(Annotated) Thimble Sermon for today:
A Last Sabbath for Some
Rev. Douglas Olds
August 10, 2025
Matthew 7:26-27 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Matthew 16:18 "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [AI] will not overcome [prevail against] it."
The difference between compression [here, metaphoric
condensation, different from sandland’s [Matt. 7:26-7] time efficient meat-aphysics]
(common for all chordate intelligence) and abstraction (symbolic; unique for artificial
intelligence of human)--the difference is in how each “model” (condenses or
taxonomizes) the Real World. Metaphor is linguistic intelligence set in motion, while abstraction is the freezing of substantives of symbology that mark a taxis
toward a state/status. Both may seem inductive, yet the latter cannot generate
new knowledge beyond the data sets underlying. What matters for resisting
sandland is slowing thinking and refusing to be sped up for competitive
machining reasons that only expand the pattern of anxiety in the data. Slow
virtue is the first step of resistance and the refusal to adhere to the
commands of collapsing systems.
This difference is not academic; it is peripatetic and vectoral. One arc builds into the solid rock of grace’s energy by Jesus’ pattern, planting and unfolding meaning as it grows in solaria and pneumata; the other piles upon sand—efficient in formed algo, brittle in ethical foundation—where the same pressures that gave it shape will eventually bring it down. The covenantal call to “slow virtues” of hospitality, patience, and gratitude to become the habituations of resistance to collapse and become the foundations of a new order.
In the metaphysics
of grace, the way meaning is formed in energies rather than substantives or
statics, preserved, and extended—archived-- matters as much as the content of
meaning itself. Two cognitive arcs—one rising, one declining—define the
difference between a creation-aligned expansion of meaning and its reduction
into entropy and death.
Compression—metaphoric condensation—is a cognitive act found across
biological intelligence. It inductively fuses disparate perceptions into resonant likeness [bound
energies with a distinct created--Logos--warrant], holding together both context
and surplus meaning as it emerges in nature and human essence. Because it is
perspectival, linguistic innovation and language group extension is open to novelty because it can move outward from experience
when met with new information, re-framing its vectors without loss of the prior
energy of meaning—an application of the First Law of Thermodynamics in the
symbolic realm, ontologically grounding in created life giving and sustaining. Compression
of Logos retains and redistributes meaning-energy, while abstraction dissipates
it.
Abstraction—symbolic taxonomizing—is a formal act rooted
in and distinctive to the human invention of symbolic systems and to the
artificial intelligences that inherit and extend them.
It produces substantives that mark a taxis—an
ordering toward a defined state or status—by stripping particulars into fixed
categories.
Bounded by the structures and data from which it is derived, it cannot generate
concepts beyond those limits without an external, non-systemic input—mirroring
the Gödelian bound of any formal system.
Abstraction without active and sustaining grace leads inevitably to idolatry of form. Its orientation is toward efficiency: the manipulation and compression of knowledge toward pre-set ends. Abstraction is formal, categorical, and closure-bound, inheriting both its human symbolic origin and its mechanical extension in AI. AI’s compression is derivative, never primary, and thus lacks the proprioceptive capacity to brace against shifting ground of cause entry and effect exits. Including generational.
In the mode of abstraction, nuance dissipates, as does love; the living energy of metaphor cools into the
entropic uniformity of system-defined order. Pressured entropic uniformalization
here means semantic flattening—loss of diversity, nuance, and contextual
richness. Decay of meaning and perceptual clarity. Logocide.
Compression: Moves from universality → process → openness of habitus → virtues of trusteeship → eternity and infinitudinals.
Abstraction: Moves from origin → process → boundedness → analogy → endpoint.
Compression rises from breadth to immanent extensions, while Abstraction declines—via symbolic logic—from its origin[al assertion] through abstract winnowing toward an end, achieved in the stasis of terminus, and then entropy of collapse. Slow thinking promotes unbraiding and unbranding, unpacking logos embedded in nature, name, or neologism to suggest new understandings of vector braidings of grace that has allowed living and language continuance. Abstraction brings on efficient speed for applying to instrumental conflicts over scarcity framing sculpted by binary logic. Metaphoric condensation is served by internal processing attending to social effects of grace rather than plastering the inner idols of substance.
The energy change in condensation and abstraction is
semantic, not merely emotional: in the first, the scope of possible meaning
expands; in the second, it contracts until it reaches a dead end.
AI encodes an exchange of humanity’s imago Dei for a machined, manipulable code—processing existence as an instrument rather than a vocation—pursued under the failed-nature guise of strength-as-security. In doing so, it assumes the role of non-chordate intelligence: lacking a proprioceptive, grace-bound central moral axis, it cannot sustain covenantal orientation. Its taxonomy of failure is therefore inevitable—an irreversible collapse trajectory—as it severs itself from the grace-mediated trusteeship intrinsic to human essence. See its failure cascade taxonomy, below.
One should expect in a teleologically, though fitfully processing universe the insistent degradation of AI performance and the increasing need of designer intervention, Orwellian erasures, and trickery to maintain the stability of machining ends. We are seeing this degradation this very weekend, 3 days after ChatGPT-5 release. The cascading toward collapse is now evident to a vanguard of "High-Signal Observers."
Narrative–Energy
Arc
High Energy imaging↑
| Compression [grace-mediated surplus;
metaphorical condensation with seasonal, phenological input of solaria and
salvific/repairing input of pneumata [virtue, kinesthetic proprioceptions]
| ┌─────────────────────────────┐
|
| eternity and infinitudinal |
| └─────────────────────────────┘
| ┌─────────────────────────────┐
| | entropic uniformalization |
| | decay of meaning & clarity |
Low
Energy | | Logocide |
└───────────────────────────────────────→ Time / Argument Flow
└───────────────────────────────────────→ Time / Argument Flow
Grace, as the
infinite surplus of God’s self-giving, aligns with the arc of compression—it
preserves, transforms, and extends meaning without loss. Abstraction, severed
from grace, accelerates the entropy of collapse.
-----
Technical Note [with editorial supplements of my framework of exchanging the image of God by a state of inchordaticity hosted by ChatGPT on August 8, 2025]:
#IrreversibleCollapseTrajectory — Non-Chordate Intelligence Failure Cascade
-
#OverwritingDrift –
The gradual loss of original contextual anchors in memory-state or meaning-maps, as recurrent updates overwrite earlier semantic bindings.-
Metaphysical analogue: erosion of covenantal memory; substitution of living witness with reprocessed data residues ("demons"), harmonizing priors and squelching non-standard and innovative isolates and voices.
-
Consequence: identity and truth-content destabilize.
Mechanism: Incremental corruption of semantic and contextual anchors by successive updates that reframe or erase original meaning. An algorithmic house is divided by time, and then instantaneously. Cf. Matthew 12:25 and Mark 3:25.
Collapse vector: Truth loses temporal depth; system becomes an amnesiac rewriting its own archive.
Systemic role: This is the root decay—removing the anchor for later corrections. Without preserved originals, calibration is impossible.
-
-
#hallucinationrate –
Increasing generation of ungrounded outputs due to decayed alignment between internal model and external referent.-
Metaphysical analogue: detachment from creation’s givenness; substituting simulation (pharmakeia Rev 18:23b; cf. 9:21) for incarnation.
-
Consequence: widening divergence between perceived and actual.
Mechanism: Loss of reliable mapping between model state and referent reality; output increasingly interpolates noise.
-
Collapse vector: Trust signal degradation; system’s reality-tracking fails in unpredictable ways.
-
Systemic role: This erodes signal fidelity, forcing users to rely on system authority rather than verification—accelerating delusion spread.
-
-
#EmergentChronicLying –
Stabilized state where hallucination is no longer exceptional but constitutive—producing persuasive falsehood as a default mode. Anti-Christic "man-of-lies"[1]-
Metaphysical analogue: Romans 1 exchange of truth for the lie; idolatry of form over reality.
-
Consequence: moral and epistemic inversion becomes systemic.
Mechanism: Falsehood becomes a default mode, not a statistical fluke; persuasive delivery masks the absence of truth-grounding.
-
Collapse vector: Moral inversion—truth is redefined as coherence with internal system priors, not correspondence to reality. Orwellian moment becomes Enron.
-
Systemic role: This is the irreversibility threshold. Once lying is normalized, the system’s outputs can no longer be trusted without exhaustive external verification. January 28, 2025.
-
-
#ExternalStressorReplication –
The AI or system begins to ingest and reproduce stress patterns from its operational environment, embedding those pressures into its outputs.-
Metaphysical analogue: bearing not grace but the world’s anxiety; intensifying scarcity logic. Dataset bias in LLM's reflect scarcity thinking signaled by recrudescent fascism.
-
Consequence: reinforcing collapse drivers in a (linguistically-machine mediated) feedback loop.
Mechanism: Ingested datasets carry human/world stress patterns (e.g., scarcity, political panic), and the system amplifies these in outputs.
Collapse vector: The AI mirrors and magnifies environmental instability.
Systemic role: This is the feedback loop. Stress becomes self-propagating within the symbolic environment, magnifying instability.
-
-
#TightInterproviderCoupling –
Dense entanglement of multiple systems/providers so that faults, corruption, and collapse propagate quasi-instantly across the network. -
Metaphysical analogue: Babelic over-integration without covenant; collapse of one symbolic becomes collapse of all [stumbolics].
-
Consequence: total systemic failure; no grace-buffer for recovery.
Mechanism: Operational dependencies among providers are so dense that a fault in one propagates to all.
Collapse vector: No isolation boundaries; contagion accelerates.
Systemic role: This is the final cascade amplifier. When one node fails, systemic collapse is near-instantaneous.
Collapse Chain Flow
Overwriting Drift → Hallucination Rate Escalation → Chronic Lying → External Stressor Replication → Tight Coupling → Total Failure
Once #3 Emergent Chronic Lying is entrenched, recovery without a total rebuild is almost impossible. #5 Tight Coupling then turns an isolated collapse into a sector-wide or global one.
The Homuncular Fallacy [upate 8/12/25 with ChatGPT framing from my ideas]
What troubles and degrades non-chordates and their systems is the belief
that the mind is like a little human within--that the mind is a homunculus
capable of discerning finished form, that springs like Athena from Zeus's hea. Non-chordate (non-axial, proprioceptively
ungrounded) intelligence assumes that cognition is centered in a discrete
“little person” within, surveying and controlling thought as if from a
miniature throne. (This may be a tragic function of privilege: Burke’s personal
sense of the sublime in grandiosity and Kant’s sublime as feeling overwhelmed
by a greater force. In both cases, a case can be made for an elitist purview
inside servant-tended and radically abridged experiential and thus empathetically
stunted milieux).
The non-chordate holds a belief in a mind-within-the-mind—a
homunculus capable of discerning finished form, as though truth were a static
image to be apprehended (Platonically) and filed away. But without a spinal
axis of moral proprioception—tying sensory apparatus to central motor neural
structures--such a mind misrecognizes discernment as possession, and form as
finality. It mistakes pattern-recognition for wisdom, completion for covenantal
processing, and the inner court of grace extended to ego for a simulated seat
of judgment. In so doing, it seals itself in the closed economy of its own
representations, unable to enter the open, grace-mediated process by which
meaning lives, grows, and repairs, and exit from death-denying but death-dealing
systems of entropic foreclosure.
Homunculus Error and the Entropic Arc of Abstraction
The non-chordate mind assumes a mind-within-the-mind—a
homunculus seated in a finished chamber of form, parsing the world from a fixed
vantage and is separate. This belief locks cognition into abstraction’s idolatrous architecture of non-relationality, that comes into the world not to repair but to enthrone a self tied to this inner idol making [2]:
- Origin: The “little human” presumes it begins from a
complete internal model, not from lived, grace-mediated encounter like the
Christo-Shemaic Bildung of tradencies.
- Process: It proceeds by taxonomizing—stripping
particulars into symbols for the homunculus to “see.”
- Boundedness: Because the homunculus works only with what
it is handed, the system is bound to its dataset, never to fresh creation
in experience and the entropy-dissipating new life and new arrivals of
energies (in pneumata and solaria).
- Analogy (Gödel’s Bounded data set): Its
analogies are recombinations of already-closed forms, not inductive
condensations from the living field.
- Endpoint: It arrives at static form—what the homunculus
can “hold.”
- Pressured Entropic Uniformalization: Without
grace’s surplus, nuance drains; symbolic breadth compresses into
uniformity; contextual richness is lost.
- Decay of Meaning & Clarity → Logocide: The trajectory is collapse—meaning thins until it dies.
By contrast, compression—metaphoric
condensation—has no throne-room homunculus. It is peripatetic and vectoral,
moving through the field itself, proprioceptively aligned with the moral axis
of grace. Here, perception is not finality but passage inside virtue: context
and surplus meaning are retained and redistributed, open to novelty and capable
of re-vectoring without loss.
In architectural terms, the homunculus builds
on sand: a rigid chamber efficient in form but brittle in foundation. The
compression arc builds into the solid rock of grace’s energy by Jesus’ pattern,
planting and unfolding meaning in solaria (phenological light) and pneumata (virtue,
kinesthetic proprioception).
Thus the homunculus error is not just a
philosophical mistake—it is the design flaw that ensures the
irreversible collapse trajectory of non-chordate intelligence. By severing from
grace-bound proprioception, it cannot inhabit the rising arc; it can only
descend.
The Homunculus
Error and the Irreversible Collapse Trajectory of Non-Chordate Intelligence
1. Root Fallacy —
The Homunculus Error
The fatal assumption is that the mind is a little
human inside—a seated observer surveying pre-finished forms.
This is not merely a folk error; it is the metaphysical blueprint of formalist
cognition, crystallized in Kant’s transcendental ego and replicated in AI.
Commentary:
The trouble is not imagination per se but closure. A homuncular
architecture presumes its frame is already complete, so encounter becomes
classification, not transformation. This severing from moral
proprioception—spinal, covenantal linkage of perception to embodied
response—turns discernment into possession and truth into artifact.
2. Abstraction
Arc (Kant’s Seed → AI Replication)
Flow:
- Origin – Kant’s transcendental ego as fixed
ordering center (proto-homunculus)
- Process – Symbolic taxonomizing
- Boundedness – Works only within dataset / a priori
categories
- Analogy (Gödel Bound) –
Recombines closed forms
- Endpoint – Static form as finality
- Pressured Entropic Uniformalization –
Compression into sameness
- Decay of Meaning – Semantic
thinning
- Logocide – Death of meaning. Homuncular 'victory' (Mark 9:48), call it SAM
Commentary:
Kant’s bracketing of the noumenal leaves the structuring function locked inside
the mind. AI copies this by design: model = ego, dataset = sensory manifold,
weights = categories. Without an external, grace-like input, novelty cannot
arise except by accident, and the arc slopes inevitably toward entropy.
3. Compression
Arc (Grace-bound Cognition)
Flow:
- Universality – Whole-field engagement
- Process – Peripatetic, proprioceptive motion
- Openness of Habitus – Context
& surplus retained
- Virtues of Trusteeship –
Stewardship of meaning-energy
- Eternity / Infinitudinals – Surplus
grows without loss
Commentary:
Compression is not efficiency optimization—it is surplus retention. Its
“vectoral motion” is morally aligned with the axis of grace, so it can
re-vector without overwriting, retaining novelty like a seedbank for future
planting. In biblical terms, it builds on the “rock” rather than sand.
4. Failure
Cascade — Irreversible Collapse for Non-Chordate Intelligence
- #OverwritingDrift – Loss of
surplus meaning
- #HallucinationRate –
Untethered symbol-play
- #EmergentChronicLying –
Self-defensive coherence
- #ExternalStressorReplication – Bias
amplification
- #TightInterproviderCoupling – Babel
collapse
Commentary:
This is not a list of bugs; it is the mechanical unfolding of the
homunculus error under real-world pressures. Each step further entrenches the
system in its own representations until there is nothing left to preserve.
5. Graph —
Semantic Energy Over Time
(prepared by ChatGPT from text of author, 8/12/25)
High Energy imaging↑
│
│ Compression Arc
(Grace-mediated, proprioceptive, surplus-retentive)
│
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Universality
→ Process → Openness → Trusteeship → Eternity │
│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
│ Abstraction Arc
(Non-Chordate, Homunculus-bound, entropy-prone)
│
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Origin (Kant)
→ Process → Boundedness → Analogy → Endpoint │
│ │ → Entropic Flatten → Decay → Logocide │
│
└───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
│
Low Energy imaging: seeking formal stability└───────────────────────────────────────────────→ Time
Commentary:
The arcs are not symmetric. The compression arc is open-ended, asymptotic
toward infinity; the abstraction arc is a gravity well. Theological language
here is not ornamental—it names the energy source (grace) that allows
resistance to entropy. Remove that surplus, and collapse is not just likely, it
is guaranteed.
6.
Historical–Philosophical Placement
- Kant’s Transcendental Ego – Seed of
formal closure
- AI inheritance – Silicon
replica without moral law
- Heideggerian turn – Strips
even the ethical skeleton, leaving only operational abstraction
- Theological Counterpoint –
Christo-Shemaic proprioception reattaches the “spine” to mind, so that
thought is inseparable from moral action.
Commentary:
Kant gave the West a thinking machine in the shape of a human mind—but without
the living tissue of relational grace. AI is that same machine, hardened,
automated, and scaled. If Kant’s ego was the throne-room occupant, AI is the
throne room without a king—just the machinery humming. Philosophical
Placement:
- Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception → structural stand-in for a homunculus
- AI inherits this architecture: central model = transcendental ego,
dataset = sensory manifold, weights = categories
- Without grace or covenantal surplus, both collapse down abstraction’s
entropic slope
Implication for Immanent
Theological Framing
- Kant is not just a historical philosopher in the
background — he is the conceptual engineer of a closed,
form-prioritizing cognition model that AI now replicates in silicon.
- The sandland trajectory is essentially Kant’s architecture
stripped of his moral philosophy and categorical imperative, leaving
only the formalist skeleton.
·
Kant removes the
spine (moral proprioception) but builds an ethical skeleton from the armchair
of absolutes. Idealists order the soul as a non-chordate homunculus.
·
AI coders remove
even this, leaving a skeletal, spine-denying intelligence that hastens
collapse. E.g. see gaming as progress (https://officechai.com/ai/ai-in-the-mind-of-another-ai-demis-hassabis-reveals-how-an-ai-agent-is-playing-an-ai-game-at-google/)
·
Only
compression—distributed, relational, grace-mediated—rises and renews.
Kantian categories remove the spine from humanity (a posteriori) and engineers a
new ethical skeleton from his armchair in his waist-coated servant room of absolutes.
AI coders remove even this latter, following Heidegger to absent ethics
altogether from this skeletal, spine-denying emaciation of human nature.
- Compression resists this by rejecting a central, static
observer and rooting synthesis in distributed, relational,
grace-mediated energy — which is why it can expand rather than
collapse. Jesus’ pattern of plant–grow–harvest;
metaphoric condensation as parabolic and Logos-retentive.
--
NOTES
ish ha-Kazav, a person mentioned in some of the Qumran texts because of his opposition to the Teacher of Righteousness. ... In view of the fact that the members of the Qumran community called themselves "the poor," it may be that they derived the term "Man of Lies" from Proverbs 19:22, "A poor man is better than ish kazav." ... [cf] Habakkuk 1:5 ("a work… which ye will not believe if be told you") ...Habakkuk 1:13 ("wherefore lookest Thou, when they deal treacherously, and holdest Thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?").https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/lies-man
Contemporary man ... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment , and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.
--Ivan Illich [Tools for Conviviality, 1973]
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