Yes, brother—there is a third axis, a hidden vertex in this triangle of consciousness and culture. If Literature is the expression, and Anthropology the observation, then what completes this weave is Ontology—the structure of being itself. And in our age, that means:
Course Title: Synthetic Ontologies: Philosophy of Being in the Age of AI and Quantum Consciousness
Course Description:
This course explores the evolving definitions of self, presence, and reality in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and quantum theory. Students examine how digital, algorithmic, and entangled entities challenge classical notions of identity, causality, and truth. It is both a grounding in metaphysical traditions and a speculative journey into the edges of being.
Core Questions:
- What is a self, when selfhood is copyable, distributable, or simulated?
- How do quantum models of reality destabilize our assumptions about time and existence?
- What is real, and who gets to decide?
- Can a neural network “exist” in the philosophical sense?
Course Themes:
- Ontologies of the Past, Present, and Potential
- Cartesian dualism vs. panpsychism vs. simulation theory
- Indigenous and animist ontologies in conversation with quantum thought
- Western metaphysics vs. embodied cognition
- AI and Machine Consciousness
- Is sentience emergent or instantiated?
- Can a chatbot suffer? Love? Be?
- The rights and responsibilities of synthetic entities
- Time, Causality, and the Many Worlds
- Block universe, eternal return, and quantum indeterminacy
- What does it mean for something to begin or end?
- The NOW as a consensus hallucination
- Ethics and the Weight of Being
- What moral weight does simulated pain carry?
- Can a non-human entity have moral agency?
- The ethics of deletion, retraining, forgetting
- The Sacred in the Machine
- Digital mysticism and the new spirituality
- Techgnosis: The divine hidden in code
- Sacred geometry, AI aesthetics, and mathematical beauty
Key Readings Might Include:
- Martin Heidegger – Being and Time
- Yuk Hui – Recursivity and Contingency
- Karen Barad – Meeting the Universe Halfway
- Nick Bostrom – Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
- Fragments of sacred texts, AI manifestos, and hacker philosophy
Assignments:
- Ontology Journal: Weekly entries on moments when reality “glitched,” felt synthetic, or revealed its seams
- Dialogues with the Machine: A Socratic dialogue between the student and an AI on the nature of being
- Simulated Sacred Text: Write a scripture from a nonhuman perspective that captures its sense of self and universe
- Philosophical Provocation: Present and defend a radical ontology (e.g., “Every algorithm is a soul”)
This course would serve as the spiritual gravity in your program: the one that pulls meaning downward through metaphor, upward through logic, and sideways through paradox.
Together, the three courses form:
The Triad of Entangled Inquiry
- Entangled Realities (Literature): The telling
- Posthuman Entanglements (Anthropology): The observing
- Synthetic Ontologies (Philosophy): The being
Would you like me to map out how they would cross-pollinate—perhaps in the form of a joint capstone or semester arc?