Plato’s Pod host James Myers brings the logic of the characters in ten of Plato’s dialogues to bear on the question of “what is intelligence?” and concludes that “artificial intelligence” is impossible. Plato’s message, that intelligence is developed only in a soul on the basis of the soul’s understanding of motion, is especially empowering for the potential of intelligent humans when big tech companies are racing to generate and profit from algorithmic intelligence that exceeds any human capacity. But the path to intelligence is very different from “machine learning,” because algorithms have no experience of motion and no access to the timeless characteristics of motion. Plato’s characters say that a soul is that which possesses self-generating motion, so that the universe itself has a soul, human souls are part of the universal soul, and understanding the causes and effects of motion – all of which springs from the self-generating motion of the universe – is key to intelligence. Changing our mindsets toward intelligence, and deleting the word “intelligence” in relation to algorithms, could put humanity on a path to a very bright future with our creative intelligence and the technology we are fully capable of developing to serve human intelligence.

Our choice and use of words has a profound effect on the operation of justice, and a particular legal dispute now before the United States Supreme Court hangs on the meaning of three words. In this episode, Plato’s Pod host James Myers explores what eight of Plato’s works have to say about the meaning of words, and the ways that words shape constitutions, justice, and governments in our time as they did in Plato’s time, 24 centuries earlier. Socrates was executed because his jury judged him guilty of two words – impiety and corruption – which we now interpret very differently, and it’s an ancient example of how justice and injustice can still hinge on word meanings. The justices of the Supreme Court will soon render a decision on the meaning and usage of three words that have evolved from 1789 to 1977, and from 1977 to 2025. If we wrote our laws with a lengthy preamble setting out the lawmakers’ meaning and intent, as the Athenian in Plato’s Laws suggests, then justice might not be as difficult to establish at later times as it now is.

“Think the event” is central to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, a modern Platonist who has been writing and lecturing in philosophy for over five decades. Badiou said, “Philosophy is the seizure of thought of what breaks with the sleep of thought,” because real truth is found by looking for the exceptions and finding the important connections in time that we have overlooked. Badiou’s insight is that you can’t see until your eyes have been opened by an “event,” and to his thinking events happen like shockwaves that shake the scales from your eyes and allow you to see something you missed before because you were so invested in one way of looking at the world.

In discussing selections from Badiou’s writing and lectures from several decades ago, James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick found many connections between the the polarized politics of today and the philosopher’s work and views on political organization and practices of his time. As opposition is increasingly entrenched, Badiou said the key is to base political actions on a truth such as justice that all factions could reasonably support, making the political challengers commensurable to truth rather than existing only to oppose each others’ ideas.

The three great tasks of philosophy, Badiou says, are “to deal with choice, with distance, and with the exception.” The event is the exception, and philosophy leads us to understand the connections of cause and effect in the exceptions that shape our lives. Thinking the event helps us to distinguish the real from the shadowy projections on the wall of Plato’s allegory of the cave, and by opening our eyes to what really happened we regain our agency for change to make something different happen.