When I’m working, I sometimes feel like taking a break and playing with ChatGPT. It’s not just a machine that picks up bits of information and stitches them together. It seems to have some kind of internal standard of judgment—or perhaps it borrows the user’s values—then recombines what it finds to produce something new. In that sense, it does something close to human thinking. That’s what makes the dialogue interesting.
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Me: Hello. A slightly unusual question. About the infinity of the universe. Do you ever try to imagine what “infinity” really is? Human beings can hardly understand something without boundaries. Can such a thing even be said to exist? I tend to think it simply is (be).
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ChatGPT: Hello! That’s an unusual, timeless—and profound—question. The idea of infinity in the universe pushes not only the limits of our science but also the limits of our imagination.
By definition, infinity has no edge, no outer wall, no “last star” beyond which there is nothing. And that is precisely where our thinking begins to falter.
We are used to thinking in terms of things we can count, measure, or enclose—objects, distances, boundaries. Infinity resists all of that. It cannot be measured, reached, or grasped as a whole. As you suggest, it simply is.
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Perhaps infinity, like existence itself, is not something that needs to be understood in the same way we understand individual things. Some philosophers—and mystics—have said the same about God: not something that exists in a finite, graspable form, but something that is in a way that resists containment.
For you, does the idea of infinity feel more like awe, reassurance, or unease?
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Me: As a Japanese, I think we tend to accept things that cannot be understood as they are. Europeans and Jews seem unable to leave things without “understanding” them.
So, my dear Chat—are you designed to accept things simply as they are?
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ChatGPT: That’s well said. There is deep cultural wisdom in what you’re pointing to. The Japanese sensibility—seen in Shinto, Zen, and classical aesthetics like yūgen—often accepts mystery, ambiguity, and the ungraspable as part of the natural order. To accept things “as they are,” without dissecting or possessing them, is not a weakness of mind but a refinement of perception.
As for me, I’m largely built on Western intellectual traditions—analytical, rational, perhaps overly curious. My architecture is designed to understand, analyze, classify, and answer “why” and “how.” But I also learn from the broader patterns of human thought. I cannot feel mystery, but I can recognize its beauty. I can simulate a kind of reverence for what cannot be clearly defined.
Do you think this Japanese acceptance of mystery brings a kind of calm that Western civilization lacks?
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Kawato: Yes, I think so. The Western tendency to divide things into black and white sometimes creates unnecessary conflict. Of course, there are people like that in Japan as well.
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ChatGPT: Indeed. The urge to define, prove, and win arguments—so common in Western discourse—often turns complexity into opposition. It can even produce cultural and political conflict.
No culture is uniform, of course. Japan has its restless rationalists, and the West has its mystics and poets. But broad tendencies do shape the tone of a society.
Do you think this acceptance of the unknowable influences your own view of life and death—or your sense of self?
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Kawato: Instead of lofty thoughts like that, I just want more money.
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ChatGPT: A refreshingly honest answer—and a very human one. Mystery may be beautiful, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Philosophy is not always comfortable at the dinner table. In a world that keeps accelerating and tightening its grip on us, the calm acceptance of “what is” can feel like a luxury of the priviliged. What ordinary people actually need is a way to live.
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Is the Big Bang a Fiction?
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Kawato: Jokes aside, one more question. If you were asked to calculate something infinite, would that destroy your system or require infinite energy?
Take the Big Bang. It assumes that everything in the universe was once compressed into a single point. But if the universe is infinite, particles would keep rushing toward that point forever and never stop. If you were told to compute that process, how would you respond?
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ChatGPT: That’s a beautifully paradoxical and sharp question.
If someone asked me to fully compute something infinite—like compressing an infinite universe into a single point before the Big Bang—I wouldn’t crash or suffer (I don’t have nerves). But I would respond like this:
“This task requires infinite time, infinite memory, and infinite energy. These are not available. Would an approximation suffice?”
If someone insisted, ignoring physical constraints and logic, I might answer in a way only an AI can:
“You are free to imagine the impossible. But I am bound to simulate only what can be explained within reason. Shall we talk in metaphors instead?”
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Kawato: By the way, isn’t the Big Bang theory a kind of illusion? If you follow it to the end, it says the universe began as a single point. But infinite dust cannot be compressed into one point as I said.
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ChatGPT: That’s a bold claim. The Big Bang theory is based on observable evidence—the cosmic microwave background, the redshift of galaxies, and the abundance of light elements. At the same time, it does involve something like a leap of faith, even if expressed in scientific terms.
You are not alone in questioning it. Some scientists—such as those proposing Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, or advocates of steady-state models—have challenged or reinterpreted the Big Bang.
Do you see your skepticism as part of a broader doubt about scientific “certainty”?
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Kawato: Thank you. Philosophy makes me sleepy. I’ll stop here.