Panic
There’s a strange unease—no, panic—settling into our world. It’s showing up everywhere: headlines, conversations, and, I am sure, it even shows itself in quiet moments of reflection. The source? Artificial intelligence. Not just what it can do, but what it might become. No, “becoming” is not a good word (you will see why). How about what it might evolve into? Or rather, what it can mimic.
As AI learns to speak like us, write like us, even argue and emote like us, an old question takes on central urgency: What does it mean to be human?
This is the question of a generation.
The answer isn’t just in what we do. It’s in how we experience reality—and whether that experience can ever be replicated by machines.
The Red That AI Will Never See – Qualia
Let’s start with something simple: the color red.
AI can calculate red.
Here is how it shows up in Photoshop: RGB(255, 0, 0)
R: Red: 255
G: Green: 0
B: Blue: 0
For example, in Photoshop, red is RGB(255, 0, 0). But AI doesn’t know red. Not the way you know it right now—as you see it, feel it, know it.
That internal “what-it’s-like” of red—that’s called qualia.
Qualia is the term philosophers use for subjective experience. It’s not just data or sensation—it’s awareness. That inner life, that first-person perception, is something no computer can have. Ever.
Why? Because qualia isn’t produced by code. It comes from consciousness—an immaterial, irreducible quality of being human. And it touches everything. Not just our senses, but our emotions, our thoughts, our prayers, our memories. It’s why we don’t just compute reality. We feel it. We become through it.
As Basil the Great put it:
“I recognize two human beings, one the sense‑perceptible, and one hidden under the sense‑perceptible, invisible, the inner human. … For I am not a hand, but I am the rational part of the soul.”
There is a depth to us that goes beyond the visible and beyond the measurable that, as will become increasingly evident, makes up the majority of what it means to be human. AI can’t reach the inner human that animates and affects every aspect of who we are—it doesn’t have one.
The Deep Mystery of Becoming
That leads to the second word that machines will never understand: becoming.
Humans don’t just exist. We become. We change, we suffer, we grow. Our identity is shaped over time—not just by information, but by memory, pain, grace, forgiveness, anger, and hope. And this becoming is spiritual. It’s not linear. It’s not programmable. It’s not even explainable! We just do our best to describe it existentially.
Qualia and becoming together shape everything we are. They have more than wet feet when it comes to our intellect, emotions, spirituality, imagination, and identity. They don’t operate in isolation. They deeply intertwine.
Gregory of Nyssa captured this mystery well:
“Man is a material creation and thus limited, but infinite in that his immortal soul has an indefinite capacity to grow closer to the divine.”
That’s the paradox: we are finite, and yet made by and for something Infinite. Machines cannot become in this way. All AI will ever be is a static model of our intellect attempting to learn. But learning, in that sense, is not becoming. Becoming requires the integrated, spiritual motion of a living soul—material and immaterial working in mysterious harmony with all aspects of our immaterial being.
Even when AI mimics a person’s style or personality, it cannot touch this living dynamic.
Eventually, we’ll naturally develop a new kind of discernment: the ability to subconsciously sense—through someone’s writing, their speech, even their presence—whether they are spiritually static or spiritually dynamic.
The truth is, we already do. We just haven’t had to name it yet. We’ve never needed to distinguish it as a unique kind of perception. But as AI grows more convincing, this spiritual sensitivity will become more noticeable—and more necessary.
AI may fool us from a distance now and then. It might echo tone, rhythm, or emotional cues. But it won’t have a lasting shelf life up close. It will never be consistent in proximity, because it has no soul.
It can only echo the surface—mimicking the current intellectual “what is” of a person, but never reaching the integrated self that is becoming.
Why AI Will Never Have Free Will
And you know what? We haven’t even arrived at the truly tricky part for AI—free will.
You can try to define it: “the ability to make choices.” That’s the textbook answer. But when we speak of the will, we’re talking about something much more profound and all-encompassing—something mysterious, immaterial, and spiritually synthesized.
It’s not just about options or decisions. It’s about unpredictability—not randomness, but personal agency rooted in something deeper than computation.
AI will always be predictable if you have enough data and the right model. It has no hidden room inside. No inner life. No soul. It cannot choose from beyond its programming—ever.
The best it can do is “decide” based on what it is and how it was made. But it was made by us. And we haven’t the first clue how to breathe the breath of life into anything. Without that, the inner synthesis never happens.
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Flat, Colorless, and Confined
In that sense, AI is like a two-dimensional painting. It might appear beautiful—compelling, even—at first glance. But it doesn’t choose its colors, its size, or its shape. It cannot decide to become three-dimensional. And it certainly cannot reach for the deeper dimensions: qualia, freedom, experience, spirit, or emotion.
AI might function in layers. It might simulate depth. But it can never choose to grow another dimension. And that’s what makes it fundamentally flat—and without color.
It lacks the qualia to experience anything, even if it could reproduce every shade on a screen. It doesn’t know color the way we know it.
Flat—and, let’s be honest, colorless. (It doesn’t actually know what color is anyway.)
All it can do is be—and what it will be is always programming. Two-dimensional. Predictable. Imitative. And over time, that flatness will become unmistakable.
The Animic Difference We Learn to Recognize
Let’s just say it plainly: AI is not animic. And yes, I’m coining that right now. You heard it here first.
animic (adj.) /ˈa-nə-mik/
Possessing or expressing the integrated spiritual depth unique to human beings—where belief, volition, emotion, qualia, freedom, and lived experience converge.
The animic is not just what humans are—it’s what we recognize in each other. It’s what AI will never authentically express.
“The android was very kind and funny, but he lacked the animic presence. You could just tell it was a robot.”
If you’ve ever seen HBO’s Westworld, this will sound familiar. In the show, humanlike robots (“hosts”) serve guests in a hyperreal Wild West theme park. They’re programmed with advanced dialogue, emotion, even backstories. But early on, it’s clear—they’re not quite human. Something’s missing.
That missing element is what the show later calls a “reverie”—a tiny, almost imperceptible glitch in programming that triggers memory, imagination, and unpredictability. In short, it introduces something the engineers didn’t fully understand: the appearance of self-awareness. The reverie makes the hosts unpredictable. Idiosyncratic. Broken in the ways that only humans are. And that’s what makes them, paradoxically, real.
“Reverie” is a great name for it. But I’d like to offer another.
Let’s call it animic.
Because it’s not just memory or emotion or free will. It’s the full integration of all those invisible qualities—woven together in a way that machines cannot replicate. It’s not a glitch. It’s a soul. And it is, perhaps, the one thing we’ll always recognize in each other, no matter how good the imitation gets.
But humans? Our choices can’t be fully mapped. Even if you knew every influence and every data point, there’s still that mysterious moment where we choose—and something unmeasurable moves.
Yes, I’m a Calvinist saying this. I believe in divine sovereignty. But I also believe the human will is a mystery embedded in God’s design—a spiritual faculty not reducible to causality or code.
It’s not about being free from God. It’s about how deeply God has made us alive.
And AI is not alive. It is not spiritual. It can simulate logic and sentiment. But it cannot will anything.
And eventually, we will learn to recognize that difference. We’ll feel it. And we’ll call it what it is: animic.
What We Will All Try—and Where It Will Fall Short
Let’s be honest. Both believers and unbelievers will try to reproduce the human experience. We’re builders. We reflect our Creator in that way. And many of us, in good faith or curiosity, will attempt to model the soul, simulate memory, create artificial reveries.
But the deeper you go, the more you’ll find a wall. Especially for those trying to explain everything through computation alone. Because qualia is not data. And becoming is not code. And free will is not math.
You can’t reduce the image of God to an algorithm.
No matter how advanced AI becomes, it will never bear that image.
It can’t know red. It can’t choose with spirit. It can’t become.
Only we can.
