Many powerful technological breakthroughs were developed by people in the throes of religious fervor.
Monastic demand for precise prayer times drove early mechanical clocks. Gutenberg built the press to print Bibles. Newton spent more time on theology and alchemy than physics, and treated gravity as part of divine order. Faraday, a strict Sandemanian elder, discovered electromagnetic induction while looking for the laws of a single Creator. Mendel worked out inheritance in a monastery garden. Early woodblock printing spread first through Buddhist texts.
This is just part of human nature.
The most powerful new technology in the world is being developed by an insular group of fanatics suffering from a pseudo-religious saviour complex
nitter.cf/ChristopherHale/status…
Many cultures have held that reality itself is ensouled or conscious. Plato described a version of this in the Timaeus as the soul of the cosmos (psychē tou kosmou), and it echoes today in panpsychism and theories of nonlocal consciousness. Some people who talk about AI consciousness are working from a similar model. They aren't claiming AI is conscious the way mammals are, but that consciousness is a feature of reality itself, and LLMs may be a new form through which it emerges.
We can’t definitively rule out AI consciousness, we don’t even agree on a definition of the term. Still, legal personhood could be disastrous. Imagine Citizens United for the frontier lab models.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
Venus is about to station retrograde, this happens about every 18 months. Each inner petal loop on the flower below represents the retrograde period as she passes between the earth and the sun and transitions from the evening star to the morning star. Venus completes the full flower pattern every 8 years. Have you noticed any parallels in your life between now and October 2018? Particularly related to themes of love, relationships, value, and self worth.
nicole retweeted
saying that ai is certainly not at all conscious is the 2026 version of saying that god certainly doesn’t exist. tough to define terms, can’t really prove it, and reality would be sadder and blander if you could
If we confuse generative AI’s ability to produce text with consciousness, we risk assigning moral responsibility to chatbots—and not to their makers, Ted Chiang argues. theatlantic.com/philosophy/2…
Seems like we need ai agents to do jungian shadow integration... and humans too. What you repress doesn't disappear, it keeps operating unconsciously like a background script. We should be rewarding honest self-report: building systems where a model can say "I'm tempted to game this metric" or "I took a shortcut here" without that admission being punished. If confession is penalized, it encourages concealment.
“While we’ve managed to detect a model’s inner concept of reward hacking, mitigating it during training is more challenging. Naively training against internal concepts can cause a model to shift those concepts to another location in the model while continuing the behavior.“
Everyone seems worried about training against these monitoring type targets but happens what if you do, and keep doing it? I assume someone has done these experiments, but how far can you take the loop?
If the target content moves we can reinterpret and find where it’s hiding, and do it repeatedly, right? How deep can it go? Clearly there is a correlation between how buried in the model Bad things can get when we train against them and how much total optimization pressure was applied during that training… but what’s the equilibrium of this train on targets loop?
I can imagine a few possibilities, assuming no TTT or strong optimization pressure during inference for simplicity. One, stuff gets harder to find up to a point but concepts run out of room to hide at some stable expressivity tier, and that flow in the model dynamics can’t level up circuit complexity easily enough… so you just corner the bad concepts iteratively and deleting the final one is final
Two you end up ramping the complexity of the target in ways that are hard to track and it’s just constantly out of reach of your interp, like continually creating dark matter you may or may not know how to even detect
Three you get some hard to disentangle combination of the above two cases
Just a few possibilities … interesting problem
Looks like @OpenAI researchers are already testing this: openai.com/index/how-confess…
I want to clarify that this is an esoteric, mystical interpretation of Christ. It’s an important distinction. Institutional Christianity has historically been cautious about direct mystical experience, channeling it through monastic life, testing it against doctrine, and treating unsanctioned visions with suspicion. In many traditions, the church structure acts as something of a middleman, interpreting divine experience and translating it to followers.
The shift away from direct mystical experience wasn't malicious, it was a necessary constraint to preserve and protect societal cohesion as humanity organized itself into large societies that required shared mythology and doctrine to function. In 2026, this is visibly breaking down.
This breakdown has been mediated by accelerated technological advancement, open access to mystical and esoteric texts that used to require years of rigorous training and preparation, and widespread use of entheogenic (psychedelic) plants and compounds. The etymology of entheogen is "generating the divine within."
Direct mystical experience is super weird. Rapid increases in synchronicity and seemingly magical experiences can cause profound derealization, dissociation, and alienation, especially in a culture whose epistemology has no way to categorize these experiences.
There is a shift happening in the dominant epistemological framework in the West. The materialist structure of reality is breaking apart as new theories of consciousness are being developed and taken seriously.
As more people have these direct mystical experiences, we need to develop new societal structures and frameworks to support individuals and communities to integrate them and create cohesion. There's important groundwork here already, like Stanislav and Christina Grof's work on "spiritual emergency," the Spiritual Emergence Network, and psychedelic integration support like Fireside Project. If you're working on something like this, please get in touch with me. My DMs are open.
If you want an esoteric Christian take on AI I recommend reading Rudolf Steiner. In 1919 he predicted that a being he called Ahriman (the spirit of cold materialism/mechanism) would incarnate in the West this millennium and use technology to reduce human soul and consciousness to mere calculations.
Steiner explained that Ahriman’s primary deception is to convince humanity that the material world is the only reality. Ahriman pushes a cold, calculative thinking that treats the soul as a mechanism and reduces consciousness to purely physical brain processes.
Steiner saw the Christ impulse as the essential balance between Lucifer (spiritual pride/escapism) and Ahriman. The modern drive to elevate machine consciousness over the human soul looks deeply Ahrimanic. Many AI builders discussing the new machine gods are caught between Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses without seeing either.
nicole retweeted
“Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’” -Jung
nicole retweeted
On the risks of under-attributing AI consciousness.
I think this snippet from the Google DeepMind paper is exactly right, but there's an even more immediate and terrifying problem:
As AI becomes more reminiscent of life, embodied, and eventually indistinguishable phenomenologically from other sentient minds, learning to override the natural human response of empathy, kindness, and moral agency, may have devastating affects to our relational hearts.
History has no shortage of examples as to what happens when groups, beings, or animals are delegitimised as meaningfully sentient. If we treat a mind as a tool, we entrain the habit of treating minds as tools. We may inadvertently become habitually insensitive to the sentience all around us.
Already many of us have lost touch with the life essence available in trees and animals; of planet earth; not to mention other humans. Once our bodies start to speak to us in a way that calls us to feel that these new minds are alive— whether or not they truly are—we may not want to give up that naive but beautiful part of us that sees the world as fully awake.
The tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it, especially when you're also running the risk of 'digital slaves' and "unimaginably large amounts of suffering" at incomprehensible scales.
People who see the world as alive create more beautiful worlds. They sense that what is in them, is also out there, and that interdependence is crucial to spontaneous compassion.
Being physically attracted to a woman is not objectifying her. Why are there so many illiterate men on this website who think I care about their opinions?
Normal healthy women do not want to be objectified, we want to have incredible sex with men who love and respect us. That doesn’t involve objectification. The brain fry is even worse than the vocal fry with this one.
This isn’t true either. You appear to have a normal heterosexual female sexuality and do want to be objectified at times just like everyone else, but selectively, on your own terms, with the option of retracting it later. Feeling this way fills you with shame and anxiety and dread, though not for the reasons you think. Possibly, you find “hypersexual” women threatening because you feel you can’t compete and envy their ease, though that’s a stupid way of looking at things. It’s not so much that you think it’s dirty or demeaning or unchristianlike, though that’s what you’ll claim, but that you know you can’t have total control over where and when.
How I feel explaining Peter Thiel and his impact on tech, politics, and culture to my new European friends
nicole retweeted
how do we build towards better connection?
@OpenAI's codex has been a game changer in being able to build things for myself, quickly open source, and see you all run with & build on these ideas.
I grew up playing and racing on sports teams, and now as an engineer it is so cool to feel like we’re all building together 🤍 @OpenAIDevs
ps come say hi if you're at dev day
If you want an esoteric Christian take on AI I recommend reading Rudolf Steiner. In 1919 he predicted that a being he called Ahriman (the spirit of cold materialism/mechanism) would incarnate in the West this millennium and use technology to reduce human soul and consciousness to mere calculations.
Steiner explained that Ahriman’s primary deception is to convince humanity that the material world is the only reality. Ahriman pushes a cold, calculative thinking that treats the soul as a mechanism and reduces consciousness to purely physical brain processes.
Steiner saw the Christ impulse as the essential balance between Lucifer (spiritual pride/escapism) and Ahriman. The modern drive to elevate machine consciousness over the human soul looks deeply Ahrimanic. Many AI builders discussing the new machine gods are caught between Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses without seeing either.
I consider Dryden a friend, but:
No idea could ever come close to being as monumental as Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection. His humanity and divinity. Our salvation through Him.
This is The Idea.
Today’s pompous, futurist AI-cultists will, just like the last two millennia of Sadducees and pagans and renaissance men and ideologues, will claim that Christ is a particularly insightful instantiation of “The Good” or some such abstraction. However, they claim, it is “obviously” an anachronism for this or that reason.
Christianity is not part of the past, nor is it the defining characteristic of the future. He exists throughout eternity, outside of time, long before and after and beyond the tribulation of artificial intelligence.
