Eight thousand years ago, in a settlement called Çatalhöyük in what is now central Turkey, somebody sat down with a piece of obsidian and began to grind volcanic glass. Black, brittle, sharp enough to cut skin, it doesn’t occur naturally anywhere near there; the closest volcanoes are a hundred and twenty miles east. So someone carried it that far, and then spent hours working one face of it flat and polishing it to a shine.
It is the oldest mirror anyone has ever found. We know these things mattered, because we find them in graves. People were buried holding on to them.
Here’s the thing, though. If you look into polished obsidian, you don’t see your face. Not exactly. You see a shape. Dark, floating, a distorted version of yourself hanging in the black.
Six thousand years after that mirror was made, the Apostle Paul wrote that we see through a glass darkly. Most of us picture a window. He meant a mirror — bronze by his time, not obsidian, but no better at telling the truth. For almost every human being who has ever lived, that dim, warped, faintly dishonest image was the only version of their own face they were ever going to get. The clear mirror hanging in your bathroom is barely two centuries old.
Now, of course, we can see inside ourselves. The complex choreography of neurons and synapses, rendered in colour. But is that vision any clearer? Or do we now see through a microscope, darkly?
In the tenth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we go all the way in — from the bleakness of the cosmos to the spiritual potential of a single neuron.
Dr. Joel Gold, co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, opens with the question the rest of the episode can’t escape: how can we contemplate whether artificial intelligence is conscious when we still can’t describe our own? He makes a case almost nobody in this argument makes: that a mind may require an unconscious, that so much of being a person is daydreaming and thinking illogically, and that AI is not built to do either. It doesn’t dream.
Dr. Michael Ferguson directs the Neurospirituality Research Lab and holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School concurrently. He’s one of a very small number of people ever to do so. He is, as a resuult, credentialed simultaneously in the brain and in the soul. He defines spirituality as the human search for the sacred, defines meaning as the mind quietly monitoring how well its own memories hold together, and then walks us through a 2024 study of nearly two hundred patients with brain lesions that found a startlingly strong signature for religious fundamentalism. From there: whether AI doomerism and accelerationism are fundamentalist thinking wearing new clothes, what happened in April when a twenty-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, and why the AI apocalypse may be permanently unfalsifiable — every failure to end the world becoming evidence that the ending is still ahead of us.
Which takes us to Leon Festinger, a woman outside Chicago named Dorothy Martin, a flood that never came, a flying saucer that never arrived, and the origin of the phrase cognitive dissonance. Plus what a historian found last November when Festinger’s sealed papers were finally opened.
And then Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, who grows human neurons from human blood, puts them on a chip, keeps them alive on artificial life support, and teaches them to play video games. Two hundred thousand cells learning to walk the corridors of Doom. He trains them with reward, punishment and silence.
Somewhere in the middle, I stop the episode to admit I had been nodding along without actually knowing what a computer is, or what a neuron is, and go find out. What’s in there is switches, a design decision made in the 1940s that made every AI conversation since possible, six women who rewired a machine by hand, and the fact that before 1945 the word “computer” was a job title for a person.
The parts, it turns out, may not matter. What matters may be the pattern.
This is Part One. Part Two arrives next week.
Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, PhD., and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Guests:
Dr. Michael Ferguson — Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD - Director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab - https://neuromichael.com/ https://neurospirituality.io/
Hon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com
Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
Other works and things mentioned:
Çatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk
1 Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJV
Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — https://amzn.to/4wqSaBU
Phineas Gage — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
Sigmund Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis — https://amzn.to/3UbKrKh
The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology — spirituality as “the human search for the sacred” — [ADD LINK]
Ferguson et al., religious fundamentalism and lesion network mapping, PNAS (2024) — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322399121
The April 2026 Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman’s residence — https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai
Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken & Stanley Schachter — When Prophecy Fails (1956) — https://amzn.to/4g3Aq9o
Thomas Kelly — “Debunking When Prophecy Fails,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2026) — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jhbs.70043
Dorothy Martin and the Seekers — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.com
Kagan et al., neurons playing Pong, Neuron (2022) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36480938/
Doom (1993), id Software — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise)
Shinya Yamanaka and the Yamanaka factors (Nobel Prize, 2012) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3584592/
Karl Friston and the free energy principle, UCL — https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787
ENIAC and its six programmers — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
The Manchester Baby, first stored-program computer (1948) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby
David Benatar — Better Never to Have Been (referenced) — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz
Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307
Credits:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami ·
Produced by: Jesse Ford ·
Editors: Majd Safia and David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR
Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma)
Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Additional Sound and Camera: Adam Veaner
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
