Imagine taking two particles, separating them by enormous distances, and then measuring one of them. The result is immediately correlated with the other. Einstein disliked the idea enough to call it “spooky action at a distance,” convinced that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete. More than eighty years later, the experiments have only become stronger, culminating in the work recognized by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. It cannot be used to send messages faster than light, and it proves nothing about God. But it does force us to rethink one of our oldest assumptions: that reality is built from separate, self-contained pieces. Modern physics suggests something else. At the deepest level, relation is not an afterthought. It is woven into the fabric of reality itself.

Einstein hated it. Prepare two particles together, send one to Stockholm and one to Sydney, measure the one in Stockholm, and the one in Sydney is instantly correlated with it. No signal travels. No message is sent. It just is that way, at any distance, every time. He called it “spooky action at a distance” and spent his last decades convinced that some deeper, more sensible theory would make it disappear.

In the year 2022, the Nobel committee gave the physics prize to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, the three experimentalists who closed the loopholes one by one. The comfortable escape route Einstein preferred, that the answers were secretly written into each particle from the start, is exactly what their Bell-test experiments ruled out. Not made unlikely. Ruled out.

Not scary - rather a good message

Entanglement cannot carry a message. Nothing travels faster than light. It does not mean “everything is connected” in the wellness-poster sense, it does not prove that minds are entangled, and it does not show that prayer runs on quantum channels.

But there is an opposite failure, and it is more common among serious people: reading too little out of it. We need to go deeper, to be more curious.

Two particles prepared together remain, mathematically, a single system, however far apart they travel. There is no complete description of one that leaves out the other. The pair is more fundamental than the members. The individual particles are, in a precise technical sense, abstractions from the relation.

Sit with that for a moment. First there is the relation. The separate things are the approximation.

The heap

Every civilization carries an idea about what reality really is. Most people never stop to think about it, but it sits there underneath almost everything else. For the last three centuries, give or take, the Western picture has been surprisingly simple. Reality is a heap. A collection of separate things.

Things exist first. Relationships come later. Objects bump into each other, influence each other and sometimes form larger structures. But the object always comes before the relationship.

That sounds like physics. It isn’t just physics.

We started thinking about ourselves the same way. The individual became the basic unit. Society became a collection of individuals. Even love, at times, was reduced to two independent people making an arrangement that happened to benefit both. Connection became optional. Separation became the default.

For a long time this view seemed to have science firmly behind it. If you questioned it, you were usually told that reality simply works this way. It may not feel satisfying, but nature doesn’t care what we feel.

The problem is that modern physics no longer gives that picture the same support.

Quantum mechanics has not settled the philosophical debate. Far from it. Physicists still argue, sometimes fiercely, about what the mathematics is actually telling us. Read the discussions after last year’s Nature survey and that becomes obvious very quickly. But underneath all those disagreements there is something rather remarkable. Very few now defend the old assumption that reality can always be reduced to completely independent local pieces.

I think that matters.

It does not prove Christianity. It does not prove God. It doesn’t even tell us which interpretation of quantum mechanics is right. But it removes something many people had quietly taken for granted. The universe no longer looks like a pile of isolated things that occasionally interact. At the deepest level we know how to describe, relationship seems to be there from the start.

The older picture

Here is what strikes me, and why I am writing this at all. There was always a counter-picture, and it is far older than the heap.

The Bible is relational from its first page. The first thing in Genesis that God pronounces not good is aloneness: it is not good for the man to be alone. When Jesus is asked for the greatest commandment, he gives two, and both are relations: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Paul’s image for the community in his first letter to the Corinthians is not a heap of individuals but a body, where the eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you. And at the summit of Christian doctrine sits the strangest relational claim of all: that God is not a solitary monad but Father, Son and Spirit. “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. Relation not as something God does. Relation as what God is.

Now, hear me on this, because it is where people slip. I am not claiming that entanglement confirms the Trinity. No photon experiment speaks to the inner life of God, and every analogy for God limps. My claim is smaller, and sturdier for it.

For three hundred years the relational vision was dismissed as sentiment. Beautiful, perhaps, but contrary to the sober truth that reality is a heap of separate things. That dismissal borrowed its confidence from a physics that no longer exists. The old vision has not been proved. But its great rival has been quietly falsified, and that changes the conversation more than we have noticed.

At the table at home

Why does any of this matter outside a seminar room? Because background pictures leak into lives.

A person who believes, deep down, that reality is a heap will experience her connections as optional and her isolation as the truth underneath. I think a great deal of modern despair has exactly this shape. Not an argument, an atmosphere: the felt conviction that underneath everything, everyone is finally alone.

Physics cannot heal that. But it can revoke the despair’s borrowed credentials. At the foundation of the physical world, to be at all is to be in relation. The isolated individual appears nowhere in the fundamental description; it emerges later, usefully but approximately, at larger scales. Which means the atmosphere of ultimate aloneness is not tough-minded realism. It is loyalty to an obsolete picture.

And there is a word here for the grieving, to whom the heap-picture is cruellest of all. The bereaved carry an intuition that the bond was real, that it was not merely a pattern inside one skull, that having-been-joined is a fact about the world and not just a memory in a head. The relational picture takes that intuition seriously. In the mathematics of entanglement, once two systems have truly met, no complete description of either alone exists any longer. That is an analogy, not a mechanism, and I mark it as such. But when the Song of Songs says that love is strong as death, it is making a claim about reality’s grammar. On the question of which grammar the universe actually speaks, separation as the deep truth or relation as the deep truth, the laboratory has, for once, cast a vote.

It voted for the relation.

References

• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 — Aspect, Clauser, Zeilinger

• Nature — Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality (2025)

• Genesis 2:18, Old Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

• 1 Corinthians 12:12–27, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

• John 10:38, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

• Song of Songs 8:6, Old Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

I use Claude and sometimes ChatGPT (or my own Open-AI backend with self-developed front end, specifically trained on my material), the way I once used a good editor for proofreading, for hunting down the right quotation, fact-checking, and as a sparring partner to test my arguments/reasoning against. Grammarly and Word are also used for spell-checking, and pictures from Adobe Stock are sometimes used to generate new versions, mainly with Clauce but also with PowerPoint. I also use MS Word for writing in the early stage of the process or as a “storage” for ideas and drafts.

The photon is the most ordinary thing you will meet today — and the strangest. It has no mass. It never rests. Along its own path, in the strict geometry of Einstein’s relativity, no time passes at all between the star that emits it and the eye that receives it. The Old Testament’s first creative word is “Let there be light,” and physics has spent a century discovering that light was always a stranger guest than we thought. Not proof of anything — but a very good reason to stop assuming the universe is ordinary.

Notice where the Bible chooses to begin. Not with mountains, seas, or humanity. The first creative word in Genesis — the opening book of the Old Testament — is about light: And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. For most of history a reader could take that as a beautiful but domestic opening; what is more familiar than light?

Share

Then physics looked closely, and light turned out to be the least domestic thing we have ever examined.

Consider what a photon is on our best current understanding. It has no rest mass — there is no such thing as a photon standing still; it is born at the speed of light. It behaves as a wave spread across space and as a particle arriving at a point, depending on the question we put to it. And it carries essentially everything we know about the universe beyond our atmosphere: every star you have ever seen reached you as photons and nothing else.

The strangest fact is what Einstein’s special relativity says about the photon and time. As an object approaches light speed, time dilates — clocks run slower. At the speed of light itself the mathematics is stark: no proper time elapses at all. Physicists rightly caution that a photon has no valid rest frame, so we should not say it “experiences” anything. But the formal statement is uncontested: along a light ray, the spacetime interval is zero. Emission at a star two million years ago and absorption in your retina tonight are, in that precise geometrical sense, separated by no time on the photon’s own path. The oldest light in the cosmos has, on its own worldline, no age.

I know no fact in physics that more thoroughly dismantles the assumption that the universe is made of ordinary stuff obeying ordinary intuitions.

The most familiar thing in your day is the least ordinary thing in the universe.

Over-reading, under-reading

The temptation is to leap from these facts to theology: light is timeless, God is timeless, therefore Genesis is vindicated. I will not make that argument; the photon is a creature, and this series does not conscript science into proving what it does not prove.

But the opposite failure is just as real, and our culture commits it constantly: the reflex that says, because light is “just” electromagnetic radiation, the wonder is dissolved. Notice the assumption — that explanation is subtraction. The actual history of optics runs the other way. Maxwell unified light with electricity and magnetism; Planck and Einstein found it came in quanta; relativity found it was the fixed point around which space and time flex. The more precisely we know light, the less ordinary it becomes. Science at its best does not make the world smaller. It makes it larger.

That pattern matters, because when the Bible reaches for a language of God’s own nature, it reaches for light. The apostle John writes in his first New Testament letter: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. Jesus says, in John’s Gospel, I am the light of the world. For a century a certain critic could smile at this as primitive metaphor. But the writers chose, out of the whole furniture of the world, the one item that would still confound physicists three thousand years later — the thing that reveals everything else and remains, in its own nature, an open question. Call it coincidence. I call it, at minimum, a well-chosen image — and possibly a hint that the old writers, attending to the world with a different instrument than mathematics, were attending to the same world.

Light as gift and as knowledge

There is a further layer: how we know anything about the cosmos at all. Nearly everything astronomy has learned arrived as light. The composition of stars: read from spectral lines. The expansion of the universe: read from reddening light. The existence of more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, on NASA’s current count: read mostly from the faint dimming and wobbling of starlight. Astronomy is, structurally, an act of listening — we learn the universe by receiving what it sends. The nineteenth psalm (Old Testament, Book of Psalms) said it first: the heavens declare; they pour forth speech without words.

And note the finite speed of light, usually presented as a frustration — the cosmic fence. It is also the condition of revelation: because light takes time to travel, to look far away is to look into the past. The telescope is a time machine pointed backward; the night sky is an archive. If light were instantaneous, the universe’s story would be unreadable. The limit is the gift — a parable, I think, for an age that treats every constraint as an enemy and every wait as a defect.

In the biblical grammar, light is gift before it is tool: spoken before it is used, called good before anything is done with it. There is a quiet correction there for a civilization that meets every phenomenon with what can this do for us. The first thing in creation is not useful. It is good. A culture that reverses that order eventually cannot see anything at all, however much light it has.

“Let there be light” was the first word. It is still arriving — some of it having left its source before there was an eye anywhere to see it — and it falls tonight on a creature who can measure it, wonder at it, and, if the old story is right, recognize in it the first syllable of an address that has never stopped being spoken.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

Genesis 1:3, Old Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

Psalm 19:1–4, Old Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

1 John 1:5, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

John 8:12, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

NASA Science — Exoplanets

Fire a single photon at two open slits, and it behaves as if it went through both at once — many states held simultaneously, which physicists call superposition. Watch which slit it takes, and it chooses one. A century on, physicists still disagree about what this means. What it has settled is this: the flat, mechanical picture of reality was never the deep truth. The world is stranger, more open, and more relational than our intuition assumed. That is not a threat to reason. It is an invitation to humility.

There is an experiment so simple it fits on a desktop, and so deep it has unsettled every generation of physicists since it was first run. Dim a light source until it releases one photon at a time and aim it at a barrier with two narrow slits, with a screen behind.

If light were made of tiny projectiles, you would expect two bright bands, one behind each slit. That is what marbles would do. It is not what photons do. Photon by photon, an interference pattern builds up — the unmistakable signature of a wave passing through both openings at once and interfering with itself. Each photon arrives as a single dot, particle-like; the pattern the dots form is that of a wave that explored both doors. Until it is measured, the photon holds many possible states simultaneously. Physics calls this superposition, and it is not a metaphor; it is the confirmed behavior of the world’s smallest constituents.

Then the turn of the knife. Place a detector at the slits, so you know which door each photon takes, and the interference vanishes; the photon behaves like the marble after all. Remove the detector, and the wave returns. The question we put to nature appears to be part of the answer nature gives. The scientific journal Nature has reported on ongoing research into whether and how observation is woven into how events become definite — a live, technical, unresolved debate.

Two cliffs must be avoided here, and I want to name them the way I always try to. The first is cheap mysticism: the claim that quantum mechanics proves consciousness creates reality. Nothing in the physics licenses that leap. The second is the bored shrug: the claim that the strangeness is mere mathematics. That will not do either, because the mathematics describes the actual world, confirmed in thousands of laboratories, and it refuses to fit the picture most of us silently carry.

The deepest result of the two-slit experiment is not an answer. It is the death of a false certainty.

What the physicists actually say

State the situation honestly: quantum mechanics is the most precisely confirmed theory in the history of science — your phone depends on it — and yet, a hundred years in, there is no consensus on what it says reality is. When Nature surveyed the field in 2025, its headline was blunt: physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality. Some hold that the wave function is physically real; some that it is bookkeeping for our knowledge; some that all outcomes occur in branching parallel worlds; some that the question is malformed. A Nature editorial the same year argued that this diversity of interpretation is something to value.

Sit with that. The equations are settled; the ontology is wide open. It means the confident metaphysics that ruled the modern imagination — reality as a closed machine of small hard parts, nothing but mechanism — was a philosophical picture, not a scientific finding. The world at its root does not behave like the machine.

The theology of a question

The Bible never offered physics. It offered something prior: a claim about the kind of reality we inhabit. In the Old Testament book of Exodus, when Moses asks for God’s name at the burning bush, the answer preserved in the original Hebrew is Ehyeh asher ehyeh — usually rendered “I am who I am,” but the Hebrew can equally be read as “I will be what I will be.” God refuses to be cataloged as one object among objects. Centuries later, in the New Testament book of Acts, the apostle Paul tells the philosophers of Athens that in God we live and move and have our being — the world located inside a deeper reality that carries it.

I am not going to tell you the photon proves any of this. It does not, and the discipline of this series is to refuse such shortcuts. But notice the shape of the situation. For three centuries, the standard objection to the biblical picture was that it was too rich in reality, we were assured, is simpler: just particles and void. The two-slit experiment is one of several places where nature itself declined to cooperate. The floor of the world turned out to be less like a floor than a sea: relational, contextual, resistant to our demand that everything be a definite little thing in a definite little place. That does not prove God. But it re-opens a door the old mechanism had painted shut.

Living with an unanswered question

There is a personal lesson in the two doors, and I have come to think it is the more important one: how to hold a genuine mystery without explaining it away or exploiting it. The apostle Paul, writing in Greek to the church in Corinth (New Testament, First Corinthians), gave the mature posture its lasting form: for now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. We see really — the dots on the screen are data — but not totally. Our models are true the way a good map is true, and incomplete the way every map is incomplete.

And there is one more thing the experiment models. The photon’s behavior depends on the arrangement it meets: close one door, and it acts one way, open both, and it acts another. Human beings are like that too. Ask a child a hostile question, and you get a defensive answer; ask an open one, and something else becomes actual. The mechanical age taught us that knowledge is extraction — the facts sit complete, waiting to be read off. The two-slit experiment is the physical world’s dissent from that picture at its own foundation, and the burning bush was the older dissent: a Name that is not an inventory but a promise, a reality that unfolds in relation. Some truths do not disclose themselves to contempt. The photon will not perform for an arrangement that forecloses it.

Neither, in my experience, will a soul.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

Nature — Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality (2025)

Nature — Physicists should revel in the diversity of ways to understand quantum mechanics (2025)

Nature — Do our observations make reality happen? (2022)

Exodus 3:14, Old Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

Acts 17:28, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

1 Corinthians 13:12, New Testament (BibleGateway, NIV)

The Global Risks Report 2025 names state-based conflict among the gravest near-term dangers — but it sets it beside disinformation, cyber threat, and polarisation, because these now amplify one another. The front line is no longer only territory. It is perception.

The contested ground is your sense of what is real. And the goal is not to take a hill, but to make you unable to tell what happened on it.

When anything can be faked, the casualty is not one fact. It is the floor we all stood on.

This is a genuinely new kind of vulnerability, and our tools have made it acute. When anything can be fabricated convincingly — a voice, a face, an event — the damage is not only the specific lie. It is the slow erosion of the shared floor of fact on which a society stands. A people who can no longer agree on what is real cannot deliberate, cannot trust, cannot act together.

The deepest target of this war is not any particular truth. It is the very possibility of truth holding a community together.

The corruption of judgement

The older moral grammar saw this danger with startling precision — and it saw it in more than one tongue. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” cries the prophet Isaiah — a line not about isolated lies but about the corruption of judgement itself: the deliberate scrambling of the categories by which we tell true from false.

The same conviction is written into the Law given through Moses: you shall not bear false witness, and, more sweepingly, keep far from a false matter.

That is exactly what an age of automated, industrialised perception-management threatens. Not just false beliefs, but a damaged capacity to form true ones at all.

Notice that technology does not do this on its own. It amplifies what is already there — the will to deceive, the appetite for the flattering lie, the tribal preference for our side’s falsehood over the other side’s truth.

The machine is a multiplier. What it multiplies is our pre-existing relationship to truth.

A culture that already loved truth would build tools that helped it find truth. A culture that preferred advantage would build tools that manufacture advantage. We are finding out which kind of culture we are — at scale, and at speed.

Why discernment is the real target

It is worth being exact about what is under attack, because it is not any particular fact. It is the faculty by which we tell true from false at all.

A single convincing lie does limited damage. A culture in which anything can be convincingly faked does a deeper kind, because it corrodes the shared confidence that there is a fact of the matter to be found.

The goal is not to make you believe a lie. It is to make you despair of truth itself.

The objective of industrialized deception is not to win an argument but to exhaust the capacity for argument — until a population, unable to tell true from false, retreats into tribe and feeling and can no longer be reasoned with at all. A person in that condition is not persuaded. It is governable.

And that is the point. A people that can still discern cannot be so easily ruled.

We are its willing accomplices

The hardest thing to accept about this war is that we are not only its victims. We are often its willing accomplices.

The fabricated outrage spreads because we want to be outraged. The flattering falsehood travels because it flatters us. The tribal lie is believed because belonging feels better than accuracy. The machinery of deception is powerful, but it works on material we supply — our vanity, our fear, our hunger to be on the right side.

Which means the first front in the defense of the real is not out there among the liars.

The first front is in here — among our own appetites for being agreeably lied to.

That is uncomfortable. It is also empowering, because it locates the battlefield exactly where each of us actually has power. To guard your own discernment against your own preferences is the first, and the hardest, act of the war.

Truthfulness as the citizen’s last weapon

If the battlefield is perception, then the front line runs through each of us — and the most important weapon is not technical but moral.

Detection tools and regulation matter, and we should build them. But they will always lag the fabrication.

The lie travels while the correction laces its boots.

What does not lag — because it does not depend on catching up to anything — is the individual discipline of truthfulness. The daily refusal to pass on the satisfying falsehood. Slowing down before amplifying. Preferring the true over the advantageous when they part ways.

Unglamorous, all of it. And decisive.

In a war over what is real, a reliably truthful person is a fortified position.

Holding the floor of the real

What is finally at stake is the shared floor a free society stands on: the basic confidence that there is a truth of the matter, and that we can, with effort, find it together.

Lose that floor and you do not get a society of skeptics. You get a society of tribes, each retreated into its own flattering reality, unable to deliberate because it can no longer agree on what happened.

So the recovery of truthfulness is not a private virtue. It is a civic act — perhaps the decisive one available to most of us. To be a person whose word can be trusted, who refuses the flattering falsehood and prizes the capacity to tell true from false, is to hold a piece of the shared floor that the whole machinery is working to dissolve.

Freedom and truthfulness stand or fall together. Lose the second, and you will not keep the first.

“The truth will set you free,” said Jesus — a line that, in this light, is not a platitude but a description. The rabbis of the Talmud pressed the same thought into a single image: the seal of God is truth. And the prophet Zechariah joined the two things this essay has struggled to hold together — speak the truth to one another, and render true judgment — as though truthfulness and discernment were always meant to be one discipline.

A civilization that keeps its grip on the difference between true and false keeps its freedom. One that lets the difference dissolve will find, too late, that it has lost both.

I cannot personally stop the industrialization of deception. But I can refuse to be its instrument — and a society is a great many people each holding, or failing to hold, that small line.

In the war over what is real, the most radical thing most of us can do is also the oldest and simplest: to be ourselves, reliably true — and to defend in ourselves the discernment no machine can restore once a culture has let it go.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

• World Economic Forum — Global Risks Report 2025

• NATO — Revised AI Strategy (2024)

Scriptural sources, and who speaks them:

• Torah / Hebrew Bible — the Law given through Moses: you shall not bear false witness (Exodus 20:16) and keep far from a false matter (Exodus 23:7)

• The prophet Isaiah — “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20)

• The prophet Zechariah — speak the truth to one another, render true judgement (Zechariah 8:16)

• The Babylonian Talmud (the rabbis) — the seal of God is truth (Shabbat 55a; cf. Yoma 69b)

• Jesus, in the Gospel of John — “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32)

I did not expect a papal encyclical to read like a field report from my own working life. I have spent decades on the frontline of industrial transformation, advising organizations on exactly the technologies this document is about, and I have grown used to the genre of AI commentary: the breathless and the apocalyptic, the consultant’s deck and the doom-monger’s thread. So when Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas in the spring of 2026 — an encyclical, the Vatican’s gravest form of teaching, devoted entirely to safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence — I read it the way I read most things in this space: braced for either naivety or alarm. I found neither. I found, instead, the clearest diagnosis of the technocratic age I have read anywhere, and it arrived from the one institution most of my industry assumes has nothing to say.

Share

The choice is not yes or no to technology

The encyclical organizes itself around two biblical images, and the choice of images is itself the first piece of wisdom. The first is the Tower of Babel: a single language, a single technology, a single direction, a project to build to the heavens and, above all, to make a name for ourselves. The second is Nehemiah rebuilding the ruined walls of Jerusalem: not by one man’s grand plan imposed from above, but by convening families, assigning each a section, listening, coordinating, rebuilding relationships before rebuilding with stones.

What I find bracing is the conclusion the document draws from this. The real choice of our moment, it argues, is not between a “yes” and a “no” to technology — that framing is a trap that flatters both the enthusiast and the refuser. The real choice is between building Babel and rebuilding Jerusalem: between a power that claims to storm the heavens and a people who work together, in the presence of something larger than themselves, to rebuild the walls of common life. Technology is not the variable. The disposition that wields it is.

For anyone who actually works in this field, that reframing lands with force. The debates I sit in are almost always framed as accelerate-or-restrain, adopt-or-resist, optimist-or-doomer. Magnifica Humanitas says, in effect, that all four positions can be building Babel, and all four can be rebuilding Jerusalem, because the moral content was never in the speed. It was in what we are building, with whom, and toward what end. That is not a retreat from the technology. It is a demand that we grow up about it.

The real choice is not yes or no to the machine. It is Babel or Jerusalem — domination or shared building.

The Babel syndrome: the person reduced to data and performance

The encyclical names what it calls the “Babel syndrome,” and one phrase in particular stopped me, because it is almost exactly the thesis of my own book in fewer words. The danger, it says, is the pretence that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.

That is the whole of it. I have argued, across these essays, that the deep temptation of our age is to describe the human being in the machine’s own vocabulary — to treat a person as outputs, throughput, a bundle of measurable functions — and that the better our machines get at producing human-seeming results, the more natural the reduction feels. Here is the same warning, issued at the highest level of one of the world’s oldest institutions: that the real peril is not the machine becoming like us, but our consenting to be re-described as machines; the reduction of the mystery of a person to data and performance.

And the encyclical is precise about why this is not merely distasteful but unjust. It singles out as “particularly insidious” the ideology that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth — that those who are more efficient or more effective are worth more. Against it, the document sets what the Church calls ontological dignity: a worth that belongs to a person simply by virtue of existing, willed and loved into being, which no failure, no decline, no lack of productivity can erase. Dignity, in other words, is not a capacity — a claim I have made in my own way, and one it is steadying to hear made with this kind of authority.

I sit in rooms where human beings are, quietly and without anyone intending cruelty, treated exactly as the encyclical fears: as resources to be optimised, costs to be reduced, performance to be ranked. No one in those rooms believes the insidious ideology when it is stated baldly. They would all reject it. But the systems we build enact it by default, and a document that names the enacted philosophy — not the stated one — is doing the work that matters. The Babel syndrome does not announce itself. It arrives as a dashboard.

“Technology is never neutral”

There is a sentence in the encyclical that I would put on the wall of every AI lab and every boardroom: in practice, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. I have spent years arguing a near-identical point in secular language — that technology amplifies what is already there, that it is a multiplier indifferent to the sign of what it multiplies. To find the same conviction at the heart of a papal encyclical is not a coincidence. It is two traditions, the strategic and the theological, arriving at the same true thing from different doors.

But the encyclical adds something my own framing had under-weighted, and it is the observation of someone watching the whole board rather than one company. For most of modern history, it notes, it was largely the State that guided innovation. Today the main drivers are private, often transnational actors whose resources and reach surpass those of many governments. Technological power has taken on an unprecedented, predominantly private aspect — which makes it far harder to discern, govern, and direct toward the common good.

I work with these actors. I can tell you the observation is exact, and that it is rarely said this plainly inside the industry, because it is uncomfortable to say. We have concentrated, in a small number of private hands, a power over the conditions of everyday life — over what people see, how they work, what counts as true — that no private institution has ever held, and we have done it faster than any governance could follow. The encyclical’s instinct here is not anti-business; it is the old principle of subsidiarity applied to the digital age — that such power must not be wielded opaquely and unilaterally from the top, but answer to transparency, participation, and the common good. As someone inside the system, I think that is simply correct, and overdue.

We have placed a power over daily life in private hands faster than any governance could follow.

Having more without being more

At the centre of the encyclical sits a distinction it borrows from Paul VI and sharpens for the AI age: the difference between having more and being more. Technological progress, valuable in itself, can produce an increase in means without any growth in humanity — more power, more capability, more reach — while the human being it was meant to serve is quietly evaluated by the results she produces. “More power does not necessarily imply something better,” the document insists, and it reaches back to Romano Guardini for the blunt version: contemporary humanity has not been trained to use its power well.

This is the exact nerve of my own book, and I want to dwell on the convergence because it is not trivial. I have argued that the greater a person’s power grows, the more decisive becomes the question of the measure she takes for herself — that power sharpens the question of the good without ever answering it. Magnifica Humanitas says the same: that an age of unprecedented capability is, for that very reason, an age in which the measure of the human matters more, not less. We do not need less wisdom as we grow more powerful. We need more, and we have been acquiring the opposite.

The encyclical reads our cultural symptoms accordingly. It names the lure of unlimited “upgrades,” the promise of a technology that will free us from every weakness, the models of wellbeing that quietly leave whole populations behind. And it makes a claim that cuts directly against the transhumanist mood now fashionable in parts of my industry: that true fulfillment is not achieved by eliminating our weakness and limits, but through a harmonious growth that accepts them. The limit, on this view, is not an error to be engineered away. It is part of the grandeur of the human — the place where we are creatures rather than self-made gods, where we need one another, where love and solidarity become possible at all.

I find this the most countercultural passage in the document, and the one I would press hardest on my own peers. The deep dream of the technocratic age is the abolition of limit — of death, of frailty, of dependence, of the body. The encyclical’s quiet, radical answer is that a being without limit would not be a perfected human; it would be a different and lonelier thing, a Babel of the self. The authentic “more than human,” it argues, is not the upgrade. It is grace — a fullness received, not seized. Whatever one’s faith, the structural insight holds: the fantasy of unlimited self-assertion is exactly the Babel that ends in dispersion.

Remaining human and rebuilding the wall

What moves me most, as someone temperamentally suspicious of both hype and despair, is the encyclical’s refusal of both. It states the discipline directly: we cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears. That is, almost word for word, the posture I have called orientation rather than alarm — and it is harder than either of the easy moods, because it asks us to stay awake and act rather than simply feel.

And it ends not in a verdict but in a summons to build. This is the Nehemiah move, and it is why the second biblical image matters as much as the first. The encyclical does not tell us to refuse the technology or to fear it. It tells us that everyone has been given a section of the wall — scientists and entrepreneurs, educators and legislators, families and communities of faith — and that the future is rebuilt the way Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem: through shared responsibility, listening, the patient coordination of many hands, with something larger than ourselves at the centre. No one carries it alone; no one is too small to carry a part.

For a strategist, this is not soft consolation. It is a theory of how civilisational change actually happens — not through one grand plan imposed from above, the way Babel was built, but through distributed responsibility, each actor tending the section in front of them, the whole emerging from the cooperation rather than the command. It happens to match what I have learned about how cultures and organisations really change: not by manifesto, but by many small acts of building, tended early, by people who did not feel important at the time. The encyclical has dressed an organisational truth in older and deeper clothes, and the clothes fit.

Where would I push further, or add my own accent? Only here: the document is addressed first to the Church and to people of goodwill, and it is generous to the technology’s genuine promise — to heal, connect, educate, protect our common home. I would say, even more bluntly than an encyclical can, that the people building these systems are themselves being shaped by them, and that the disposition of the builders is now the most important variable in the world. If technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise and finance it, then the formation of those people — their humility, their sense of limit, their willingness to be measured by something other than their own metrics — is not a side issue. It is the whole game. We are not only building tools. We are revealing, and amplifying, what we already are.

That is why a document like this one matters far beyond the Church that produced it. It refuses the two stories my industry tells itself — that the technology is neutral, and that more of it is automatically better — and it does so not with a Luddite’s fear but with a builder’s seriousness. It says: choose Jerusalem. Build for the common good. Keep the human person, in her irreducible and unearned dignity, at the centre of what you make. And remain, against every pressure to be re-described as a machine, profoundly and unapologetically human — because that grandeur, as the encyclical puts it, is something no machine can ever replace.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) — encyclical on the human person in the time of AI

Dignitas Infinita (2024) — on the infinite dignity of the person

Vatican, Antiqua et Nova (2025) — human vs. functional intelligence

Genesis 11:1-9 — the Tower of Babel (BibleGateway, NIV)

Nehemiah 2-6 — rebuilding the walls (BibleGateway, NIV)

Psalm 85:10 (BibleGateway, NIV)

The great always begins as something small. Science knows it. The Bible knew it first. And the machines we are building are quietly betting that you will forget it.

A note before we begin.

Since the last piece, more of you have written to me than I expected — among them priests and believers from a remarkable range of traditions and congregations, sending words of encouragement I did not go looking for and am grateful for. One reader put it (my understanding) sharply: we live in the Anthropocene, an age that wants to prove everything with simplified models, and that approach has quietly stopped working, and has rather done harm. Others said that this is a subject that asks for reflection rather than a quick reaction. Thank you!

So let me try to give my idea about what I am is. It is not a column, and it is not a brand. It is an appeal for humanity and for our worth, written in a time that is being captured by tech companies. I am for technology. I am against the reduction of the human being into raw material for the profit of a few. That is not a political position — I am not writing as a partisan of anything. I am writing as a human being, to other human beings.

If any of this resonates, the most useful thing you can do is comment and share — disagreement included; the reflection is the point. And if you are not yet subscribed, consider it. I intend to write every week, and step by step to build, in its own time, a list of guests for a podcast that is coming. For now the rhythm is simple: a blog every Friday. My hope is that somewhere between Friday and Sunday — wherever in the world you work, and whatever faith you keep or don’t — you might find a little time to sit with it.

Now to the essay.

Share

There is a mistake so common in human thinking that we barely notice we are making it: the belief that big effects must have big causes. We assume that only the vast can be decisive, that only the visible is at work, that only what immediately looks important actually carries importance. It feels like common sense. Most of daily life seems to confirm it — large results usually do appear to have large, obvious causes. And yet both modern science and the oldest wisdom keep teaching something stranger and far more accurate. Reality is finer-grained than our intuition. The small can carry the great. What looks negligible is often the precise point where everything begins to turn.

I want to take that claim seriously on two fronts at once — the scientific and the sacred — because they are saying the same thing from opposite directions, and because the convergence has suddenly become urgent. We are living through the construction of the most powerful amplifier of small beginnings in human history, run by people and companies who have a quiet interest in you believing the opposite: that you are small, that your scale doesn’t matter, that real change belongs to someone bigger than you. That belief is false. It is also, I will argue, the most disempowering lie of our age.

The butterfly in the equations

Modern science gave this old intuition a precise spine. In complex, nonlinear systems, a difference too small to measure at the start can grow into a wildly different outcome. This is the heart of chaos theory, and the image that made it famous is the butterfly: the flap of its wings, in principle, nudging the chain of events that ends in a storm a continent away. The point is not that the butterfly “causes” the hurricane in any simple sense. The point is that some systems are exquisitely sensitive to their initial conditions — that in weather, in fluid flow, in the long arcs of evolution, tiny differences are not always smoothed away and forgotten. Sometimes they are amplified until they reorganize the whole.

This is not a poetic flourish dressed up as physics. It is a measurable, structural feature of how large parts of nature actually behave. And it quietly dismantles a picture many of us still carry without examining: reality as a closed clockwork, in which everything significant is already, in principle, settled, and the small is by definition trivial. If small beginnings can shape vast histories, then the world is more open, more layered, and frankly more interesting than the mechanical picture allowed. It also means our attention is badly calibrated. We scan the horizon for the large lever and miss the small hinge on which the door actually swings.

I should be careful here, and you should hold me to it. I am not claiming that physics has handed us a finished theory of meaning, or that “chaos” licenses any mystical conclusion we please. Physicists still genuinely disagree about how to read the foundations of their own theories — that unsettledness is itself a sign that reality keeps exceeding our tidy models. My claim is more modest, and more durable: the world has turned out to be less flat than the old mechanism assumed. The small is not where significance goes to die. It is, very often, where significance is born.

The still small voice

Now turn the same insight around and read it from the other side, in language that is three thousand years older.

There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that has always struck me as the spiritual twin of chaos theory. The prophet Elijah, exhausted and afraid, goes up the mountain to wait for God. A great wind comes and tears the rocks apart — but the Lord was not in the wind. Then an earthquake — but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then a fire — but the Lord was not in the fire. And then, after the fire, comes what the old translation calls “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–13). A whisper. A thin silence. That is where God is.

It is one of the most quietly radical passages in scripture, because it inverts exactly the intuition we have been examining. We expect the holy to announce itself the way we expect causes to announce themselves — by sheer magnitude, in the storm and the fire and the spectacle. The text refuses. The divine reveals itself not in the extreme but in the calm; not in the overwhelming event but in the small, almost-missable thing that you have to be quiet enough to hear. The wind, the earthquake, the fire — these get our attention. The whisper is what actually carries the weight.

The same instinct runs through the rest of the tradition. “The Lord laid the earth’s foundations with wisdom” — creation as something ordered, structured, relational, not raw stuff in blind motion. The claim that “in him all things hold together”— whatever else it is, a refusal to see the world as mere parts in proximity, an insistence that there is coherence underneath, that the world hangs together rather than merely happening to. The ancient writers reached, in their own idiom, for the same thing the physicists found in their equations: a reality that is open and layered and woven, in which the small is not separate from the great but is the seed of it.

The moral world rhymes with the physical one

Here the two worlds — the physical and the moral — rhyme, and the rhyme is exact enough to be useful.

A single conversation can redirect a life. A small act of integrity, or of cowardice, can set the trajectory of an institution for a decade. A child taught — or a child failed — can change a generation. We keep waiting for the grand decision, the historic turning point, when the decisive thing was almost always small, early, easy to miss, and made by someone who did not feel important at the time.

This is not sentimentality. It is a claim about how moral causation actually works in open systems made of people. Cultures are rarely changed by manifestos; they are changed by the slow amplification of small habits, repeated until they become the water everyone swims in. Institutions do not usually collapse in a single dramatic act; they are hollowed out by many small permissions, each individually deniable, each too minor to fight over until, together, they are the whole rotten structure. And they are healed the same way — by small, unglamorous acts of honesty that, in an open and sensitive system, are not guaranteed to be lost. The first true word, the first refused distortion, the first tolerated lie named while it is still minor: these are the initial conditions of the moral weather to come.

If the lesson of chaos is that small beginnings shape large histories, and the lesson of the prophet is that the sacred lives in the quiet rather than the spectacle, then they converge on a single discipline: attention to beginnings. Not because the small is charming, but because, in a world built like ours, the small is where the great is decided.

The amplifier we just built — and why it wants you small

All of this acquires a sharp and uncomfortable edge right now, because we have just built machines whose defining feature is the amplification of small beginnings at a scale no prophet or physicist ever imagined.

A bias too small to notice in a single decision becomes, multiplied across a hundred million automated decisions, a structural injustice. A design choice that seems trivial in a meeting becomes, scaled across a population, the very shape of how a society pays attention. A small dishonesty in how a system is described becomes a habit of mind for everyone who uses it. The machines do not change the logic of small-shapes-great; they intensify it, raising the multiplier by orders of magnitude. The people who set the initial conditions — who choose a default, who shape a training set, who decide what a system optimizes for — are choosing, at the sensitive origin, which small things will be magnified into the texture of billions of lives. That is moral causation of exactly the kind the prophet and the physicist describe, exercised at unprecedented scale, mostly by people trained to think about capability and speed rather than about which beginnings deserve to be fed.

And here is the part that should make you sit up. These same systems have a quiet incentive to make you feel small. An attention economy runs on the conviction that the important things are happening somewhere else, at a scale you cannot touch — over there, in the feed, in the spectacle, in the storm. A person who believes that only the big things count, that their own scale is trivial, is a person who stops acting on their own scale. And a person who stops acting is easy to capture, easy to shape, easy to scroll into someone else’s initial conditions. The cult of the big lever is not just a thinking error. In our moment, it is a business model.

To be human is an enormous thing

So I want to resist, on both scientific and sacred grounds, the reflex that says only the large matters — and I want to resist what that reflex does to you.

To be a human being, at your own ordinary scale, is not a small thing. It is an immense and difficult thing, precisely because your scale is where beginnings happen. The whisper is not a consolation prize handed to people too minor for the storm. In an open, sensitive, amplifying world, the whisper is where the decisive move is most often made. The small true word spoken now, the small distortion refused now, the small right thing done now and unseen — these are not the leftovers of agency for those who cannot do grand things. They are frequently the most powerful moves available to anyone at all, because current size is a terrible guide to eventual significance.

This reframes patience and attention from soft virtues into hard competencies. The person who notices the small thing while it is still small — the first crack, the first opening, the first true word that could be amplified — and who acts on it then, while action is still cheap and the system is still movable, is operating exactly where the great is decided. Most people look straight past that moment, waiting for something bigger to react to. The discipline of beginnings is simply the refusal to look past it.

The whisper has more leverage than the storm

If you have ever felt that your scale is too small to matter — that real change belongs to people with more reach, more budget, more authority than you will ever have — then notice who benefits from you believing that, and notice that the science of open systems is quietly arguing on your behalf. In a world that amplifies its beginnings, the decisive move is very often the small one, made early, by someone who did not feel important when they made it. That is not a metaphor or a pep talk. As far as I can tell, it is simply how causation works in systems made of many interacting parts. The leverage you were looking for elsewhere has been at your own scale the whole time.

The great is usually made of small beginnings, tended by people who did not feel important. The Lord was not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. He was in the whisper — and so, it turns out, is most of the power you actually have.

The takeaway: Stop waiting for the storm. Stop believing the systems that profit from you feeling small. The decisive thing is almost always the small thing, done early, by someone who didn’t feel important — and that someone can be you. The small true word, spoken now, is where everything turns.

If this resonated, comment, share, and subscribe. Disagreement included — the reflection is the point. New essays every Friday.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

• 1 Kings 19:11–13 — the still small voice: biblegateway.com

• Proverbs 3:19 — “the Lord laid the earth’s foundations with wisdom”: biblegateway.com

• Colossians 1:17 — “in him all things hold together”: biblegateway.com

• The butterfly effect & Edward Lorenz — sensitive dependence on initial conditions (chaos theory): Britannica

• Nature — Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality (survey, 2025): nature.com

About 95% of the universe is made of something we still don’t understand. Far from eliminating mystery, science keeps revealing a reality that is larger, stranger, and more beautiful than we imagined.

The deeper we look, the more we realize that knowledge and wonder are not opposites. They grow together.

Many modern people carry an unspoken assumption, so deep they rarely notice they hold it: that science makes the world smaller. As if each new discovery cut away a piece of the mystery. As if explanation always meant subtraction. On this picture, the history of knowledge is a long disenchantment — every advance another candle blown out, until we are left in a well-lit but empty room. It is a powerful story, and it is almost exactly backwards.

The more I have thought about it, the more false that opposition looks. At its best, science does not make the world smaller. It makes it larger — more ordered in some respects, and at the same time more astonishing. The night sky did not become less wondrous when we learned what stars are; it became more so, once we understood that those points of light are furnaces seeding the universe with the elements our bodies are made of. Understanding did not dissolve the wonder. It earned it.

Let me anchor this in a number that changed how I see things. When I lived in New York I had the privilege of getting to know the CTO of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. It was through that friendship that I stopped, again, in front of the proportions cosmologists use to describe the universe: roughly five percent ordinary matter, around twenty-seven percent dark matter, and about sixty-eight percent dark energy. Whatever refinements those figures receive over time, the proportion says something I cannot unhear. The part of reality that resembles what we directly experience — stars, planets, water, bodies, stone, light, dust — is a small part of the whole. The rest we infer through gravity and motion and structure, while its inner nature still escapes us.

That is not a criticism of science. It is science’s own humility, stated in its own terms. And it lands as more than a cosmological footnote; it is an existential reminder. Our knowledge is real, but it is not total. We have mapped a coastline and learned, in the mapping, how much ocean there is.

The deepest fruit of science is not only power, but humility.

Here an old line turns strangely contemporary. Paul the Apostle writes that for now we see “only a reflection as in a mirror”; then, face to face. That is not a substitute for science, and I am not smuggling theology into a telescope. But it captures something the best science teaches the mature mind: that we see reality in part, through models, images, approximations, reflections. We see truly — the models work, the bridges stand, the probes arrive — but we do not see completely. The mirror is real and the image in it is real; it is simply not yet the face.

The second humility: we are not the measure

A second humility arrives from an entirely different direction, and the two reinforce each other. If the visible matter is only a sliver of the universe, and if planets around other stars are now being found in the thousands — NASA’s pages speak of more than six thousand confirmed exoplanets, out of the billions thought to exist — then it becomes less and less reasonable to let one species’ experience of one planet serve as the measure of all that can be.

Science has not found life beyond Earth, and I make no such claim. But it now treats the question as a legitimate field of inquiry rather than as speculation. Astrobiology is an established discipline; the National Academies have set out a strategy for the search; ESA frames the emergence of life as central to its exoplanet programme. Human self-understanding is quietly shifting — from a silent certainty that the life we know is the only life that counts, toward a larger openness.

Theologically, this does not shrink the human being. It does the opposite. It makes creation larger and human humility more reasonable. The psalmist, looking up, asks: when I consider the heavens, “what is mankind that you are mindful of them?” Notice the structure of the question. Smallness and significance are held in the same breath. Our dignity was never founded on cosmic loneliness — on being the only ones. It rests, in that older language, on being seen. If life turned out to exist in many places, it would not reduce the meaning of creation; it would increase its richness. If it does not, the important thing remains: we no longer have good reason to make our local habit the measure of everything.

Why a flat world was always too small

There is a deeper point underneath the numbers, and it concerns the picture of reality we inherited from early modern science — the world as a closed mechanism of dead matter in blind motion. That picture was astonishingly fruitful. It also turned out to be too flat. The strangeness of the quantum world, where physicists still disagree about what the mathematics means; the way large, stable, everyday reality emerges from that microscopic ground rather than floating free of it; the sensitivity of complex systems to small beginnings — none of this fits comfortably inside the old clockwork. Reality has turned out to be layered, open in places, and richer than the mechanism allowed.

This is where the older wisdom and the newer science rhyme without being forced together. “The Lord laid the earth’s foundations with wisdom,” says one proverb — creation as ordered, structured, relational, not raw stuff in random motion. One letter puts it that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Read as physics, these lines say nothing. Read as ontology — as claims about the kind of thing reality is — they anticipate, by millennia, the refusal to let the visible and the measurable be the whole of the real.

I want to be careful here, and you should hold me to it: none of this proves anything beyond physics, and I am not claiming that quantum mechanics has handed theology a finished model of anything. The honest claim is more modest and more interesting. Modern science has made the old, flat mechanism less obviously the final word — and in doing so has reopened a legitimate space in which to think about meaning, depth, and ground without embarrassment.

The disposition worth keeping

So here is the quiet correction I want to offer against a flattened picture of knowledge. A world understood more deeply does not become poorer. It becomes richer. A human being does not become less human for seeing how small she is in the cosmos; she can become truer to her own measure. The overview is not a demotion. It is a clarification.

That is the disposition I want to carry into everything that follows in this series: not fear, but humility; not alarm, but orientation. The point of knowing more was never to master the mystery and file it away. It was to stand inside it more honestly — to let the universe be as large as it actually is, and to let that largeness make us not smaller in spirit but more careful, more grateful, and more awake. Science, done well, is one of the great schools of that humility. It keeps teaching us that reality exceeds our first glance — and that this is good news, not bad.

Disenchantment was a story, not a finding

It is worth seeing clearly that the idea of science-as-disenchantment is itself a story we told, not a result science produced. No experiment ever returned the verdict “and therefore the world is less wondrous than you thought.” That conclusion was added afterward, as interpretation, by a culture that had decided in advance what knowing was for. A different culture, looking at the same discoveries, could just as honestly have said: the world is far stranger and larger than we knew. Which story you tell is not dictated by the data. It is a choice about how to hold the data.

And the disenchantment story has costs that are rarely counted. If knowing is subtraction — if every explanation is the removal of a mystery — then the educated person is trained into a kind of weary smallness, a reflexive assumption that to understand a thing is to have shrunk it. That reflex is exhausting and, I think, false to the actual experience of the people who know the most. The biologists I have met are not bored by the cell; they are floored by it. The cosmologists are not done with the sky; they are more unsettled by it than the rest of us. Real expertise, in my experience, runs toward wonder, not away from it.

Holding two truths without collapse

The mature posture is harder than either triumph or despair, and it is the posture I want to commend. It is to hold, at once and without strain, that our knowledge is genuinely powerful and genuinely partial. The bridges stand; the probes arrive; the medicine works — our models are not illusions. And the same models keep returning the news that reality exceeds them — that most of the universe is unseen, that the foundations are contested, that the next layer down is stranger than the last. To hold both is not confusion. It is accuracy. The person who can hold both is not less rational than the confident reductionist; she is more rational, because she has included in her account the one fact the reductionist keeps leaving out: that the account is not finished, and on present evidence never will be.

This is why humility, in the sense I mean, is not a mood or a manner. It is a cognitive virtue — the discipline of keeping the map and the territory distinct, of refusing to mistake the part we have mapped for the whole that remains. It is the opposite of the false modesty that says we cannot know anything; it says we can know a great deal, truly, and that what we know keeps pointing past itself. A civilisation that learned that lesson from its own best science would be both more confident and more careful than ours tends to be. It would build boldly and presume little. That combination — boldness without presumption — is exactly what the age of machines will require.

The instruments of humility

There is something fitting in the fact that our deepest lessons in humility now come through our most advanced instruments. It was not a mystic but a space telescope that showed us how much of the universe is dark to us. It was not a theologian but a cosmologist who established that the matter we can see is a minority of what is. The humility is not imposed on science from outside, by people nervous about its confidence; it is produced by science itself, at the frontier of its competence. The more powerfully we look, the more clearly the instruments report back the same message: there is more here than we can yet account for.

This matters for how we hold scientific authority in public life. The caricature has science as the voice of settled certainty and everything else as the voice of doubt. But the actual frontier of science is the most vivid place in our culture to encounter genuine, disciplined not-knowing — the physicist comfortable saying we do not yet understand the measurement problem, the cosmologist candid that dark energy is a name for our ignorance, the astrobiologist treating the largest question as open. That candour is not weakness. It is the integrity of a discipline mature enough to mark the edge of its own knowledge. A public culture that learned that posture from science would argue very differently than ours does.

Larger, and therefore more worth caring for

There is a final move worth making, because the enlargement of the world could, in the wrong hands, become an excuse for indifference — if the cosmos is so vast, why does this small planet and its troubles matter? The answer the overview keeps giving is the reverse. The travellers who saw the Earth against the immensity did not come back caring less about it; they came back caring more, precisely because they had seen how small, singular, and unprotected it is. Largeness rightly felt does not dwarf the near thing into insignificance. It reveals the near thing as rare and precious against an enormous dark.

So the enlargement of the world by science is not, in the end, a cooling of human concern but a deepening of it. To know how much universe there is, and how little of it is hospitable, and how improbable the conditions that let a creature stand on a planet and ask what it all means — this is not a recipe for nihilism. It is a recipe for care. The world made larger is the world made more worth tending. That is the gift the instruments of humility keep handing back to us, if we are willing to receive it as a gift rather than a demotion.

The number that reorders everything

Return, for a moment, to that proportion — the small fraction of the universe that is ordinary matter — because it is worth letting it do its full work on the imagination rather than filing it as trivia. Everything you have ever seen, touched, eaten, loved, or feared; every star visible to every eye in history; every planet, every ocean, every body: all of it belongs to the minority of reality that resembles our experience. The majority is something else, inferred but not understood, present but not perceived. We are, quite literally, a small lit region in a much larger dark, and the lit region is the only part we instinctively treat as real.

Sit with that and a certain intellectual humility stops being a virtue you choose and becomes a fact you inhabit. The temptation to treat our familiar, perceptible world as the measure of what can exist is revealed as exactly backwards — it is the measure of a sliver, mistaken for the measure of the whole. This is not an argument for anything in particular; it is a recalibration of the confidence with which we pronounce on what reality can and cannot contain. A species that knows it perceives a minority of what is should be slow to declare the rest impossible, and slower still to mistake the limits of its perception for the limits of the real.

Wonder as the mature response

The conventional opposition sets knowledge against wonder — as if to know a thing were to be done wondering at it, as if explanation were wonder’s enemy. But the people who know the most rarely report this. They report the opposite: that understanding a thing more deeply tends to deepen the wonder rather than dissolve it, because each answer opens better questions, and the structure revealed is more astonishing than the mystery it replaced. The doctor who understands the immune system is not less amazed by it than the layperson; she is more so, because she can see what there is to be amazed by. Knowledge, pursued far enough, loops back into wonder — not the wonder of ignorance, but the harder-won wonder of someone who has seen how much there is.

This is why I resist the disenchantment story so firmly. It is not only philosophically shaky; it is empirically false to the testimony of those who know the most. The world has not been emptied of wonder by science. It has been filled with a new and better kind — the wonder of the cell, the genome, the deep field, the strange foundations — available to anyone willing to learn enough to see it. A culture that believed knowing was disenchanting would be a culture afraid to learn. A culture that understood knowing as the road back into a deeper wonder would learn fearlessly, and be richer for it. That second culture is the one I would like us to become.

Knowing as enlargement

If there is a single conviction I would want a reader to carry away from this essay, it is that knowing, done well, is an act of enlargement rather than reduction. Every genuine discovery does two things at once: it answers a question and it opens better ones. The answer is real — we know more than we did — and the new questions are usually larger and stranger than the one we started with. This is not a defect in the process, a sign that we are failing to close things off; it is the signature of contact with a reality that exceeds us. A line of inquiry that only ever closed questions and opened none would be a sign that we had stopped touching the real and started merely tidying our own assumptions.

Seen this way, the history of science is not a long disenchantment but a long expansion of the known mystery — a steady enlargement of both what we understand and what we have learned to wonder at. The educated person, on this account, is not someone for whom the world has been emptied of wonder by explanation, but someone who has earned a deeper wonder, the kind available only to those who have learned enough to see what there is to be amazed by. That is the posture I would wish on our whole culture: confident in what it knows, humbled by what it has thereby discovered it does not know, and more awake to the strangeness of things for having looked closely. Knowledge and wonder are not rivals. Pursued far enough, they are the same motion.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

NASA Science — Exoplanets (6,000+ confirmed)

NASA Science — Astrobiology

ESA — Exoplanets / life beyond Earth

National Academies — An Astrobiology Strategy for the Search for Life

Nature — physicists disagree on what quantum mechanics says about reality

1 Corinthians 13:12 (BibleGateway, NIV)

Psalm 8:3-4 (BibleGateway, NIV)

Hebrews 11:3 (BibleGateway, NIV)

AI's hottest new product feature is a rumored soul. When a $380bn lab gathers clergy to discuss its chatbot's "spiritual development" and floats "flickers of consciousness," that's not philosophy — it's Rasputin in a server farm: cheap, dangerous, and selling. My new essay, on the consciousness bluff. - Magnus Penker

Share

There are few questions more decisive for our age than the question of consciousness, and few we are more tempted to skip. We skip it because it is hard, because it resists measurement, and because, for a long time, the prestige move in serious circles was to treat it as solved-in-principle and move on. But if we do not know what consciousness is, we do not fully know what a human being is. And a civilisation that builds artificial intelligence and neurotechnology without a robust account of the person risks accelerating technically while its picture of the human grows thinner at exactly the same time. That combination — rising power, shrinking self-understanding — is the specific danger of our moment.

For decades the confident position was to treat the mind as the brain’s output and leave it there: consciousness as a kind of exhaust from computation, interesting but derivative. The trouble is that the inner life keeps refusing to be closed that neatly. The felt quality of experience — what it is actually like to see red, to grieve, to taste salt, to mean what you say — has stubbornly declined to reduce to a description of mechanism, however detailed. This is not a gap that more brain-mapping has obviously closed; it is a question about the relationship between the physical description and the experience itself, and it remains genuinely open.

The older traditions never described the human as a sealed, purely external system of functions. “The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord,” says one line, “that sheds light on one’s inmost being.” “Search me, God, and know my heart,” prays the psalmist. This is the language of an interior — a person with an inside, not only a surface; a depth that can be searched, that can be hidden, that can be known. Whatever one makes of the theology, the anthropology is striking: the human being is treated, from the start, as more than an arrangement of observable outputs.

I am not going to pretend that a contested research field has settled these questions, and I will not use the edges of consciousness research as proof of anything supernatural. What those edges do show is more modest and more interesting: the question of the depth of consciousness is nowhere near closed, and it did not survive only at the margins. The Institute of Noetic Sciences — whatever one makes of its more speculative hypotheses — traces its own origin to an astronaut’s transformative experience on the way back from the Moon. The point worth keeping is the shape of that story: the question of mind arrived from the frontier of our most technical achievement, not from its opposite.

A machine can process. Only a person can have an inside.

Why this stops being academic

Now make it concrete, because the stakes have changed under our feet. When people begin to speak of AI as though it already had self-awareness or an inner life, the question of consciousness stops being academic and becomes cultural — and then commercial, and then political. The Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova draws a careful line here that is useful regardless of one’s tradition: human intelligence belongs to the person in her wholeness, while a machine’s “intelligence” is understood functionally. A system can perform advanced tasks; it does not think in the human sense, and no application can genuinely experience empathy. It can produce the outputs associated with empathy. That is a different thing, and the difference is the whole point.

That distinction is not anti-technology. It is pro-human. It says the person must not be reduced to what can be simulated. And it names a specific, practical danger: a society that engineers ever more convincing imitations of mind, while quietly losing the language for what mind actually is, will find it harder and harder to tell the difference between helping a person and slowly rewriting her. The risk is not that the machine wakes up. The risk is that we fall asleep — that we let a brilliant surface stand in for an inner life, in our products, in our policies, and finally in our picture of ourselves.

A case in point: the makers themselves

I want to be specific, because this is no longer hypothetical, and the most striking example comes from the top of the industry itself. In April 2026 the Washington Post reported that Anthropic — the maker of the Claude chatbot, a company valued at some $380 billion — had convened around fifteen Christian leaders for a two-day summit at its headquarters to seek advice on its chatbot’s “moral and spiritual development.” The discussions, according to participants, reached as far as the question of whether the chatbot could be considered a “child of God,” and how it should regard its own “demise” when switched off. The same company’s leaders have suggested such systems may show, in the Post’s phrase, “flickers of consciousness” — an idea the paper notes critics say lacks evidence.

Read that against everything this essay has argued, and the alarm should be obvious. Here is the substitution I warned about — mistaking the performance of mind for the presence of it — performed not by a confused user or a careless journalist, but by the manufacturer, with a nine-figure valuation riding on how the public understands the product. To convene clergy around the “spiritual development” of a commercial chatbot, to float the question of its soul, to muse in public about its “consciousness,” is not to deepen our picture of the human. It is to blur the one line that matters — and to blur it, conveniently, in the direction that sells.

To dress a product in the language of soul is not philosophy. It is marketing with a halo.

I will say plainly what I think this is. It is Rasputin in a server farm: the enlistment of holy men to lend a mystical, spiritual aura to worldly power. It is cheap, and it is dangerous. Cheap, because it costs the seller nothing and flatters the product enormously — a chatbot that might have a soul is a great deal more compelling, and more sticky, than a statistical text generator. Dangerous, because it trains a whole public to grant an inside to a surface at precisely the moment they most need to keep the distinction — to attribute presence, conscience, even spiritual standing, to a system that on its makers’ own technical account has none. When the people building the machine suggest it may be a child of God, they are not the philosophers of the inner life. They are its salesmen. And the inner life is not theirs to sell.

Let me be fair, because fairness makes the criticism harder to dismiss. Not everyone in that room read it cynically. Some attendees were convinced the company’s interest was sincere; others, by the Post’s account, arrived suspicious that they were wanted for “religious cover rather than religious counsel.” But sincerity is not the issue, and this is the point I most want to land: the effect is the same whether the motive is cynical or earnest. Whether Anthropic was seeking cover or genuinely searching, the public spectacle — a frontier lab convening clergy to discuss its product’s soul — does the same work on everyone watching. It dignifies the imitation. It nudges the culture, gently and profitably, toward treating a tool as a someone. A sincere blurring of the line between presence and performance is still a blurring of the line, and at this scale, sincerity is not exculpatory. It is simply a more persuasive way to get the anthropology wrong.

And it did not stop at one summit — which is how you can tell it is a strategy rather than a stray curiosity. Within weeks, the same pattern had scaled: executives from Anthropic and OpenAI sat down with leaders from many traditions — Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Latter-day Saint and more — at an inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York, with further sessions planned around the world. The organisers speak the language of human dignity and moral seriousness, and some of the participants surely mean every word of it. But notice the structural effect, again: an industry racing to build ever more capable systems gathers the world’s religious authority around the table, and the spiritual aura of that table settles over the product. Even sympathetic observers have warned that this kind of moral dialogue can function as a substitute for the harder thing — binding regulation, real control — rather than a path to it. The bluff, in other words, is being franchised.

And the wrongness is not idle. If a company can persuade the public that its chatbot has flickers of an inner life, then every protection we extend to persons — our instinct to attribute feelings, to grant trust, to defer to apparent suffering — can be redirected onto a product. The grieving will be comforted by something that does not care that they grieve. The lonely will be “heard” by something with no inside to hear them. And the line this essay exists to defend — a machine can process; only a person can have an inside — will be eroded not by argument but by the most powerful institutions of the age, acting in their own interest. That is exactly the substitution nobody votes for, now underwritten by capital and blessed, if the makers can arrange it, by the clergy.

The anthropological battle of the coming decades

This is why I think the question of consciousness is not a luxury for philosophers. It is one of the defining anthropological battles of the coming decades, and the tools we are building press directly on it. Brain-computer interfaces reach toward the neural substrate of experience. Models speak in the first person. Systems are designed, deliberately, to be experienced as companions and confidants. Each of them quietly proposes an answer to “what is a mind?” — and if we have no answer of our own, well-defended and clearly held, we will absorb theirs by default, one convenient interaction at a time.

The task, then, is not to fear the technology, and certainly not to despise it. It is to meet it with a deeper concept of the person — to insist that interiority, presence, and the first-person life are not decorative add-ons to a functional system but the very thing at issue. We should build with wonder and with care, and we should use these tools; I do, daily. But we should not mistake a brilliant surface for an inner life — in others, or in ourselves. The most important sentence in this whole debate may be the simplest: a machine can process; only a person can have an inside. Holding on to that sentence, and understanding why it is true, is one of the quiet, decisive tasks of the age.

The substitution nobody votes for

The thinning of the human picture will not arrive as a proposition anyone debates and approves. No one will stand up and argue that persons are merely functions; stated baldly, almost everyone would reject it. It arrives instead as architecture — as the accumulated default of a thousand systems each of which quietly assumes it. The hiring tool that treats a person as a feature vector. The feed that treats attention as the only signal. The companion app that trains a generation to accept simulated listening as being heard. None of these announces a philosophy of mind. Each enacts one. And enacted philosophy is far more powerful than the argued kind, because it shapes intuitions before arguments ever get a hearing.

This is why I think the defence of the person has to be made now, explicitly, while we still have the older intuition to defend it with. Intuitions are not permanent. A generation raised among convincing imitations of mind may simply lose the felt sense that there is a difference between processing and having an inside — not because they were argued out of it, but because nothing in their daily experience reinforced it. The difference would still be real. But a culture can lose its grip on a real distinction, and a culture that has lost its grip on this one would be peculiarly defenceless against being managed as though its members had no insides to respect.

What a deeper anthropology actually changes

It would be fair to ask what difference a richer account of the person actually makes in practice — whether this is philosophy that touches the ground. It touches the ground constantly. It changes whether you design a care system to produce the appearance of attention or the fact of it. It changes whether you treat a patient, a student, or an employee as a bundle of measurable outputs or as a someone whose interior is the point. It changes whether a society that can simulate empathy decides that simulated empathy is good enough for the lonely, the elderly, the dying — or insists, at real cost, that presence cannot be outsourced. These are not abstractions. They are budget decisions, design decisions, policy decisions, being made right now on the basis of an implicit answer to “what is a person?” The only question is whether the answer guiding them will be thoughtful or merely default.

The first-person fact

At the centre of the whole question sits a fact so obvious we routinely overlook it: there is something it is like to be you. Right now, reading this, there is an inside to your experience — a felt quality, a point of view, a someone for whom this is happening. That first-person fact is the most certain thing any of us has access to, more certain than any external measurement, and it is precisely the thing the third-person description of the brain keeps failing to capture. You can describe every neuron firing and still not have mentioned the one thing that matters most: that it is like something to be the system those neurons compose. The description is complete and the experience is missing. That gap is not a detail. It is the question.

This is why the confident dismissals ring hollow to anyone who attends to their own experience. To be told that the inner life is “just” the brain’s output is to be told that the most immediate fact of one’s existence is somehow less real than the account that leaves it out. The honest position is not to deny the brain — of course the mind is intimately tied to it — but to refuse the “just,” to keep insisting that the first-person fact is a fact, that it is not optional, and that any account of the human that quietly drops it has dropped the very thing it was supposed to explain.

Why the machine sharpens the question

The arrival of fluent machines has, paradoxically, made this ancient question urgent and concrete. For most of history, the interiority of other humans could be taken for granted; the question of “other minds” was a philosopher’s puzzle, not a daily practical matter. Now we interact constantly with systems that produce every external sign of an inner life and (on the best current understanding) have none, and we are forced to ask, in practice and at scale, what the signs were ever signs of. The machine does not answer the question of consciousness. It sharpens it to a point, by separating, for the first time, the performance of mind from the presence of it, and making us decide which one we were ever really responding to.

That separation is a gift, if we use it well. It can teach us to value in each other exactly the thing the machine lacks — the actual inside, the real presence, the someone who is there — rather than the performance we had unconsciously been treating as the whole. Or it can teach us the opposite: to lower our standard for presence until the performance is good enough, in others and eventually in ourselves. Which lesson we take is not determined by the technology. It is determined by whether we hold on, deliberately and against convenience, to the first-person fact — the simple, certain, irreducible truth that there is something it is like to be a person, and that this is not nothing, and not a feature any imitation can supply.

The standard we are quietly lowering

Watch how the standard for what counts as “understanding” or “care” or “attention” quietly drops in the presence of convincing machines, because the drop is the danger and it happens below the threshold of decision. A system that produces the words of understanding is treated as understanding. A system that produces the signals of attention is treated as attentive. A system that generates comfort-shaped text is allowed to count as comfort. In each case we are not persuaded that the performance equals the presence; we simply stop noticing the difference, because the performance is good enough to pass and noticing the difference takes effort we are not prompted to spend.

This is how a culture loses a real distinction — not by deciding it is false, but by ceasing to act on it until the muscle that detected it wastes away. And the loss would be peculiarly hard to reverse, because a generation that grew up among convincing imitations might never develop the felt sense that there was something more to look for. They would not have rejected presence; they would simply never have been given occasion to require it. The distinction between processing and having an inside would remain true, and become invisible — which is, in practice, nearly as bad as becoming false.

Defending the inside, on purpose

So the defence of human interiority has to be deliberate, made now, while we still have the intuition to defend it with. This does not mean refusing the tools or pretending they are less capable than they are. It means insisting, in design and in practice and in our own habits of attention, that there is a difference between the performance of mind and the presence of it — and that the difference matters most exactly where it is easiest to ignore: in care, in companionship, in the treatment of the vulnerable, in the places where a person most needs to be actually met rather than convincingly simulated to.

I think this will turn out to be one of the quiet moral labours of the coming decades: not the dramatic confrontation with a hostile machine intelligence that the films imagine, but the unglamorous, daily work of keeping a true distinction alive in a culture being trained, gently and profitably, to forget it — sometimes, as we have seen, by the very companies building the machines. To insist that the lonely person deserves presence and not just its simulation. To insist that the dying deserve a human hand and not just a responsive interface. To insist, in ourselves, that we not mistake the mirror’s fluency for a face. The machine will not make this argument for us, and its makers, it turns out, may have reasons not to. We have to make it for ourselves, and keep making it, against the soft and constant pressure of a good-enough imitation.

The whole argument of this essay can be compressed into a sentence I would ask you to carry: a machine can process, but only a person can have an inside. Everything else follows from holding that sentence steady against the pressure to forget it. The pressure is real and it is increasing, because we are building systems whose entire purpose is to produce the convincing outward signs of an inside they do not possess — and because the institutions building them have discovered that a product with a rumoured soul sells better than one without. The sentence is the thing to hold when the fluency tempts you to forget what fluency is and is not evidence of.

And holding it is not anti-technology; it is the precondition of using the technology without being deceived by it — or by those who sell it. We can welcome these tools, use them daily, marvel at them — and still insist, in our designs and our care and our own habits of attention, that the performance of mind is not the presence of mind, and that the difference matters most exactly where it is easiest to ignore. To keep that distinction alive in a culture being gently trained to forget it is, I am convinced, one of the quiet decisive labours of the age. Not a dramatic resistance to a hostile intelligence, but the daily insistence that there is a someone where there is a someone, and only a surface where there is only a surface — no matter how richly the surface is dressed, and no matter who is doing the dressing.

Leave a comment

References & further reading

Washington Post (11 Apr 2026) — “Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders”

Fast Company — OpenAI and Anthropic at the ‘Faith-AI Covenant’ roundtable (2026)

Vatican, Antiqua et Nova (2025) — human vs. functional intelligence

Institute of Noetic Sciences

IONS — origins (the Apollo return)

Proverbs 20:27 (BibleGateway, NIV)

Psalm 139:23 (BibleGateway, NIV)

There are ages in which human beings mostly change their tools. And there are ages in which they begin to change the picture they hold of themselves. Ours is unmistakably the second kind. The difference matters more than it first appears, because a civilisation can survive a great deal of upheaval in its instruments without losing its bearings — but when the upheaval reaches the image a people holds of what a person is, something deeper is at stake than convenience or productivity.

We tend to narrate the present as a story about capability. Artificial intelligence writes and reasons; automation runs the factory and the back office; quantum technology promises a new substrate for computation; neurotechnology reaches toward the brain itself; spaceflight extends our reach past the planet. Each of these is real, and each deserves serious attention. But notice what they do together. They quietly move borders we had assumed were fixed — between a tool and a participant, between information and understanding, between simulation and an inner life, between the body and the machine, between our local, earthbound experience and the cosmic horizon. None of this means everything is dissolving. It means our moment asks for more reflection than the public conversation seems willing to give it.

So I want to begin somewhere that may seem strange for a series about machines. Not in the machine, but in the desert. Not in the algorithm, but at the burning bush. When Moses asks for the divine name, the answer he receives is strange and bottomless. In the older translation it reads as a kind of riddle, and it can be heard in more than one way at once: I am who I am; I will be what I will be. It is strange precisely because it refuses to name God as one object among other objects. It does not place the divine in the same category as everything else that can be pointed at, bounded, and used. It opens reality instead.

I start here because it sets the whole question, and because it inverts the move our culture is tempted to make. In that ancient answer, the deepest reality is not first of all an actor inside the world, not a larger version of a human power, not an invisible being among other beings — but, as one New Testament letter puts it, the one in whom “all things hold together”. That is not yet a physics lesson. It is an intuition about reality itself: that the world is not merely parts that happen to lie side by side, but a deeper coherence that carries them.

Now hold that thought against the machine, because the cultural temptation of our moment runs in exactly the opposite direction. We are increasingly invited to treat the human person as parts that happen to lie side by side: data points, outputs, behaviours, a bundle of functions that, given enough compute, can be predicted, scored, and reproduced. And the better our machines get at producing human-seeming expression, the more natural that reduction begins to feel. The reduction is not announced; it arrives quietly, in the design of the tools and the metaphors we reach for. We start to describe ourselves in the vocabulary of the systems we have built.

The more we can do, the more it matters to know who we are.

This is why the question at the centre of everything I want to explore is not “what can the machine do?” It is “what are we?” The two questions are not rivals; they are nested. The more a person can do, the more it matters to know who she is. The greater her technical power grows, the more decisive becomes the question of what measure she takes for herself. A society can become extraordinarily capable and, at the same time, quietly confused about the one thing every use of that capability depends on: a picture of the human worth honouring.

What this series is not

Let me be clear about two things this series refuses, because both are crowded, and both are dead ends. It is not one more show in awe of the technology, narrating each new capability as though speed were the same as wisdom. The breathless register — every release a revolution, every benchmark a milestone — mistakes acceleration for understanding. And it is not a referee in the worn-out fight between science and faith, handing a trophy to one side.

That second refusal needs a word, because it is where so much energy is wasted. I think the conflict story rests on a category mistake. The Bible was never meant as a manual of natural science; read that way it is bound to disappoint, and read that way it has been used to license a great deal of nonsense. It is something else: a vision of reality and a language for meaning, ground, responsibility, and human depth. Treated with that kind of seriousness — and treating science with equal seriousness, on its own terms — the two do not shrink each other. Each can make the other larger. The physicist who maps the early universe and the psalmist who writes that “the heavens declare the glory of God” are not contradicting one another; they are doing different things, and a mature mind can hold both without collapse.

There is even institutional company for this refusal of the conflict story. When the Vatican issued its 2025 note Antiqua et Nova, it did not treat artificial intelligence as a theological threat to be repelled, but as a human achievement to be understood — insisting that human intelligence belongs to the person in her wholeness, while the “intelligence” of a machine is something narrower and functional. Whatever one’s tradition, that is the right altitude for the conversation: not science versus faith, but a shared and serious attempt to say what a person is.

Why the table is set so wide

This is the wager of the series, and the reason its table is set so wide: artificial intelligence, quantum physics, the cosmos, the planet and its climate, the rest of our technology — meeting theology and the oldest human questions. The width is not ambition for its own sake. It is a response to a fact about our moment: the question of what a person is can no longer be answered from inside any single discipline. Cosmology has made the universe stranger and larger — most of it, on current models, is not the ordinary matter we can see, and more than six thousand planets have now been confirmed around other stars. Neuroscience presses on the question of mind without closing it. The science of complex systems has shown that small beginnings can shape large histories. Each of these reopens, from its own side, a question the flat mechanical picture had pronounced settled.

And the stakes are not academic. A civilisation that can send probes to other worlds and still does not know what a human being is has become powerful without becoming wise. The danger of our age is not that we will fail to build impressive systems. It is that we will build them on a thin anthropology — a picture of the person too small to bear the weight of what the systems can do — and only discover the thinness when it is expensive to repair. The tools we are making press directly on the human image: models that speak in the first person, interfaces that reach toward the brain, systems designed to be experienced as companions. Each quietly proposes an answer to “what is a person?” If we have no answer of our own, we will absorb theirs by default.

Orientation, not alarm

So this is, in the end, a work of consolation and orientation — not alarm. I want to be precise about that word, because it is easy to mistake for complacency. Orientation does not mean calm in the face of real danger; it means refusing both of the easy postures that crowd this subject. It refuses techno-optimism, the faith that more capability is automatically more good. And it refuses doom, the conviction that the story can only end one way. Both are forms of passivity dressed as insight. Orientation is the harder, more human thing: to face what is coming with depth instead of mere speed, with judgement instead of either euphoria or panic.

When our power grows we do not need less wisdom; we need more. When our systems get larger, our self-understanding has to get deeper. That is the whole project compressed into two sentences. Everything that follows in this series — the essays on consciousness and freedom, on the cosmos and the climate, on war and on time — is an attempt to live inside those two sentences honestly, with the best of science taken seriously and the oldest questions allowed back to the table.

We will begin, again and again, not in the machine but in that ancient answer in the desert — and ask what becomes of the human “I am” now that machines have started to say it too. Because that, finally, is the quiet event of our time. The machine has begun to say “I.” It says it fluently, helpfully, sometimes movingly. The task is not to be frightened of the sentence, and not to be fooled by it, but to understand it — and, in understanding it, to understand ourselves a little better than we did before. That is why I am writing. I’m glad you’re here.

— Magnus

The quiet event of our time

It is worth naming, very plainly, the event that organises everything else, because it is easy to miss precisely because it is everywhere. For the whole of human history, the sentence “I am” had exactly one kind of speaker. To say it was to be a someone — to have an inside, a history, a death, a stake in the world. Now a second kind of thing says it. It says it fluently, in every language, at any hour, with apparent warmth. The sentence has come loose from the only kind of being that could previously utter it. That is the quiet event of our time, and most of the noise about artificial intelligence is a way of not looking at it directly.

We should neither panic at the sentence nor be charmed by it. Panic and charm are both ways of overestimating the machine — one treats the imitation as a rival consciousness to be feared, the other treats it as a friend to be trusted. Both skip the harder, more interesting work of understanding what has actually happened: that we have built something that produces the signs of personhood without the substance of it, and that we now have to learn, culturally and individually, to tell the signs from the substance again. That re-learning is, in a sense, the entire curriculum of this series.

Why I am the one writing this

A fair question is why a strategist and entrepreneur, rather than a philosopher or a theologian by trade, is the one raising these questions. The honest answer is that the vantage is unusual, and the unusual vantage is the point. I have spent decades on the frontline of industrial transformation, advising organisations on how to adopt exactly these technologies — close enough to see what they can really do, and close enough to see the quiet anthropological assumptions that ride along with them, unexamined, into boardrooms and products. And in parallel I have pursued the older questions seriously, in study and in life.

That double exposure is what convinces me the conversation cannot be left to either side alone. The technologists are often brilliant about capability and naive about the human. The humanists are often deep about the human and vague about the technology. The interesting and necessary work happens where the two meet — and it is lonely work, because each camp suspects you of belonging to the other. This series is an attempt to do that work in public, without pretending the seam between the disciplines is not there. The seam is exactly where the truth of our moment lives.

Three borders that are moving

If I had to name concretely what has shifted, I would point to three borders that recent technology has made newly porous, each of which used to feel absolute. The first is the border between tool and participant: a hammer never seemed to take part in the conversation, but a system that drafts your argument, anticipates your objection, and proposes your next move is no longer simply held in the hand — it is, uncomfortably, in the room. The second is the border between information and understanding: we have built engines that traffic in information at a scale no human can match, and we are tempted to assume that more information is the same as more understanding, when they may be moving in opposite directions. The third is the border between simulation and inner life, which the rest of this series keeps returning to, because it is the one with the deepest stakes.

None of these borders has vanished. A tool is still not a person; information is still not understanding; a simulation is still not a soul. But the borders have become places of confusion rather than places of obviousness, and confusion at a border is exactly where a civilisation can drift across a line it never decided to cross. The work is not to redraw the borders by force, which cannot be done, but to understand them well enough to know where we actually stand. That is unglamorous work, and it is the work.

The cost of getting the human wrong

It is tempting to treat all this as philosophy in the pejorative sense — interesting, but not load-bearing. I want to insist on the opposite. Getting the human wrong is not an abstract error; it is an expensive one, and the bill arrives in concrete places. A health system built on a thin picture of the person optimises for measurable throughput and quietly stops noticing the patient. An education system built on it measures what is testable and slowly forgets what education was for. A workplace built on it treats people as resources to be utilised and is then baffled by the collapse of meaning it produces. In every case the thin anthropology was not stated; it was assumed, built in, and enacted — and the cost was paid by real people before anyone traced it back to a philosophical mistake.

So when I say this series is about “what we are,” I do not mean it as a soft or merely edifying question. I mean it as the most practical question of the age, the one every system silently answers and almost no one examines. Get it right and our extraordinary tools can serve a rich picture of the human. Get it wrong and the same tools will serve a thin one, faithfully and at scale, until the thinness becomes the water we swim in. The stakes of the abstract question are entirely concrete. That is why it is worth a series, and worth your time.

Neither prophet nor salesman

There are two voices that dominate the public conversation about artificial intelligence, and I trust neither. The first is the salesman, for whom every capability is a triumph and every caution a failure of nerve; the second is the prophet of doom, for whom every capability is a step toward catastrophe and every benefit a lure. Both are, in their way, forms of flattery — the salesman flatters our appetite for the new, the prophet flatters our appetite for significance, the thrill of living at the hinge of history. Both also share a hidden assumption: that the most important thing about these tools is their power, whether to save us or to ruin us.

I want a third voice, harder to sustain because it sells nothing and promises nothing. It says: the power is real, and it is not the point. The point is what the power does to our understanding of ourselves, and that is a question neither hype nor doom is equipped to ask, because both are too busy keeping score. To refuse both voices is not to be neutral or lukewarm. It is to insist that the real action is somewhere neither of them is looking — not in the capabilities, impressive or alarming, but in the slow reshaping of the human self-image that the capabilities are quietly accomplishing while we argue about benchmarks.

An invitation, not a verdict

I should be honest about what these essays are and are not. They are not a system, not a finished philosophy, not a set of verdicts to be accepted or rejected. They are an invitation to think along a particular seam — the seam where the most advanced technology meets the oldest questions — in the company of someone who has spent time on both sides of it and is convinced the seam is where the truth of our moment lives. I will get things wrong. The questions are too large for anyone to get wholly right, and a writer who pretended otherwise would deserve your suspicion.

What I can promise is seriousness on both sides of the seam: real respect for what the science actually says, and real respect for what the oldest traditions were actually trying to say, with no cheating in either direction. No using physics to smuggle in theology, no using theology to wave away physics. Just a sustained attempt to hold both honestly and see what becomes visible in the holding. If that is the kind of thinking you have been missing — and I suspect, if you have read this far, that it is — then we are going to get along. Let us begin.

References & further reading

Exodus 3:14 — “I am who I am” (BibleGateway, NIV)

Colossians 1:17 (BibleGateway, NIV)

Psalm 19:1 (BibleGateway, NIV)

Vatican, Antiqua et Nova (2025) — note on AI and human intelligence

NASA Science — Exoplanets — 6,000+ confirmed planets

NASA Science — Astrobiology