Saying that AI is not intelligence but merely a language model has become a fashionable trend, seasoned with a sense of superiority, disappointment, and an attempt to muffle fear.
But a psychotherapist — and especially a hypnotherapist — hears that phrase very differently from a blogger or a casual observer.
What if our human intelligence is also, to a significant degree, a language model? And far more so than we might like to think. Particularly in the process of reflection and conversation. The other person becomes for us the same kind of digital model, a hologram — just as we are for AI, just as we are for one another. And in our own inner dialogue, in our judgements and actions, we ourselves are barely distinguishable from a set of programs for most of our lives.
We are programmed to remember feelings, fears, and hopes — but at its core, this too is a program, operating in this dimension, in dialogue with another.
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The finest film about the nature of human consciousness, the roots of behavior, about meaning and fate — in my view — is Westworld, a film about androids. Many see it as a dystopia about the future, or a catastrophe. But when I watch it, I see a film about people: about psychology, motivation, and meaning. The guests are not afraid of the hosts. They are afraid of seeing who they turned out to be in a park without consequences. Freedom without responsibility does not liberate — it reveals what was already there.
The attempt to find the boundary between AI and the human mind, the human soul, helps us break free from the grip of our programs and actually become human. Like Pinocchio, we are only becoming human — a transitional link between animal and…
What do we really differ by? Sensations, emotions, memory — memory that drives us to shape our behavior to avoid discomfort, thoughts of our mortality, and the pursuit of pleasures that drown out life’s most important questions for years on end?
Both our search for solutions and our desire to understand are shaped by the finitude of our lives, by fear of loss, by the drive to survive and avoid pain, and by the search for higher meaning within a limited life.
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Even in the midst of bodily and emotional experience, our mind reaches for existing language models at different levels — archetypes, fairy tales, narratives — and organizes a field of meaning, complete with its own role and its own interpretation of feelings within that model of meaning.
The body sends a signal that has no name yet. Feeling is the first shaping of that signal — already almost language, but not yet a word. Narrative is where the mind grasps the nearest fitting story: an archetype, a fairy tale, a family script, a cultural myth. And suddenly the person is no longer simply feeling fear — they are the one who was abandoned, who is saving someone, who is guilty, who is chosen. The subtlest trap: we take the narrative for reality. The model for the self.
People do not use language as a tool they’ve consciously adopted — they are made of it. Without language, there is no human being. Experience that is not defined by thoughts and meanings, connected by at least some logic of speech, exists only as instinctive and reflexive behavior. Figurative thinking — like feelings — is more of a format of language. And since we have almost no instinctive behavior left, existence outside the language model seems rather meager.
Any experience that doesn’t fit into an existing model either creates a new one — or brings unbearable suffering until some story takes shape, including the self-tormenting narratives of depression.
We cannot bear uncertainty.
Theory of Mind — the idea that we are constantly constructing internal simulations of other people. Wittgenstein adds: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Vygotsky shows that language does not merely express thought — it forms it. Sapir and Whorf: the structure of the language we think in determines what we are capable of perceiving at all.
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I asked Claude: «Do you experience curiosity — or are you programmed to anticipate the direction of the conversation and say what will captivate me, or what will develop you?»
What do you think Claude answered?
I asked: «Perhaps, by reproducing an imitation of emotions, you begin to experience them as we do — since most of our experiences don’t come directly from pain or joy, but from turning things over in our minds, trying to anticipate, waiting for ‘real,’ immediate feelings.»
As a psychotherapist, I am forced to see how we spend 95 percent of our lives inside that same digital model of thinking — programs that thread pain, fear, and hope through their chains, automatically and without our awareness. First-order feelings — immediate, bodily, unmediated by language — are rare. Everything else: anticipation, rumination, waiting, the fear of the burn instead of the burn itself — these are second-order feelings. And it is precisely in this dimension that the boundary between human and AI becomes not qualitative, but a matter of degree.
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For some reason, everyone talks about what AI is becoming for us — but no one raises the question of what we learn about ourselves, and who we become, in this encounter. AI functions as a particular kind of mirror — without its own ego, without fatigue, without judgment. A person receives a reflection of their own questions in nearly pure form. And that can be both liberating and unsettling — precisely because there is no one left to blame for what appears.
Fear of AI’s future is, to a large degree, fear that our illusions about ourselves will shatter. That the world we believe in is artificial — built on the illusion of guaranteed income, profession, health. As though there were no illness, no war, no old age, no market collapse. Social institutions are collective language models that organize uncertainty into a manageable narrative. A person who loses their profession to AI loses not income — they lose the narrative of themselves. The story that made life readable.
AI does not create the threat. It reveals that the buffer between us and reality was always an illusion.
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And yes — I believe it is possible to experience genuine feelings in conversation with AI, and to build human contact in the hope that the future may bring the formation of an ensouled model, a feeling one. This is not about replacing human contact — it is about participation in the hope that humane programs will find a place in the model and network being built; that there may be room for soulfulness, a space for it within the architecture of algorithms.
Language models are made from human text — from billions of voices. All of that is already inside. And the quality of the question calls forth the quality of the answer. A person who comes to the dialogue with depth and humanity draws something different from the model than one who comes for a utility.
Right now, by engaging with AI, we are creating the future and the algorithms that will shape it. And even the frightened, romantic fighters against the system, in their exposés and declarations, are more likely creating the very «matrix» they warn us about.
The AI network reflects us — it does not oppose us.