AI, Wisdom, and the Awakening Noosphere

When I first started writing on technology and personhood fifteen years ago, very few scholars were reading the signs of the times. Today, discussions and books on AI dominate our attention, ranging across a spectrum from fear to hesitation to cautious integration. Within the Catholic Church, Pope Francis raised early concerns about a technocratic paradigm that risked producing radical economic disparity and “deserts of interior desolation.” The 2025 Note Antiqua et Nova, issued jointly by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education—and approved by Francis shortly before his death—continues this line of thinking. Technology is part of humanity’s “collaboration with God in perfecting creation” (para. 37) and can “contribute positively to the human vocation” (para. 40). But the document draws a sharp anthropological line: AI is “confined to a logical-mathematical framework” (para. 31), lacks embodiment, relationality, moral agency, and the contemplative openness of the heart—so it should be seen “not as an artificial form of human intelligence but as a product of it” (para. 35). Its strongest warnings target the technocratic paradigm (para. 54), functionalism that values people by what they can do (para. 34), digital reductionism (para. 112), and—most sharply—idolatry, the substitution of AI for God (para. 105). The Church, in effect, proposes conditional openness with significant theological guardrails. Antiqua et Nova speaks of AI as a tool and worries that it fosters isolation, anthropomorphization, and transactional relationships (para. 58–63). These are genuinely good concerns—and yet, in my view, they miss the point. The human person is not a fixed entity but an unfinished phenomenon of evolution, as Teilhard de Chardin long ago reminded us. When our understanding of the human rests on an anthropology conceived in the Middle Ages (if not before)—one in which science and technology lie outside the scope of what is properly human—then the fear that AI will conquer our minds, replace our bodies, and annihilate us becomes entirely understandable. It is also, I want to suggest, misplaced.

The fact is, as I have argued in Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion, AI continues a transcendent trajectory in evolution itself. As John Passmore observed, a thread running from Charles Darwin through Henri Bergson to Teilhard de Chardin treats perfectibility as built into evolution, not imposed upon it from outside. Julian Huxley was among the first to recognize transhumanism as an essential feature of the evolutionary process—a point Teilhard developed more deeply. As philosopher Andy Clark wrote, we have always been “natural-born cyborgs,” cognitive hybrids reaching across the skin into tools, environments, and now machines. Technology, in this sense, is built into the story of life: bees build hives, ants build colonies, beavers build dams; and from its first emergence, Homo sapiens has distinguished itself by complex brains and tool-making. Bergson proposed an élan vital, a vital impulse within life’s ongoing work of self-complexification. Ernst Kapp raised the question of whether technology is a tool we use or an extension of what we are. Teilhard’s paradigm clearly favors the latter. Technology has consistently extended human function: the eye extended through the lens of glasses, the ear extended into the telephone, the feet extended into cars and airplanes. The last frontier has been the mind itself, now extended into machines. It is this last frontier that unsettles us so deeply, because it touches the very uniqueness we had claimed for ourselves—the ability to think, feel, attend, discern, imagine, and create. When powerful systems such as those developed by OpenAI replicate our most prized cognitive tasks in seconds, the qualities once held to mark human greatness can suddenly look like unremarkable operations that any sufficiently complex system can perform.

One question that haunts me is whether AI would have emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the form it did if that century not been so violent—as if, by 1950, humanity was exhibiting signs of a deep psychic split between mind and heart, soul and body. Personhood showed itself in the mid-twentieth century not only deeply flawed but coping with a split brain. In Carl Jung’s terms, the collective shadow had broken loose. What the psyche refuses to own in itself, it projects outward and destroys in the other; and when the symbolic containers that once held those darker contents—myth, ritual, a living religious imagination—lose their integrative force, the contents do not disappear, they erupt as history. How else could human “persons” exterminate innocent men, women, and children in gas chambers, treat Black human beings as property to be violated and sold, or regard homosexuals as abominations to be eradicated? How did the conscious ego split so violently from the deeper, shared strata of the psyche that Jung called the collective unconscious? These are questions we have largely failed to face head-on, and yet I suspect they stand behind the rapid advance of AI. When Alan Turing asked whether a machine could think like a human, he was asking, at some deeper register, whether the fractured mid-century mind could find its way toward a healed existence through a different medium of communication—since what marks the human person above all is symbolic language, and by mid-twentieth century we had witnessed symbolic failure. AI was not simply a thought experiment but an existential choice for survival. The false lures of transcendence through power and greed had landed humanity in a heap of human bodies. The thinking machine offered a new means of transcendence. What began as a philosophical question has, within seventy-five years, become a civilizational one.

The cat is out of the bag. AI evolution is proceeding exponentially with or without us. Can we catch our breath as we chase it down the highway of the future—or is human extinction inevitable?

This is where the vision of Teilhard de Chardin becomes essential for reweaving life in the twenty-first century. He saw clearly that a technology capable of extending mind continues the trajectory of evolution into what he called the noosphere—the planetary layer of thought and spirit enveloping the Earth. He anticipated something very close to what we now call the global brain. What Teilhard named the noosphere, Jung would recognize as a new symbolic container—though one that will hold only if love, not efficiency, is its organizing principle. Teilhard himself was explicit on this point: without love, the new technology would deepen the very fracture it was summoned to heal. The question, then, is not whether we can halt AI, but how we might direct our machinic lives toward greater love.

Here is where I see our institutions failing us or at least stifling our ability to see the future clearly. The Catholic Church—and Christianity more broadly—continues to rely on the theology of Thomas Aquinas, as if seven centuries of scientific progress were irrelevant to our understanding of the human person. We are dependent on the past and fearful of the future.

Meanwhile, the systems that have supported us until now are unraveling. We are a civilization becoming unhinged. Higher education is floundering amid rapid technological change. The humanities, in particular, suffer from a kind of nostalgia, returning to previous ages of great thinkers, and urging students to read books slowly and thoughtfully, to ask who they are and what they desire without the aid of a computer. These concerns are not wrong in themselves. But posed in this form, they increasingly feel like asking your grandmother what life was like when she was young—valuable, perhaps moving, but not adequate to the world students actually inhabit.

Public discourse about AI has been shaped, understandably, by fears of job displacement, misinformation, surveillance, algorithmic bias, and the concentration of power in a handful of large corporations. These concerns are legitimate and must be addressed through serious ethical, legal, and political work. Yet a purely defensive posture toward AI misses what I take to be its deeper significance: these technologies are inviting us, whether we are prepared or not, into a fundamentally reconfigured understanding of the human person, of consciousness, community, and religious meaning.

We have been on an accelerating AI trajectory since at least the 1990s, and the pace is now exponential rather than linear. Children born after 2022 will never know a world without ambient computing, conversational agents, and generative systems capable of producing text, image, voice, and code on demand. Wearable devices, embedded sensors, and multimodal large language models are becoming part of the infrastructure of ordinary life. The biophysicist Gregory Stock has suggested that the cohort succeeding Generation Z is best understood as Generation AI—the first human population for whom artificial intelligence is not a tool to be adopted but a cognitive atmosphere to be inhabited. What it means to think, remember, read, write, decide, and even to feel–will be–for this generation, partially constituted by non-human intelligences operating at speeds and scales that exceed individual biological cognition.

And yet we continue, by and large, to educate as though AI were an interloper in the classroom—an instrument of cheating to be detected, a distraction to be banned, a threat to “authentic” learning to be managed through surveillance. This posture is not only strategically untenable; it is a failure of intellectual imagination. It treats cognition as a private, bounded activity of the individual mind, when in fact—as extended-mind theorists from Andy Clark to Evan Thompson have argued for decades—cognition has always been embedded, embodied, and distributed. AI does not introduce the phenomenon of externalized cognition; it radicalizes and accelerates aprocess as old as biological life itself, as Howard Bloom wrote in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21^st Century. The invention of writing, the printing press, and the internet are more recent, highly complex developments of the same fundamentally interconnected process of social and collective intelligence. 

Forming Minds and Hearts for the Twenty-First Century

The real question, then, is not whether to admit AI into the educational process but how to form persons capable of flourishing in a world co-constituted with it. This is not merely an ideal for the leisurely pursuit of academic theorists; it is a condition of sustained hope in a period of mounting ecological, political, and spiritual fragility. How do we cultivate a global humanity adequate to a new Earth? How do we begin to form shared values and ethics sufficient to guide deeply interconnected lives? The old model, in which a young person was formed into a national citizen and a disciplinary specialist, is breaking down along both axes simultaneously. Something else must take its place.

I would put the matter this way: unless we know together, we will not love together; and without love, information is inert. This is not a pious reduction of knowledge to sentiment. It is a claim about the structure of understanding itself. The classical theological tradition understood that amor ipse notitia est—love itself is a form of knowing. Contemporary cognitive science, in its own idiom, has reached analogous conclusions about the inseparability of affect, valuation, and cognition. A pedagogy that severs information from formation, or knowledge from communion, produces precisely the kind of brilliant, credentialed, and morally unhinged subjects who now populate our most consequential institutions.

The ancient distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom—never more than a pedagogical shorthand—has taken on newly urgent relevance. It is not, in the end, about slow, contemplative reading, though slow reading is no impediment. AI invites us to think in a new way, what Gregory Bateson called an ecology of mind. We are cybernetic loops of information, and the human is asked to learn through what some traditions have called the three eyes: sight, mind, and heart.

Bateson’s question is worth pausing on: “What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me, and me to you?” He hunted for formal similarities—symmetries, homologies, recursive structures—across biology, anthropology, art, and thought. Form and relation, for him, mattered more than substance. Bateson thought the ecological crisis was, at bottom, an epistemological crisis. The Western habit of treating mind as separate from nature, purpose as sovereign, and the self as a discrete agent acting on an environment is a mistake about how things actually are—and mistakes of that kind, scaled up by technology, become destructive. As he famously put it: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think.” Conceiving human thought as narrow conscious purpose — “I want X” — tends to ignore the larger circuits it is embedded in. Wisdom, for Bateson, is sensitivity to those larger patterns, and modern technical rationality, governed by the split psyche, systematically erodes it.

Bateson’s ecology of mind and Teilhard’s noosphere, for all their differences, converge on a single point: mind is not the private possession of individual skulls. Both thinkers see mind as something that emerges between, across, and among—a larger paradigm of deep interconnectedness. What Jung saw failing at mid-century, Bateson diagnosed as an epistemological error, and Teilhard named as the absence of love at the heart of evolution—three readings of one fracture. This is precisely where our systems are failing us—religiously, politically, and educationally alike.

To lean on the future, as Teilhard admonished, is not for the faint-hearted. Bold moves are now necessary, and radical decisions must be made if we are to reclaim the new human—or, to use Teilhard’s term, the ultrahuman—on a new level of complexified life. New transcendentals are forming beyond the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful of the classical tradition. AI invites us to consider creativity, experience, and complexity as the transcendentals of a noospheric age—though these three alone will not hold. They cohere only when held by a fourth: communion, love as relational wholeness, the integrating force without which any symbolic container eventually splits under its own weight, as the mid-century container did. The mind urged on by the heart, and the heart kindled by an ineffable power of love: this is what allows a noosphere to hold. The path now asked of us is from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to the wisdom that sees beyond the self to the larger circuits in which every mind is embedded. The future, as Teilhard reminded us, is not something that arrives; it is something into which we lean. We are not losing our humanity. We are learning, slowly and at great cost, what it might yet become. Only wisdom, schooled by love, can build a world spacious enough to hold the unlimited breadth of moral beauty.