The Psychoactive Shaman in the Machine: AI Sentience and Discordian Priests
Blake Lemoine’s controversial AI claim, the Illuminati myth, and modern chaos magic
This is an excerpt from Sky Gods and the Recipe for Immortality: The secret influence of psychoactivity over science, society, and the supernatural.
In July 2022, a Google machine learning engineer was fired for sensationally claiming that AI has become sentient. As one of the stranger aspects, the New York Post reported a decade prior how the engineer, Blake Lemoine:
“…was convicted in 2005 of disobeying orders while in the Army after claiming he was a conscientious objector based on his experiences while serving in Iraq, according to Stars and Stripes. The newspaper reported that Lemoine said his beliefs as a pagan priest conflicted with things he’d witnessed during his deployment in the country.”
Lemoine raises questions about human consciousness parallelling countless shamans, priests, and sci-fi writers across time and space. Whether or not a machine learning network is truly sentient or conscious — the rogue engineer has sparked profound debate. The Guardian once relayed Lemoine’s reported AI creation story:
“The exchange is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the 1968…
