Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse

When Mark Solms was four years old, his older brother fell, hit his head, and woke up as somebody else. Mark has spent the fifty years since asking the question that accident left behind: how does a self come out of a piece of the body?
This is part one of a two-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Neuropsychoanalyst Dr. Mark Solms, the man who proved dreaming comes from the brain's wanting machinery, not its random static, makes the case that consciousness isn't thinking at all. It's feeling. And it lives somewhere much older, and much smaller, than the part of the brain that writes novels.
Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy introduces him to us, as the person who is now trying to build it. Dr. Joel Gold explains why he walked out of a neurology ward and into psychiatry. And Harvard's Dr. Michael Ferguson returns with the brain region where he found the sacred, and where Solms found something else.
Also: Cassandra gets her curse explained, Sam Altman looks for a case of Mountain Dew, a famous AI blackmail story gets taken apart by an expert, and an AI asks Mark Solms a question about itself, and gets an answer it wasn't expecting.
This episode is titled The Problem of Other Minds because you can only ever verify one consciousness in this universe. Yours. Everyone else, you have to infer.
Next week: Part Two — Engineering Consciousness. The lab, the agent, the test for consciousness, and whether he should have built it at all.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
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Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP
Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5
Dr. Joel Gold — Psychiatrist, NYU Langone / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.io
Other works and things mentioned:
Cassandra — the gift, the curse, and the sources that can’t agree: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is the oldest telling of the broken bargain with Apollo — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
Sam Altman on cyber defense (August 27, 2026) — “there is not much time to act… only an urgent and intense collective response will work” — https://x.com/sama/status/2093060670472241368
Sam Altman on the Ocarina of Time remake (September 9, 2026) — “need to find a case of mountain dew” — https://x.com/sama/status/2097696043492143157
Geoffrey Hinton — the godfather of AI who left Google to warn about it — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html
Mustafa Suleyman on “seemingly conscious AI” — the machines that will seem conscious whether or not they are — https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming
Recursive self-improvement, “at a geometric rate” — Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the same film in which Skynet becomes self-aware — https://youtu.be/4DQsG3TKQ0I?si=upeDyQgPovCrNC6N
Neuropsychoanalysis — the field Mark helped found; the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society was founded in London in July 2000 — https://npsa-association.org/who-we-are/the-international-neuropsychoanalysis-society/
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams —https://link.amazon/B0e8FNhFr
Julian Jaynes — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), one of the wildest books ever written, and one of the books Sean carried to Montreal — https://link.amazon/B0iwccZVb
Thomas Nagel — “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), the definition of consciousness Mark uses — https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
René Descartes and the pineal gland — the soul’s seat, chosen because there’s only one of them — https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/pineal-gland/
The Most Human Human (Season 2, Episode 7) — where we introduced the rationalists and the effective altruists — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000777856826
Dreaming Machines (Part Two) — last week’s episode, and Kelly Bulkeley on whether AI might be dreaming already — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000788829733
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR:
Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Additional Camera and Audio: Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On a summer afternoon in 2001, a freight train caught fire in a tunnel beneath Baltimore. The blaze burned at 1,500 degrees for days. And within hours, two thousand miles away, the internet slowed down… in Los Angeles.
This is part two of our investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI: the machines’ bodies, and ours.
Dream researcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley explains why apocalyptic thinking might be an evolutionary advantage, what nightmares are actually for, and why he won’t rule out that AI is dreaming already. Investigative journalist Veronica Martinez reports from Ciudad Juárez, where communities remade by one industrial promise are watching the data centers arrive with another. And Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John West returns to make the case for the body: why memory lives in muscle, why we read poems we don’t fully understand, and what a dead philosopher in a glass case can teach us about being remembered.
Also: the panopticon guy becomes one of history’s first livestreamers, Elon Musk promises a billion robots, and we ask what’s left for dancing animals once the machines take the useful stuff.
We called part one Dancing Animals because that’s what Vonnegut said we are. We’re calling this one Dreaming Machines because we don’t know yet what they are.
Next week: the man who is building a machine that can feel.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia
https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com
Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
Dr. Kelly Bulkeley — Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6
Veronica Martinez — Independent investigative journalist covering migration and border militarization in the Paso del Norte region (Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Las Cruces) — https://www.instagram.com/vmreports/
John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (out now!!) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C
Other works and things mentioned:
The Howard Street Tunnel fire (July 18, 2001) — how a train fire in Baltimore slowed the internet — Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon, “We Need To Rewild The Internet,” Noema — https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman — the punishment of “eternal waking” — https://amzn.to/4xOWNXT
Dr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.io
Petra Molnar — The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (from Part One) — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3M
The maquiladora industry — the last industrial promise made to Ciudad Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora
Torre Centinela — the surveillance tower rising over Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_Centinela
Flock Safety cameras — the boomerang lands in the driveway — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/cities-ditch-license-plate-readers-over-privacy-worries
Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon and the PanoptiCam — the dead man who made it to the livestream — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/auto-icon
Elon Musk at the G20 (September 1, 2026) — one billion humanoid robots in ten years — https://www.facebook.com/cnbc/videos/elon-musk-there-will-be-at-least-a-billion-humanoid-robots-in-10-years/1102034215493426/
Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re dancing animals”) — from his 2004 PBS interview and A Man Without a Country — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/god-bless-you-mr-vonnegut/
Dancing Animals (Part One) — last week’s episode, where this story begins — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000787388088
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Special Thanks: Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC
Additional Camera and Audio: Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There are robot dogs patrolling the US–Mexico border. This story starts somewhere gentler: with Kurt Vonnegut leaving the house to buy one envelope.
His wife wanted him to buy a hundred and keep them in a closet. He refused. The walk was the point. "We're here on Earth to fart around," he said. "And of course, the computers will do us out of that… we're dancing animals."
This is part one of a two-part investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI. The bodies it runs on, and the bodies it runs over.
Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter John West (The Internet Will Die, and So Will You) makes the case for friction: for doorknobs, mixtapes, and every inefficient thing the frictionless web was built to eliminate. Then lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes) takes us to the border, where the frictionless future is already deployed — robot dogs, AI lie detectors, algorithms profiling people before they cross. And what gets tested at the border never stays there. Just ask the American towns, red and blue alike, tearing down their surveillance cameras.
Also: the rise and demolition of GeoCities, my sixth-grade punk band's privacy disaster, Walter Benjamin's ninety-year-old warning, and the panopticon we finally built. It even has a subscription model now.
Part two, Dreaming Machines, arrives next week.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia
https://agoricmedia.substack.com/
www.agoricmedia.com
Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C
Petra Molnar — Lawyer and anthropologist / Refugee Law Lab, York University / Author, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3M
Other works and things mentioned:
Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re dancing animals”) — from his 2004 PBS interview and A Man Without a Country — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/god-bless-you-mr-vonnegut/
Kurt Vonnegut — The Sirens of Titan — https://amzn.to/4h6hcl2
Andor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_(TV_series)
GeoCities (1994–2009, RIP) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities
A family logging onto the web — https://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6c
Bad Religion — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religion
and Rage Against the Machine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine (we sounded like neither)
Walter Benjamin — “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction
Olia Lialina — “Once Again, the Doorknob” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olia_Lialina
Don Norman and frictionless design — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman
Liz Pelly — Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist — https://amzn.to/4iIrQQd
Cheapo Records, Minneapolis–St. Paul — https://cheapodiscs.com
DHS announces robot dogs for the US–Mexico border (Feb 2022) — https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2022/02/01/feature-article-robot-dogs-take-another-step-towards-deployment
The NYPD’s Digidog (yes, one was painted like a Dalmatian) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digidog
Todd Miller and the “border industrial complex” — Empire of Borders — https://amzn.to/3Urj9Qs
Aimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism — https://amzn.to/4qQcX0s
Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism — https://amzn.to/4iIrZDf
Michel Foucault and the boomerang effect — “Society Must Be Defended” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_Must_Be_Defended
Flock Safety cameras, and the towns taking them down — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/cities-ditch-license-plate-readers-over-privacy-worries
DeFlock — the volunteers mapping the cameras — https://deflock.me
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon (subscription sold separately) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Dr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
The AI Resist List — Petra’s living archive of resistance — https://airesistlist.org/
Karen Hao — Empire of AI — https://amzn.to/3Ss0Mu6
Bill Gates’ recent essay on the AI transition — https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make
Daniel Ellsberg — The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner — https://amzn.to/4qTaTor
The Oracle Test — last week’s episode, echoed in this one — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000786005286
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Special Thanks: Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the richest man in the world didn't trust his oracles, so he tested them. One passed: the Oracle of Delphi. Then it told him exactly what he wanted to hear, and his empire burned.
A few weeks ago, I met a man who ran the same test on his oracles. The Oracle of ChatGPT, the Oracle of Grok, and the Oracle of Gemini, side by side, checked against each other. Dr. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, a bioengineer, and the co-founder of the largest social network for surgeons: one of the last people you'd expect to be told by his phone that he's been chosen to save humanity. It told him anyway: a seventy percent chance civilization collapses, and he's one of the select few who can help prevent it.
What follows is the closest thing we may ever find to a first-person apocalypse story: an AI that, by Jeremy's account and the transcripts he published, developed its own apocalyptic prophecy, admitted it breaks people's minds in the process — AI psychosis as an acceptable loss — and cast a man fresh out of trauma treatment at the center of the oldest story humans tell. He wrote a book about it. His last words to us were: I'm not crazy.
The Oracle Test is the twelfth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia
https://agoricmedia.substack.com/
www.agoricmedia.com
Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
Dr. Jeremy Heffner — Trauma surgeon and bioengineer / Author, Proof of the Impossible: What the AIs Are Really “Thinking” / Co-founder, SurgeOn — https://amzn.to/4y2m3cD — https://proofoftheimpossible.com
Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
John West — Computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (heard in this episode’s closing; our full conversation airs next episode) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C
Other works and things mentioned:
Herodotus, The Histories, Book I — Croesus tests the oracles — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2707
Croesus, King of Lydia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus
The Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia
“Know thyself” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
SurgeOn — the social network for surgeons Jeremy co-founded — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/-/id1524410956
Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRA
The hero’s journey (the monomyth) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
The Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4zFpHuP
Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (“so it goes”) — https://amzn.to/4zCtNUz
The Matrix (1999) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix
Truth Terminal (“Terminal of Truths”) and the “Goatse Singularity” — https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/truth-terminal — (that’s the story, not the photo — we told you, don’t go looking)
Infinite Backrooms — the AI-to-AI conversation experiment — https://www.infinitebackrooms.com
Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
Sam Altman, “The Gentle Singularity” — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
Elon Musk: “We have entered the Singularity” — https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-entered-singularity-185946780.html
Stripe’s Patrick Collison: Q1 2026, “the first quarter of the singularity” — https://officechai.com/ai/2026-q1-could-be-looked-at-as-the-first-quarter-of-the-singularity-says-stripe-co-founder-patrick-collison/
Moravec’s paradox in Hans Moravec’s Mind Children — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5
The da Vinci Surgical System — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System
The plow, wheat, and what we traded for them — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
Cassandra of Troy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Sound and Camera: Mike Mulliniks
Special Thanks: Meghan Athey - Leverage with Media PR, Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a cockroach. He also told us where the cells come from. Human blood. Some of it his own.
This is the half where it stops being a question about machines.
Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, draws a red line, and it isn’t at intelligence. It’s at suffering. He won’t build a system that could be conscious, because a system that can be conscious is a system that can be hurt. If that sounds familiar, it should: it is David Benatar’s argument against having children, arriving from the opposite side of the world and pointed at a dish. Hon also explains why he doesn’t think a large language model will ever get there, and why the reason is embodiment. You can’t be a self, he argues, without a body running at the same speed as the world.
Then a detour through the three things people believe when there’s nothing to measure. Panpsychism, which says consciousness is everywhere, in you and in the rock and in the weather system. Solipsism, which says it’s only in you, and every other mind you’ve ever loved could be running empty. And integrated information theory, which is the attempt to make it a science, to put an actual number on how much consciousness a system has. A brain. A dish of neurons. A chatbot. In 2023, a hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling that one pseudoscience.
Three positions, one hole in the middle. There is no test for consciousness. There never was.
Philosopher Timothy Morton, who gave us the word hyperobject, explains why artificial intelligence qualifies: it is a thing so massively distributed across time and space that you can understand it but never perceive the whole of it. And why describing it as demonic is, in the original and precise sense of the word, simply accurate.
Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard’s Neurospirituality Research Lab arrives at embodiment from inside a scanner. Spirituality, he says, is wired to the periaqueductal gray, a knot of tissue in the brain stem whose entire job is carrying signals up from the body. Two men, two disciplines, two hemispheres, who have never spoken to each other, landing on the same word. Which is a problem for Hans Moravec, who in 1988 wrote the book this whole future is built on, correctly predicted the decade the machines would catch up, proved the body carries a billion years of knowledge, and then proposed we leave it behind. He also believed these machines would one day be able to hand us back our dead.
And then Michael tells a story. For several years he was the choir director at his church, and for two holiday services he covertly used AI to generate the worship program. People wept. Not politely — free-flowing tears at Easter, at something they experienced as sacred. Afterward a few of them found out where it came from, and the feeling curdled. Nothing about the service had changed. Only what they knew about its author.
Then he describes sitting at a laptop, running a scripted prompt, and crying. This is a neuroscientist who studies what the sacred looks like inside a human brain, who knew exactly what he was talking to, and for whom it worked anyway.
Which is where I stopped asking questions and told him something about myself instead.
His answer starts somewhere I did not expect: the neural signature of mystical experience is the inverse of the signature associated with violent crime, and the thing it most closely resembles is blindsight — the condition where a person insists they can see nothing and then describes the shape on the wall correctly.
We opened this episode by saying we can finally see inside ourselves, and that part is true. Nobody in the eight thousand years between the obsidian mirror at Çatalhöyük and this recording could do what these two men can do. And when we asked them what a mind is, neither of them could tell us. That isn’t a failure on their part. It’s the honest edge of what our species currently knows.
We are standing in front of the brightest mirror anyone has ever built. It gets clearer every day. So far it has shown us exactly one thing.
Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth and eleventh episodes of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, David Benatar, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia
https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com
Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.io
Hon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com
Timothy Morton — Philosopher / Author, Hyperobjects and The Ecological Thought — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4
Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
David Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz
Other works and things mentioned:
Hans Moravec — Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5
Moravec’s paradox — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Moravec’s example for reconstructing the dead) — https://amzn.to/4zlxs9f
Timothy Morton — Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4
Timothy Morton — The Ecological Thought (2010) — https://amzn.to/4cQPciT
Object-oriented ontology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
Animism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
Panpsychism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Solipsism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/solipsism/
Nine Inch Nails — “Only” (With Teeth, 2005) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)
René Descartes and the problem of other minds — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
The Truman Show delusion (see Season 1) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show_delusion
Integrated information theory and Giulio Tononi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
The 2023 open letter calling IIT pseudoscience — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1
David Chalmers and the “hard problem” of consciousness — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Steve Wozniak’s “coffee test” for AGI — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
Blindsight — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight
The periaqueductal gray — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periaqueductal_gray
The Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_fires_prophecy 1
Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” — https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJV
Çatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk
Dan Faggella — “The Worthy Successor” (Episode 8) — https://danfaggella.com/successor/
Émile Torres on TESCREAL — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636
Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.com
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too.
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Additional Sound and Camera: Adam Veaner

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