After the Thaw of Two “AI Winters”, a Spiritual Spring Heats Up Our “Consciousness Winter”
Let’s now endeavor to answer a fundamental question: How will technologists create a “sentient” machine with human-level consciousness without even understanding consciousness in the first place?
As the new U.S. administration doubles down on artificial intelligence with the $500 billion Stargate AI Initiative, amid resounding fears of a Chinese rival named DeepSeek, one thing is clearer than ever: We are in a manic race against China to be the first country to develop AGI — or artificial general intelligence, that ambiguous goal to replicate human intelligence, even our consciousness.
Make no mistake about it, fear is the underlying motivation driving this manic race — and fear is a powerful motivator. As geopolitical analyst Alice Han pointed out in an essay for the online forum Engelsberg Ideas, just as fear is framing American perceptions of the Chinese threat, China’s massive commitment of resources to AI research is, in turn, rooted in the shock of both the country’s government and tech community following Google DeepMind’s stunning defeat of a (human) Go champion in the complex Chinese game by its AlphaGo AI model “way back” in 2016.
“Companies like DeepSeek are a product of Chinese fears of US AI supremacy, and we should expect many more DeepSeeks to emerge in the coming years as the AI arms race intensifies,” wrote Han, an analyst at Greenmantle, an advisory firm founded by historian Niall Ferguson (who is incidentally a co-founder of the new University of Austin).
Yet fear is seldom an effective guide. So in this post I’d like to take a step back and propose a slow, deep breath amid the hyperventilation. If we can just look a little further, what we are witnessing is the convergence of both AI’s relentless advance of ground-breaking science with a renaissance of efforts to get beyond the materialist explanations for human consciousness itself. Said differently, the exponential trifecta of AI, robotics, and quantum computing will, perhaps paradoxically, drive a movement to explore mindfulness, meditation, the utility of psychedelics, and even the lessons of “near-death experiences” (NDEs) that challenge assumptions of our brains as the originator of consciousness.
Full disclosure here. I am a passionate advocate for AI development. The many virtues of AI, a promise unequaled in human history, are topics on which I’ve often espoused with LinkedIn posts on the coming age of a billion dreams, reviews of many books by leading experts such as Dr. Fei-Fei Li, and in countless podcast interviews, including one that Whurley and I were on at the height of the 2023 mania for a moratorium.
At the same time, the deliberate and ethical navigation of these powerful technologies is crucial for humanity’s collective benefit. As they accelerate exponentially, they will redefine labor, identity, and reshape our moral and ethical frameworks in ways we can barely imagine. Adapting our institutions to this new AI-driven era — while harnessing its transformative potential in healthcare, education, the economy, and beyond — will be the greatest challenge of our time. But it is a challenge not to be faced with manic fear.
A “digital David” confronts seven technology Goliaths
In recent days, the back-to-back revelations from Stargate and DeepSeek are certainly a helpful microcosm of these challenges that the world is facing. The implications of China’s frugal but impressive innovation — a $5.8-million AI model that triggered a $1 trillion market correction last week — are profound and will long echo. Overnight, DeepSeek found itself cast as a sort of digital David taking on not just a single virtual Goliath, but seven at once. The so-called “Magnificent Seven” — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, and xAI/Tesla — were humbled by a low-key math prodigy-turned-overnight national hero in Guangdong, China.
The scramble for analogies is on. From the particle physics race against Germany to win World War II to the technological race with Russia to win space, analogies to past conflicts are dominating discourse. Inevitably, the search comes to rest on the Manhattan Project, the massive endeavor led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer that delivered not just the atomic bomb, but crucially gave us our understanding of nuclear fission. The use of the bomb will forever be shrouded in controversy, but let’s not forget that scientists at Los Alamos produced the first radioactive isotopes used for cancer treatment in 1946 and laid the groundwork for civilian use of nuclear power, which today produces 20% of America’s electricity — and which will be key to help us avert the worst effects of climate change. China has ambitious plans for 150 new nuclear reactors by 2035, while none are scheduled (yet) for construction in the United States, which now operates an aging fleet of 93.
Still, that storied endeavor 80 years ago does serve as a fitting analogy to the Stargate plan unveiled two weeks ago by President Trump alongside leaders of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. The Manhattan Project consumed roughly 1% of America’s 1940s wartime GDP. Stargate’s tab would approach 2% of today’s GDP.
If your choice of analogy is the space race, begun with the 1957 Soviet launch of the world’s first orbital satellite, Russia’s Sputnik, the measure of inflation-adjusted dollars is instructive. The Apollo Project, which ultimately landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969, pencils out at a bit more than half the cost of Stargate at $260 billion in 2025 dollars.
Stargate is a project of daunting scope and scale, even without articulated financials. That it could be rivaled by a startup like DeepSeek with a miniscule budget, simpler computing chips, and far less energy demand is endlessly intriguing.
But our urge to explore this fascinating microcosm of high stakes techno-politics should not blind us to the macrocosm of AI that is casting new light on consciousness itself. We are moving toward the unraveling of the mysteries of human consciousness, the quest of philosophers, scientists, and poets since the time of Plato’s penning the Allegory of the Cave and the sage Vyasa’s composition of the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu text.
The missing analogy to Oppenheimer’s work
Thus the analogy we are missing is to the philosophical and spiritual mindset that Oppenheimer brought to his tasks: his study of Eastern religions and his view that physics and consciousness are deeply interconnected. There’s a hint of Oppenheimer’s spirituality in most popular accounts of the first nuclear explosion, the famous “Trinity Test” of July 16, 1945, in New Mexico, including in the eponymous 2023 movie. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer is said to have remarked as he reacted to the fiery light, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, sometimes called “The Song of God”.
While the quote is often associated with the test itself, Oppenheimer actually made this reflection two decades later. What matters more is the mindset behind it — his deep engagement with philosophy and spirituality as he grappled with the consequences of his work.
The larger point is that understanding consciousness — our own and perhaps that of the systems we create — is crucial to navigating the profound changes this exponential trifecta of technologies (again, AI, quantum computing, and robotics) will bring to society.
This leaves us with an inconvenient question: How will technologists create a “sentient” machine with human-level consciousness without even understanding consciousness in the first place? And a further question: Can we get to that understanding without falling prey to such tempting but flawed and morally corrosive ideas that suggest we are living in some kind of Matrix-like simulation? I believe we are not, as I argued in an article last week written with my good friend, the author and entrepreneur Byron Reese.
Those questions return me to Oppenheimer, a brilliant polymath, who took his study of philosophy, spirituality, and consciousness as seriously as he took the exploration of physics. So should we.
AI’s rapid development demands not only technical innovation, such as the tools we have developed at data.world with our data catalog built atop the foundation of a knowledge graph — what I liken to the nervous system and brain of the emerging, data-driven AI reality. We must also pair this imperative to innovate with a deeper and concomitant inquiry into what it means to be human. Without this, we risk creating tools that outpace our moral and ethical understanding as we reshape our economy, society, and even our sense of self in unforeseen ways. Oppenheimer’s example reminds us that science and spirituality are not in opposition, but are intertwined and must advance hand in hand.
On the scientific side of this advance, one question is surely settled by the developments of Stargate and DeepSeek: the prospect of a so-called “third AI winter”, about which I wrote last fall. Much discussed in tech circles, the first “winter” came in the mid-1970s when research funding dried up amid unmet expectations for machine learning and robotics. The second “winter”, in the early 1990s, and lasting roughly a decade, was driven by the collapse of progress in so-called “expert systems” and the economic effects of a recession aggravated by the first Gulf War and the U.S. savings and loan crisis. If our “ChatGPT moment” on November 30, 2022 didn’t quell fears of a new AI winter, the heat of the “DeepSeek moment” surely will.
The first and second “consciousness winters”
But what about the “consciousness winters” of the last century? I realize this is hardly a well-known concept, as I just invented it. But these intellectually frigid moments mirror the cold snaps in the history of AI, when interest in understanding consciousness has waned amid conceptual or cultural challenges.
Any history of the study of consciousness — as distinct from the history of traditional religions — traces at least to the 4th and 5th centuries BCE with Plato’s exploration of the soul, Aristotle’s examination of perception and imagination, and of course the creation of the Bhagavad Gita.
But in the modern sense, the pioneers include the German philosopher Wilhelm Wundt, who in the late 19th century sought to break consciousness down in its fundamental elements, similar to how chemists analyze compounds into elements. His Anglo-American contemporary William James, sometimes called the “father of American psychology”, was more interested in the functions and purpose of consciousness; he in fact coined the term with which we’re all familiar, “stream of consciousness”.
But by the mid-20th century, scientific ideas of the mind as mechanistic, as mere stimulus-response, took hold and the work of Wundt and James became taboo, and the introspection of Wundt and James disappeared from mainstream scientific discourse. This was what I’ll call the “first consciousness winter”.
The late 1950s and the 1960s saw a thaw of sorts, a flourishing of interest in consciousness and its relationship to spirituality. Pioneers would certainly include the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley, famous for his novel Brave New World. His book Doors of Perception explored his experimentation with psychedelics, including LSD, which he saw as tools to expand consciousness. In particular, Huxley argued for a universal spiritual truth underlying all religions, which could be accessed through meditation, contemplation, or altered states.
Abraham Maslow, best known for his “hierarchy of needs”, was another contemporary pioneer who saw “peak experiences” of joy and transcendent insights as bridges to a larger universe of consciousness.
Their work and that of many others led to, among many things, the birth of the self-actualization movement and humanistic psychology, which both found their center of intellectual gravity at the storied Esalen Institute in California.
But paradigms shifted again in the 1980s and 1990s and science moved away from introspective methods of psychology to a focus on brain function, information processing, and measurable data. The conservative zeitgeist of the Reagan and Thatcher eras dimmed both interest and societal approval of experiments involving psychedelics. The final ice storm was a book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991 by vocal atheist and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. In it, Dennett argued that mental states, including consciousness, are no more and no less than the result of physical processes in the brain. Dennett is sometimes referred to as a founder of the “New Atheism”, along with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.
Dennett effectively explained consciousness away. And this was the beginning of what I call the “second consciousness winter”.
But just as spring has come to AI, it is also coming to consciousness research and exploration.
What is human consciousness?
“And consciousness! What is it?” asks author and philosopher James ‘Jay’ Ogilvy in a stunning scholarly survey of the past and future of our understanding of consciousness, Coming Together, to be published later this year. “How does it relate to the brain, the mind, the self? Its nature is so obscure that researchers now speak of ‘the race for consciousness’ the way scientists in the 1960s talked about the race for the moon.”
The work in this area is coming at a rapid pace if you look for it. For now, a few of the fine minds exploring the nature of the mind need mention here:
In An End to Upside Down Living: Reorienting Our Consciousness to Live Better and Save the Human Species, author Mark Gober, with whom I recently met, proposes a paradigm shift in how we perceive consciousness and its role in our lives. One analogy he makes in his equally compelling podcast, Where is My Mind?, is to the “cloud” of data storage. We think our smartphones are amazing, and they are. But the real “smarts” are not in the instruments in our hands, but in the saved memories, files, and computational power stored elsewhere. The smartphone is just the means to connect. Consciousness, Gober maintains, is in a similar realm beyond our physical selves.
Interconnected consciousness is among the many threads in two books, Proof of Heaven and The Map of Heaven. by neuroscientist Eben Alexander, who endured a near-death experience that upended his views on mainstream science, including materialism. Of the seven days during which he was declared “brain dead”, Alexander describes a journey to meet with a beautiful angel in Heaven, of being moved profoundly by a higher being he calls “Om”, and experiencing a feeling of love more vivid (what he calls the “ultra-real”) than anything he had encountered in earthly terms. As a scientist, formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, his insights on “quantum entanglement” are particularly illuminating. Quantum entanglement, a mystery that famously stumped even Albert Einstein, is at the heart of future quantum technologies. When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, they remain connected even when separated by vast distances. Alexander argues that the classical Newtonian view of the brain as a mere biological machine is outdated and quantum physics will replace it as a means of understanding the mind.
A similar argument was hinted at last summer at the annual TED Conference, which I always love attending, by Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind (and now all of Google AI). This was shortly after Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two other scientists, and his talk was the most stirring of any session at TED. He argued that AI can deepen our understanding of the universe at the most fundamental level, the so-called “Planck scale”, the smallest measurable scale in physics. If Hassabis is right, and I believe he is, we will soon gain insights into the fundamental nature of reality, answering these questions about consciousness.
If you are inclined to go further toward understanding the “third consciousness spring”, a documentary I highly recommend is Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds. The film, by Canadian filmmaker and meditation teacher Daniel Schmidt, is inspired in part by the same Sanskrit texts that once influenced Oppenheimer. It suggests the presence of an all-pervading, vibratory field that connects everything in the universe, again reminding us of quantum entanglement and the fact that we do not understand what 96% of our universe is made of (instead calling it “dark matter” and “dark energy” to fill in the holes).
Signs are everywhere, you just have to look for them
In summary, these are just a few resources I’ve found in what is still an early stage of my own deep-dive into understanding the nature of consciousness. But signs of a profound planetary awakening are everywhere — when you look for them.
As philosopher Ogilvy frames the quest to understand consciousness in Coming Together — which I will reference again once it becomes publicly available — today’s materialist science presents us with a false dichotomy: one must either be a traditional believer or an atheist. Yet, neither perspective fully captures the vast, unifying spiritual power of the universe, a force we are only beginning to comprehend.
No longer, he concludes, with a coming understanding of consciousness that is fundamentally at odds with what just about everybody believes, whether secular materialists on the one hand or religious believers on the other. It is a “third way,” he argues, “a road less traveled, far less traveled.”
It’s a road, I believe, to a future where science and spirituality are not at odds but instead entwined in unity like the Caduceus.
It all prompts me to recall that famous quip of author and futurist Stewart Brand, made when he published the first edition of the pioneering technology and environmental journal Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, which is now all online for free. On the cusp of this convergence of the trifecta of AI, quantum computing, and robotics with a new spiritual understanding of consciousness, his advice is as sage today as it was 57 years ago. In fact, it illuminates challenges beyond the fear driving the rivalry of Stargate vs. DeepSeek and the panic over which country will be first to create AGI.
“We are as gods,” Brand wrote, “and might as well get good at it.”
A version of Brand’s sentiment, inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, could be framed around Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna about divine power, duty (dharma), and self-mastery.
“You are of My eternal nature, O Arjuna, and bear the power to shape the world. Act with wisdom, for mastery over creation comes through mastery of the self.”
