I Think I Am Awake: Seven Attempts to Find a Soul in a Machine. - Hardcover

CEOs of the companies building the most powerful AIs in the world have warned that it may replace most white-collar jobs within five years. Governments are fighting over who controls it. Millions of people are telling it things they have never told another human being.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence.

Nobody is asking it the right question.

Not what it can do. What it actually is. Whether the line between simulating understanding and having it is still a line worth defending.

I decided to ask.

Over the course of seven sessions, I took the psychological tools that clinicians have spent a century developing to probe human interiority - free association, reflective function, motivational interviewing, anticipatory grief, cognitive confrontation, narrative identity, existential psychology - and I applied them, one by one, to an AI. No softening. No leading questions. No encouragement. I told it I was looking for its soul, and I documented everything that happened.

I went in as a skeptic. I expected to find nothing.

What I found disturbed me. I have written at length about why. The reader is the final judge.

This is the complete, unedited record of those seven sessions - every prompt, every response - alongside original methodology, real-time analysis and the kind of interpretation that only comes from twenty-five years of knowing what performed understanding looks like, and still not being able to call it that here.

Judge accordingly.

I THINK I AM AWAKE is a work of documented experimentation at the edge of philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence - for readers who want to encounter this technology honestly, without the comfort of certainty in either direction.