Good morning everyone,
My name is Nathán Goldberg, I graduated with the Class of 2014, and I was in Mr. Woodruff’s theology class my senior year.
To try and capture what I learned from Mr. Woodruff, first I want to talk about the Turing Test.
Alan Turing was an English mathematician who is widely considered one of the pioneers of computer science and artificial intelligence.
The famous Turing Test he proposed refers to a computer’s ability to fool humans into thinking they are having a conversation with another human, instead of a machine.
Today, there are annual contests and competitions where people submit programs designed to “behave” like humans. Human judges will have simultaneous conversations with a computer and with another human and then have to guess which is which.
At the end, the program that fools the most judges into believing it is human wins a prize for the Most Human Computer.
But here’s the really neat thing: many competitions also award another prize, to the human who correctly convinced most judges that they were indeed human – a prize for the Most Human Human.
So what makes a human human?
I don’t know the exact answer, and I’m not sure that anyone else does, either.
It’s something intangible, something that surely cannot be easily captured in words.
But in Mr. Woodruff's class, we sought to grapple with that question every day.
In our journey through some of the world’s preeminent religious and spiritual texts, both holy and academic, we learned about how people from many different faiths conceive of their relationships to themselves, to each other, and to the universe.
As a Jewish student at an Episcopal school, I felt this approach embodied what made my education at St. Stephen’s so special.
We were curious, not judgmental.
We were inclusive, not restrictive.
We were open-minded, not dogmatic.
And in doing so, we got closer and closer to understanding the ineffable essence of being human every day.
Today, it is my honor to thank Mr. Woodruff, for helping me cultivate this human-centric perspective and for showing me the power of self-reflection as a tool to lead a happy, fulfilling life.
Sometimes, when I face big challenges, I still like to flip through the Dao De Jing or go for a walk to clear my head with my hands behind my back, like a Theologian, and I am so glad to know that, even after 34 years of Mr. Woodruff’s teachings, so many of you will learn to do the same when you take his class.
