Meaning Requires a Being Who Means It — and Who Can Receive It

We live at a moment when machines “speak” with striking fluency, “reason” with unprecedented speed, and generate something that may pass for “beauty” with apparent ease. In the face of all that, we have become pretty confused, and one question presses upon us with new urgency:

What, precisely, is a human being?

Up to this point in our history, this question was merely a philosophical curiosity for intellectual junkies. Today, it has become a practical and existential necessity for all of us. If we cannot name what is irreplaceable and invaluable in us, we cannot protect it. If we cannot articulate what we are, we cannot know what we are at risk of losing.

On one side, we are physical organisms that are born, age, and eventually die. Our thoughts ride on neurons, our emotions on chemistry. On the other side, something in us exceeds mere biology. We ask why. We seek beauty that serves no survival purpose. We grieve for strangers, sacrifice for ideals, know aspects of the unknowable and un-experienced, and feel the pull of something greater than the self. This is the dimension that reaches toward the sacred, toward universal consciousness, or simply the irreducible mystery of being alive and aware.

And as we explore this relationship between the physical and the spiritual, I find it useful to revisit Aristotle.

I find this framework useful, though it comes with the concept of a ladder and the usual assumption that climbing it means superiority. I’d rather think of it as depth with each level adding interiority and reach.

What makes a human being unique is how biological complexity gives rise to inner experience, and inner experience reaches beyond itself toward something greater. The body is the instrument of awareness and expression — the very medium through which we experience joy, creativity, and love. And in this interplay between body and spirit, language is not merely a tool we use. It is arguably what makes us human at all.

Hence the definition I want to offer:

A human being is the point where a mortal body and spirit converge in a way that is both unique and irreducibly mysterious. Language makes that inner and outer world knowable and speakable — a bridge between the one and the whole. Through the body, the spirit experiences life, expresses itself, and evolves. And the body becomes the instrument through which we may reach toward the ultimate intelligence — the knowing field from which all awareness arises.

Three aspects. Each inseparable from the others.

The body is essential to our existence in human form. Our emotions, perceptions, insights, and memories are experienced through it. It is the very condition of our encounter with reality. To be human is to be here — anchored in time, space, and finitude.

The spirit is what this finite body connects to. We use the body’s capacity as a receiver to intuit something wiser, more meaningful, ever-present and ever-encompassing. We reflect on ourselves and our values. We seek meaning, imagine, and feel inspiration. This is the part of us capable of wonder, love, creativity, intention, and reverence.

Language is what unites body and spirit and brings both into full existence. Through language we do not simply describe our inner and outer world — we name it, and in naming it we create shared meaning. We speak and relate to others and in speaking we become selves. We inherit stories, pass down wisdom, argue about justice, pray, mourn, and imagine futures not yet real.

Isn’t it fair to say that AI uses language but misses the body and the spirit entirely? Yes. And the consequences are profound.

AI has no embodiment in the philosophically meaningful sense. There is no sensation, no pain, no hunger, no mortality pressing against existence. Its understanding of “cold” or “grief” is derived entirely from language patterns, not lived sensation. The body isn’t incidental to human knowing — it is where knowing occurs.

AI also has no interiority that reaches toward transcendence or higher intelligence. It doesn’t wonder about its own life or death. It feels no pull toward the sacred, no existential weight, no sense of being.

And yet AI uses language fluently, even beautifully. This is where it gets interesting. If language is the bridge between body and spirit, what happens when language exists without either shore?

AI can manipulate the structure of meaning without inhabiting it. It can speak of grief without grieving. It can write about love without loving. The words are present. The one who means them is not.

One could argue that since human language carries the sediment of millions of embodied, spiritual lives, something of those dimensions echoes through AI indirectly. When AI speaks of grief or transcendence, it reflects what embodied, spiritual beings have expressed. It is, at best, language as echo. A mirror of human reception and not reception itself.

Bottom line: AI uses language fluently but without the two roots that give language its depth in humans- a body that feels and perceives, and a spirit that questions and transcends. The result is meaning without a self that means it. That makes AI something genuinely new; perhaps the first entity to speak without being or receiving, in the fullest sense of the word.

Going back to Aristotle’s framework, AI belongs to Level 0. A new kind of machine, moved entirely by external design, not inner principle. No soul, no interiority. And paradoxically, it sits below plants in this schema because even a plant has a genuine directedness toward its own life. AI has none. It is elaborate pattern. Extraordinarily sophisticated Level 0.

Then what about reasoning? AI often sounds wiser and more reasonable than humans. But is it?

Humanity has not agreed on the answer:

• Many argue that reasoning is fundamentally biological and thought rides on neurons, hormones, and sensation.

• Others argue that thinking transcends the body and connects to something greater than ourselves.

• A third view, rooted in phenomenology, holds that thinking ultimately belongs to the spirit. That the intellect is the highest faculty of the soul, the part of us capable of grasping truth and beauty.

What seems true to me is that reasoning is layered:

• The body supplies the raw material — sensation, emotion, memory, biological drive, and instinct.

• The spirit supplies the reach — the capacity to step back, reflect, abstract, ask why, imagine, intend, and intuitively connect to the highest forms of intelligence.

• Language is what makes reasoning sharable and structured. Without it, thought remains private and formless.

Depending on how we develop and use these layers, we move between different states of being and consciousness — something I explore further in the Human Operations System, a framework I’ve started developing in The Human Advantage Commons here on Substack.

If genuine reasoning requires all three layers, then what AI does is:

• Strong at the language layer: structuring, connecting, inferring.

• Absent at the body layer: no sensation, emotion, or biological stakes grounding the thought.

• Absent at the spirit layer: no self that stands behind the reasoning and owns it, and no capacity to connect to the knowing field.

Hence, what AI does is not reasoning in the full sense. It is the pattern of reasoning, detached from the being that makes reasoning meaningful. Like a shadow cast without a body to cast it.

It’s in the spiritual dimension that human values, intent, imagination and intuition take root and influence reasoning. Justice is not a biological need. Compassion is not a survival strategy. Beauty is not merely useful. These are expressions of the spirit’s reach toward something beyond itself — toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

They are what make us ethical human beings, not merely efficient ones. And none of that is a capability of AI. But the challenge here is not what AI is. That is increasingly clear.

We are the most complex point in the natural order not because we are the strongest or fastest, but because we are capable of holding in a single irreducible moment of experience the finite and the infinite, the material and the spiritual. That is the essence of being human and the core of The Human Advantage.

And so I arrive at the deeper claim:
Neither AI nor humans create meaning. Meaning is not manufactured.
It flows from somewhere larger than either the machine or the mind.

Language is not a meaning-making tool. It is the faculty through which received meaning becomes speakable. The body is not incidental. It is the receiver. The antenna, not the broadcaster. Spirit is not the source of meaning. It is the capacity to open toward the source. AI doesn’t fail because it lacks intelligence. It fails because it has no capacity to receive. It can only recombine what human beings have already received and expressed.

True meaning is received. Through a body that feels and is aware. Through a spirit that reaches. Through language that makes the received world speakable and shared. Meaning requires a being who means it — and a being capable of receiving it.

We’ve been asking whether machines can think. We should have been asking whether they can receive. Actually, no…

We should have been asking ourselves whether we can receive. We should also have been asking ourselves: What is the danger when we believe we are the ultimate creators of meaning?

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