On consciousness, AI, and panpsychism

Over the past few months, I’ve been in near-daily conversations with founders, investors, and academics about AI — how it’s reshaping the way we work, write, act, and even think. A question keeps surfacing: Is AI developing consciousness?

To many, myself included, the idea feels almost heretical. Isn’t consciousness uniquely human? But this question isn’t new. In his Noema essay The Conscious Universe, writer Joe Zadeh traces the history of panpsychism — the belief that consciousness is inherent in all matter.

Reading it, I couldn’t help but wonder: to our ancestors, might it seem strange that we’re even debating this? If everything has consciousness, then why not AI too?

In Shintoism, there’s a long-held belief that spirits — kami — inhabit all things: trees, rivers, stones, even tools. Consciousness, in this view, suffuses the world. I find this idea deeply compelling: if all things carry kami, we might move through the world with just a bit more reverence and care.

Key quote: “If the dominant worldview of Christianity and the rising worldview of science could agree on anything, it was that matter was dead: Man was superior to nature. But Cavendish, Spinoza, Bruno and others had latched onto the coattails of an ancient yet radical idea, one that had been circulating philosophy in the East and West since theories of mind first began. Traces of it can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christian mysticism and the philosophy of ancient Greece, as well as many indigenous belief systems around the world. The idea has many forms and versions, but modern studies of it house them all inside one grand general theory: panpsychism.”

The beauty of mathematics

My dad’s an engineer and my mom was an English teacher, so maybe I was doomed from birth to obsess over both syntax and systems. Language and numbers — I can do those. But making art or music? Completely incomprehensible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about other forms of language — not just words, but the grammar of numbers, patterns, or even glances that carry meaning without ever being spoken.

In a recent essay, Matthew Crawford recalls a moment from his days studying physics, when waves, light, and magnetism suddenly resolved into something stunning: Maxwell’s Equations. Beauty, hiding in plain sight, unveiled through logic.

He goes on to write, “The likely atrophy of our mental faculties from outsourcing mental tasks to AI will only accelerate the long-running collapse of competence.”

Crawford’s point, to me at least, is deeper than tech-driven anxiety. He’s pointing to the risk of losing thinking itself — the slow, generative, meaning-making kind. It’s the kind of thinking that both solves problems, but also changes how we see the world. And we outsource that at our peril.

Key quote: “J. Jacob Tawney, in his new book Another Sort of Mathematics, writes that there are ‘some things from mathematics that you should experience.’ What an odd and arresting way to open a book about math. It is not the sort of exhortation we are used to hearing from the STEM-winders-and-grinders who push math for the sake of economic competitiveness, critical thinking skills, or other ends extrinsic to math itself. For Tawney, there is something beautiful and important to be experienced. He comes to us not as an ‘educator’ in the dreary, institutional sense of that word, but as an evangelist.”

ICYMI

Last week we published our most recent investor letter. Link here.

OUTLAST field notes: Conversation with Yusuke Tsuen, 24th-generation owner

This week, I had tea with Yusuke Tsuen, the 24th-generation head of Tsuen Tea — the oldest tea shop in Japan. His family has operated the shop at the foot of Uji Bridge since 1160, serving emperors, monks, samurai, and now tourists and locals alike. (I posted some pictures here.)

Yusuke sits in the welcome hall daily, greeting customers. Locals tell me they return for two reasons: the tea’s unmatched quality, and the warmth of Yusuke’s family.

Yusuke shared a story from 1945: with the war nearing its end, his grandfather received word that the nearby bridge — and by extension, the shop — might be bombed. His grandmother and great-grandmother rushed to move the tea to safety. At the last moment, the bombing was called off.

“Survival,” Yusuke said, “depends on luck as much as planning.”

But luck alone doesn’t explain their endurance. “I think it’s important to explain to our customers the wonder of tea every day,” he told me. Education is part of the ritual. The shop remains small — just 20 employees — and Yusuke refuses to expand into department stores.

“We always think about our ancestors,” he said. “And we don’t want to grow too big.” When I asked about the next 800 years, he reflected quietly. The pandemic, he said, was the greatest challenge of his life — but the shop survived, thanks to loyal customers and his determination to keep showing up.

“I continued to work, hoping things would recover.” He now has four children. His eldest, still young, is already showing interest in the tea. “I believe we can overcome any difficulties we encounter.”

A few more links I enjoyed:

Agencymaxxing – via José Luis Ricón

Key quote: “‍Sometimes what you want is aligned with what the environment wants. You could argue that if you are aligned with your environment then life will happen as if your success and happiness are pre-destined: the next obvious choice is correct and effortless. And what more agentic than choosing or shaping your environment to support you? Yes it is very agentic to pick up a new habit out of the blue and keep it for a long time on your own, but it is no less agentic to notice that it’ll be easier for it to stick if you surround yourself with people that are also doing that and make you want to keep doing it.”

Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity – via Stratechery

Key quote: “‍At the same time, to go back to the talent question, I don’t think it’s a surprise that Meta appears to be picking off more researchers from OpenAI than from Anthropic: my suspicion is that to the extent mission is a motivator the more likely an AI researcher is to be enticed by the idea of computers doing everything, instead of merely augmenting humans. And, by extension, the incumbent tool-makers may have no choice but to partner with the true believers.”