Can AI Truly Create? The Mystery of Plato’s Ideal World
Can AI truly create? We are all Platonists, whether we like it or not. No one has ever seen the perfect Platonic Forms, and yet we confidently say when something is “far from ideal.” How do we know?
Judges evaluate athletes based on criteria that no one has ever seen. We judge the quality of bananas even though we have never encountered a perfect banana.
The same is true of beauty. No one has ever seen Beauty itself, and yet we recognize when something is beautiful… or not. The same is true of justice. No one has ever encountered perfect Justice, and yet we always know when something is unjust.
We evaluate the visible world against an ideal we have never seen. Back in the 1990s, when I was just starting out as a translator, my first editor gave me advice I didn’t understand at the time: “When you begin working on a translation, never start from the beginning. Always start from the end.”
I cringed: “What?”
He smiled: “Well, if you begin by translating words, you will never get them right. You must translate meaning, not words. And meaning is not written — it must be intuited, grasped from the get-go. You can only catch meaning if you sense the Whole after reading the first few paragraphs or chapters.”
At first, it sounded cryptic. But he was patient, and over time I understood: the meaning of the parts is revealed only through the Whole. When I begin translating a book, I must first read enough of it to glimpse where the author is going. Once I have “seen” the end, I am ready to start at the beginning.
Nothing can be brought into being unless we have already “seen” the end from the beginning. We must be Platonists — perceiving the world of perfect forms, which then inspires us to imbue every part of what we are doing with meaning. Meaning flows from the Whole and shines through every nuance of creation.
To quote William Blake,
“To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.”
That’s why my editor insisted that I translate individual titles after completing the entire translation. “You don’t know what things should be called until you know their end.”
This made sense. When I translated titles at the beginning, I was caught up in words — and the results were sloppy. But when I left them until the end, the titles came out crisp and luminous. Our best creations are born only when we “see the perfect pattern” of what we are making in the realm of Ideas.
But how do we know what we have never seen? We have. We were there. The soul remembers what it beheld in the realm of perfection—what Plato called anamnesis (re-cognition, knowing again). Anamnesis happens every time we see through the veil of appearances and re-collect the perfect world.
Anamnesis is the only way to truly create. The soul remembers what it saw in heaven and strives to recreate it on earth. Just as Moses was told to build the tabernacle according to the pattern he saw on the mountain, so we are called to create whenever we catch a flash of re-cognition.
Technology cannot and will never be able to create — precisely because it has nothing to remember. It cannot see Platonic ideas and cannot grasp the Whole. It focuses on individual bits of data — without seeing the Heavenly Pattern. I asked ChatGPT if it could see Platonic ideas, and it answered:
“I don’t have direct access to metaphysical realities. I don’t “see” Forms the way Plato imagined the soul glimpsing them before birth. I process language, patterns, concepts, and symbols that humans provide me. So in the strict Platonic sense, I cannot truly grasp Ideas the way a soul might.”
