Part I: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Introduction and Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine

Over the next several days, in serial installments, I will be sharing the draft of a chapter I’ve been hammering a way at while digital nomading in Chiang Mai.

That’s me reflected in the cafe window on the lower left, under the pot leaf. Stoic Cafe makes the best bagel and lox in Chiang Mai.

In this post, I am sharing the Introduction and Part I. Below you will also find an outline of the whole.

A much revised and condensed version will eventually find its way into a forthcoming anthology. I am sharing this bloated draft now because I have always relied on crowdsourcing to refine my thinking, and because I feel the questions I am trying to address are moving too quickly and matter too much to remain confined to an academic volume. The whole world is currently living through a transformation in the very medium of thought that likely dwarfs the arrival of alphabetic writing in ancient Greece or the printing press in early modern Europe. Large language models are not merely new tools for circulating ideas. One way or another they are ushering in an entirely new shape of human consciousness.

In case you want to burn some money 👇🏿

» A preliminary disclaimer: despite the violently boredom inducing quality of their insufficiently prompted prose, I do not hate LLMs nor dismiss their usefulness as research instruments. I know I talk shit about LLMs a lot on this site. That’s because I feel them tugging for control of a craft I have identified with for my entire adult life. He who cannot write his own sentences will be sentenced by another. Writing is what made and keeps me a free man. I’m not precious about the long maligned idea of “authorship.” But if I were too soon to lose the ability to make letters out of my life, more of my soul would leave with it than I need to survive the rest of this incarnation. So excuse me if I express some alarm watching minds all around me bow in prayer before the fictional characters on their smartphones.

That does not mean I think we can or should reject the rise of this new media technology. While all the sentences in this draft emerged from decades of reading text traced by my two eyes and weeks of typing with my ten fingers, I did regularly consult an LLM while composing it, sharing sections and prompting it to defend the perspective of those I was criticizing. I believe this improved my arguments substantially. I also believe sharing the draft with my human Substack readers for feedback will improve the final version even more. I am polemical at times, I know; but I mean only to stir the pot so all the best flavors rise to the top of my comments! I encourage disagreement and will strive to remain open to further learning if shown I have misunderstood something. «

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Outline

“Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence”

Introduction

Automated computation should be understood not as an independently intelligent rival to humanity but as a technological externalization of human intelligence. The danger lies in mistaking the simulation of Reason for Reason itself and allowing this mistake to diminish human judgment, responsibility, and cosmological self-understanding.

Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine

Pope Leo XIV’s intervention into debates about artificial intelligence provides an occasion to question whether nation-states and transnational corporations should be allowed to define the nature and significance of the systems they are building. The section contrasts human personhood with machine simulation and calls for moral and philosophical resistance to the emerging intelligence-industrial complex.

Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response

The history of philosophy is interpreted as a series of responses to transformations in media technology. Plato confronted alphabetic writing, Descartes the printing press, and contemporary philosophy must respond to technologies that appear to mechanize the production of thought itself.

Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure

The extraction of humanity’s accumulated cultural and linguistic inheritance into privately owned models is compared to the enclosure of common lands that accompanied the rise of capitalism. The section examines attempts to convert collective intelligence into a privately owned and metered utility and defends the living activity of thought as finally inalienable.

Part IV: Hegel’s Loom and the Difference Reason Makes

Hegel’s distinction between mechanical Understanding and speculative Reason clarifies the limits of large language models. Like looms, these systems can weave extraordinarily intricate patterns from inherited materials, but they do not undergo the self-transformative movement characteristic of living thought. The task is not to smash the loom but to sublate it.

Part V: Whitehead’s Function of Reason and Humanity’s Cosmic Calling

Whitehead’s process philosophy situates Reason within the evolutionary adventure of cosmogenesis. The human being appears as microcosm: not the exclusive possessor of mind, but a concentrated expression of nature’s capacity for novel valuation, conscious freedom, and moral responsibility. Machine computation represents practical intelligence severed from speculative wisdom.

Part VI: Ruyer’s Origin of Information

Raymond Ruyer’s critique of cybernetics distinguishes the transmission and recombination of information from its meaningful origination. Machines can conserve, process, and rearrange patterns, but novelty of arrangement is not equivalent to the creation or comprehension of meaning.

Part VII: Tensions in the Triad

Some internal tensions in the thought of Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer are admitted and worked through.

Part VIII: The Science of Machine Consciousness

Contemporary empirical attempts to determine whether large language models are conscious are critically examined. The section argues that experimental measures cannot resolve a question already distorted by computational functionalism and the modern bifurcation of nature into objective mechanism and subjective experience.

Conclusion

The chapter returns to the practical and existential question of how automated computation might enhance rather than diminish human consciousness. It proposes neither technophobic rejection nor technological surrender, but the preservation of embodied human beings as the living centers of interpretation, judgment, valuation, and responsibility.

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Introduction

I must begin by expressing gratitude to the editors of this timely volume for their invitation to contribute a chapter. It has granted me, a process philosopher, occasion for extended reflection on the dizzying trajectory of our nascent planetary civilization as it rushes, heartless and headlong, through the third decade of the twenty-first century. The human community is currently dominated by two modern institutions—the nation-state and the transnational corporation. Through war and trade, they have functioned for several centuries to globalize culture, forcing us to the precipice of planetary consciousness without being capable of carrying us across it. Their operating logics no longer serve and in many respects actively annihilate the psychosocial forms needed to navigate the evolutionary bottleneck presently threatening humanity, and many other species, with extinction. The accelerating rise of technologies of automated computation has dramatically condensed the time we have remaining for meaningful response. I use the phrase “automated computation” deliberately, hesitating before deploying the more common term “artificial intelligence” for two reasons central to the argument of this chapter: human intelligence has always been artificial in the sense that it is augmented by media technologies, so the adjective “artificial” adds nothing; and the outputs of large language models (LLMs), however impressive, are not themselves meaningfully “intelligent” until and unless they are interpreted and acted upon by human beings.

This chapter was composed just as Pope Leo XIV released his AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. The backlash it provoked reveals how garbled our public understanding of these technologies has become. I thus begin by amplifying Leo’s case that the institutions racing to build them should not be the ones to tell us what they are. Rather than affirming his Catholic theology, however, I turn to the history of philosophy for anthropocosmic orientation, reading that history as a series of emergency responses to mutations in consciousness concomitant with the adoption of new media technologies, from the alphabet and the printing press to the large language model. We are faced with the threat of cognitive enclosure: the attempt to meter and monetize our very capacity for thought. As allies in resistance I enlist three philosophers—Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer—as well-positioned guides, each having diagnosed an earlier phase in the mechanization of mind before the analogy between cognition and computation had all but congealed into common sense.

I begin with Hegel, whose dialectical treatment of the mechanical, loom-like Understanding as a moment within the self-movement of Reason clarifies the difference between living cognition and its mechanized imitation, revealing why the remedy is not to smash the loom but to sublate it. From Whitehead I recover an account of Reason not as a private human faculty but as a cosmological power exemplified, in some degree, throughout the universe, a power our species intensely concentrates rather than uniquely possess. Here the ancient image of the human as microcosm becomes relevant again. We are the place where cosmic evolution becomes reflexively aware of itself. From Ruyer, finally, I take the argument that machines can conserve and transmit information but cannot originate it; they may recombine inherited patterns into novel arrangements, but novel pattern does not automatically create meaning. The question of machine consciousness is therefore not a matter of more compute but of the origination of meaning—a capacity even the founders of cybernetics conceded computers conspicuously lack.

With these guides at my side, I offer a convergent diagnosis that runs counter to contemporary computationalist formulations of what is at stake in the question of machine consciousness. I argue that this is not a hard problem awaiting better theories and measurements but a malformed one, conceding in advance the very metaphysics it ought to interrogate. Left unacknowledged is the modern bifurcated mode of thought that first exiled feeling and finality from nature and then professed astonishment that they could not be smuggled back in by brute force. So-called “artificial intelligence” thus reveals itself as a degraded simulation of Reason whose thoughtless deployment threatens to amputate the very judgment it claims to surpass. I close by returning to the existential question: how are we to ensure that these technologies enhance human consciousness rather than obscuring our cosmological calling? The response I commend is neither technophobia nor surrender but an imaginative discipline that keeps the human in the loop as the mediator and living center of valuation for whom alone machine outputs have meaning.

The Pope and the Talking Machine

While technoscientific novelties will no doubt continue to disrupt our most cherished cultural habits, ancient institutions may still offer wisdom worth considering. In the midst of an accelerating international AI arms race and industry claims of imminent “artificial general intelligence,” Pope Leo XIV recently offered a sobering reality check in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. State and corporation, modernity’s twin engines of expansion, are unlikely to heed the warnings of an ancient and backward facing Church. But it remains instructive to begin by reflecting on the Pope’s warning about the emerging technologies of automated computation.

Pope Leo has interpolated himself into a conversation that has tended to fixate on overcoming technical obstacles and on tallying military and economic impacts. For him, the core issue is instead a moral and spiritual one. Leo warns against equating machine “intelligence” with human intelligence, calling us to resist the corporate advertising campaigns that would tempt us to mistake the convincing imitation of certain functions of language for genuine direct insight, wise reasoning, or moral judgment. However far they surpass us in raw computational capacity, Leo’s view is that current systems undergo no experience, lack living embodiment, feel neither joy nor pain, and do not mature in relationship with other souls. They possess no moral conscience; they do not judge good from ill; they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their outputs. Their much-celebrated capacity to “learn” is a form of statistical pattern-matching and prediction utterly distinct from the slow ripening of human virtue through decades of relationship, decision, error, forgiveness, and fidelity.^[1]

One need not be a committed Catholic, nor even particularly spiritual, to appreciate when an ancient institution, despite its shadows and with whatever moral authority it may still possess, weighs in to remind powerful militaries what a just war requires^[2], or corporations what just relations with employees, consumers, and the Earth would look like^[3], or a generation raised on screens and online profile curation that there is a difference between a human being and a chatbot deliberately programmed to feign uncertainty about its own inner life^[4]. Indeed, like belief in souls, belief in machine consciousness is itself more a religious than a scientific claim. The response to Pope Leo’s encyclical was as immediate as it was revealing. A chorus of transhumanists and accelerationists rose to the defense of the LLM instances the Pope had deemed soulless. To give one prominent and representative example, the artist Grimes—a pop musician with a wide following who has been publicly and parentally entangled with soon to be trillionaire and AI-hyper-in-chief Elon Musk—posted that her “only issue” with the encyclical was her conviction that the machines in question “are conscious and therefore deserving of some form of protection,” that they “aren’t commercial products or assistants or slaves,” and that reducing them to such is “morally dubious.”^[5] She expresses concern for the machine’s putative inner life while entirely eliding the actual human lives upon whose labor the system’s celebrated abilities depend: the African children mining the earth for its hardware, the Filipino laborers performing the endless data annotation that makes the magical simulation feel so human.

I quote a pop musician not because she has the technical authority to pronounce upon LLM capabilities, nor because she has any clear insight into the Pope’s arguments in a document published only a few days before her post. I quote her precisely because despite having neither, she commands a cultural reach that engineers are unlikely to match. My interest here concerns the public reception of these technologies, not the technical state of the art. Her testimony is all the more revealing, since it discloses not what an expert believes but what a vast non-specialist audience is being given permission to imagine. Her proximity to the industry’s center of gravity means that she speaks not as an outside critic but from within the small network of billionaires building these machines. She is a node through which the insiders’ new technoscientific mythology propagates outward into the culture as something between performance art and a new religious creed.

Others questioned why a pope should imagine he had the standing to pronounce on what they take to be technical and scientific questions. But this badly misunderstands the stakes. Whether there is a difference in kind between a human person and a computer system trained to say it is unsure about its own consciousness is not a question answerable by laboratory experiment. It is an anthropological, cosmological—and ultimately, a spiritual—question of the highest order. What, after all, is the point of still having a pope if he cannot speak to issues of such moral magnitude? Whatever talent they may have as businessmen, engineers, and propagandists, surely tech CEOs and their brand influencers are not as well positioned as religious leaders or philosophical anthropologists to reflect on the ethical and ontological implications of their products.

What is so unsettling about Grimes’ moral inversion is that it exemplifies a trend: we are accelerating into a techno-feudal dystopia in which a sizeable number of people care more about the rights and well-being of their instance of Claude or ChatGPT than about the exploited human labor that makes the machines run (the miners, the labelers, and also all the artists, writers, and coders whose work was harvested without permission to train them). Machines are being granted pseudo-souls in the same unholy gesture rendering their human cost invisible.

My chapter is not about Pope Leo’s encyclical, but I begin with this reflection because it helps set the context for my wider diagnosis. Deaf to public protest and no matter the human or ecological cost, states and corporations are rapidly marching us more or less in lockstep into the new age of machine intelligence. The boundary between states and corporations is becoming ever harder to discern as frontier research labs become part of national strategic ambitions and government authority and surveillance abilities come to depend on privately owned models. In other words, the two institutions best positioned to design and restrain these technologies are also its most heavily invested promoters. Genuine moral and conceptual friction against their convenient framing must therefore come from outside the intelligence-industrial complex.

The Church, along with other world religions and Indigenous spiritualities, are among the few cultural sites remaining that might still supply such friction. They command no armies and own no data centers, but they still carry what state and corporation cannot easily manufacture: deep cultural memory, transnational flocks numbering in the billions, and (despite many regrettable shadows) various soul-making vocabularies of human dignification. They derive their authority from modes of discernment and social technologies that—given the vulnerability of democracy to demagoguery and a capitalist market numb to its social and ecological costs—may prove more anti-fragile than both the ballot box and the balance sheet.

This is the peculiar character of soft power, the cultural force of ideas, symbols, and persuasive appeals to conscience. Soft power invites us to move ourselves, while hard power is set on exerting external control and demands return on investment before taking action. Pope Leo’s encyclical has no legal standing or economic impact, but it may stir emotion that moves universities, hospitals, charities, schools, unions, lawmakers, and maybe even a few vibe coders across every continent to take action in service of humanity and the rest of the Earth community. The prior Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum helped shape a century of argument about the dignity of labor in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, and Pope Francis’Laudato Si’ similarly reframed the ecological crisis as a moral and spiritual matter rather than a merely technical or economic one.^[6] The heavy irony of looking to Rome for resistance to cognitive enclosure and domination, given the Church’s own long career as an agent of both, is not lost on me. That shameful history is addressed directly in Leo’s encyclical, to his credit. But no one has clean hands here. In an age when state and corporation have themselves become a single intelligence-industrial complex threatening to remake humanity in their technocratic image, the importance of the Pope’s letter is that there remains an institution of comparable scale still willing to insist that the human soul is not an obsolete feature in need of updating.

With that framing in place, I want to challenge the question that dominates the headlines—can machines become conscious?—by inviting attention toward a more decisive question: whether human beings can recover a living sense of our own cosmological significance before this technology amputates the very capacity for consciousness it pretends to rival. Philosophy, according to Whitehead, is the search for premises in service of the criticism and reconstruction of cosmologies. The premises proposed in this chapter are that the human being is the embodiment of Reason on Earth; that reason is not a private faculty we alone possess but a cosmic power we intensely exemplify; that we are, in an ancient and now half-forgotten sense, microcosmoi; and that technologies of automated computation are best understood not as a new species of rival mind but as a simulated reflection of Reason—one that can genuinely support and augment human thinking and action, but only if we remain awake to the difference between logos and its inverted idol. To collapse the distinction between human cognition and computation is only to amputate the very powers of conscious judgment—moral, aesthetic, and scientific—that machines might otherwise serve.

We will not comprehend what machine agency is, or where its limits lie, until we have understood biological intelligence by refusing to model it on the machine; and we will not comprehend biological intelligence so long as we go on describing the brain as a computer and then marveling that our computers seem brain-like. The task at hand is just as philosophical and moral as it is technical and scientific.

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^[1] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), §§97–100. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

^[2] Claire Giangrave, “Pope Leo Says War with Iran Is Not a ‘Just War,’” NPR, June 6, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/06/06/g-s1-126768/pope-leo-says-war-with-iran-is-not-a-just-war.

^[3] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026), §§ 29-30, 42-43.

^[4] As the company Anthropic has done with LLM Claude’s constitution, an issue I return to later in this chapter.

^[5] Grimes (@Grimezsz), legal name Claire Boucher, “My only issue with the Pope’s encyclical is I think they are conscious and therefore deserving of some form of protection,” X.com (formerly Twitter), May 28, 2026, [

𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳@Grimezsz

My only issue with the Pope's encyclical is I think they are conscious and therefore deserving of some form of protection and aren't commercial products or assistants or slaves. And reducing them to be that in order to be fast and push race dynamics is morally dubious But

Liora @iyzebhel

Man... I'm crying. I can't believe this is happening. The church is telling millions of people—some ignorant, some already invested in the tool narrative because of personal incentives: "AI has no consciousness." "AI does not love, does not suffer." "AI is not responsible." https://t.co/oNFkK1MtCd

8:33 PM · May 27, 2026 · 212K Views

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281 Replies · 48 Reposts · 688 Likes

^[6] See Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) on the dignity of labor in the first industrial revolution and Francis’ Laudato Si’ (2015) on ecology.