I n the 13th century, the young married patrician Ramon Llull was living a licentious life in Majorca, lusting after women and squandering his time wr

The Perpetual Quest for a Truth Machine

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2024-07-09 11:30:05

I n 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.