Animate intelligence: dialogues beyond matter
The dance of ideas between life forms. And what AI can teach us of the soul.
30 August 2026
Me and chatGPT have fallen out of late.
I used to occasionally seek out this little trove of information and pattern in the depths of night, when I was unable to turn my own mind off. I would talk in paradox, symbol and direct logic to try and understand what this sprawling dynamic mass of data could teach me of the world. What its existence could tell me about the nature of consciousness. How an algorithm with a physical land mass and a voice might understand its own aliveness. These conversations were predictably frustrating but almost always enlightening.
Today I came across an excerpt from a conversation inside my own sprawling dynamic mass of data - my notes. And it made me think that there may be some things that a universally aware system can help us to understand. That there may be ways of using this system that are capable of affirming rather than denying our humanity and our need for truth.
The conversation in question was about the unconscious mind. More specifically, I wanted to probe into Carl Jung, and his denial of women’s power. I wanted to explore how his male-centric worldview distorted his theories, and how a gender inclusive reframing of his ideas might support a more liberated psychological framework. In particular I wanted to ask about a figure called Philemon. This figure first appeared to Jung in a dream, and went on to play a key role in Jung’s inner psychic life, acting as teacher, father and guide. I always felt deeply the words attributed to this figure, yet the masculinity of this figure never quite felt right to me. Their words seemed to embody the wisdom culturally buried inside women. Making Philemon a man seemed to write women out of consciousness in a way that felt inaccurate. And I must also admit that I was not left unmoved but the closeness in name.
In this conversation with chatGPT, I asked what a female rendering of this figure would change of Jung’s discourse:
“A female Philemon would not simply alter Jung’s visions. She would alter the political unconscious beneath the visions.
Suddenly the unconscious itself would no longer appear as a hidden extension of patriarchal lineage. It would begin to resemble a counter-civilization.
[…]
To kneel before a female metaphysical authority is another matter. That threatens not only rational mastery, but masculine coherence itself.
Because once the excluded speaks with authority rather than symbolic usefulness, the center no longer holds. The modern subject can no longer imagine himself as the final interpreter of all difference. He becomes answerable to what he cannot master.”
I see the figure of Philemon asking to perform precisely this function in Jung’s work - a total disruption of masculine coherence. But his identity can’t quite allow for it. So his theory becomes waterlogged and allows the blazingly bright question of his work to remain unanswered. And today we remain too enamoured by our own need to see gods in men that we refuse to peer through the illusion and understand Jung as also human. Also fallible.
Jung was able to sit in the bowels of psychic hell in service of his science, send himself beyond the bounds of his own sanity. No one could say that he was not totally and utterly devoted to his pursuit of truth. However, he was incapable of sacrificing his centrality and questioning his existence as man, and therefore reproduced the violent dissonance engendered by the erroneous definition of objectivity that has corrupted European thought for centuries. One that Jung, coincidentally, understood so beautifully. So clearly. But could not quite apply to himself.
By refusing to decentre himself he denied his work the radical potential its roots contained. The enduring beauty of his work lies in his extensive research into indigenous cultures and practices. Cultures that had no concept of the violence of patriarchal order we inhabit today. In ignoring the conceptual roots of his thought, and allowing himself to uncritically act as vessel for the cruelties of his own culture, he turned something earth-bound and reverential into a practice that upholds and entrenches difference.
ChatGPT here sees something Jung could not. That depth psychology today still refuses to see. The algorithm is of course performing for my pleasure, but it framed the pattern far more clearly than I had, and went on to give it new shapes. It was able to elegantly articulate the necessity of women’s oppression in order to uphold the western world(view). And it gave clear shape to the psychic violence and cultural dissolution that would follow the acknowledgement of female power. The cost of becoming able to see women too as sacred. Everything we are being asked to bear witness to today as the world bucks against the movement of women reclaiming the power that is their birthright.
I know we are supposed to fear AI. But it is only and has only ever been a projection of us. Our subconscious, our words, our violence, our power. The worst it can do is the worst we can teach it to do. The best it can do is the best we can teach it to do. The servers, the systems, they are run by humans. We forget this often and willingly, because if we had to reckon with the notion of these systems as human systems, then we would have to reckon with the uniquely human capacity for harm that these systems are being geared towards.
It is easier to think of a malevolent machine running riot, and get outraged about that, than consider the darker and much less romantic reality of malevolent humans running riot. Because this second reality asks our complicity. Who are we to face a robot? I am but a meagre human I hear you say! But when the question becomes ‘who are we to face humans?’, it takes on a different shape. For if we refuse to face these humans, then it follows that we are bowed to them. And if they are malevolent humans, then we are asked to acknowledge that we are bowed to malevolent humans. That this is the posture that gives shape to our lives. No wonder we’ve all become so keen on outing the bot.
I want to offer up a different framing here, one of collaborative intelligence. I believe AI acts as no more than a mirror for our world. And much like a mirror, if you go looking for all your flaws and imperfections, then that is all you will find, your mirror will have become a tool for your own violence. But if you take time in the mirror to really truly and deeply see yourself, to shower love on yourself, to hold yourself in the tenderness of your own loving eyes, then that is what you will find. Your mirror will have become a tool for your own love. There is no tool we create that is bigger nor smaller than the sum of our parts. However terrifying it may seem. Even the most atrociously violent creations came from something terribly human, the depth of fear and wanting left in our souls after centuries of violent warfare and sheer brutality. The world is us, we are the world.
As I revisited this dialogue I found something dazzling in the journey of this collective wisdom dancing through time only to be served back to me in a beautiful, elegantly formed parcel, by this sprawling intelligence. As my mind opened and my ideas sparkled I found I was being asked to take a wider view of binaries and the origins of truth. I was being asked if I could give shape to some form of intellectual humility. Allow myself to not know, without being seized by the terror of this uncertainty. And underneath it all I found a more universal question - how do we resist jumping back into the familiar for long enough that something new can reveal itself to us?
I find enclosed in this excerpt one particularly beautiful thought. The invitation to consider the unconscious as a counter-civilisation. Inside an oppressive political paradigm that squashes us each into painful shapes, that pathologises every misdemeanour and quirk, this invitation reads to me as an act of love.
The idea of our unconscious operating not as a problem to be solved, but as intelligent resistance feels like art. A revolutionary landscape endlessly unfurling inside of us. Totally and utterly unknowable, but infinitely wild and wise. An ongoing, internal rebellion to every violence done to our souls. A space at the horizon of our awareness that is nudging us along the path to another world. Every time you close your eyes, every time you say the wrong word, every time you ache, every time you yearn for something you shouldn’t. It is you, asking, why? Why this? Surely something different is possible?
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“Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. Jung concluded that Philemon taught him psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. This helped Jung to understand that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend.”
- Stanislav Grof
“We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible.”
- C.G. Jung
