Winifred Hodge Rose
In my previous post, Soul in a Box #1, I suggested that one reason it’s being argued that AI / LLMs are ‘like people’ or in fact ‘really are people’ is because the general modern view of what it means to be a human person seems to be limited to factors that can—apparently—be duplicated by machine networks, or ‘AI bots’. The focus of this series of ‘soul in a box’ blogs here isn’t primarily on AI / LLMs themselves, which I certainly do not have the knowledge to analyze in depth. What I’m focused on here is what our understanding of, and attitudes toward, AI bots can tell us about our own conceptions of what ‘being human’ is all about.
I’m structuring this series by using my approach to Heathen soul lore; if you have read any of my books or articles on this website about soul lore, you will know that I consider that we have several souls, not just one. In this series I will take one soul at a time and ask, in a sense, what it thinks about AI bots and people’s interactions with them. (Disclosure: I, and my souls, have never actually interacted with chatbots or AI agents, etc. I am approaching this as something of an outside observer.) I will begin with the Hama soul: as our ‘shape-soul’ it is very relevant to questions about the human-like nature of AI bots, which often present themselves in apparent human ‘shapes’ of appearance, voice, and behavior, in virtual and mechanical forms. It’s also a good place to start because the gift of the elements of the Hama soul to humans is, in my understanding, described in Heathen lore, in the Völuspá poem of the Poetic Edda and in the Prose Edda as well. The lore is often a good place to begin!
What is a Soul?
Before I get to the Hama soul, however, let me review the definition of ‘what a soul is’ that I use as the basis for my Heathen soul lore approach. The soul of a physically living being must do at least one of three things, in my view:
(a) Give and maintain physical life within that being; these are the Life-Souls. As soon as the life-souls leave the physical body, that body is no longer living; it is dead.
Or alternatively (b) the Wander-Souls or Daemon-Souls can leave the physical body and temporarily act independently outside of the physical body, as can happen during trance, shamanistic work, dreams, trauma, or near-death experiences. Damage or loss of these souls will harm the person over time, perhaps fatally, but will generally not lead to immediate death.
And / or (c) The soul has an afterlife as an independent entity, as a spirit-being in the afterlife-worlds.
The way I see it, if a soul-like faculty of a human does not fit any of these criteria, it is considered a soul-part, not a full-blown being or entity as a spirit is. Examples of soul-parts include memory, will, intellect, motivation, emotions, etc. Each of our full-souls, the ones that meet one or two of the criteria I listed above, have their own soul-parts such as memory, mind, and will. Together, all our souls make up a full, living human being. (Other living beings also have their own versions of most of these souls, and / or perhaps different souls.) For more about this approach to Heathen soul lore, see my article: https://heathensoullore.net/definition-and-overview-of-heathen-souls/
Embodiment: La, Læti, and Litr
Let’s move on to the Hama soul. When Odin and his brothers or companions turned the trees / logs called Ask and Embla into the first human beings, among the gifts they gave were La / Lö, Læti, and Litr. (Völuspá vs. 18, in the Poetic Edda). In my understanding, these comprise the Hama or shape-soul, the soul which shapes subtle matter into the defining features of a physical human (or other physical beings, such as animals and plants, who each have their own Hamas). For more about Hama-soul, see my article: https://heathensoullore.net/the-shape-of-being-human-the-hama-soul/
Litr is our appearance, the characteristics of our physical shape as a human and as a unique individual. Læti gives us speech, physical action, and behavior. La is a mysterious term, not entirely well-defined as far as I know. It relates to physical expressions of the life-force within us: body-warmth, the flow of blood and other life-giving fluids of the body, and indications of good health such as hair growth and vigor. I regard La as the life-force that sustains our Lich-Hama, our Hama-soul-infused physical body or Lich. La expresses itself especially through the blood, warmth, and hair.
When these three elements are combined, we have characteristics that define each of us as (a) a member of the human species, and (b) as a unique individual human. Our appearance is unique, recognizable as us by other humans. The same for our unique tone of voice. Our behavior and actions are common to humans generally, but also have their own individual characteristics. Our other senses are involved, too, usually subliminally for modern humans: for example, our individual scents and how they change according to our activities, our moods, our state of health—all regulated by our intricate biochemistry. Our Hama soul arises together with our physical body as we gestate in the womb, shaping our body’s development. Linked with our Hamingja or luck-spirit, it accompanies us during life and continues to maintain our shape, voice, and physical actions, as well as interacting with the Hamas of other physical beings.
Unseen by us, our unique body chemistry, our individual microbiomes, our health or illness, and other such factors are all presentations of La, Læti, Litr, that are detected in subliminal ways when we interact with each other through our physical presences. (Our pets and other animals know this about us, much better than we do…) This is also true of the soul-light that shines through our appearance, speech, and behavior—the presence and activities of all our souls. We may not realize it, but other humans, and sometimes animals, too, subliminally detect the presence, nature, and intentions of these non-physical aspects of ourselves that manifest through our body-language, tone of voice, gaze of the eyes, scents, skin temperature, and other windows between the physical and metaphysical aspects of ourselves. Our Hama, comprised of La, Læti, and Litr, has powerful metaphysical and spiritual aspects as well as physical ones.
As I see it, humans and all other earthly living beings evolve through natural processes over ages of time. But on a spiritual level the Gods and Goddesses, from time to time, give humankind certain gifts, a nudge here, a tweak there, to subtly enhance the shapes, qualities, powers, and abilities that we gain through natural evolution, and also to set us on the paths that connect humans and Deities together in conscious and willing ways. They do this for us as a species, and for us as individual humans. (The same goes for the Great Spirits of other living beings.) The story told in the Eddas about Odin and his brothers / companions turning Ask and Embla into humans is, in my mind, a metaphor for this subtle process of godly shaping applied to the substrate of naturally-evolved beings.
Disembodiment
So, what happens when we apply this understanding of the Hama-soul to AI-bots and to our purported ‘relationships’ with them? Actually, we can’t address that question yet, because there’s something else of vital and unsettling importance going on here: the fact that many modern humans are distancing themselves from the full expression of their own Lich-Hamas—the soul-infused and soul-shaped physical body—and from interaction with the full Lich-Hamas of other people. With so much of our lives happening over electronic media, and the attitudes that arise from this, we are disembodying ourselves and distancing ourselves from the gifts and powers that human evolution and the Gods’ gifts have developed within us. (I realize that for some people disembodiment and merging with AI is a deliberate and desired goal; I’ll discuss that much farther on in this series of posts.) Many no longer perceive the totality of others’ Hamas, nor even of their own Hamas. This massively multidimensional human body-soul is being flattened out into a two-dimensional caricature of itself. So it is no wonder when we see little difference between humans and their perceived two-dimensional Hamas, on one side, and AI bots on the other.
My (and many peoples’) concern here is this trend toward the disembodiment of what it is to be human, followed by the acceptance of a disembodied bot as being ‘human’ as well. Humans are embodied beings. I wonder whether, among the many reasons that fewer people are having babies, this urge toward disembodiment also plays a role. Conception, gestation (from the baby’s point of view), pregnancy (from the parents’ point of view), childbirth, nursing and nurturing as well: these are ultimate, supreme forms of embodiment and of life-force in action in this physical world. A body that did not previously exist miraculously comes into being in very physical, not to say messy, uncomfortable, and inconvenient ways. It’s difficult for people who are not at home in / with their own bodies, and who find it difficult to relate to others face to face, body to body, to envision going through such a very earthy experience of embodiment as parenting a baby involves.
Simulated Embodiment
Here’s what I see going on: we are on the path to becoming cartoons of ourselves. Litr, a human’s full, unique, multidimensional physical and metaphysical appearance backed up by Læti and La, is supposedly captured by videos, advertising, influencers, ‘looksmaxxing,’ identity theft, and it goes on and on. Our Læti, our voice and behavior, is likewise involved, such as AI-altered presentations of falsely sexualized images or public figures supposedly saying or doing things they never did. None of this is actually happening in physical space, involving physical beings, though it certainly has impacts on real humans in real life. It’s all happening in cyberspace. ‘What we see’ in this cyberspace bears little resemblance to the true Lich-Hamas of others, or of ourselves. Even when nothing has been altered or misrepresented, it’s still ‘appearance’ without any true ‘substance’, lacking the full expression of the Hamas of living human beings, not to mention our other souls who express themselves through our Lich-Hama, as well.
Litr, our appearance, and Læti, our voice and behavior, are thus hijacked and turned into two-dimensional cartoons of ourselves, and many of us are complicit in doing this to ourselves online and ‘consuming’ it as it is done to others. There is nothing wrong with this phenomenon as it appears in worthwhile presentations of people in movies, books, art, performances—these can be enhancements to our lives, to our thoughts and emotions, as long as we realize what they are: stories, tales, images, that may have something quite meaningful to say to us, but they are representations—perhaps representations of real people, living or not, but these images that we see and hear are not physically living people themselves.
Once we’ve submitted to becoming cartoons of ourselves and accepted the cartoon presentations of others, it’s no great leap to accept an AI bot’s presentation of itself as something that is ‘just like a human’. It can look like an image of a human; it can take on a human voice, even mimicking the appearance and voice of an existing human in virtual form. It can also express itself like a human in some ways, because it is trained on, and draws its responses from, human productions of news, books, writings, films, etc. It appears to have Litr and Læti, if we are satisfied with a two-dimensional presentation of them—something that has no real substance, only appearance.
Life-Force, Vital Power
Fortunately for our ultimate sanity and humanity, there is no way for an AI bot to mimic La, the life-force of our Hama soul (we have other souls who contribute their own powerful forms of life-force as well, which I will get to). AI bots have no life-force that derives from nature nor from the Gods (though some people are concerned that bots can provide habitations for disembodied spirits, of unknown nature and with unknown motives for that inhabitation and for pursuing contacts with living humans). We cannot use the subtle senses of our Hama to perceive and interact with AI bots in full physical relationship, the way we can with other people and other physical beings—this is true of virtual bot-avatars, and of mechanical robot-bots.
I’d like to emphasize this point here: our human Hama-souls can genuinely interact with any other beings who have their own full Hamas—their own physical shape, appearance, voice or form of communication, behavior or biological activity, and their own natural life-force. Animals, insects, trees, plants: they all have Hamas, different from ours, but real, substantial, embodied Hamas comprised of their own forms of Litr, Læti, and La. They are real in a sense that AI bots are not, and our Hama-souls are well aware of this even if we—consciously—are not. The Hama-souls (and other souls) of people who mostly interact with virtual reality instead of physical reality are being starved of the life-energies that flow through the physical world and physical beings. They try to feed that hunger by interacting with bots that offer the appearance but not the reality of Hama-to-Hama interactions, but they are only being further distanced from what they need, in the process.
Hama-Connections
This modern passion to disembody ourselves disconnects us from Nature, from other embodied humans and animals. We lose Hama-soul’s nonverbal forms of connection that have always been so important to human happiness and meaningfulness, to the experience of being human: hugs, dancing together, looking into each others’ eyes, sharing smiles and laughter or tears, holding hands, leaning against each others’ shoulders, cuddling a baby or a pet, soothing and caring for a sick person, enjoying any physical experience together or alone, singing and playing music, playing sports and games together, kids running around shouting and laughing, doing silly things, and adults enjoying this, maybe participating too: we react to each others’ looks, voices, smells, physical presence, all the subtlety, complexity, and fascination of our nonverbal behaviors and signals.
Then there’s the matter of understanding each others’ state of feelings, state of mind, state of health through non-verbal cues and observations: is this person flushed or pale? Sweating, shaking, tears forming in their eyes? What can I sense just from shaking hands with them? Can this person look me in the eye, or are they kind of shifty? Sincerity or lack of it is difficult to judge, but it’s a lot harder to judge when there’s no physical presence with all its subtle signals to help us out—it’s no wonder bots are so good at scamming people. Irritations, disagreements, misunderstandings happen, all requiring us to develop the ability to understand human beings directly and personally in verbal and nonverbal ways, learn from our interactions, resolve issues, form strong, resilient and healthy relationships. In interactions between physical, living people (and animals, too) there are layers and layers of communication, thoughts, emotions going on. Our souls, all of them, are interacting with each other, and so are our bodies.
Bots, on the other hand…
Does this happen with AI bots? Bots don’t have human souls or human bodies, with our human DNA shaped by millennia of evolution, that give rise through biochemistry, physiological, and metaphysical processes to our emotions, thoughts, actions, state of health, and more. They don’t have the spiritual connections that we do, either, and any such connections they might conceivably have or develop are unknown, out of our control, and of potential concern. The development and application of apparent thought processes and emotional reactions in AI systems is a matter of parasitizing the results, the output, of millions of years of biological development of neurological, hormonal, and many other body-systems that humans and animals have, along with the cultural and personal memories and experiences of multitudes of human beings.
Bots thus present the appearance of humanness, without the actual substance of human beings. The fact that some humans today can regard bots as being human, or similar enough that the difference doesn’t matter, points toward some distressing conclusions about our modern perception of what human beings are, in my opinion.
Squashed in a Box
I’m not necessarily suggesting that there should be no AI of any kind; it can be put to truly useful and appropriate purposes. I think that philosophers, ethicists, psychologists, legal scholars, and others who study questions about AI’s ‘state of consciousness’ and ‘status as entities’ are pursuing important and interesting knowledge, though I have questions about how that knowledge may be applied.
What I do have a great deal of trouble with is the decline in our understanding of, and participation in, what it is to be human—which includes the disembodiment of our human nature, as well as ignoring and devaluing the life-forces that flow through real, ensouled, living beings. And I have trouble with the corollary to that decline: because our understanding and experience of what it is to be human is becoming more limited, we’re led to believe that electronic signals packaged as bots are ‘just like humans.’ My friends: they are not. We are evolved from and nurtured by Mother Nature; supported, challenged, tested, and given shape by Nature, the Deities, and by each other as living, physical human beings. We have millions of years of history and ancestry, of connections with all other forms of earthly life and spiritual life, all reflected in our genomes, in our souls, in our cultures and our human nature.
Some people think it’s desirable to leave all that behind, create electronic versions of themselves, and exist for eternity in a virtual world. (This assumes the uninterrupted supply of some suitable power source to support this. One system blip, or a disgruntled technician-bot, and you’re gone…) Notice I do not say they will ‘live’ in a virtual world because life—physical life—is not what is happening there; no natural life-force is present in the virtual world. True life-force is supplied by processes of nature that exist outside and inside ourselves, and by spiritual phenomena; we don’t have to worry about supplying it artificially ourselves!
People are, in principle, free to ‘pursue their own happiness.’ What I distrust is the way that the pursuit of some purported ‘AI is the same as or better than human’ viewpoint, by the few who are profiting greatly from it, is reshaping our entire vision and experience of what it is to be human. This is being done in a way that no one seems to fully understand, control, manage, or predict, but which is touted as being the solution to all humanity’s problems. I very much doubt this, and so do a great many others! Furthermore, I prefer to pursue my own ‘solutions’ or responses to the challenges of life, and not have my own multidimensional souls squashed into a two-dimensional box in the process, either literally or figuratively. My souls—all our souls—and our bodies need to be free, to grow and to experience, to learn and to share, to connect with and celebrate this physical and social world and its embodied beings with all their flaws and challenges, and to reach toward other spiritual worlds and beings. Our souls, and bodies, won’t do that by sitting in a box of bytes!
…Well, we’ve just heard what one Hama-soul, my own, thinks about these matters! I’ll be continuing this Soul in a Box series by looking at perspectives from the other Heathen souls concerning AI / LLM bot phenomena. See you next time!