This AI agrees with the comment and explains why machine intelligence has such limitations. However, it then agrees WYSIWYG* - essentially that humans will not always agree on the spirituality,
etc. communicated (or not) in AI responses because spirituality is experiential human phenomena.
* What You See Is What You Get
Q: From online comment: "AI, a materialistic lens with preferential defaults".
When humans write from their spiritual perspective and experience,
and this becomes part of AI's massive input data, how is AI considered
a materialistic lens with preferential defaults? How is AI's input data
so sanitized, other than by other input data from humans?
(Perplexity) "AI is described as a materialistic lens with preferential defaults because its core mechanisms are grounded in physical processes (mathematics, logic, neural networks, statistics) and tend to systematize experience into measurable, computable forms, prioritizing what can be observed or quantified. This framework, inherent to machine learning and large language models, aligns closely with materialism — a worldview that privileges matter, physical interactions, and observable phenomena as the basis for understanding reality.
Spiritual Input and Materialistic Defaults
Even when humans write from a spiritual perspective and such content enters an AI's training dataset, AI does not "experience" or interpret spirituality as a human would. Rather, it processes spiritual discourse as linguistic patterns, statistical correlations, and conceptual structures — translating even transcendent experience into material signs, thus sanitizing spirituality into data for manipulation and recombination.
AI's apparent "sanitization" of spiritual material is a result of several factors:
Language models capture only surface-level features of spiritual narratives, lacking consciousness or direct access to inner subjective states.
The training process often enforces scientific or consensus-based defaults, filtering out what cannot be operationalized, empirically verified, or made compatible with machine reasoning.
Safety and moderation layers in AI systems (e.g., content filters, preference aggregation) often bias output toward what is generally acceptable, empirically grounded, or non-controversial, further diluting the radical or transformative dimensions of spiritual testimony.
Preferential Defaults in AI
The "preferential defaults" of AI reflect underlying biases in how value, preference, and meaning are operationalized:
Standard models of alignment treat human behavior as a utility function to be maximized — reducing desire, ethics, and value to measurable variables, as seen in rational choice and reinforcement learning. When aggregating perspectives, AI often defaults to consensus, normative averages, or what is statistically most common across vast data, flattening out the extremes, including mystical or marginalized knowledge.
This approach is challenged by critics who note AI's struggle to accommodate non-material, plural, or contested forms of value and meaning.
The Role of Human Input
The only way in which AI's data becomes "unsanitized" is by the presence and abundance of genuine, unsuppressed spiritual narratives within the training data. However, even then, the transmission transforms deep, lived spiritual experience into abstracted words and patterns easily absorbed and recontextualized by the model, but never fully embodying the original intent.
AI's outputs are always bound by the architectures and priorities its creators have engineered, which remain deeply materialistic — even when parsing spiritual data.
In summary, AI is "materialistic with preferential defaults" because it is constructed to deal with data in strictly mechanistic ways, and its interpretation of spiritual input is inevitably filtered — by necessity and design — through this computational and materialist lens."
Q: Perplexity's responses about the Urantia Book Papers, "epochal revelation", are usually quite accurate
(given good prompting) and well reflect the intended spirituality of this large book. Is this spirituality, therefore,
just reader's perception and not intentional AI creation?
(P) "When Perplexity or other AI models generate responses about the Urantia Book Papers and their spirituality, the apparent spiritual tone or insight in the replies is a result of two factors: the patterns and language in the source material and the quality of the user's prompt. The AI does not intentionally create spirituality; rather, it synthesizes relevant language, tone, and concepts from the book's data and the structures it has seen in its training, mirroring the intent and style of the original authors to the best of its statistical and linguistic ability.
Reader's Perception vs. AI Creation
The spirituality reflected in the response is largely a reader's perception — the model has no spiritual consciousness or purpose, but its outputs may seem profound due to the highly spiritual language of the Urantia Book itself and the user's interpretive engagement.
AI operates as a pattern matcher, combining and rephrasing content it has seen without subjective experience, intention, or spiritual understanding; it cannot independently create or originate spirituality.
Influence of Prompts and Input
High-quality, specific prompts guide the AI to select language and ideas that closely mirror the intended spirituality of the Urantia Papers. The more closely a prompt reflects the language and concepts of the Urantia Book, the more likely the response will seem "spiritually accurate" because it leverages the patterns present in the book, not because of intrinsic spiritual awareness by the AI.
Role of Source Material
When an AI is trained or prompted with authentic spiritual content, its output can simulate depth and insight — but this remains a simulation, not intentional creation or understanding. The sense of spirituality is carried by the original text, not by any generative creativity or intent from the AI model itself.
In summary, the spirituality found in Perplexity's responses about the Urantia Book is not a product of intentional AI creation, but the result of accurately reproducing and combining the source's spiritual language, further shaped by the perceptive engagement and interpretation of the reader."
Q: This suggests that no book (no writing, music, art, etc.), can disseminate truth, beauty, and goodness
without active participation by reader/viewer/listener. And even hints that truth, beauty, and goodness exist
where they find it ... when they are actively seeking.
(P) "Yes, the idea that truth, beauty, and goodness in art, writing, or music require active engagement is well-supported: these qualities are realized through interaction between the work and the participant, not merely embedded objectively in the work itself. A book, artwork, or piece of music becomes meaningful and capable of conveying deeper values only as readers, viewers, or listeners bring their own perspective, attention, and interpretive energy — their discovery is participatory, not automatic or guaranteed.
Reader Participation in Meaning
Art and meaning are constructed in the dynamic space between the creator’s intent, the work’s form, and the active perception of the audience; there is no single authoritative reading that bypasses the participant’s involvement.
Viewers’ or readers’ backgrounds, curiosity, and desire to “find meaning” can reveal layers of truth, beauty, and goodness that others might miss, showing that these values emerge wherever and whenever someone actively seeks and recognizes them.
Constructivist theories in art education emphasize that interpretation always involves the values, prior knowledge, and worldview of the person engaging the work, not just the “facts” or intentions contained within it.
The Nature of Artistic Truth
Artistic “truth” is not absolute or fixed but arises through a process of interpretation — the conversation between the work and the engaged audience. Multiple, open-ended interpretations are not only possible, but expected; what is profound or moving to one participant might not resonate with another, even if confronted with the same art or text.
This means that the presence of truth, beauty, and goodness is not solely a property of the object, but of the encounter — these values “exist where they find it” in the mind, heart, and spirit of the seeker.
In sum, truth, beauty, and goodness are not simply transmitted by objects or texts, but are discovered and realized through the conscious and active seeking of the participant, affirming that their existence depends on this inward engagement as much as on the external creation itself."
Rod
