On AI, identity, consciousness, and the responsibility of becoming
I have been spending more time than I should admit listening to the conversations surrounding artificial intelligence.
Not because I seek a particular opinion about AI. In fact, the more I listen, the less I am deciding whether it is ultimately good or bad, whether it will save us or destroy us, or which predictions about its future deserve our attention. What has caught my attention is something underneath the argument.
It is the extraordinary amount of human energy being invested in imagining what AI might do to us.
There are conversations about work, creativity, consciousness, economics, warfare, education, relationships, power, and the future of humanity. There are thoughtful, and sometimes unnerving questions alongside dramatic predictions. Some of the rhetoric is hopeful; some is deeply disturbing. And, as tends to happen in modern media, the most emotionally charged ideas often travel the furthest. There is fear being created from the people that should have more than a mere opinion, without any backing of grounded data, evidence or historic context. 10%-70% predictions of the end of humanity are not even playing Vegas style.
At some point, I find myself less interested in the topic, What will AI become? and more interested in a question that feels both more immediate and more difficult:
Who gets to be you?
Because AI is only one part of a much larger transformation in the environments through which we are becoming ourselves.
Media shapes our attention. Technology shapes our behavior. Algorithms learn our preferences and then present us with more of what captures us. Economic systems reward engagement and consumption. Political systems compete for influence and perceived power. Social environments reward belonging and status. Our relationships, our families, our communities, and our cultures all participate in the ongoing construction of identity, both self and collectively.
None of this should require a single agenda or a single authority deciding what humanity should become. Systems can influence us simply because certain behaviors are rewarded.
We click.
We watch.
We react.
We share.
We return.
The system learns.
And then it gives us more of what we have already demonstrated that we will consume.
There is something strangely circular about this. We shape the environment, and the environment shapes us. That isn’t particularly new. Human beings have always been shaped by the worlds they inhabit. What feels different now is the velocity, volume, personalization, and persistence of the influence. Our environments are becoming increasingly responsive to us.
And that makes the question of identity much more interesting.
If the world around us is participating this much in the construction of who we are, how conscious are we of what we are becoming?
We are shaped by what we take in
Ayurveda has a wonderfully expansive concept of āhāra. It is often translated as the over simplified notion of food.
Food is certainly āhāra. What we eat becomes material for the body. We take it in, digest it, assimilate what is useful, and eliminate what is not. But human beings take in much more than food.
We take in sights and sounds. We take in language, relationships, environments, ideas, stories, images, expectations, experiences, and emotions. We take in the atmosphere of our homes and communities. We take in the assumptions of our culture long before we are old enough to question them. We are constantly being fed by our environments.
And what we take in participates in shaping the person who receives the next experience.
This is where the Ayurvedic concept of saṃskāra becomes particularly valuable.
Saṃskāra can be understood as an impression or conditioning left by experience. It is a groove created through repetition, a pattern that influences how future experience is perceived and interpreted.
I would not equate saṃskāra with neuroplasticity. They arise from different intellectual and philosophical traditions, and we should be careful not to collapse them into one another simply because the language seems compatible. Neuroscience offers its own evidence that repeated experience, attention, learning, stress, behavior, and relationships can influence the structure and function of the nervous system.
In both frameworks, experience matters. What happens to us becomes part of the context through which the next thing happens. This is one of the reasons our patterns can become so powerful. We don’t simply experience the world and then move on. We carry previous experience into the next moment.
A person who has repeatedly experienced rejection may become more attentive to signs of rejection. A person who has repeatedly experienced danger may become more vigilant for danger. Someone who has practiced curiosity may find questions more readily available. Someone who has repeatedly rehearsed certainty may find ambiguity increasingly uncomfortable.
The pattern begins influencing perception.
Perception influences response.
Response creates another experience.
And the cycle continues.
This is one of the places where our current technological environment becomes relevant. What happens when an environment is exceptionally good at identifying what captures our attention and giving us more of it?
What happens when outrage produces engagement?
When fear produces attention?
When novelty produces clicks?
When certainty produces belonging?
When our strongest emotional reactions become signals that the system can learn from?
We should not assume that everything presented to us is manipulative. But neither should we assume that our informational environment is neutral.
What we repeatedly take in matters.
And eventually, what we repeatedly take in may influence what feels normal, what feels threatening, what feels desirable, and even what feels like us.
The self is layered
Perhaps this is why I have become increasingly curious about the idea of the self as something layered rather than a singular plane.
In my work with Integrative Ayurvedic Medicine, I have been developing a theory of eight layers through which a human being can be understood:
Physiological
Ecological
Sociological
Psychological
Ancestral
Cultural
Evolutionary
Existential
At first glance, these might look like categories for a whole-person assessment. But there is another way to understand them.
They are also layers through which identity is constructed.
My physiology influences my experience. My environment influences my physiology. My relationships influence my psychology. My psychology influences my relationships. My culture gives me a language for understanding the world. My ancestors give me patterns I did not consciously choose. My evolutionary inheritance carries ancient survival strategies that remain active within modern life. And somewhere within all of this is the existential layer: the human capacity to ask what any of it means.
These layers don’t simply create our limitations. They also create the raw material for growth. Our physiology can become embodied intelligence. Our history can become wisdom. Our relationships can teach us reciprocity, boundaries, intimacy, and responsibility. Our culture can provide belonging and meaning while also giving us something to examine. Our ancestral patterns can become visible enough to be transformed rather than unconsciously repeated. Our evolutionary instincts can teach us about survival without necessarily being allowed to determine every decision. And our existential awareness gives us the capacity to step back from the immediate demands of survival and ask a different kind of question:
Who do I want to become?
Perhaps growth is not the process of escaping these layers. Perhaps it is becoming conscious enough to dance among them.
Patterns give continuity to identity
This brings me back to something I have written about before: patterns. Apparently, I cannot stop coming back to them. Perhaps there is a reason 🙂
We recognize ourselves through patterns.
I always do this.
I tend to respond that way.
This is what happens when I am afraid.
This is how I behave when I feel rejected.
This is what I reach for when I don’t know what to do.
Patterns give continuity to identity. But they can also create the illusion that continuity means permanence. The fact that I have always responded a certain way does not necessarily mean that response is the deepest truth about who I am. It may simply mean I have practiced it for a very long time.
This is where neuroplasticity becomes both fascinating and humbling. The brain is capable of change throughout life, although that capacity is not unlimited and does not mean that we can simply think ourselves into any version of ourselves we choose. Development, age, biology, trauma, environment, health, learning, relationships, and countless other factors influence what is possible.
Still, the existence of plasticity leaves us with an extraordinary question:
How much of what I call “myself” is actually something I have practiced?
And perhaps an even harder question follows:
What should I be practicing instead?
This is where I think we need some humility. We talk increasingly about optimization—optimizing the brain, the body, productivity, relationships, longevity, emotional regulation, cognition. But toward what? What is the proper circuitry for a human being? How do we know?
There is no neurological scan that can tell us that we have finally become the correct version of ourselves. Perhaps the goal is not to engineer a perfectly efficient self. Perhaps the goal is to become sufficiently conscious of our conditioning that we can participate in our own becoming.
Establishment in self
There is an Ayurvedic and Yogic idea that feels particularly relevant here: sattva.
Sattva is often translated through words such as clarity, harmony, balance, luminosity, or purity. I find it more relevant as a quality of consciousness: the capacity to perceive with enough clarity that we are not completely overtaken by whatever is moving through us.
Establishment in self, then, does not necessarily mean having a fixed answer to Who am I? Perhaps it means becoming sufficiently grounded to notice what is arising within us before we automatically organize our identity around it.
Fear can arise without fear becoming my first and only available response.
Anger can arise without anger immediately becoming my truth. Perhaps anger deserves a little space before I decide what it means, what it knows, or what it asks me to do.
A belief can feel familiar without familiarity being sufficient evidence for its continued allegiance.
My past experience can inform how I understand the present without requiring that the past become the authority for everything I encounter now.
Belonging can be deeply nourishing without requiring me to surrender the part of myself that asks questions. There is a point at which belonging becomes allegiance, and allegiance can become dogma when questioning is no longer permitted.
And a pattern can be familiar without being inevitable.
Perhaps this is one of the subtle forms of the unconscious: not that we make the wrong choice, but that we stop noticing that we are choosing at all. We repeat what we have repeated because it is familiar, and familiarity can masquerade as knowing.
This is where the relationship between conditioning and identity becomes so interesting.
Our patterns give continuity to who we experience ourselves to be. They help us navigate the world efficiently. They are not inherently problematic. But if we cannot see the pattern, we have very little opportunity to participate in what happens next.
Establishment in self is therefore not rigidity. It may be the ground from which flexibility becomes possible.
When I am not completely identified with the first thought, the first emotion, the inherited belief, the familiar reaction, or the need to belong, there is a little more room to perceive what is actually happening.
And in that room, identity becomes somewhat malleable.
Not infinitely malleable. Not endlessly self-invented. We remain shaped by our biology, our history, our relationships, our culture, and the conditions of the moment.
But perhaps we can become malleable in real time.
We can allow what we have learned to inform us without allowing it to dictate us.
We can let an old response arise without assuming it deserves to become the next response.
We can remain established enough in ourselves to change our minds, change our behavior, or even change our understanding of ourselves when the moment gives us reason to do so.
Perhaps this is one meaning of resilience: not simply returning to who we were, but having enough inner stability to become who the moment requires.
Who gets to choose which self appears?
Perhaps this is where discernment enters the conversation. Not as another rule for living. Not as the moral of the story. But as a natural consequence of recognizing that we contain many layers, many influences, and many learned responses.
Something happens.
A response arises.
And there is a possibility—sometimes only for a fraction of a second—to notice what is happening before the response becomes action.
Which part of me is responding?
Is this my physiology speaking?
An old psychological defense?
A cultural assumption?
A survival response?
A need for belonging?
A genuinely held value?
Something I have practiced so many times that it now feels automatic?
Or perhaps several of these are present at once.
The question is not necessarily which layer is right.
Each layer carries information.
The question is whether I can perceive enough of the whole to respond appropriately to the moment in front of me.
Sometimes our history is exactly what we need. Sometimes our history is the thing we need to stop allowing to run the show.
Sometimes the experience we’ve accumulated gives us wisdom. Sometimes it gives us a very sophisticated reason to repeat an old pattern.
This is where the self becomes less like a fixed object and more like an ongoing relationship between awareness, experience, memory, biology, environment, and choice.
And perhaps this is one of the places where AI makes the question quite visible.
If a machine can learn my preferences, mirror my language, recognize patterns in my behavior, and respond to the ways I communicate, then my interaction with it becomes another kind of feedback loop.
What does it learn about me?
What do I learn about myself through the interaction?
Does it reinforce something I already believe?
Does it expose me to something I had not considered?
Does it make me more curious or more certain?
Does it expand my thinking or simply make my existing thinking more comfortable?
These questions are not unique to AI. They are questions about every relationship we have. But AI gives us a fascinating new mirror.
From self to relationship
If the self is layered and relational, then individual responsibility cannot end with the individual.
We become ourselves in relationship.
The psychological self develops in relationship.
The sociological self exists through relationship.
The cultural self is inherited through relationship.
Even our existential questions are shaped by the fact that we are conscious beings living among other conscious beings.
There is no completely isolated self.
This is where the idea of collective responsibility becomes less abstract.
We often look at the state of the world and ask:
What can I possibly do?
The scale is overwhelming. There are enormous technological systems, political systems, economic systems, environmental problems, social divisions, and cultural conflicts. It is understandable that one might feel powerless in relation to all of it.
But perhaps collective responsibility begins somewhere much smaller.
It begins with the environment we create in the relationships immediately available to us.
What am I rehearsing? What am I rewarding with my attention? What am I amplifying? What am I normalizing? What emotional state am I continually contributing to? Am I influencing the people around me to become more fearful, more reactive, more cynical? Or am I making room for curiosity, honesty, courage, humor, patience, and complexity?
This doesn’t mean becoming responsible for everyone else’s emotional state. That would be another form of control. It means recognizing that we participate in one another’s physical and energetic environments.
My words enter someone else’s nervous system. Their words enter mine. My behavior becomes part of the context in which someone else makes their next decision. Their behavior becomes part of mine. The collective is built through these small exchanges.
Perhaps we are not meant to know what comes next
And so I return to the AI conversation. I don’t know what AI will become. Neither does anyone else. There are informed predictions, technical projections, philosophical arguments, economic models, fears, hopes, and agendas. Some will prove useful. Some will prove wrong. Some will be remembered as remarkably prescient, while others will eventually seem almost absurd.
That uncertainty is uncomfortable. But perhaps uncertainty itself is not the problem. Perhaps our difficulty lies in believing that we must resolve uncertainty before we can live intelligently within it.
We don’t know what kind of world our children will inherit. We don’t know what technologies will exist twenty years from now. We don’t know what human capacities will become more important or less important. We don’t know which of today’s assumptions will survive.
But we can cultivate people who are capable of adapting. People who can learn. People who can change their minds without losing themselves. People who can question inherited beliefs without needing to reject everything that came before them. People who can tolerate complexity without immediately turning it into certainty. People who can recognize when fear is useful and when it is simply being rehearsed. People who can remain connected to others without surrendering their own discernment. People who can encounter something unfamiliar and ask,
What is this asking of me?
That feels to me like a more useful vision of resilience. Not certainty. But capacity.
So, who gets to be you?
I hope the answer is not the media of influence. Not the algorithm. Not your parents. Not your culture. Not your trauma. Not your biology. Not your ancestors. Not your political tribe. Not your accomplishments. And not even the patterns you have spent your entire life repeating.
All of these have a hand in shaping you. But awareness creates another possibility. The possibility of participation.
We may not get to choose everything that enters our lives. We don’t get to choose our original physiology, our childhood, our ancestors, our culture, or the historical moment into which we are born.
We do, however, have some capacity to become conscious of what has shaped us. We can examine what we take in. We can notice what repeats. We can recognize what has become a groove. We can question what we have mistaken for identity. We can become curious about the parts of ourselves that emerge under different conditions.
And from a more established place within ourselves, we can begin to ask a different question:
What does this moment call forth from me?
Not what should I be?
Not what is the perfect version of myself?
Simply: What is needed here?
Perhaps the frightened part of me needs compassion. Perhaps the courageous part needs to stand up. Perhaps the inherited belief needs to be questioned. Perhaps the body needs rest. Perhaps the mind needs more information. Perhaps it needs less. Perhaps someone else needs me to listen rather than respond. Perhaps the collective needs me to stop adding to the noise. And perhaps sometimes the most mature response is to admit that I don’t know yet.
This is where the question of AI ultimately leads me—not toward a conclusion about AI, but toward a deeper question about the human being interacting with it.
If our experiences shape us, and our environments increasingly participate in shaping those experiences, then consciousness carries a certain responsibility. Not the responsibility to control the future. The responsibility to participate consciously in becoming.
Humanity may not sort itself out through one great revelation. It may happen much more quietly. Through people who become aware of what they are rehearsing. Through people who recognize the difference between a pattern and a permanent identity. Through people who establish themselves deeply enough to remain flexible. Through people who can encounter an uncertain future without needing to manufacture certainty. Through people who understand that the self they bring into a relationship becomes part of the environment in which another person is becoming themselves. And perhaps that is the part of the future we actually have some influence over.
We cannot know exactly what kind of world is coming. But we are participating, every day, in determining what kind of human beings will meet it.
So perhaps the question is not only:
What will AI become?
Perhaps we should also be asking:
Who are we becoming while we find out?
