You Are Not a Computer

I have not noticed it as much among you students, but every so often adults say things like: “I need to recharge this weekend” or, “I don’t have the bandwidth for that now.” I want to say that this is a serious mistake. Why do we talk like we’re computers? We know on some level that we’re not machines but we talk like we are. The Christian answer is “I have a soul and a computer doesn’t.” While this is true, I want to think about this for a while with you. What does it mean to have a soul or a mind rather than be a brain or computer?

I’ve been reading about the difference between brains and minds this summer. Philosophers and theologians have been working through this for over two thousand years but it is only with the advent of calculators, computers and now artificial intelligence that there’s a need to think through this more carefully. Pope Leo has been working on this recently. I’d like to think through this with you this morning.

How does artificial intelligence work? AI networks have read and been trained on most of the body of published work—almost everything that’s been printed from the ancient, medieval and modern world. AI has also trained on almost everything that has been written on the web—all those chats, blog posts and comments. This is hundreds of trillions of words. If you read a book a week it would take you seven million years to read what a typical AI program has read. What AI does is predict answers based on how much writing it has analyzed—finishing your email or giving you an answer to a question about rabbits.

But is information wisdom or even knowledge? I don’t know if you know what this is, but when I was a kid there was a thing called the Guinness Book of World Records. I had the 1989 edition and by the time I was twelve I had read it many times through. I could tell you about the longest snake in history (50 feet), the tallest man (8′11″), and the most crooked city street (Lombard in San Francisco). The book was about 700 pages long and I had memorized vast swaths of it. I was full of information.

I also thought that it was virtuous to think that I was a bad person. I had an inner, fiercely critical, voice and I thought that God wanted me to hide when I had sinned. I thought that if I didn’t get into my dream college that I would be a failure and would disappoint my parents. I could be a bully at school.

I was considered very smart, but I lacked wisdom. Wisdom is not necessarily something that comes with age, although it often does. However, there are many young saints who are wise: Carlo Acutis, Pier Giorgio Frassati, Thérèse of Lisieux all come to mind. Wisdom, it seems to me, comes from living in the Holy Spirit and seeing things as they really are.

Do you or your parents ever go to a website and come across a test to make sure that you’re human? They will often have things like a series of pictures of various things and the website will ask you to identify all of the stop lights or buses or trains. The designers use your answers to strengthen AI. AI still stumbles over pictures like these, uncertain in ways a human never would be. It has seen millions of stop signs and yet can hesitate over a single one. How many times do you suppose a five-year-old has to see a stop sign to know what one is? Six? A dozen at most. And there are truths that human beings can know that are much deeper than how to identify a stop sign.

Before I continue let me quote some famous, perhaps overused, lines from my favorite poet, T. S. Eliot. In his Choruses from the Rock he asks: “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

School in the past century has mostly been about words—write a good paper and get an A. But there is a deeper way of thinking that is more fundamentally human. I spent about fifteen years studying classics, philosophy and theology. I read about 7,000 books in ten different languages during that time—most of them about Christianity. I studied and taught at six different universities, three of them world-class (Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of Vienna). But I didn’t know God loved me like a father loves his son. As one of my favorite novelists, Walker Percy, wrote: “You can get all As and flunk life.” It took my wife loving me and working at a truly Catholic university to realize that I didn’t have to earn God’s love by behaving correctly. Although I had a lot of information and complicated thoughts, I didn’t know the most important thing in life.

So, information is not wisdom. Wisdom is something lived, something felt or intuited. All that reading and writing that I did helps me now that I’m a bit more wise to communicate the truths, the reality, that I can now see.

Well, then, having established the difference between wisdom and information, is the brain where we know things, where we’re conscious? Yes and no.

City planners in Tokyo spent over thirty years designing the most complicated and yet efficient train system in the world. Obviously that required a lot of brain power and advanced degrees.

I want to point out an interesting experiment related to this Tokyo train system. Dr. Nakagaki, a Japanese scientist, decided to do a test on slime molds. Slime molds are single cells and have no brain or nervous system. They’re also kind of gross. They can’t think, or so we thought. Slime molds were presented with a series of oat flakes to eat in a pattern like the suburbs of Tokyo. It was an extraordinarily complex system. The astonishing thing is that the slime mold without a brain or even the evolutionary ancestor to a brain was able to make a path strikingly similar to the path that the city planners spent thirty years designing. The slime mold somehow displays something like intelligence although it doesn’t have a brain.

Another brief example. Scientists in England examined an honors student with a 126 IQ. That means he is more intelligent than 96% of the population. Guess what they found? He had a brain one-tenth the weight of an average person’s. So, the brain, while having something to do with our thinking, doesn’t seem to fully explain our consciousness. We are neither computers nor brains. We are, the Church argues, bodies made alive by our souls.

How, then, do human beings know the most important things? Have you ever known that something is safe and yet not been able to do it? Jumping off the high dive perhaps? Or learning to ride a two-wheel bike? One of my favorite authors, Luigi Giussani, tells a story from his childhood. He was hiking in the mountains with some adults and had to jump a two-foot-wide chasm that went down about one hundred feet. He had jumped two feet hundreds of times and was attached to his guide by a rope. If by some chance he didn’t make the jump he would have been saved by his guide. When he put it into words he knew that it was perfectly safe. But he didn’t feel it. He froze and couldn’t jump. As his guide and fellow hikers encouraged him, as he saw other boys jump the chasm, he began to grow in confidence. He knew these men, knew that they were trustworthy and so grew in courage to make the jump.

Human beings learn the things based on trust. St. John Henry Newman gives an example in his Grammar of Assent. A seven-year-old boy is walking in a field of alfalfa with his mother and he asks her what the scientific name for alfalfa is. She tells him it is Medicago sativa. The boy doesn’t understand the term, but he trusts his mother and so grows in knowledge.

Is the earth round or flat? Have you sailed around the world and come back to where you started? If not, how do you know the earth is round? Because you’ve been told or have seen a globe which is the same thing. You trust your parents or teachers who told you that the earth is round.

We learn by living with people that are trustworthy, and then from them we learn truth, we come to know reality better. We can read a book and learn about ideas but until we live the truths we read about we just carry around information. We need to experience, to feel the truth. Again, think of how much I knew and had read about God but it wasn’t until I was middle-aged and experienced being loved that I came to know God in what Newman called a real way.

We read a lot at St. Augustine’s. We can achieve a lot in the classroom with our essays and math equations. These are good things. Our final task, however, is much deeper than that. If we want to avoid being merely machines, we need to live the truths we learn in the classroom. We don’t recharge, we rest. We don’t have bandwidth, we have the space and time to think. We bring the wisdom we learn from our books into our relationships, in how we smile and laugh, in the hugs we give to our family and friends. We slow down our thinking in our common arts, lunch, recess, morning prayer and mass and get in touch with the heart of reality. The slime mold without a brain is guided by the intelligence that underlies the whole cosmos—God. Information, reading, writing, Latin declensions and lab reports are good and help us to bring the truths we can know deep down into words and into our consciousness.

I am grateful for the fifteen years I spent learning languages, reading deeply, having conversations with world-class scholars, and writing books. However, it took being loved by my wife to make any of that learning worthwhile, to come to know God in my guts (this is where we know and love God according to scripture (σπλάγχνα)). God, working through my wife, taught me the fundamental thing. All those years of study help me to see with greater clarity and to communicate the wisdom that I needed to feel in my bones. But without wisdom, without experiencing God in what St. Augustine calls “my deepest down self (interior intimo meo)” all that learning is superficial and worthless—and, worse, can lead to pride.

Our task at St. Augustine’s is to grow in both kinds of knowledge. We want to know in our bodies and our rest what Dante called “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars (l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle)” and to learn to put that wisdom into words and to see the wisdom that we intuit or feel with greater clarity. It is a great adventure and the faculty and I are honored to be a part of your growth in intelligence and wisdom.

Matthew Briel

Student Orientation

August 2026

St. Augustine School