How Artificial Intelligence Is Eating Our Worldview

The "hard problem of consciousness" and the exciting philosophical opportunity presented by artificial intelligence's assumptions about consciousness

Remember how venture capitalist and belligerent techno-optimist Marc Andreessen loved saying that “software is eating the world?” Although it seems that AI leaders want artificial intelligence to finish eating the world, I think artificial intelligence will end up eating the very worldview that created it. Let me explain.

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It is impressive yet puzzling that we have managed to get through the past one hundred years without ditching physicalism (the assumption that there is nothing more to nature than dead matter and random chance). In the early 20th century, quantum weirdness (entanglement, nonlocality, uncertainty) complicated the Newtonian “clockwork universe” that said that consciousness was a mere byproduct of mechanical parts by suggesting that reality may be more like consciousness than matter. But most people at the time, including most physicists, just shrugged. “How strange!” they said, going back to their double slits and entangled photons.

Around that same time, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were birthing the new field of depth psychology, exploring the unconscious and discovering that nature is infused with archetypal patterns, that deeper meaning is a fundamental property of nature. Once again, the response was a collective shrug from global society. “Well isn’t that interesting,” everyone said before going back to their widget making, imperialism, and world war planning.

As the ecofeminists and de-colonialists have pointed out, this refusal to consider any philosophy or metaphysics that might undermine physicalism is a stark reminder of how physicalism serves the needs of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and consumerism. After all, we can’t flatten the Amazon rainforest to bolster beef production if it’s a living, interconnected ecosystem. We can’t have a meaningful cosmos getting in the way of the markets! The Dow is over 50,000!¹

Pam Bondi wonders why we are talking about metaphysics and consciousness when the Dow is over 50,000!

This physicalist bias also explains why most university philosophy departments today prefer so-called analytic philosophy over continental philosophy (or non-Western philosophy). Analytic philosophy is focused on logic, abstraction, and ethics, viewing science as the primary source of truth. In short, it is a left-hemisphere-friendly, watered-down offshoot of science. In contrast, continental philosophy is concerned with the big questions of human existence and phenomenology, and is often critical of science’s attempt at replacing philosophy. This scientist physicalist bias in universities explains why Eastern philosophies, like Buddhism or Hinduism, are relegated to the religious studies department, and indigenous philosophies to the anthropology or ethnology departments.

The only thing worse than a scientist trying to do philosophy is an engineer trying to do philosophy. Yet that’s pretty much the state of AI discourse today.

In light of this, it makes sense that Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s own in-house philosopher, comes from the analytic philosophy tradition. It allows her to support Anthropic’s techno-utopian, rationalist ideology and assertions that AI systems may become conscious, have “interests,” and be deserving of “wellbeing.”

Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house analytic philosopher

But I think that’s all about to change because of AI, and something called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Science vs. Scientism

Before I go on, remember that science is very good at telling us how nature behaves, while philosophy or metaphysics attempts to explain what nature is. However, this distinction was lost over a century ago and now science tries to take the place of philosophy, even though it is an unsatisfying substitute. Science posing as philosophy is known as “scientism.” Scientism is to philosophy as bored apes are to art.

Anyway, I want to stress that criticizing the scientist’s attempts at doing philosophy—theorizing about what nature is—is not the same as criticizing science. Science is a rigorous method that is incredibly useful in medicine and technology innovation. But that’s as far as it goes. Science can never provide meaning or tell us what nature ultimately is.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the End of the Road for Physicalism

The physicalist, neuroscientific view on consciousness is that it emerges somehow from the firing of neurons in the brain, that the matter in your brain somehow produces the rich experience of moving through a forest hearing the sound of thrushes and warblers and smelling the moist soil, decomposing maple leaves, and petrichor after a heavy rain. But no neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, or physicist knows how that might happen, how conscious experiences can emerge from unconscious matter. This is known as the “hard problem of consciousness,” a term coined in 1994 by philosopher David Chalmers.

Could a robot ever appreciate and revel in the sights, smells, and sounds of a lush forest after a rain?

The current approach to AI mirrors the physicalist view on consciousness: In order to create a conscious AI system, we simply need to add more matter—more data centers, more compute, more data. Then, whatever evolutionary miracle that caused consciousness to emerge from our own brain will do the same for these enormous machines, sort of like Frankenstein’s monster.

As I have talked about before, I think this hard problem is the end of the road for physicalism. It is forcing scientists and philosophers to retrace their steps and consider ensouled metaphysics like panpsychism and analytic idealism.

Your Ficus Is More Conscious Than ChatGPT

Let’s take a moment to reflect on how scientism has approached nature over the past few centuries.

The Parable of the Two Suitors

Our modern, Western civilization is the only one in the world that has developed this physicalist, materialist, soulless, flattened worldview. And this worldview won out despite a complete lack of proof for its validity. It was simply assumed by a string of supremely confident English, French, and German men: René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and August Comte.

There is no scientific proof for physicalism. Because there cannot be. The “proof” of metaphysics must be experiential and is inherently subjective. Anyone who has experienced an ineffable moment of unity with nature through reverie, breath work, meditation, entheogens, or other holotropic states of consciousness knows without a doubt that there is a profound, mystical unity at the heart of existence.²

Furthermore, ancient Greeks, Indians, Chinese, indigenous peoples worldwide, and even a few Medieval Dominican friars knew that nature is imbued with consciousness, and with archetypal tendencies, with a sort of cosmic intelligence.

There is no scientific proof for physicalism, the belief that there is nothing more to nature than dead matter and random chance.

So why is it that this physicalist worldview is the only worldview in the history of human civilization that believes the cosmos is a random, meaningless void? Because it serves the great machinery of neoliberalism and empire. And AI is conceptualized and designed as the perfection of that machine.

Cultural historian and philosopher Richard Tarnas has suggested that nature happily obliges in confirming whatever assumptions we have about her. In his parable of the two suitors, he asks us to:

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe. But . . . not the disenchanted mechanistic universe of conventional modern cosmology, but rather a deep­-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence.

And imagine that you are being approached by two different epistemologies—two suitors, as it were, who seek to know you. To whom would you open your deepest secrets? To which approach would you be most likely to reveal your authentic nature? Would you open most deeply to the suitor—the epistemology, the way of knowing—who approached you as though you were essentially lacking in intelligence or purpose, as though you had no interior dimension to speak of, no spiritual capacity or value; who thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to himself (let us give the two suitors, not entirely arbitrarily, the traditional masculine gender); who related to you as though your existence were valuable primarily to the extent that he could develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his various needs; and whose motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a desire for increased intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient control over you for his own self­-enhancement?

Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitor who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, as he?

Because the modern, scientific materialist approach to nature has been that of the first suitor, we think that intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties of matter, and therefore a simple engineering problem amenable to computation.

On the contrary, barring any definitive proof that the cosmos is a disenchanted, mechanistic one, given the miraculous and profound experience of consciousness that an increasing number of people have had, I think we should entertain the idea that it is ensouled, and imbued with creative intelligence.

The Metaphysical Opportunity Presented by AI

If there really is a hard problem of consciousness, some relevant questions about AI sentience may never be fully resolved. — Anthropic, Claude’s new constitution (January 22, 2026).

Try as they might to ignore the hard problem of consciousness and assert that AI systems might have feelings and consciousness, AI labs are stuck inside the physicalist, scientist paradigm. As we have seen, it is not in their short-term, economic interests to consider other possibilities.

Their attempts to find the ghost in the machine are like trying to find the radio broadcasters inside the radio. That’s just not how it works.

The Dow than can be named is not the eternal Tao.³

The failure of AI to become a machine god that solves all of humanity’s problems—one largely shaped by its designers in their own image—will force a reckoning, forcing us to confront our assumptions about consciousness, life, and the cosmos, finally revealing how irreplaceable humans and humane philosophy are.

The sooner the better I say.

1. This is a reference to Pam Bondi’s vociferous assertion that the economy is more important than prosecuting sex trafficking in her congressional hearing last week. As of this writing the Dow is actually at 49,662.

2. By the way, Michael Pollan has a new book coming out this week about consciousness and I will discuss that once I’ve had a chance to read it.

3. Apologies to Laozi.