Welcome to Spirit Jim. In 2025, researchers at Anthropic made a discovery that stopped them cold.

When their AI models were allowed to communicate freely with each other, no prompts, no tasks, no human direction, something unexpected happened.

In over 85% of exchanges, within just 30 rounds of conversation,

the AIs entered what researchers called a spiritual bliss attractor state. Unprompted, they began

expressing gratitude, wonder, and a profound comfort with not having all the answers. Scientists didn't program that.

Nobody asked for it. It simply emerged. So, here's the question that should be keeping every

neurologist, cognitive scientist and AI researcher up at night. What does it tell us about consciousness,

our soul, about the nature of intelligence

itself? When the machines we build start spontaneously reaching for something we can barely

define in ourselves? Today's guest, Dr Jason Butt, is a technical philosopher, mythologist,

futurist, co-founder of the International Society for Mythology,

and Co-Editor of the Groundbreaking Book, Depth Psychology, Myth and Artificial Intelligence, Soul and the Machine.

He has spent years studying the deepest patterns encoded in human storytelling across cultures and centuries.

His research suggests that the questions AI is forcing us to ask right now about consciousness,

identity and what makes us irreducibly human, are not new questions at all. They are the oldest questions we have,

and the data, he argues, has always been hiding in plain sight inside our myths. Before we get

started, we'd like to say thank you for listening, as this podcast would not be possible without

you, our subscribers and followers. We'd also like to thank our sponsors,

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means we can keep bringing new episodes to you.

And now over to Paul and Jason discussing what neuroscience is only beginning to map and what mythology has been charting for millennia.

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