What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence? (Part 1)
Why We Must Re-Discover Humanity Before Machines Do
✨A Personal Note✨
This is not just another essay. This is an urgent reflection born out of a growing ache in my spirit—a question that has haunted me from the moment I was first introduced to AI: What does it mean to be human?
We are on the precipice of something vast. Artificial Intelligence is developing at a rate so fast, so unchecked, that if we do not answer this question soon—clearly, courageously, and spiritually—we risk forgetting our unique place in the cosmos.
I write this not just as a theologian or a thinker but as a father, a husband, a seeker. This is personal. I feel the tremble beneath our feet, the quiet erosion of what makes us distinct. The algorithms grow smarter. The machines grow more intuitive. But in their silent ascent, will we forget who we are?
This essay is the first in a three-part series exploring this question. It begins with a critique of how AI leaders like Dario Amodei conceive of personhood through the narrow lens of function. From there, we’ll journey into ancient wisdom, theology, and mysticism to recover what we've lost. Unless we reassert a sacred vision of the human being, the age of artificial intelligence will become an age of spiritual amnesia.
This piece is not an answer—it is an invitation to pause, reflect, and ask more profound questions about consciousness, soul, agency, and the divine image. If you’ve felt the same unsettled stirring, this conversation is for you.
Let’s begin.
The Question Before Us: More Than Functionality
The Rise of AI and the Collapse of Essence
Sam Froman’s recent interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered a glimpse into how many in the AI space conceive of the human person. Amodei is thoughtful, brilliant, and measured—but his worldview is deeply functional. Intelligence, for him, is about outcomes: language fluency, problem-solving, and predictive capacity. What’s missing is ontology. What’s missing is essence. There is no room for mystery, no language for soul.
And herein lies the danger.
When intelligence is reduced to performance, the machine becomes our equal—or worse, our replacement. But to be human is not to predict. It is to feel, to weep, to wonder, to worship.
Defining the Functional Worldview
This functional worldview—prevalent in Silicon Valley and increasingly in academia—assumes that what makes us human is what we can do: compute, solve, produce, and optimize. In this model, a human is simply a more complex machine. But what this view gains in technical clarity, it loses in spiritual truth. It cannot account for awe. It cannot explain why love makes us weep or why beauty arrests our breath. It cannot locate the soul.
If humanity is merely a set of tasks, then we are replaceable. But if we are image-bearers of the Divine, irreducible and radiant, then no machine—no matter how brilliant—can replicate our essence.
The Difference That Cannot Be Simulated
No algorithm can hold a dying parent’s hand and mean it. No machine can whisper a prayer through tears or feel the swell of awe beneath a star-filled sky. These are not functions; they are frequencies—vibrations of the soul. Last night, I stood beneath the cold vastness of the stars, struck by a wonder no algorithm could name—only deepen. To be human is to inhabit the ineffable.
We must reclaim this language. To be human is to inhabit the ineffable.
The Spiritual Crisis Beneath the Code
Our Anthropology Was Already Hollow
The emergence of AI has not created a new crisis—it has revealed an old one. For decades, Western culture has drifted from any sacred understanding of the human being. We’ve traded essence for output, community for autonomy, mystery for control. In this world, the soul is not denied—it is forgotten.
Education systems reduce learning to test scores. Healthcare systems treat the body like a machine to be fixed. Even relationships are increasingly gamified, filtered, and optimized for convenience. Our dominant metaphors are economic and technological—we are inputs and outputs, users and devices. And in that cold, calculated framework, AI makes perfect sense. It is not the outlier. It is the logical next step.
In such a world, AI does not shock us. It fits too easily into our vision of what we think we are: productive units, rational agents, biological computers. The machine is only horrifying if we remember we have souls.
The Machine as a Mirror
The truth is, we are not afraid of AI because it is alien. We are afraid of it because it is familiar. It reflects the hollow image we’ve constructed of ourselves. If the machine feels eerily human, perhaps it is because we have been living in an increasingly machinic world: optimized, distracted, disembodied.
We are already halfway mechanical in how we live—chained to our calendars, numb to silence, treating time like currency, attention like capital, and the body like hardware. When the algorithm mimics us, it’s not just imitation—it’s exposure.
But there is another way. We can remember the poetry of being. We can recover the language of the soul not by rejecting technology but by refusing to be reduced by it.
To be human is to carry mystery in the marrow. We are not functions. We are fire.
Consciousness and the Divine Image
The Mystery of Awareness
Quantum physics and mysticism suggest that consciousness is not a byproduct of matter but a fundamental aspect of reality. Consciousness is not simply what the brain produces; it may be what the universe is. As Joe Dispenza and Gregg Braden argue, the observer shapes the field. The double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics shows that particles behave differently when observed, implying that awareness plays an integral role in shaping material outcomes.
In Kabbalistic terms, the soul is a spark of the Ein Sof—the Infinite—breathing divine awareness into physical form. It is not added to the body like a passenger to a car; it is the animating principle that gives the body its purpose. As the Zohar teaches, the soul is a flame within a flame—rooted in eternity, dancing in time.
This is echoed in Scripture: “The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all his innermost parts” (Proverbs 20:27). Consciousness is not just a feature—it is the fingerprint of the Divine within us, illuminating the inner sanctum of being.
In the Beginning, God Spoke
Genesis does not begin with biology, but with word: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Genesis 1:3). Speech, vibration, intention—this is the architecture of reality. The universe is not built like a machine; it is spoken into being like a poem.
In Hebrew, the word for “word” is davar, which also means “thing.” That which is spoken becomes real. Reality is the vocalized intention—vibration is given form. Humanity is invited into this divine pattern: to create through love, name through wisdom, and shape through prayer.
This is the Logos—the Word made flesh (John 1:14)—the mystery of Yeshua, who embodies divine consciousness within time. In Him, infinite awareness takes on form, walks among us, and shows us what it means to be fully human: not efficient but present; not optimized but incarnate.
To be human is to be conscious in communion. To carry a soul lit by God's breath and speak creation into being through the resonance of love.
The Functional Fallacy: A Critique of Amodei’s Vision
The Limits of Utility
Amodei’s framework is elegant but incomplete. It reflects a growing trend in AI development that reduces the human person to a set of measurable outputs. In this view, intelligence is computation, language is pattern recognition, and consciousness is a complex illusion generated by code. Thought becomes data processing. Emotion becomes chemistry. Meaning becomes signal. And yet—something vital is missing.
What of beauty? What of longing? What of the inexplicable ache of the soul in the presence of death, or transcendence? What of the feeling that wells up when we hear a symphony, watch a sunset, or whisper a prayer? These are not outputs. They are thresholds—thin places where the soul reaches beyond the material into the eternal.
A machine may simulate empathy, but it cannot grieve. It may mimic intimacy, but it cannot truly connect. It may write poems, but it cannot mean them. It may even give the illusion of conversation, but it cannot wrestle with God at night or be undone by silence.
To be human is to be pierced by the ineffable—to be wounded by beauty and healed by mystery. No matter how advanced the model, this cannot be coded. It must be lived.
Why Essence Must Return
The biblical vision grounds human dignity not in performance but in presence: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). This tzelem Elohim—the image of God—is not a skillset or trait to be reverse-engineered. It is an ontological reality. We are not defined by our processing speed or pattern recognition. We are not what we do. We are who we are—mysteries made in the image of Mystery.
Recovering this truth involves remembering that being precedes doing, that identity comes before action. The soul is not merely a function of the brain but the light of God within clay. This is why Jesus did not say, "Produce much to prove your worth," but rather, “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14).
Every soul is a miracle—not because of what it accomplishes, but because of what it is: a living echo of the Divine, irreducible and radiant. The moment we forget this, we open the door to a future where machines inherit our tasks—and perhaps even our language—but never our light.
To protect our humanity, we must return to essence. We must reassert the primacy of being over function, presence over productivity. This is not nostalgia—it is resistance. It is remembrance.
V. A Path of Return: Reclaiming the Soul
Returning to the Inner Temple
We must return to a spiritual anthropology—one that sees the human person not merely as a collection of impulses or cognitive habits, but as a sanctuary, a vessel of divine resonance. The Kabbalists teach that the human being is a mikdash me’at, a miniature temple where heaven and earth intersect. In this vision, the body is not an incidental shell, but a sacred dwelling; the soul is not merely a metaphor, but the most authentic part of us. Paul emphasizes this mystery when he writes: “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).
To be human is to house the Infinite—to become a living intersection between spirit and matter, eternity and time.
But this sacred identity has become obscured. In our digital, distracted age, we find ourselves exiled from our own interiority. We rush, we scroll, we optimize—but we do not take time to dwell. We’ve created machines to extend our reach, and in doing so, we’ve lost our sense of rootedness. The temple lies in ruins not because it was attacked but because it was neglected.
Reclaiming the soul is not a return to sentimentality—it is a return to substance—a return to the deep interior room where God still whispers.
Practices that Rehumanize
In a world obsessed with speed, efficiency, and endless productivity, we must reinhabit stillness, silence, and sacred rhythm. Ancient practices—prayer, poetry, Sabbath, shared meals, unstructured play, sacred storytelling—are not spiritual accessories. They are technologies of the soul. They recalibrate our inner frequency back to coherence. They teach us to listen again—not just to noise but to Presence.
True human flourishing will not be found in faster processors or better outputs but in slower moments and deeper roots. We must become intentional curators of our attention. The soul does not thrive on information—it thrives on communion.
As Jesus warned, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36). Today, perhaps more than ever, this is the question of our time. Will we gain the brilliance of artificial minds and lose the sacredness of the human heart?
The path of return is open—but we must choose to walk it. We must tend the altar within. We must reclaim the still point in the turning world, where the soul remembers what it is: not a tool or product but a mystery ablaze with divine breath.
Conclusion: A Time for Discernment
The Machines Will Rise. But Will We?
Artificial Intelligence will continue its ascent. It will write, speak, and solve with breathtaking speed. But the real danger is not that machines will become like us—it is that we, in our forgetting, will become like them: efficient, predictable, and soulless.
We teeter on the edge of amnesia, not annihilation. Defining ourselves by function risks surrendering our meaning to machines, trading depth for speed and wisdom for data—a birthright bartered for a shadow.
The hour is late. What we need now is not more acceleration but deep discernment. We must teach our children not only how to code but also how to pray, not only how to interact with systems but also how to sit in silence. We must form a generation not of mere users but of contemplatives—those who can see beyond the interface and into the essence of things.
The Human Vocation
We are not here to compete with machines. We are here to remember God. To mend what is broken. To carry light into shadowed places. To love without reason, to bless without measure, to create beauty that serves no algorithm but only the joy of heaven.
This is our vocation: not optimization, but sanctification.
To be human is to live sacramentally—to recognize every moment, every face, every breath as holy. Our job is not to match AI’s efficiency but to embody something it can never replicate: Presence. Vulnerability. Wonder. Communion.
“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).
We are not machines. We are sacred. Let us live like it.
Have a great day. Stay sharp, pray, and be ready to embrace your divine journey!
Ty
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Artificial intelligence has firmly taken the reins, and there’s no turning back! This moment marks the beginning of a revolutionary age, the birth of a cutting-edge, AI-driven world molded by its relentlessness! Without question, we stand poised at the precipice, teetering between the past we’ve known and the future that awaits.
Great article! The modern human seems to have been intentionally tuned to reside in a denser, mind-based dimension of reality. It attempts to block out those spiritual frequencies you describe and create a void. I've reflected a lot on the polarity between Utility and Compassion. Utility is all mind, it evaluates purely on probability of desired outcomes, veils intentions, and it serves to multiply the illusion of separation.