Here's a quote I came across while reading St. Bonaventure in his Intinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Soul's Journey into God):
Ideo omnimodum, quia summe unum. Quod enim summe unum est, est omnis multitudinis universale principium; ac per hoc ipsum est universalis omnium causa efficiens, exemplans et terminans, sicut "causa essendi, ratio intellegendi et ordo vivendi". Est igitur omnimodum non sicut omnium essentia, sed sicut cunctarum essentiarum superexcellentissima et universalissima et sufficientissima causa; cuius virtus, quia summa unita in essentia, ideo summe infinitissima et multiplicissima in efficacia.
Finally because it is supremely one, it is all-embracing. That which is supremely one is the universal principle of all multiplicity. By reason of this, it is the universal efficient, exemplary, and final cause of all things as it is the "cause of existence, the basis of understanding, and the rule of life." Therefore it is all-embracing not as though it were identical with the essence of all things, but as the most excellent, most universal, and most sufficient cause of all essences whose power, because it is supremely unified in its essence, is supremely infinite and multiple in its effects.
Bonaventure isn't the only one who notes this feature of metaphysics, but his quote brings it out well. God isn't only the first efficient cause of the universe, but also its first exemplar cause and its ultimate final cause as well. We are not just created by God, but we also have the basis for thought from God as cause of all exemplars, and we have a basis for action in God as our ultimate final cause, stirring up desire and love within us. There is a triad of being, intellect, and will; memory, understanding, and love; past, present, and future. All of these are unities expressed in diversity; rather than rationalizing the Trinity, we see how mysterious our life is.
Maybe this is the problem with Strong AI: we can give a computer its efficient cause, and maybe even to some extent its exemplars, but its final cause is always entirely reducible to these. It cannot synthesize the future into the present, it cannot have a will which is both the same as and different from its reason and memory. We must either collapse it, or separate it.
Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach presents human beings as "strange loops," or "twisted hierarchies": hierarchies where as one goes up or down, one ends up back where one started. Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem is part of the basis for this book, in which Gödel produces a statement which can state its own unprovability (and hence, if it is provable, it is false; if it is unprovable, it is true, but unprovable). I think that there is something akin to that here, in these footsteps on the Trinity within ourselves; we start with willing, but then have to mention understanding and being, which in turn come back to willing. It is the non-duality of these which joins them so that they cannot be thought apart from each other, but it is their non-identity which lets them be mentioned apart from one another and so discussed independently. Is this "strange loop-ness" a vestige of the Trinity as well?
Some time, I think that I'll talk about Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus on the Trinity and its relation to the world. For Henry especially, the Trinitarian nature of God is evident in creation's relation to God and its structure, even though at the same time all acts of God are performed by the entire Trinity. At any rate, they'll provide some more analytic approaches to what I have mentioned above.
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