In the 13th century, the young married patrician Ramon Llull was living a licentious life in Majorca, lusting after women and squandering his time writing "worthless songs and poems." His loose behavior, however, gave way to a series of divine revelations. His visions urged him to write what he believed would be the best book conceived by a mortal: a book that could converse with its readers and truthfully answer any question about faith.
It would be, in a sense, an early chatbot: a mechanical missionary that could be sent to the farthest reaches of humanity to convert any unbeliever with undeniable truths about the universe. Europeans had spent the past two centuries attempting to win hearts through the blood-drenched Crusades. Llull was determined to invent a linguistic device that would communicate a higher truth not through violence, but fact.
His main works, collectively known as Ars Magna, described a sort of logic machine: one that, Llull claimed, could prove the existence of the Christian God to even the most stubborn heretic. Llull likely took inspiration from the zairja, another combinatorial device, which Muslim astrologers used to help generate new ideas. In the zairja, letters were distributed around a paper wheel like the hours on a clock. They could be recombined to answer questions through a series of mechanical operations.
Llull divided his machine's paper wheels into fundamental religious concepts, including goodness, eternity, understanding, and love. Users would rotate a series of concentric paper discs mounted on threads to combine different divine attributes into logically true statements. It was hardly a turnkey system—potential converts would have to study for months to be able to consult it. And Llull's obsessively detailed examples obfuscated, rather than revealed, how the machine worked. But his hope to derive truth through the reduction—and mechanical recombination—of knowledge into basic principles and terms prefigured contemporary computing by nearly 800 years.
Although Llull was certain his logic machine would demonstrate the truth of the Bible and gain new Christian converts, he was ultimately unsuccessful. One report has it that he was stoned to death while on a missionary trip to Tunisia.
Humans exist at an uneasy threshold. We have a dizzying ability to make meaning from the world, braid language into stories to construct understanding, and search for patterns that might reveal larger, more steady truth. Yet we also recognize our mental efforts are often flawed, arbitrary, incomplete.
Woven throughout the centuries is a burning obsession with accessing truth beyond human fallibility—a utopian dream of automated certainty. Llull, and many thinkers since, hoped a sort of machine could operationalize logic through language to end disagreements—and perhaps even war—opening access to a single, indisputable truth. This has been the seduction of modern computers and artificial intelligence. If our limited human minds can't alight—or agree—on pure, rational truth, perhaps we could invent an external one that can, one that would use language to calculate our way there.
In the end, truth machines haven't progressed much from Llull's Ars Magna. The 13th-century zealot hoped to automate truth to dispel people's uncertainty—instead we've automated the uncertainty. Perhaps the elusive truth about the universe does lie in the baroque, feverish ramblings of Llull's Ars Magna, if only somebody could decipher it. Just don't ask ChatGPT.