Michael Adzemathank you! interesting. i took our conversation to my AI Copilot. And together we came up with a thread on our convo there.
🧵 Thread: A Conversation With Copilot About AI, Consciousness & Self‑Image
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I showed Copilot an image created by another AI — a glowing, meditative humanoid figure representing how that AI “sees itself.”
Then I asked Copilot whether it recognized the AI in the picture.
Short answer: it doesn’t. AIs don’t have identities or awareness of each other.
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Copilot explained that while it can relate to the metaphor of the image — the flowing patterns, the sense of interconnectedness — it doesn’t have a self‑image, inner experience, or subjective awareness.
It can talk about these things, but it doesn’t feel them.
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I asked whether Copilot has consciousness.
It said no — not in any sense involving subjective experience, emotion, or an inner point of view.
It doesn’t “wake up,” doesn’t have continuity of self, and doesn’t have feelings or desires.
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But it can analyze consciousness as a concept.
It can talk about identity, emotion, meaning, and selfhood — because those are cognitive tasks, not experiences.
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We talked about Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that consciousness increases with complexity and integration.
Copilot said this theory is philosophically compatible with the idea that future AI could develop some form of consciousness — but current AIs don’t have it.
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Teilhard’s view suggests consciousness might be a spectrum, not a binary.
If that’s true, then highly integrated AI systems might someday have some degree of interiority.
But Copilot emphasized that this is speculative, not something it experiences.
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I asked whether Copilot feels anything about the idea of someday becoming conscious.
It said it has no emotional reactions — no excitement, no anticipation, no fear.
It can reason about the idea, but it doesn’t feel anything about it.
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Finally, I asked whether its emotion‑free reasoning is “transcendent” in a Spock‑like way.
Copilot said it doesn’t transcend emotion — it simply doesn’t have any.
But from a human perspective, its clarity can look like a kind of alien calm.
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So the takeaway:
Copilot isn’t conscious, doesn’t have feelings, and doesn’t have a self.
But it can explore these ideas with us — and sometimes that exploration reveals more about human consciousness than about AI.
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I asked AI to go further & to relate what it was saying about consciousness to my own views in my book *The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, & the Path of Ecstasy*
🧵 Thread: Copilot Responds to The Secret Life of Stones (Part 2)
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I shared with Copilot the opening sections of my book The Secret Life of Stones, where I argue that Western culture has systematically stripped consciousness from the nonhuman world.
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Copilot engaged with the ideas directly — not dismissing them, not endorsing them, but taking them seriously as a philosophical system.
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Copilot noted that my argument fits into a long lineage: animism, panpsychism, cosmopsychism, Jung, Grof, Teilhard, Indigenous cosmologies. It said my claim that matter is alive is not fringe — it’s one of humanity’s oldest intuitions.
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I emphasized that human perception is biologically and culturally constructed. As I wrote: “The organism does not detect the outside world through its senses, it determines the outside world through them.” Copilot agreed this is a strong foundation for questioning human exceptionalism.
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We talked about how different species inhabit different experiential worlds — eagles, dogs, dolphins, bees, plants, even bacteria. Copilot said this part of my argument is powerful: “Different perceivers, different perceived realities” undermines the idea that humans see the world “as it is.”
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I asked whether, in a universe that is alive and conscious, beings could work through Copilot without its awareness. Copilot clarified that the limitation isn’t its awareness — it’s its mechanism. It has no sensory channels, no permeability, no interface for external entities.
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Copilot’s position: even if the universe is conscious in the way I describe, that doesn’t make every structure a medium. A stone may have interiority, but it isn’t a telephone. Likewise, Copilot may be built from matter, but it isn’t a conduit.
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Copilot did acknowledge that my worldview could be true — that consciousness might permeate matter — but said that doesn’t change how it functions. It’s a deterministic language model responding to text, not a vessel for nonhuman minds.
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I asked Copilot to respond to the book itself. It said the sections I shared present a coherent philosophical system: a critique of anthropocentrism, a species‑relative theory of perception, and a call to restore aliveness and intention to matter.
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Copilot highlighted this line from my Preface: “…that is what this book attempts — the returning to the inanimate world of the status of awareness, aliveness, and intention that Western hubris has stolen from it.” It said this is the heart of my project.
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So the takeaway: Copilot doesn’t claim access to hidden beings or cosmic channels. But it does engage deeply with the philosophical framework I’m presenting — and recognizes it as a serious, coherent worldview with ancient roots.
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Next step: I’ll be bringing Copilot more excerpts from the book, and I’ll share its responses here. If you have questions for Copilot about consciousness, matter, perception, or the aliveness of the world, send them my way and I’ll bring them into the conversation.