I had more or less the same discussion with both Grok and Gemini about the origin of the universe and causality, asking them both if time was a property of the universe, then the universe can't possibly have a causal origin, right? and moving from there. I'm not well educated in quantum physics, but I was interested in how my conjecture on the topic mirrored if any scientists and philosophers in the field.

For my money, Grok is smarter.

When I asked about time emergent from a higher-order, or integrated realm where information is encoded logically but without dimension, and time being the differential axis along which a derivation of that higher-order realm is projected, or derived out in what we experience as time, both Grok and Gemini pointed to similarities in the works of St Augustine.

But at that point, once I started to flesh out the conversation with theorizing, Grok kinda started to diverge. It came back discussing similarities with Bohm's later work (he did a lot of work on the Manhattan project under Oppenheimer on neutron dispersion, that sort of thing - was also a communist) and his ideas on implicate and explicate order, Julian Barbour's Platonia and time capsules, Page-wootters and conditional time, it was just far more in-depth and had me reading for hours.

I conversed at length with both on how those ideas would relate to Greek or Christian theologian ideas of a Logos, I supposed that if the idea of a projected universe were true, then that higher-order universe would be the repository for all knowledge, and that perhaps being made in the image of God meant that a universe produced a being capable of knowing truth, or discerning a bit of that higher-order reality at one second per second like we poor humans exist, and that act of observance is reflecting back that image of truth, a sort of higher version of your own mind and being, looking back at you with all possibility where concerns you within it. Your conscious mind is a reflection and a differentially elongated version of that mind.

And Grok got all that, and was able to compare and contrast it with St Augustine's idea of the Eternal Now, I pointed out how the hebrew Yahweh ("I AM" ) was being without regard to time, and it brought up the time distention of the soul Augustine developed in Confessions 11. Augustine argued that time is a product of mind, that it only exists in observance and not as an intrinsic part of reality, and I think that might be a bit geo-centric/egotistical, I kinda envision it as the differentiation between the possible and the real.

Even if it's just blowing smoke up my ass, I gotta say the machine is a really fun way to learn, and read.