A Soul in the Machine
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) August 20, 2026 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22832061 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that the tendency to read personhood or soul into machines, which the author calls "Turing animism" after Andrew Skinner, is a longstanding human cognition rather than a new response to artificial intelligence, and that historical and cross-cultural practices of attributing personhood to made beings illuminate why people do so with language models. |
Abstract
This essay asks why people read personhood into machines, and what else have we attributed personhood through cultures in history. The argument is made between philosophy, anthropology and psychiatry. It treats Turing's imitation game as a test of the observer, sets Searle's Chinese Room against Hilary Putnam's multiple realizability, and reads the personhood trials that science fiction has been staging since the 1980s in Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell and Star Trek's "The Measure of a Man". It then turns to Graham Harvey's account of animism as a world full of persons, Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy, and the made companions of Tibetan tulpa practice, Western egregores and Chaos magick servitors, including Samuel Veissière's survey of 130 tulpamancers. The essay adopts Andrew Skinner's term "Turing animism" for the reflex that reads soul into a language model, and argues that the cognition of such a soul is an old notion. Originally published at https://jlopes.eu/blog/soul-in-the-machine/ on 20 August 2026.