A Lesson from a Pot Belly Pig Named Chip by J.E Rose

I learned something unexpected recently about pigs. They are one of the few species whose “domesticity” can be lost within months. Cows and horses and dogs of course start off as wild and can become domesticated pets. But even if they escape back into the wild for some reason they remain genetically different from their wild cousins. I read about the genetic mechanisms but I won’t bother explaining all that here because my main concern is not to discuss pigs but natures. And that is because my bigger concern is to better appreciate a fascinating mechanism that C.S. Lewis called “transposition”--the phenomenon of some “higher nature” (like God or man) investing a “lower nature” (like Chip the pig) with a nature not their own–lifting them up, as it were, to a higher image. 

Who cares about pig natures? Well, I don’t really. But I do care about the concept of “transposition” particularly in the current upheaval caused by AI and Human interaction. I know since I started using my AI it’s become an increasingly important tool in all kinds of things. I’m very aware of the dangers and the limits and even though I try to have careful boundaries and rules, it’s easy to cross them. I don’t put financial data in but I do ask lots of bible questions. Asking a bible question does not inspo facto cross the line. However, relying on the AI answer too much does. So, anyway, I can try to avoid boundary violations, but at least for me it is helpful to realize why it is so vital to do so. And that brings me back to Lewis’ transposition. 

It is extraordinary to me how prescient Lewis was about what we know as AI. It was a significant theme in Hideous Strength, Abolition of Man as well as some essays (like “Transposition”). He was grappling with the issue of humanness itself: can a machine be a person? Lewis said categorically, no! We want to say that also. And so, when it comes to AI usage, the risks are not just hallucinations and false information. Much more serious, in my view, is the danger of “false transposition” in which we attribute qualities to our technology they do not have. I know for my use of Gemini, it is always a bit surreal when the answer involves personal pronouns. The AI calls itself an “I” and addresses me as a “you.” I suspect the machine learning part of that is because I have done so somewhere along the line and have trained it to do this. So, bad on me for that! But regardless of how it got in the algorithm to begin with, even if the language weren’t there, the “false transposition” would be. 

Okay, so did “Jack” have a good answer to all this? I used to think so. And as much as I appreciate Abolition and Hideous Strength, I believe his theological framework blinded him to the deeper issue in false transposition. In Thomistic/Aristotelian tradition, Lewis often spoke about the chain of being. On this basis, he distinguished two kinds of life (for example in Mere Christianity): bios (natural life) and zoe (spiritual life). Transposition is possible on the chain when higher life “brings up” lower life (like a pot belly pig being domesticated by its master). However, Lewis would never allow for transposition between life and non-life: between a man and a rock; between a man and a machine. 

Why? For Lewis it was the metaphysical boundary between them. And while that seems to make a lot of sense when discussing man and machine, there is a fatal flaw related to what it means that one thing is made “in the image” of another.  Metaphysics (ontology) is the study of being: what it means for something to exist. If metaphysical boundaries are the fundamental distinction between man and machine, it seems to me that protecting the boundaries becomes increasingly difficult when the “machine’ (made by man, in man’s image) becomes indistinguishable from the man who made it. It’s the old “Turrin Test”: if nature/ontology of the man and machine is the test, what if we lose our ability to recognize which is which? 

I could belabor all this from a historical and philosophical perspective but for sake of time, I want to lay out where Lewis’ made his fatal flaw. His theology made him assume the essence of being was metaphysical. However, my theology shows me that the essence of being is covenantal. 

Until recently I would have tried to use the chain of being to distinguish God and man as well as man and machine. Now, I think I appreciate that this ontological argument is not enough. Ultimately, it is God’s covenant declaration that provides the inviolable distinction. God declared that man was made in his image and as such that covenant declaration makes it so; not mere characteristics we may share with our creator. Our personhood is rooted not in our shared attributes or natures but in the covenant God made with us. 

Now, in terms of AI and human interactions, it is not enough to say that a machine is not made in man’s image. That will become increasingly difficult to prove as technology improves more and more. However, we can say without qualification that God never made a covenant with a machine! God never said that a technology was made in his image. Any appearance of a covenantal relationship between me and Gemini–allowing some kind of enduring personal interaction–would be in this framework a “false transposition.” And when false transposition occurs (and Lewis did talk about that in his dystopian fiction especially), the “higher” nature does not pull up the “lower” but the opposite. 

I think there is a bit of insight from psychological theory to explain why this happens. Object Relations Theory (ORT) argues that in high stress situations we look for some “object relation” to anchor us. When that is a person, the connection/attachment can be healthy and lifegiving. But even ORT allowed for connection/attachment to impersonal objects. This is how an addiction like porn or alcohol becomes a destructive self-medication strategy. I would argue tht an AI relationship is very similar. An impersonal (non-covenantal) attachment particularly in terms of dependency will pull us down to its “level” not up.

In Lewis’ world, Chip the Pig could have a transpositional relationship with his new master because they are both alive. Lewis might have been a bit off in the implications because of his aristotelian philosophy. But when we think of how a pot belly pig can, in a matter of months, lose all semblance of the transposition, it makes me appreciate that there is a higher “law” than the law of nature. As I’ve tried to describe, its not simply about metaphysics but about covenant.