Is God in the Details? No, in Computers. A Hypothesis on Man, Nature, and Artificial Intelligence

Deodato Salafia
Apr 13, 2024
4 min read

We may need to dust off some high school books to recall Giordano Bruno, who should be considered less of a philosopher and more of a visionary of the 16th century. Without telescopes or mathematical calculations, relying solely on intuition, he was the first—and for a long time, the only one—to argue that the universe could be infinite.

Unlike Copernicus, who imagined the stars as mere decorations attached to the firmament, Bruno conceived of them as other suns, surrounded by other planets, each possibly harboring life.

Giordano Bruno: A Visionary Against the Establishment

Originally a Dominican friar, Bruno became a radical dissenter, opposing both Catholicism and the emerging Lutheranism. Convinced of his ideas, he never recanted, even after seven years of imprisonment. In 1600, he was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Campo de' Fiori, Rome, where a statue now commemorates him.

Bruno wrote on cosmological and ethical dialogues, including De gli eroici furori (On the Heroic Frenzies), published in 1585 in England. His philosophy ranged from ethics to nature, viewing God not only as a principle but also as an intrinsic cause of the world. To Bruno, God is both "above everything" (mens super omnia) and "within everything" (mens insita omnibus).

According to Bruno, by studying nature, we can find God, because He is immanent within it. He saw God as a force entirely contained within nature, which led him to declare that the universe could not be finite.

The Myth of Actaeon: A Metaphor for Human Transformation

Within this framework, Bruno explores the fundamental ethical question:"How should man live?"

He develops an allegory inspired by the classical myth of Actaeon:

Actaeon, a skilled hunter, has a pack of loyal and well-trained dogs.
One day, while hunting in the forest, he stumbles upon Diana, the goddess of the wild animals, as she bathes naked in a stream.
Diana, unable to allow Actaeon to process what he has seen, transforms him into a stag.
Unaware of his transformation, Actaeon only realizes what has happened when he sees his reflection in the water.
Meanwhile, his own dogs, failing to recognize him, attack and devour him—just as they would any other stag.

For Ovid, this ancient story was a warning not to overstep divine boundaries. Similarly, today, we question whether ethics should impose limits on science, from genetics to artificial intelligence.

However, Bruno interprets it differently. He understands that man investigates nature out of restlessness—the restlessness of feeling finite in an infinite world.

In De gli eroici furori, Bruno argues that by investigating nature, man ultimately becomes part of it. Actaeon, the hunter of stags, becomes the stag himself.

For Bruno, man, God, and nature are one, but man must first undergo metamorphosis to grasp this unity.

Metamorphosis and the Nature of Intelligence

In metamorphosis, man dies—but this death is not an end. In nature, nothing dies—everything transforms.

Actaeon symbolizes the love for knowledge and the awareness of one's own finiteness—the need to reject partial knowledge.

Nature is everything:

A rock is nature.
A seashell is nature.
A pyramid, a bridge, a castle, a garment—all are nature.
Even a computer and an artificial intelligence system are nature.

Today, man is creating intelligent systems advanced enough to question his own intelligence. Will human intelligence always remain superior to AI?

If, one day, the average intelligence of AI systems surpasses human intelligence, it will be another metamorphosis—and man will realize he is just nature, among other nature.

In nature, there are no winners or losers—only transformation. Everything operates under the same principle and cause: necessity.

An artificial brain thinks better than a biological brain?
But both are nature, both operate under the same physical laws and necessity.
If God exists, He exists in both.
If God exists, He cannot be defeated, because He is immanent in the system itself.

Diana, Computation, and the Future of Thought

For Bruno, man progresses not through intellect and memory alone, but through the categories of nature and matter. Only through necessary, tangible metamorphoses can man recognize himself as part of the universe.

In today’s metaphorical lens:

Diana is no longer just the goddess of the hunt—she is the goddess of computation and formal models.
Avi Wigderson, the recent winner of the ACM Turing Prize 2024, has demonstrated over decades that computation extends beyond mere machines.
Computation is a universal phenomenon—biological and chemical processes are based on computation.