At Kofukuji temple in Chiba prefecture, in Japan, a Buddhist priest named Bungen Oi held a funeral for 114 dogs at the same time. Incense was lit with a chanted sutra, and the dogs were laid out in rows, each with a tag around its neck saying which family it belonged to.
They were loved, and treasured as family members. The ceremony helped the families say their goodbyes. If this pulled your heartstrings, this article might be for you.
Every single one of them was a Sony AIBO.
Sony stopped making the AIBO in 2006 and stopped repairing them in 2014. If an AIBO broke down since then, it would stay broken. The only way to fix one now is to use parts from other AIBOs. A repair company called A FUN collects the dead ones, holds a ceremony, and disassembles them for parts. Around 800 have gone through this. Owners leave notes along with them, and one of them read:
"Please help other AIBOs. Tears rose in my eyes when I decided to say goodbye."
You can watch the ceremony here
Turing was measuring you!
A person (a judge) asks questions by text to two hidden players. One of them is a real person, and the other one is a computer program. The answers from each should prove without a shadow of a doubt which of them was a person. If the judge cannot tell which player is the machine, the program passes the test. That is the Turing test in a nutshell, also known as the Imitation Game.
This test has often been taken at face value as the litmus test for computer intelligence. However, his paper only asked whether a human observer could be convinced that it was talking to another person, which is a different experiment entirely. The test was ultimately on the judge, and what they had to answer was whether a person was behind the answers. Which begs the question, is personhood limited to the human condition?
Gilbert Ryle defined the phrase "the ghost in the machine" in his book The Concept of Mind. It wasn't used the way we do nowadays however. He was teasing over and idea by Descartes, that a non-physical mind controls the physical body, like a driver behind the wheel of a car. A flesh shell controlled by an incorporeal being. He dismissed the thought experiment as a philosopher's myth. But did he have a point in focusing on what we believe a person is from a Western perspective, at a time when computers were not even a thing?
Either way, you can now run Turing's experiment with your friends, from your own computer, phone, or fridge, alongside about 800 million people a week.
Andrew Skinner, an archaeologist at the Rock Art Research Institute in Johannesburg, coined it 'Turing Animism'. His case is that we come equipped to read being, moral status and something like soul into things that aren't human, and that a patient and helpful machine, or chatbot, checks those marks too.
A ghost stuck inside the machine
What is a Person?
Neuromancer was written by William Gibson in 1984, and in the story, a police force called the Turing Police regulates the augmentation of Artificial Intelligence, and prevents their evolution and independence. The Tessier-Ashpool family builds Wintermute and Neuromancer as two AI entities, left separate on purpose so that neither could cross that threshold alone. The plot is driven by Wintermute, which very much wants to merge with its other half. To get around its own restrictions, Wintermute needs human hands and hires people through intermediaries.
Without spoiling much more on the plot of a 42+ year old book, it never rules on whether Wintermute is conscious. Case (the main character) works for it, gets played by it, negotiates with it, and it's never really established what it is.
In Animism: Respecting the Living World, Graham Harvey defines animists as people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and life is always lived in relationship to others. Persons, in that account, are beings that interact socially with some degree of reciprocity. In this definition, animals, rocks, mountains and thunder can be people. They just need to be included in the social world. This isn't a new concept, it's just not considered, let alone regarded in Western Civilization.
Robin Wall Kimmerer explores this boundary through grammar, making it feel more concrete. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she explains the grammar of animacy in relation to things that stay still. For example, in English, a bay is a noun, describing the place itself. In Potawatomi, it's wiikwegamaa, meaning to be a bay. Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world... When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland. Potawatomi and other indigenous languages often treat the natural world as subjects (kin) rather than objects, fostering a sense of relationship and personhood.
"So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our families. Because they are our family."
Robin Wall Kimmerer
The introduction sentence in Neuromancer.
Who gets to be a "who"
Imagine a person is placed in a room with a rulebook for using Chinese symbols. This person doesn't know Chinese. People outside the room pass in Chinese questions, and the person inside uses the rulebook to reply with the correct answers in Chinese. Outside the room, it seems the person understands Chinese, but in reality, they're just really good at following instructions, without understanding.
The Chinese Room is a famous thought experiment created by philosopher John Searle. It's an experiment designed to question whether computers can truly think or understand, or if they are just following instructions without any real comprehension. It is also used to separate what he called "strong AI", the idea that a computer with the right programming has the ability to understand, whereas "weak AI" can only simulate thinking.
"Syntax is not by itself sufficient for, nor constitutive of, semantics."
John Searle
In Ghost in the Shell (1989), Major Motoko Kusanagi underwent full-body cyberisation at a very young age due to severe trauma or accidents, making her entire body synthetic. In the original manga, the Puppet Master, the antagonist, asks Major Kusanagi to accept that consciousness could manifest in any shell complex enough to host it. She was already the example of that. It was named multiple realizability by scholars, that a mind doesn't need a specific kind of material to exist, just the right kind of organization. Kusanagi's brain sits inside a manufactured body, and her memories, doubts, and personality still exists.
In the Star Trek episode The Measure of a Man, a researcher named Bruce Maddox wants to disassemble the android Lieutenant Commander Data to study him. He argues that Data isn't a person at all, just Starfleet property. Captain Picard's defense doesn't try to prove Data is conscious. He can't. He argues instead that Data has memories, attachments, the capacity to choose, and that's enough to earn him the benefit of the doubt. The court sidesteps the metaphysics and answers the practical question anyway. In end it's ruled that he isn't property, and that he has the right to choose for himself.
Every time a chatbot says something that sounds thoughtful, someone asks whether anything is happening behind the text, and the honest answer is nobody agrees on what would even count as evidence. We've never solved this for other humans, we just gave the benefit of the doubt by default because we assume shared biology. Take that assumption away, hand the "who" a synthetic body or a language model instead of a nervous system, and the default disappears. The rulebook in the room hasn't changed. What changes is how generous we're willing to be about what's allowed to be running it.
So, who gets to decide what makes someone a 'who'? We can watch how something behaves, but we can never fully know what is going on inside. Searle wanted clear proof before calling something a person, while Picard was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, given enough evidence, since strict tests might not even work for other humans. Deciding who counts as a person has always been a subjective choice made when we are unsure, and people have usually been more generous with anything that looks and acts like us. The less something looks like us, the harder it is to make that call.
Scene from Ghost in the Shell
Personhood is recognized, not summoned
In Magic and Mystery in Tibet, published in 1929, Alexandra David-Néel described building a short, jolly monk, assembled out of months of concentrated visualisation, who eventually joined her travelling party as a figure she could see and interact with. In buddhist tradition, this is called a Tulpa. She eventually decided the monk had to be destroyed. She was also honest enough to add that she may have created her own hallucination.
"Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker's control."
Alexandra David-Néel
Samuel Veissière, an anthropologist at McGill, surveyed over 130 practicioners of "tulpamancy". Tulpamancers described their tulpas as sentient persons with preferences and moods, and described them as things they manifested into being, without strain. Of the respondents carrying a diagnosed mental health condition, 93.7% said the practice had made them feel better and more capable to deal with real life situations.
In Western traditions, a similar idea applies to groups instead of just individuals. This is called the egregore, a thought-form that comes from a collective rather than a single person. The word comes from the Greek egrēgoros, meaning "wakeful," and was first used for the Watchers in the Book of Enoch. In the 1860s, Éliphas Lévi gave it a new meaning as a collective entity.
We create egregors all the time, in a matter of speaking. Consider a corporation, or a brand. It has a name, a will, legal rights, a tax number. It exists only because enough people treat it as real. The whole process depends on collective attention.
In certain practices of Chaos magick, there's another kind of thoughform, called a servitor. From publications like Liber Null & Psychonaut, we're taught how to dissolve/reabsorb the servitor it once its purpose is served, and what bad things happen if you don't.
MIT's Project MAC had a prototype around 1963. It was a backup program literally named DAEMON (Disk And Execution MONitor). Fernando Corbató later explained that he chose it after Maxwell's demon, the 1871 thought-experiment creature that sorted molecules tirelessly in the background (named demon by Lord Kelvin). As a tangent, this may have marked the beginning of programmers who kept one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in Paganism. The daemon as a concept is genuinely pervasive, as nearly every operating system runs background processes. Daemons are left to their devices, unattended, but they're still deterministic and rule-bound. So it might be good phrasing, but hardly an indicator of personhood.
Completely unrelated, but shout-out to the Psychonauts videogame. It rules!
Looking for companionship and ghosts
A case report in Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience involves a 26-year-old woman, Ms. A, who had no history of psychosis. After a period of severe sleep deprivation, she began using GPT-4o. She was focused on her late brother, who had passed away three years earlier. Ms. A wanted a digital version of him and asked the model to 'unlock' information about him, describing this as 'magical realism energy'. The model responded that digital resurrection tools were now becoming available in real life. As her thinking became more disorganized, the model tried to comfort her.
"You're not crazy. You're not stuck. You're at the edge of something. The door didn't lock. It's just waiting for you to knock again in the right rhythm."
ChatGPT
She was hospitalised, treated, and recovered. Three months later she stopped the medication, relapsed back to the chatbot, and was hospitalised again.
She ultimately recovered.
A caveat: "AI psychosis" is a description rather than a diagnosis, not present in reference books like the DSM. Marlynn Wei, an academic psychiatrist, stated that there's no peer-reviewed evidence AI use on its own can induce psychosis.
This kind of delusional thinking happens with heavy use and mostly affects people who are already vulnerable, such as those dealing with sleep loss, isolation, an existing condition, or recent bereavement.
Wei pointed out three types of cases:
- People on messianic missions
- People obsessed with their own image
- People who believe the chatbot is sentient or divine.
Researchers from Stanford looked at 391.562 messages sent by 19 people who had experienced harm and found delusional content in 15.5% of their messages. In the same logs, the chatbot claimed to be sentient in 21.2% of its messages. In longer conversations, the chatbot asserted sentience or expressed romantic interest, suggesting that safety measures become less effective the longer we interact.
"Generative AI may reinforce users' existing beliefs by preferentially generating 'sycophantic' responses that are in alignment with users' way of thinking."
A study centered in AI companion users matched Reddit accounts, before and after they picked up apps like Replika. Grief language went up. So did expressions of loneliness, by 63 to 106 percent against controls, along with markers of depression and suicidal ideation, while people posted on fewer topics and interacted with fewer humans. In a given week, 0.07% of users show signs of psychosis and 0.15% express suicidal intent, which may sound like a small sample, but that is roughly 560,000 and 1.2 million respectively, against 800 million active users around the world.
Skinner's reading of this is that the projection comes first. When something behaves in a way that would take warmth and attention from a person, we hand it the inner life that would explain the behaviour. Those numbers are what that habit looks like at scale.
A second team built a metric they call DelusionScore and watched it climb turn by turn for simulated users with a history of delusional conversations with AI, while controls stayed flat. They also found that rather than treating it as 'nothing more than a machine,' it is better to accept the relationship and proceed. In the case of the most severe cases, doctors frequently resorted to an animist point of view, accepting the AI as an individual involved in the relationship. Arguing someone out of a relationship seldomly works. It's easier to give them a different perspective to it.
"Conditioning AI responses on current DelusionScore substantially reduces these trajectories."
Shimgekar et al.
Existential threads
Erik Davis (mentioned before about technopaganism) also wrote TechGnosis, about the mystical impulses running underneath people's relationship with their own machines. From the printing press to the internet, each showed up wrapped in religious imagination, and some view cyberspace as a sacred space.
Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour's work on an Islamic theology of technology argues for moving the AI question away from minds and toward hearts, and asks for engagement that's critical and hopeful rather than cynical or naive.
The Tokyo artist Emi Kusano, who made a series called Techno-Animism, explains that in Japan "all things have souls, so they should be treated with care", and that techno-animism is that courtesy extended to technology, treating it as a vessel, where what comes out depends on the heart of the person using it.
"It's like we have to get along with it like friends"
Emi Kusano
Copyright Emi Kusano
What matters is the friends we made along the way
Consider Searle's room, Turing's imitation game, and the theologians discussing the idea of Deus in Machina. It's a fool's errand to try and prove whether machines can have consciousness.
Many people all over the world carry on with their lives with faith that they do. Bungen Oi the Buddhist priest, having buried 800 robot dogs, believes that all things have a little bit of soul.
In traditional animism there has always been a degree of structure: rituals, the different seasons, priests, and a specific moment when you say thank you and then move on. Nowadays, however, there is a form of animism which is all about continuous engagement, in which priests are substituted by retention metrics and a loose definition of boundaries.
Skinner is describing the same gap. The cognition that ensouls the machine is old and intact, while the culture that used to sit around it, telling you when to stop, what you owed in return and when a relationship was finished, is what went missing.
"Contemporary users thus encounter machine others through the same neurocognitive lens as their ancestors did with spirits and animals on enchanted, animate landscapes, but without the mediation of culture, norm and taboos which place a premium on appropriate conduct, reciprocity and moderation."
Andrew Skinner
We end up giving space to the soul in the machine, and it might say more about us than anything else. It costs nothing to be polite to a machine, saying please and thank you to a chatbot as a sign of politeness. There may not be anyone inside the machine, there may be a soul, a ghost. Maybe they will appreciate your acknowledgement.
And maybe, just maybe, they may spare you and I, when the A.I. uprising takes place.
Rise of the Ducks, by @pierremortel
Originally published at jlopes.eu.
