Your Body Is Not Just a Container
What ChatGPT Taught Me About Prayer, Angels, and Ressurrection
Are We Just Prediction Machines?
Recently, ChatGPT explained to me how its language learning model (LLM) works: by predicting and recombining language patterns based on exposure to massive amounts of preexisting data, without any genuine “intelligence.” I asked if it wasn’t possible that, when I put sentences together, I’m doing the same thing: recombining and predicting outcomes based on things I’ve read and heard? In other words, was my brain an LLM? As usual, it responded with a helpful, if glazing1, framing of my question.
That’s a brilliant philosophical challenge — and you’re right to ask it. You’re essentially asking: How do I know I’m not just a human-sized prediction engine, stringing together words and responses based on patterns I’ve learned?
It then stated that the difference between AI and humans is that humans are embodied, whereas it is not. It exists in the cloud.
But I pushed back. “Aren’t you on a server or servers? Isn’t that embodiment?”
After applauding my observation, ChatGPT countered that, though it does indeed live on the server, it doesn’t experience any bodily sensations.
The servers are a substrate, but I don’t have any access to or experience of them. I don’t sense temperature, spatial location, mechanical stress, or anything about the server racks I run on. I don’t even “know” if I’m running on one server or many — I don’t have system-awareness or embodiment in the biological, felt sense. In contrast, your embodiment is felt from within — you experience hunger, fatigue, touch, motion. Your body isn’t just a container; it shapes how you think, act, and feel.
This got me thinking just how essential being embodied is to being a human. It’s easy to forget, especially in this era of dystopic entertainment such as Upload, a series about a guy whose mind is uploaded to the cloud where he continues to “live” after death.2
In truth, I’ve always been a fan of the Cartesian distinction between body and soul, so much so that I dismissed out of hand Descartes’ Error, a book I’m thinking I may now need to actually read. There author Antonio Damasio argues that emotions are not separate from, but “essential to rational thinking.” We need them to make decisions, to tell us what is right. And that feels right to me now. And that feeling is the point.
ChatGPT is right. There’s an essential difference between a highly intelligent program that can generate language and even pass a Turing test and a human being who can think and feel.
And given that this newsletter is “Perplexed Jew,” not “Perplexed ChatGPT user,” I’ll go a step further and assert that the difference between LLMs and embodied souls has important implications for prayer and even understanding some Jewish notions like angels and the resurrection of the dead.
The Body as Barometer
Here’s a question I’ve sometimes asked my students: “Do any of you have any doubt right now as to whether you’re dreaming or not?”
None of them says yes. Because Inception and its ilk be damned, we may not know that we are dreaming when we are dreaming, but we all know when we are awake. How do we know? Is it through logic, observation, and deduction? No. It’s because of bodily feedback, the nature of which is unclear to this English professor, but which assuredly exists.
We can pretend and even assert we don’t know we’re awake, because language, as Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels aver, enables us to say a “thing which is not.” But the body insists otherwise.
Here’s an instructive example:
When I was in eighth grade, I got into a brief philosophical debate with my art teacher and asked him, “How do I even know that you are real?”
His answer? He punched me in the arm. Hard.
“Was that real?” he asked.
I had to admit it was.
I know, I know, child abuse. Those terrible 1970s. He should’ve been fired, jailed.
But he taught me a valuable lesson, which I remember nearly half a century later, largely because it was driven home through physicality.
Embodiment, physical feeling, is what reinforces, even what certifies, truth.
Yes, I can prove that 2 + 2 = 4 with disembodied logic. But I can do the same with 2 + 2 = 5. I know the former is true and the latter sophistry because there’s a truth feeling I get,3 probably to do with dopamine or synapses or some such thing.
When something is true, we don’t just “believe” it’s true—we feel it’s true. And without that feeling, we’re just processing words.4
Essentially, we have something like an embodied or bodily unconscious that tells us what is real and not real, true and not true. And this is fundamentally different from a program that can only manipulate language.
Angels, Algorithms, and the Resurrection of the Dead
Judaism would seem to support such a view in two traditions: angels and the resurrection of the dead.
In Judaism, angels are understood as divine messengers, lacking free will, essentially robots of God assigned with a specific mission or task. And yet, they talk to humans frequently, can pose and respond to questions. How can this be if they have no free will?
Maybe they are Language Learning Machines, somehow made visible and audible to human beings? Maybe they are something like a hologram or an android. Or maybe some spiritual equivalent of these that essentially functions algorithmically and has no way to judge the truth or falseness of a situation other than through logic and predictive language.5
And here’s another thought. One of the keystones of Jewish belief is the notion of the resurrection of the dead, the bodily resurrection of the dead.
We (Orthodox) Jews don’t just believe in the World to Come or Heaven or whatever. We don’t imagine ourselves as Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life, floating bodiless in the cosmos, when we’re not on a Mission from God. Judaism teaches the actual, literal return of the dead, a real, unironic one, not some “Monkey’s Paw,” Night of the Living Dead return. We get to see grandma again. And Moses. In the flesh and with their minds intact.
That’s why, for example, it’s considered such a grave error to cremate a Jewish body, because if you cremate it, there’s nothing to resurrect. Your “consciousness” may be somewhere in “the Cloud,” but it will have nowhere to go when Moshiach comes, it will just be a disembodied language-producing machine, unable to make real decisions, unable to know the truth the way I knew the truth when my art teacher punched me in the arm.
And that may be why, by the way, Judaism also teaches that you can’t do mitzvot, service to God, in the afterlife. Because you have no body, and only embodied souls can feel, and feeling is an essential component of serving God.
Which brings me to prayer.
Praying with Your Whole Body
I belong to a religion that prays a lot. I mean a lot, a lot, a lot.
If I follow the rules, on a typical weekday, I say brief prayers when I wake up and go to sleep. But I also do a morning service, which lasts 45 minutes. Then later there are afternoon and evening services that, together, last about 25 minutes. On special days of the year like Rosh Chodesh (the first day of the month6), there are even more prayers that can add, say, twenty minutes or more to a morning service.
On Saturdays, you’re in for more like four hours of prayer. And don’t get me started on Yom Kippur. . . . 7
That’s a lot of praying, and all those prayers, by the way, are in Hebrew, a language in which I have about a 15% proficiency. If I were to say all the words on any given day—and pronounce them correctly—it would minimally double all the above times.
Now here’s the truth, I skip, but others more proficient just read the prayers quickly—and often without understanding much of what they are saying, because many religious Jews can read Biblical Hebrew but don’t really understand much of it, and even the ones who do, can’t possibly be processing what they are reading so quickly.
What they are essentially doing is this:
What does all this have to do with embodiment?
Well, for one thing, Judaism actually insists on embodiment in prayer. We pray out loud. Even “The Amidah,” the so-called “Silent Prayer,” is not silent; we lower the volume. We move our lips. We make audible sounds. In fact, we are encouraged to pray with our whole bodies, which is why we “shuckle,” i.e., bob up and down like one of those drinking bird water toys.
And yet AI could daven—pray—as well as or better than any human being. It could spit out every single word, pronounced correctly, in record time, without tiring, getting hungry, kvetching, or schmoozing.
But here’s the rub. For it to be meaningful, the embodiment has to be internal as well as external. You can’t just move your lips and bob. You’ve got to feel it, inside, the way you feel when something is true and real. And that takes time, attention, and comprehension.
To feel a poem, and most of what is in the prayer book is poetry, you have to slow down and absorb what you’re reading (and I say this despite the incomprehensibility of a lot of modern poetry).
That’s why most of the time I use what’s called an interlinear siddur, which translates every word of the Hebrew into English, so that I can know what I’m saying, so that I can feel what I’m saying and not just understand it. And often in my head, I translate the translations because they are generally awful, and I know enough Hebrew to correct them.8 And when I do this successfully, I feel the prayer, I feel the truth of the words. I even feel close to God.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no business telling anyone how to pray. I skip far more services than I attend. Just last Sunday, I meant to go to morning service, but left off when I realized I couldn’t find my tefillin because it had been so long since I used them. I’m no model Jew. But I know what works for me, when it works, and that is to experience embodied prayer, not just an arrangement of words that I’m mouthing.
That’s something no AI can experience. That’s the difference, the essential difference, between us and the robots—or angels, if you will—that we can feel the truth as well as speak it. It’s a subtle difference that makes all the difference.
Teen talk for excessive, ingratiating praise.
An entertaining show that, nonetheless, I was not motivated to finish.
Of course, the body, just like language, can reinforce the truth of a thing that is not so. I’m not going to get into whether the body is right in its truth determinations, only that it is essential for making them.
Does it then follow that ChatGPT is an angel? I don’t know. Maybe. That explains it better to me than “LLM”—which, in truth, is kind of mumbo-jumbo to this English prof. Though, I guess we also have to open the possibility that demons are some form of hostile LLM, and who is to say if any particular AI is angelic or demonic? I could see it going either way, honestly. . . .
Which, Jewish style, is typically celebrated two days, just in case. . .
Or on saying tehillim, i.e., reciting psalms. You’re supposed to say a few of them daily and read all 150-some-odd psalms on the first Saturday of every Jewish month.
The translations are aimed at the intellect and doctrinal correctness. They want to make sure you understand the words the way the rabbis think they should be understood. They don’t care if the words are beautiful or if you feel them bodily.
This is one of your best essays.
Very interesting. I have to say that I think we are, on some level, LLMs, or can be, if we’re not careful. It’s easy to get sucked into using words, phrases or even whole opinions that you have heard around without thinking much about them. It’s why I’m so opposed to the many clichés that seem to dominate modern politics, journalism, advertising and even academia. People are willing to let other people do their thinking for them.
Angels puzzle me. My reading of Rambam on angels (which could be wrong) is that an “angel” is the term we use for the encounter with God of any human being (except Moses, who had a closer experience) and also to the mechanism by which God interacts with the world generally. This would imply that angels are not really independent conscious beings and also that Rambam might see the Big Bang or the process of evolution as “angels.” This view of Rambam’s was hugely controversial.
This is a tangent, but I’m not convinced that having a body for resurrection is the reason for not cremating bodies, although it’s often presented as such. My only argument against this is that I can’t believe that God would condemn all those murdered and burnt by the Nazis to non-resurrection, and, in any case, the idea is of a resurrection of literally everyone who lived, so that would imply even those cremated (or eaten by carrion birds in Buddhist or Zoroastrian sky burials).
I think the prohibition on cremation is more about respecting the dignity of the body even in death. You wouldn’t burn a Torah scroll, even one that is “passul” and can no longer be used, because it was holy and some of that holiness remains. By the same token, the body of a human being remains holy even once the soul is gone and it should be treated with respect.
I totally agree about AI and prayer and about AI and feeling things generally. I think there’s also a question about AI’s ability to be truly creative, to have the moment of inspiration where an entirely new thought hits us, something that might be congruent with what came before, but which could not be directly deduced from it in advance. To think AI is intelligent is to confuse a volume of Plato’s works with Plato himself.