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

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

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

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

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

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

Segall