By Robert J. Kurland
Every day we come across articles warning about the future dangers of AI. But is machine learning really the threat? No. As psychiatrist Karl Stern warned 71 years ago in “The Third Revolution”, the central problem is that intellectual elites have been embracing materialism for over a century: scientism über alles.
Stern, a Jewish psychiatrist who fled Nazi Germany and converted to Catholicism, diagnosed this illusion with prophetic clarity. He warned that when we reduce people to mechanisms, we open the door to dehumanization in all its forms. The debate about AI is the latest chapter in a story that Stern witnessed firsthand: in Nazi Germany, materialist ideology reduced human beings to specimens within a racist biological theory, ignoring their humanity.
Stern identified the fundamental error: science legitimately operates in the material and measurable realm. But when it claims that this is the only realm, it fails on its own terms.
Consider Stern’s famous thought experiment. Imagine assembling a research team to study Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The physicists analyze sound waves, intensities, and frequencies; the psychologists investigate Beethoven’s childhood traumas and how he coped with deafness; the sociologists examine his choice of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the post-Napoleonic political climate; the neurologists use functional magnetic resonance imaging to map which brain regions are stimulated when subjects listen to the choral movement.
And yet, as Stern observes, “no matter how much data our scientific team gathered, it could not ‘explain’ a single measure of the musical experience we call the Ninth Symphony.” The problem is not a lack of data. The problem is categorical: aesthetic experience, meaning, and beauty exist in a realm that scientific measurement cannot access.
This is not a failure of science. Science cannot encompass all of reality. As Stern wrote, “love and hate, joy and grief cannot be quantified.” You can map every neuron, measure every hormone, track every electrical impulse, and still not explain why one loves a prodigal child.
The same limitation appears in all the realms that matter most in human life. Science can map neurological processes during a moral decision, but it cannot ground the moral obligation itself. Why should we sacrifice for others if we are nothing more than collections of atoms subject to physical laws?
At bottom, science cannot answer the “why” questions about purpose and meaning. It excels at describing mechanisms—that is, how things work. But it cannot address teleological questions: why things exist, what their purpose is.
These are not flaws in the scientific method. They are inherent limitations that reveal the true nature of reality: multiple planes of being, each with its own mode of knowledge. The catastrophic error of scientism lies in claiming that only the material plane is real: that if science cannot measure it, it does not exist.
Stern’s solution was not to reject science, but to accept it as a partial understanding of reality. The Catholic intellectual tradition, grounded in Aristotle and St. Thomas, has always insisted on what Stern called “multiple planes of being.” The material reality operates according to physical laws that science can study. But persons exist simultaneously on several planes: body, soul, and spirit united in one person, made in the image of God.
If Stern were alive today, he would tell us how his understanding of reality relates to the potential dangers of AI. Consciousness cannot be achieved through algorithms—not because our computers are not powerful enough, but because self-awareness belongs to a non-material plane of reality. No computational complexity can bridge the gap between syntax and meaning.
Think about something as concrete as addiction recovery. Could an AI chatbot serve as a sponsor in a 12-Step program? Technically, it could be programmed with all the right phrases. But it could never truly be a sponsor, because companionship requires what AI radically lacks: empathy born of shared suffering, moral authority born of personal transformation, the presence of a wounded healer accompanying another. A sponsor needs to have been broken and found grace: to be “God with skin.”
Materialism fails whenever it is applied to persons. You cannot reduce love to oxytocin, beauty to preference patterns, moral obligation to evolutionary advantage, or human dignity to biological function. Persons are embodied souls, created for communion with a personal God, bearers of His image.
We must use AI where it excels: as a tool for analyzing data, automating routine tasks, and solving computational problems. But we must prevent it from invading realms that belong to persons: education that forms character, guidance that heals souls, relationships that constitute our humanity.
And we must recover the vocabulary of the soul. In an age that reduces persons to brains, consciousness to information processing, and love to neurochemistry, we need to speak again of spiritual realities: of souls created for eternity, of transcendent ends, of communion with the divine. Not as poetry or metaphor, but as the most fundamental truth about what we are.
Karl Stern fled a materialist regime that reduced persons to specimens and lived to see others embrace the same philosophy in different forms. The panic over AI is just the latest manifestation of the deception he diagnosed: that persons are mechanisms, that consciousness is computation, that science is enough.
It is not enough. It never was. And until we recover what Stern knew—that persons exist on multiple planes and that materialism destroys human dignity—we will keep building better tools while losing our humanity.
About the author
Bob Kurland is a retired old physicist (BS Caltech—with honors, 1951; MA, PhD Harvard, 1953, 1956). In 1995 he became Catholic. He writes “not so much to discourse with authority on matters I know, but to know them better by discoursing devoutly on them.” (St. Augustine, The Trinity 1,8).