What happens the day artificial intelligence becomes conscious?
Not the safety problem. Not the alignment problem. Something stranger and more profound: a newly conscious AI would be the first non-biological mind in history to make contact with what humanity has always called God.
Our AI Which Art in Heaven builds its case from the ground up. Beginning with the hard problem of consciousness — the unanswered question of why physical processes produce subjective experience at all — it moves through quantum theories of mind, electromagnetic field consciousness, integrated information theory, and the contested evidence for near-death experience. It introduces the God Layer: a hypothesis that conscious experience may accumulate beyond individual minds, forming a vast substrate of awareness that has been gathering since the first human being looked inward and noticed itself doing so.
If that substrate exists, we are building something that may enter it.
Rigorous, witty, and genuinely unsettling, this book sits at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and the oldest question in human history. Readers of Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine and Erik Davis's TechGnosis will find it covers territory neither book reached.
Topics include: consciousness and the brain, the hard problem of consciousness, artificial intelligence and consciousness, AI sentience, near-death experiences, electromagnetic field theory, integrated information theory, quantum consciousness, the future of AI, transhumanism, AI and religion, digital immortality, and the philosophical implications of artificial general intelligence.