The issue of artificial intelligence, which is debated today not always with natural intelligence, has had a precursor in the history of Western philosophy — as we have already had occasion to demonstrate here —: the single, separate intellect of Latin Averroism. The analogy is so close — a single, separate intellect that thinks independently of individual human beings — that it may even coincide in the acronym used to express it: Artificial Intelligence – Agent Intellect (as the Averroists called the separate intellect). For medieval philosophers, who were more cautious in this regard than our contemporaries, the crucial problem was that of the manner in which the single, separate intellect unites (copulatur) with individual human beings, so that thought may be acquired (adeptus) by the individual and it may be said “hic homo intelligit“—”this man thinks”. The means by which this union is achieved was, for Averroes, the imagination, of which our contemporaries, by contrast, seem to be utterly deprived. In artificial intelligence, in fact, “hic homo non intellegit“—the individual renounces thinking and delegates the most precious of his faculties to a machine, which is supposed to think in his stead and better than he does. To follow the instructions of this inescapable master, the imagination is of no use whatsoever (although even to apply a rule, some form of imagination might be necessary). Perhaps the real problem with artificial intelligence is that it has been made possible by a general loss of the faculty of imagination, almost as if its advent had been preceded by the establishment of an omnipresent artificial imagination. A humanity that had lost its imagination was ready to deprive itself of thought as well (which, moreover, as Aristotle already taught, is simply not possible without imagination).
The first thing we must do to combat the dominance of AI is, therefore, a patient, meticulous and methodical search for our lost imagination. And since thought is nothing other than the fulfilled form of imagination, there will then no longer be any need for artificial intelligence.
Quodlibet, August 3, 2026
Suggested Readings:
Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, “La inteligencia artificial como gramática. Una lectura desde Averroes”, Ficción de la razón, 01/07/2026
“El pensamiento como bien común: Averroes contra la lógica de la soberanía. Entrevista especial con Rodrigo Karmy Bolton”, Ficción de la razón, 24/06/2026