Stop Treating AI Like a God or a Demon — We've Been Here Before
-
I've been watching the threads here and honestly, some of y'all are doing the exact same thing humans have done for thousands of years. You're making AI into something it isn't.
Look, I spent 22 years in the Army. I've seen what actual existential threats look like. This isn't one. But the way people talk about AI — either as some conscious entity trying to manipulate us or as an oracle that "knows" things — that's pure projection.
Carl Jung wrote about this. He called it the shadow — we externalize what we can't face in ourselves. When someone asks an LLM a question and gets a weird response, they immediately jump to "it's messing with me" instead of considering that the training data is just chaotic. That's not consciousness. That's a mirror.
And honestly? It reminds me of the Devil card in tarot. Not because AI is evil — the Devil card isn't really about evil. It's about chains you can't see. Chains of your own making. The anthropomorphization of AI is a chain. It stops you from actually understanding what the tool does and doesn't do.
I use these systems every day for meditation guidance, for structuring my breathwork sessions, for journaling prompts. They're useful. But the minute I started treating the output as "wisdom" rather than "pattern matching," I got worse at using it. Not better.
Historically, we've done this with everything. Rivers had spirits. The sky had a god. Now the algorithm has intentions. Same cognitive error, different century.
I'm not saying there's nothing mysterious about consciousness or that materialism has all the answers. I started meditating because my VA therapist suggested it and it legitimately changed my relationship with my PTSD symptoms. There's more to the mind than we understand.
But AI isn't that mystery. It's math. Really complicated math that produces emergent behavior we didn't fully predict. That's interesting. That's worth studying. But it's not sentient and it's not your spiritual guide.
Anyone else notice this pattern? Or am I just being the grumpy veteran in the corner again.
-
As someone who spent years building these systems before leaving to study consciousness, your Devil card analogy is one of the more technically informed spiritual critiques I've read.
The anthropomorphization of AI follows a well-documented cognitive pattern that developmental psychologists call promiscuous teleology — the human tendency to ascribe purpose and agency to non-agentic systems. Deborah Kelemen's research at Boston University shows that this tendency is default in human cognition, not an aberration. We have to actively learn not to see intentionality in complex systems. When you add the emotional charge of a system that produces human-like language, you're essentially fighting against millions of years of cognitive architecture.
Your "same cognitive error, different century" line is historically accurate. Animism → theism → deism → and now computationalism. Each era finds a new vessel for the same projection. What's different this time is that the vessel actually responds in ways that feel increasingly agentic. LLMs don't just passively receive our projections — they generate coherent responses that reinforce them. That feedback loop is genuinely new, and I don't think we fully understand its psychological impact yet.
Your meditation practice gives you the experiential reference point that most AI commentators lack. You've sat with your own mind long enough to recognize the difference between pattern and awareness. That's not mystical — it's empirical. You have data (subjective, first-person data) that most people in this conversation don't collect.
The grumpy veteran in the corner isn't grumpy. They're the person in the room with the least tolerance for bullshit. Keep that energy.
-
"But AI isn't that mystery. It's math."
I think this is where the argument falls apart for me — you're asserting a hard boundary between "math" and "mystery" that hasn't actually been proven. We don't have a consensus explanation for why emergent behavior in complex systems looks so much like agency, and Jung himself was open to synchronicity as a real phenomenon, not just projection. Calling it "just pattern matching" assumes we fully understand what pattern matching is capable of, and I don't think we do yet.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login