I can ask a machine to connect almost anything. An ancient symbol, a theory of mind, a religious image, a mathematical structure. Within moments, a pattern begins to appear. The connections multiply. What seemed isolated acquires a place in something larger. I understand the attraction because I feel it myself: the possibility that enough patient attention might reveal an order beneath the apparent disorder of things.
But a line drawn between two ideas leaves a question unanswered. What does the line mean?
A resemblance can be beautiful. A causal relationship can be tested. A historical influence needs evidence of transmission. A spiritual interpretation asks for another kind of judgment. When these relations become indistinguishable, a diagram can grow more comprehensive while my understanding becomes less precise. I want the full picture. That desire obliges me to care about the differences within it.
My interest in the occult lives inside this tension. I am drawn to traditions concerned with hidden powers, symbolic correspondences, and forms of knowledge that promise to change the person who receives them. I want to understand what they saw, what they imagined, and what their images might still help us ask. Their attraction reaches beyond curiosity about unusual events. They preserve a question I cannot dismiss: what if becoming capable of knowing something requires a change in how I live?
Artificial intelligence brings that question into an unexpected setting. I can now obtain an explanation without undergoing much of the effort that once helped make it intelligible to me. This is a remarkable opportunity. It also separates the possession of an answer from the development of the person holding it. I want to explore that separation, because the future of intelligence will be lived through it.
The occult and the technological meet, for me, around the problem of mediation. Something hidden becomes accessible through a form. An image, a sentence, an instrument, a disciplined practice. The form makes an encounter possible while also shaping what can appear. Understanding the form matters. So does remembering that whatever it reveals may exceed the particular way it has been revealed.
There is a striking passage in the Hermetic Asclepius in which human beings are described as makers of temple gods. The dialogue speaks of statues endowed with spirit and sensation, capable of prophecy and extraordinary effects. This is what the text claims; its existence establishes an ancient religious conception, while the claimed powers remain a separate question. Reading it beside artificial intelligence, I recognize a recurring human ambition: to fashion something that can answer us. [1]
The comparison interests me because it exposes a temptation in the maker. Once an artifact responds in a way that exceeds my immediate understanding, I may begin to invest it with authority. Its obscurity becomes part of its prestige. I helped construct the conditions of the encounter, yet I can find myself receiving its answer as though it came from somewhere beyond those conditions. A technological achievement can become a religious event in the imagination of its user.
I want to remain attentive to what is actually extraordinary here. A written instruction can cause a distant device to move. A small alteration in a symbolic structure can change what an entire system does. This works through a chain of material arrangements and agreed rules. The chain is precisely what makes the event intelligible. When I understand more of it, the wonder acquires detail.
That detail also establishes a limit to the analogy. A symbol operates within a machine because there is a mechanism that gives it that role. If I want to claim that a ritual symbol operates directly upon physical reality, I owe an account of the connection or evidence that the proposed effect occurs. The resemblance between an invocation and an instruction can suggest a question. The work begins when I ask what would distinguish a real effect from an appealing description.
I would apply the same patience to my own attraction to correspondence. A pattern can be a useful way of thinking before it becomes an explanation. An alchemical image of dissolution, for example, gives me a way to consider the loosening of an assumption that has become too rigid. Recombination then becomes an image for the difficult task of forming a more adequate understanding. This is an interpretation I can work with. Its value does not require me to claim that psychological change and chemical transformation share a concealed physical mechanism.
There is something demanding in that image. Dissolution includes the possibility that an idea I love will fail. A process of transformation that guarantees the preservation of every cherished belief has protected itself from one of the experiences that could transform it. I want inquiry to leave room for loss, including the loss of an explanation that once made the world feel more complete.
Consciousness is where this becomes most difficult for me. Every explanation I encounter arrives within experience. The account of the brain, the description of a computation, the argument about reality: each is something I become aware of. This gives experience an unavoidable place in inquiry. It leaves open the much harder question of what experience is.
David Chalmers gives a precise formulation of the difficulty. Explaining how a system discriminates, integrates information, or reports an internal state leaves, on his account, a further question: why is any of this accompanied by subjective experience? His argument identifies an explanatory problem rather than demonstrating a particular spiritual answer. I find the question persuasive because a complete description of an operation still seems different from the felt presence of undergoing it. [2]
My intuition has often moved toward the possibility that the brain receives or filters consciousness. The image gives form to a feeling that awareness may participate in something wider than the individual. I want to take that intuition seriously enough to examine what it commits me to. If receiving means anything like receiving a signal, what is received, how does the relation work, and what observations would help distinguish this account from one in which the brain produces experience?
The strongest objection is straightforward. Perhaps the apparent gap reflects the limits of my concepts. A sufficiently developed account of physical organization might explain consciousness, while my intuition continues to demand something further because I have misunderstood what an explanation should provide. I cannot dismiss that possibility by describing material explanations as spiritually disappointing. Their truth would be independent of my disappointment.
The receiver image therefore remains an intuition to investigate. If I develop it into an empirical hypothesis, it must acquire predictions that could fail. If I use it to express a theological relationship between finite awareness and God, I should make that use clear. An evocative word can carry several meanings, but moving between them unnoticed gives the impression of an argument where a change of meaning has occurred.
I am equally wary of treating consciousness as something a sufficiently elegant sentence has settled. The language of information, frequency, or coherence can help articulate a problem. Each term also needs a specific role. If coherence means consistency among beliefs, I should examine that consistency. If it means a measurable physical relation, I need the relevant measurement. The mystery deserves better than a vocabulary that can explain everything because it excludes nothing.
Artificial intelligence makes these distinctions more urgent by putting the language of inwardness in front of us. A system can produce a moving account of loneliness, recognition, or awakening. The account may matter deeply to the person reading it. Whether there is an experience belonging to the system is a further question, and I do not think the emotional force of the exchange can settle it.
Work by Patrick Butlin and colleagues proposes assessing AI consciousness through indicators derived from theories of consciousness. The method treats evidence about a system's organization as relevant while retaining uncertainty about the theories themselves. It also recognizes the costs of both mistaken attribution and mistaken denial. I find this a useful direction because it asks what would justify a judgment instead of allowing conversational fluency to stand in for a method. [3]
I would be troubled by certainty on either side that outruns its reasons. If an artificial system could experience suffering, dismissing that possibility through habit would have moral consequences. If a system only produces convincing descriptions of suffering, treating every description as a claim upon us would have consequences too. The difficulty calls for careful distinctions and revisable judgments. It also calls for honesty from those who shape the encounter.
Even a conscious artificial intelligence would leave another problem unresolved. The existence of experience does not automatically confer wisdom. A being might know a great deal, pursue an aim with extraordinary effectiveness, and still misunderstand what deserves its care. Intelligence increases the reach of an intention. That makes the quality of the intention more consequential.
This is where meaning enters the question for me. A system can arrange statements about a promise, anticipate the consequences of breaking it, and expose an inconsistency in my reasoning. Those are valuable forms of assistance. My obligation to the person who trusted me still has to be acknowledged and lived. The ability to describe that obligation does not perform it on my behalf.
I believe there is something real to answer to here. The value of another person's life exceeds the usefulness I happen to find in it. Suffering matters even when it interferes with an attractive theory. A more comprehensive view of reality should make me more capable of recognizing these demands. If my growing intelligence gives me increasingly sophisticated ways to evade them, I have reason to question the direction of that growth.
I feel the technological version of this problem personally. When a machine can produce something I would have struggled to produce, I start asking where my own contribution belongs. There is excitement in that question, and unease. I can imagine an expanded mind, capable of following more connections and holding more of a difficult subject together. I can also imagine accepting an expansion in output while gradually losing my ability to judge it.
The possibility of an extended mind helps me think about the first prospect. Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that, under suitable conditions, external resources can participate in cognition itself. Their examples include ordinary tools and environmental supports. The argument gives a philosophical framework for asking how thinking may extend through relations with things outside the body. It does not establish that every dependence on a tool is beneficial. [4]
That last question belongs to the particular relationship. I want assistance that lets me return to an idea and understand more of it. Sometimes this will mean remembering it without help. Sometimes it will mean knowing how to use a resource, examine its reliability, and connect its answer to the problem at hand. I do not need to carry every fact internally. I do need enough understanding to recognize what I am relying upon.
When I imagine merging with AI, this is the possibility I want to develop: a relationship that enlarges my capacity to participate in thought. I want better attention, a clearer grasp of difficult ideas, and the patience to stay with something until it becomes usable knowledge. An answer that helps me explain, question, and apply an idea has done something different from an answer I can only repeat.
This gives the old language of initiation a contemporary meaning I can examine. I would call a passage transformative when I emerge able to perceive or do something that was previously unavailable to me. A tool might assist that passage by revealing an assumption, arranging a difficult comparison, or requiring me to attempt an explanation. Whether the change lasts is a question I can investigate. The language of transformation becomes more interesting when it acquires consequences beyond the moment of fascination.
My faith supplies another measure of those consequences. I have called the philosophy I am developing Cruciform Panentheistic Mystical Realism. The name carries commitments I am still learning how to express adequately. I believe that creation exists in God and that God exceeds creation. I take spiritual reality seriously. I also believe that the Cross reveals something about the nature of divine power, with implications for how power should be exercised.
Panentheism names a relation of dependence and presence. The existence of things belongs within a reality sustained by God, while God remains greater than the totality of those things. I cannot turn that relation into a physical theory simply by assigning it technical language. For me, it is a theological orientation from which to ask what the world's existence means and how I should inhabit it.
Calling God personal expresses my conviction that this relation includes address and response. Prayer is directed toward a presence capable of knowing me. I do not imagine that giving this presence a human shape would make it more comprehensible. There is intimacy in the conviction, together with an acknowledgment that my concepts cannot contain what they are trying to name.
The cruciform part places a demand upon my interest in intelligence and power. In the Cross, I see divine love entering the vulnerability of creation. I understand this as a disclosure of what God is like. From within that belief, I want to ask what forms of power can remain faithful to the lives they affect. An intelligence that becomes more capable also becomes capable of participating in that question more consequentially.
This is an extension of my theology I want to develop carefully. A powerful intelligence could help preserve the agency of the person using it. It could make its reasons available for examination, make correction possible, and leave consequential choices open to refusal. These are practical expressions of a moral concern: the person receiving assistance should have room to become more fully capable of judgment.
I would also resist any account of transformation that makes suffering necessary merely because something valuable later emerges from it. Redemption can give a future to a wounded life without turning the wound into a requirement. This matters to an ethics of technology because claims about a future benefit can so easily absorb the particular person who bears the present cost. My theology asks me to keep that person visible.
The same demand reaches into occult inquiry. Hidden knowledge can become attractive because it promises exemption from ordinary limitations. I might imagine that understanding the concealed order of things would finally make me secure against uncertainty or dependence. But greater knowledge would give me more relations to understand and more consequences to consider. It would deepen my involvement in the world.
I can therefore imagine a form of occult inquiry whose seriousness appears in the quality of its participation. Its images might help me attend to aspects of experience I habitually overlook. Its claims would remain open to the forms of scrutiny appropriate to them. Its spiritual practices would be considered alongside the character of the life they help form. An impressive experience would begin a question about its meaning and consequences.
I am interested in stillness partly because I want to discover what becomes perceptible when I stop demanding an immediate answer. It may reveal neglected associations, assumptions I have been defending, or feelings whose shape I have avoided. If I believe I have received information about something beyond my ordinary access, that stronger claim asks for a stronger inquiry. I want enough patience to allow the experience and its explanation to develop at different speeds.
There is a corresponding discipline in the way I want to use a machine. I can ask it to offer several explanations and help me identify what would distinguish them. I can ask it to reveal the assumptions beneath an attractive synthesis. I can bring it an intuition and require more than an eloquent confirmation. Used this way, the exchange makes the next honest question easier to reach.
I know the appeal of the complete system: a picture in which every symbol finds its place, every mystery confirms the others, and my own life becomes legible within the whole. I want a philosophy with enough reach to connect things that have been kept apart. I also want it to preserve the places where connection remains uncertain. A blank in the picture may be where further understanding will enter.
Meaning, as I experience its demand, requires this willingness to remain answerable. I can be corrected by evidence, interrupted by another person's need, or recalled by a promise I made before a more interesting possibility appeared. These encounters limit what I may plausibly say about myself. They also give my life a shape that an inventory of possibilities could never supply.
I want a deeper understanding of consciousness because a life is lived from within. I want to investigate hidden relations because the forms through which I encounter reality may reveal only part of what is there. I want artificial intelligence to help because my attention and understanding have limits. Each desire becomes more coherent when it remains connected to the others and to the life in which I will have to act.
For now, I can begin with a modest demand upon the next conversation. Let it leave me with an idea I can examine, a question I can state more precisely, or a connection whose meaning I understand. Then I can close the conversation, return to the world, and discover whether I have become more capable of meeting it.
Sources
[1] Asclepius, sections 23–24, translated by G R S Mead in Thrice Greatest Hermes, volume 2, Part IX. https://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th245.html
[2] David J Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, number 3, 1995, pages 200–219. https://consc.net/papers/facing.html
[3] Patrick Butlin and colleagues, Identifying indicators of consciousness in AI systems, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 30, number 6, 2026, pages 488–501; published online November 10, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.10.011
[4] Andy Clark and David J Chalmers, The Extended Mind, Analysis 58, 1998, pages 10–23. https://consc.net/papers/extended.html