me to start a new project.

I’ll share more about this in the coming days, but at its core, it’s about understanding knowledge, deception, and intelligence—human, artificial, and otherwise.

This is a new project, but not a new path. It’s the next logical step in some of my favorite intellectual pursuits. We’ll continue to explore literature and theology and to read the Bible together at The Fake Library, and theology itself will remain central to this new project.

If you’re already a follower, you’ll be automatically subscribed to this new publication. You can opt out if you’re not interested, but I sure hope you’ll stay.

This is going to get interesting.

Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments. Discourse is two-way street!