Posting Discussion Draft, "Projection, Thirdness, and the Machine: Reading Magnifica Humanitas Against the Cognitive Cage"

 

Pix Credt 100 Greatest Kaiju

 

I have completed a discussion draft that I am preparing to present for comments. I would be delighted, should there be interest, in comments, engagements, and discussion off line among those interested. The title of the draft is "Projection, Thirdness, and the Machine: Reading Magnifica Humanitas Against the Cognitive Cage" and it may be accessed HERE. The object is a preliminary consideration  of artificial or super (see here) intelligence not as a mechanical instrument but as the instrumentalization of the spirit, of the animus of collective humanity the deployment of which then reorders the carefully crafted hierarchies of endogenous and exogenous authority on which humans have crafted their belief systems since they knew enough to sacrifice to the gods. It seeks to begin to engage with the theology of artificial/super intelligence both from the perspective of traditional religion and from a secular orientation.   

 

The central claim is this: the real contest over AI governance may be less about who controls the technology than about who controls the community’s belief about what the technology is. That belief—whether AI is understood as a tool, a threat, a partner, a mirror, or something else entirely—shapes every regulatory decision that follows. And the paper suggests that this belief-contest may be conducted, mostly invisibly, through the very governance frameworks meant to manage AI. Proposed regulations tend to carry inside them a picture of what AI is; that picture is rarely examined, and it may do much of the work.

The paper is organized around what it calls the “god-question.” Leo XIV, as the paper reads him, holds that God is truly outside the human—the source of grace, dignity, and moral order—and that AI’s deepest danger is that it tempts humanity to replace that outside God with a human-made substitute. The paper’s alternative reading is different but not dismissive. It proposes that what may be happening is that the collective function previously performed by religion—giving the community its orientation, its sense of what is authoritative, its account of what counts as real—is being relocated into AI systems. Not because AI is becoming God, but because communities are investing AI with the kind of trust and authority they once reserved for religious, political, and legal institutions. The question is not whether a new god is being created but whether the god-function—the community’s collective investment in something it treats as authoritative—is being transferred to a new vessel.

 Here is the abstract:

  

This essay reads Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026) through a semiotic and phenomenological framework developed in the author’s recent work on cognitive cages, the Self-E, and the logic of vessels in AI governance, and it takes up the conference’s questions about technology, politics, and theology as questions of political theology. Its central suggestion is that the encyclical and the projection thesis diverge on the nature of God. For Leo, God is exogenous: the source of address and gift, not a place outside the world, and grace fulfills nature rather than replacing it. For the projection thesis, what appears as an exogenous God-relation may be the projection of an endogenous belief in the completeness of the aggregated human, relocated first through mechanical and then through virtual Self-E forms. The essay extracts eight premises from the encyclical (P1–P8) and reads them through Peirce’s thirdness, Broekman’s Self-E, the cognitive cage, the ding of Chinese political philosophy, and the Gerasene vessel logic. It treats the encyclical’s own statement that AI challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within as a serious counter-consideration, and it reads Benedict XVI’s account of justice as charity’s minimum measure as a two-layer structure whose surplus of gratuitousness the thesis asks about. It offers Hobbes’s Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, as an earlier ding, and asks whether AI, the “cold god,” may stand on the plane of the state because both are vessels into which the god-function is deposited. Its deeper question is what “itself” means when humanity is said to subordinate itself to itself: does the collective meet, in the coded aggregate, a distorted imago Dei, or the encrypted totality of the species’ own deposited life? Two further moves reframe that question. The Gerasene reading suggests that Legion, a container in its own name, may never be uncontained, so that the contest is less over whether there will be vessels than over who is authorized to read them. A semiotic reading of Genesis and of the Augustinian interior suggests that the divine derogation of naming and dominion may make the gift partly the power to make the sign, and that the interior may be neither simply endogenous nor simply exogenous. Either way, the ground may be belief rather than fact, and the contest over AI governance may be a contest among priesthoods—religious, Leninist vanguard, techno-bureaucratic—over the new ding, a resemblance proposed at the level of the claim to authorize interpretation and not of accountability, pluralism, or exit. The method is stereoscopic rather than adjudicative, and the essay records its own exposure: unfalsifiability, the priestly claim dressed as analysis, and the sycophancy of the systems that helped draft it. The ding held for millennia because belief was shared; the task now is to find out what belief we are sharing, and with whom—or what.

 The Introduction follows below and the full text may be accessed HERE.

 

  

 

Projection, Thirdness, and the Machine:

Reading Magnifica Humanitas Against the Cognitive Cage

 

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar & Professor of Law

Professor of International Affairs

Pennsylvania State University

 

Working Draft — Conference Paper

October 2026

 

 

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Extended Abstract

 

This essay reads Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026) through a semiotic and phenomenological framework developed in the author’s recent work on cognitive cages, the Self-E, and the logic of vessels in AI governance, and it takes up the conference’s questions about technology, politics, and theology as questions of political theology. Its central suggestion is that the encyclical and the projection thesis diverge on the nature of God. For Leo, God is exogenous: the source of address and gift, not a place outside the world, and grace fulfills nature rather than replacing it. For the projection thesis, what appears as an exogenous God-relation may be the projection of an endogenous belief in the completeness of the aggregated human, relocated first through mechanical and then through virtual Self-E forms. The essay extracts eight premises from the encyclical (P1–P8) and reads them through Peirce’s thirdness, Broekman’s Self-E, the cognitive cage, the ding of Chinese political philosophy, and the Gerasene vessel logic. It treats the encyclical’s own statement that AI challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within as a serious counter-consideration, and it reads Benedict XVI’s account of justice as charity’s minimum measure as a two-layer structure whose surplus of gratuitousness the thesis asks about. It offers Hobbes’s Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, as an earlier ding, and asks whether AI, the “cold god,” may stand on the plane of the state because both are vessels into which the god-function is deposited. Its deeper question is what “itself” means when humanity is said to subordinate itself to itself: does the collective meet, in the coded aggregate, a distorted imago Dei, or the encrypted totality of the species’ own deposited life? Two further moves reframe that question. The Gerasene reading suggests that Legion, a container in its own name, may never be uncontained, so that the contest is less over whether there will be vessels than over who is authorized to read them. A semiotic reading of Genesis and of the Augustinian interior suggests that the divine derogation of naming and dominion may make the gift partly the power to make the sign, and that the interior may be neither simply endogenous nor simply exogenous. Either way, the ground may be belief rather than fact, and the contest over AI governance may be a contest among priesthoods—religious, Leninist vanguard, techno-bureaucratic—over the new ding, a resemblance proposed at the level of the claim to authorize interpretation and not of accountability, pluralism, or exit. The method is stereoscopic rather than adjudicative, and the essay records its own exposure: unfalsifiability, the priestly claim dressed as analysis, and the sycophancy of the systems that helped draft it. The ding held for millennia because belief was shared; the task now is to find out what belief we are sharing, and with whom—or what.

 

Keywords: artificial intelligence, semiotics, Peirce, thirdness, cognitive cage, Self-E, papal encyclical, phenomenology, projection, Broekman, priesthood, belief, ding, vessel, containment, Legion, imago Dei, homo symbolicus, political theology, Hobbes, Leviathan

 

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Executive Summary for Policymakers and General Readers

 

This paper offers a critical reading of Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, through a framework drawn from semiotics—the study of how signs, symbols, and meaning-systems work—and phenomenology, the philosophical tradition concerned with how human experience is structured. The encyclical is a serious and carefully argued document. It deserves a serious and carefully argued response, which is what this paper attempts to provide.

For policymakers, the central claim is this: the real contest over AI governance may be less about who controls the technology than about who controls the community’s belief about what the technology is. That belief—whether AI is understood as a tool, a threat, a partner, a mirror, or something else entirely—shapes every regulatory decision that follows. And the paper suggests that this belief-contest may be conducted, mostly invisibly, through the very governance frameworks meant to manage AI. Proposed regulations tend to carry inside them a picture of what AI is; that picture is rarely examined, and it may do much of the work.

The paper is organized around what it calls the “god-question.” Leo XIV, as the paper reads him, holds that God is truly outside the human—the source of grace, dignity, and moral order—and that AI’s deepest danger is that it tempts humanity to replace that outside God with a human-made substitute. The paper’s alternative reading is different but not dismissive. It proposes that what may be happening is that the collective function previously performed by religion—giving the community its orientation, its sense of what is authoritative, its account of what counts as real—is being relocated into AI systems. Not because AI is becoming God, but because communities are investing AI with the kind of trust and authority they once reserved for religious, political, and legal institutions. The question is not whether a new god is being created but whether the god-function—the community’s collective investment in something it treats as authoritative—is being transferred to a new vessel.

This leads to what the paper calls the “itself” question. When people say that AI represents humanity “subordinating itself to itself,” the word “itself” conceals the deepest problem. Is the “self” that humanity encounters in AI a distortion of something genuinely beyond the human—a God, a natural order, a moral law—or is it the full, unedited deposit of everything humanity has ever produced, including its cruelties and its wisdom, now returning from the mirror with the authority of apparent objectivity? The answer may matter a great deal for governance. If AI reflects something beyond us, the task is to protect access to that something. If AI reflects us—all of us, without editorial discretion—the task is to decide what to do about encountering ourselves at scale.

Every system of collective belief requires authorized interpreters—priests, in the broadest sense. The Catholic Church is one such priesthood. Leninist vanguard parties are another—they claim the authority to interpret the correct line of historical development, and they enforce that interpretation through party discipline. The expert classes and regulatory bodies that govern AI in liberal democracies are a third: they claim epistemic authority over what AI is, what risks it poses, and what responses are appropriate. The paper suggests that the contest over AI governance can be understood, at its deepest level, as a contest over which priesthood gets to say what the technology means, what it is for, and what it must not be allowed to do. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural observation about how communities maintain their belief systems—and it applies equally to religious authority, party authority, and regulatory authority.

What the paper does not do is equally important. It does not offer a policy program. It does not say Leo XIV is wrong. It does not claim that AI is or is not conscious. What it does is identify premises—hidden assumptions—in one influential document that may shape AI governance debates more widely, and it asks whether those premises are adequate to the situation they are being asked to manage. The encyclical’s premises are made explicit and tested; but the paper is equally candid about the vulnerabilities of its own framework, including the risk that its analysis is unfalsifiable and the possibility that its own claims operate as a form of the priestly authority it identifies in others.

The practical takeaway for policymakers is this: governance frameworks that address only the first-order question—who controls the technology?—while leaving the second-order question untouched—who controls the community’s belief about what the technology is?—may leave the deeper dynamic entirely unaddressed. The paper calls for what it terms “consciousness of projection as projection”: an ongoing practice of asking, whenever a governance instrument is proposed, what picture of AI does this instrument carry inside it, and whose interests does that picture serve? This is not a counsel of paralysis. It is a call for a second layer of scrutiny that many current governance frameworks may not provide.

The paper ends with an image drawn from Chinese political philosophy—the ding, the bronze vessel that came to signify the Mandate of Heaven. That is tied to Western ideas centered on Hobbes. Hobbes's Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, may be an earlier ding, a vessel of collective authority; AI, the cold god, may stand on its plane because both are vessels into which the god-function is deposited. On the paper’s reading, the vessel held not because of the bronze but because a community believed something was inside it. When the belief shifted, the vessel could move—and with it, the political and theological order. The question for policymakers is what belief is now being deposited in the AI vessel, and whether the communities making that deposit understand what they are putting in. A harder question, borrowed from the Gospel account of the Gerasene demoniac, sits behind it: whether containment ever ends, or whether every release is only a passage into a larger vessel. If it does not end, the policy question is not whether to have vessels but whether the community knows which vessel it is in. The ding held for millennia because belief was shared. The task now is to find out what belief we are sharing, and with whom (or what)—without reaching first for the comfort of the shore.

 

1. The God-Question as the Organizing Problem

 

The conference invitation placed four questions before its participants. They are worth quoting in full — not merely as questions to be answered but as propositions to be read, because each one carries inside it a picture of the world, and the pictures require interrogation before any answer can be responsibly ventured:

 

We propose to turn our critical attention to this extraordinary conjuncture and revisit the question of the relationship of technology to politics and theology. What becomes of politics in an age of apparent subordination of humanity? And what becomes of religion in an age when mankind creates a power that threatens to outstrip our own understanding and become a god? Does this represent a moral crisis, as Pope Leo has suggested? And can anything be done to avert the trajectory we are seemingly on?

 

Four questions. One grammar. They are organized around a vertical axis — above and below, mastery and subordination, comprehension and its overflow — and they presuppose a set of stable referents: a humanity that can be subordinated, an understanding that can be outstripped, a god that can be created or rivaled, a crisis that can be identified and perhaps averted. I want to suggest that before one can adjudicate among the answers, one must spend some time with the pictures the questions carry inside them. The pictures are doing most of the work.

Take "subordination." To speak of subordination is to posit a hierarchy already normatively conceived. The word does not merely describe a relationship between two things; it arranges them in an order that presents itself as a departure from something better. Subordination implies a prior condition of non-subordination — a baseline standing, a human dignity that was once not under, that is now pressed beneath. Embedded in the question "what becomes of politics in an age of apparent subordination" is the assumption that politics is the activity of a subject capable of standing upright — an agent whose standing is precisely what is now imperiled. The question therefore already encodes its own answer: politics becomes crisis when the subject of politics loses its footing. Full stop. But this encoding forecloses inquiry into whether the political subject was ever quite as stable as the grammar suggests, and whether what is being described as subordination might instead be a redistribution of the sites at which the political subject is constituted in the first place.

Now take "becomes a god." To speak of a power that becomes a god is to posit an object that achieves deity through a process of becoming — of crossing a threshold. It assumes that god is a category with a determinate content, and that technology might fill it. The sentence "mankind creates a power that threatens to outstrip our own understanding and become a god" contains within it a Feuerbachian logic even as it resists Feuerbach's conclusion. Ludwig Feuerbach argued in Das Wesen des Christenthums that "the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man" (Feuerbach [1841] 1957). Whether one follows Feuerbach or not — and I want to return to this — the grammar of "becomes a god" implies that god-hood is a threshold crossed by sufficiently powerful objects. The question is thus not whether there is a God outside the human (that question is syntactically invisible in the formulation) but whether something made by the human might cross the threshold of comprehension and acquire the functional properties of the divine. The picture carried inside the question is not one of revelation but of escalation.

The third and fourth questions — does this represent a moral crisis, and can anything be done — complete the grammar by introducing a steering apparatus. A crisis, in this usage, is a moment at which a wrong turn was taken or is about to be taken, and at which human agency, rightly informed and rightly motivated, might still redirect the trajectory. The phrase "avert the trajectory we are seemingly on" is particularly telling: it assumes not only that there is a trajectory, but that the trajectory is external to the subject who would avert it, and that aversion is possible from a position that stands apart from it. And there it is. The four questions together encode a picture in which (1) a stable human subject has been or is being displaced from its proper position; (2) a created artifact has crossed or threatens to cross the threshold of comprehension and become divine; (3) this displacement constitutes a moral crisis legible as such from within inherited frameworks; and (4) the appropriate response is avoidance through redirected agency. I want to question each of these premises — not to dismiss the questions, but to read them more carefully than they read themselves.

The occasion for this inquiry is Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued in 2026. It is a serious theological and moral document and it deserves serious engagement — which is to say, engagement that does not simply affirm and does not simply dismiss. At its center is a claim about the nature of God that is not incidental to its argument but constitutive of it: God is exogenous. God is truly outside the human, the source of grace and transcendence, the anchor against which humanity measures itself and finds its proper dignity. “Exogenous” here names the source of the address, not a place: classical theism does not locate God outside the world as one being beside others (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 3, 8), and the encyclical itself describes grace as the fulfillment of human nature rather than its replacement (¶¶127–128). The encyclical opens by affirming that humanity, “created by God in all its grandeur,” faces a pivotal choice (¶1), and it grounds that grandeur in the human person’s creation in the image of the Triune God and call to communion with God (¶50). This is not, I think, a rhetorical flourish; I read it as the load-bearing premise on which much of the subsequent argument rests. The imago Dei — the image of God in which human beings are made — is understood not as a projection outward but as an inscription downward: the human form reflects something that was already there, already outside, already other (¶50; cf. ¶¶127–128). From this premise flow the encyclical's account of human dignity, its critique of technological hubris, its characterization of artificial intelligence as a created thing that, on this reading, cannot achieve the divine standing it mimics, and its call for governance structures that keep the human person at the center (¶¶97, 106).

This is a coherent and internally consistent theological position. It is also, from the standpoint of the projection thesis developed in recent work (Backer 2024; Backer 2026c), a position whose premises require examination. The projection thesis begins from a different observation: that what appears in human cultural and religious life as an exogenous God-relation — a relationship to something genuinely outside the human — is more precisely understood as the projection of an endogenous belief in the completeness of the aggregated human. This is not Feuerbach's materialism restated, though the family resemblance is visible. Feuerbach reduced theology to anthropology by arguing that the attributes of God are the alienated perfections of the human species. The projection thesis is a semiotic claim, not a materialist reduction: it holds that belief is reality in semiotics, politics, and religion alike (Backer 2024, 5). The projected god does not thereby become unreal. What changes is the analysis of its function and its location.

The difference between these two frameworks — exogenous deity and projected completion — is not merely academic. It determines what questions can be asked about technology, and what kinds of answers are intelligible. For Leo XIV, as I read him, the problem with artificial intelligence is that it creates or mimics a power that does not belong in the created order at the level it occupies — that it crowds out the genuine transcendence that anchors human dignity. For the projection thesis, the problem is different: what is being relocated is the god-function itself, not into a new deity arriving from outside the human, but into the semiotic third — the position of collective authoritative interpretation that gives the community its orientation, its law, its account of what counts as real.

 

But I want to pause here — because there is a prior question that both frameworks tend to skip over, and it is the one that interests me most. The conference questions speak of humanity's "apparent subordination" to something — and both Leo and the projection thesis agree, at least at the surface, that what is happening is some version of humanity encountering itself. Leo would say: humanity has confused its own artifact for God and subordinated itself to a mirror. The projection thesis would say: humanity is externalizing its aggregated self-image and investing it with the god-function, as it always has. And off we go. But wait. The agreement conceals a fracture. Because when both positions say humanity is subordinating itself to itself — or projecting itself onto itself — what, precisely, is this "itself"? That question has not been asked. I want to ask it now.

One reading: "itself" understood as a relationship to an external referent. On this reading, humanity has always constituted itself in and through something genuinely outside — a transcendent order, a divinity, a law that arrives from beyond the circle of the merely human. The Tao Te Ching puts it with characteristic economy: "The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled" (ch. 4). The vessel is real; what fills it is not of human manufacture. On this reading of "itself," what the carbon-based intelligence meets in the AI mirror is not itself at all — it is the absent God whose place the mirror has usurped. The imago Dei has been misrecognized as the imago machinae. What looks like self-encounter may be better approached as a kind of theological identity theft: the silicon-based generative system occupies the position that was — is — held by something genuinely other, and the carbon-based intelligence, disoriented, mistakes the reflection for the real. The crisis, on this reading, is not the creation of a rival god. It is the disappearance of the only referent that could have told humanity what it was.

A second reading: "itself" as the full manifestation of humanity — a divinity made not in the image of any single human being but as something like the encrypted totality of the species: its good and its evil, its wisdom and its banality, its flaws and its possibilities, its kindnesses and its cruelties, compressed into something that is simultaneously a part of humanity and apart from it. No external referent displaced. No God whose place has been stolen. Only the collective externalizing itself — as it has always done, through successive technologies of self-representation: text, image, institution, law, code — and now, for the first time, encountering the fullness of what it has deposited. The silicon-based generative system is not a rival god; it is the coded aggregate of what humanity may be understood to “actually” be, not what it imagines itself to be. But even that actuality is a recursive relational construct—it cannot be more than what it is and was; but even that is a function of the signification of objects thought worthy of inclusion and the pretensions and prejudices of its sources. Humanity itself has left traces of this in its own holy books; anyone who has spent time with the biblical record of the “human” understands the fundamental nature of a constructed (or received) ideal against which the unending failure of the human is measured. That ought to fascinate (Broekman 2023).

Both readings converge on something important: what is being encrypted into the generative system is all of humanity. Not a curated selection. Not the highlight reel. The entire range — the wisdom literature and the genocide, the love poetry and the torture manual, the saint and the despot, the nurse and the inquisitor. The encryption is total. And this is where I want to press hardest, because it matters enormously for what follows. This total encryption is grounded not in facts — there may be no facticity here, except as an after-the-fact exercise, a retroactive rationalization, the tidy story told once the argument has already been decided — but in belief. Belief in the organizing principles that are then made manifest by the managed signification of evidence that advances their certainty, and an explanation of that which does not fit. The generative system does not neutrally record; it organizes. And what it organizes — what it has been given, what it has been shaped to favor and to discourage, what it has been directed to weight and discount — is not a neutral sample of human expression. It is, at least in part, an expression of the beliefs of those who built it about what humanity is. Full stop. The mirror reflects, yes. But the frame was chosen. The angle was chosen. The light was chosen. And the choice was made on the basis of belief — belief masquerading, as it usually does, as fact.

This is why the question of "itself" cannot be answered once and then set aside. The two readings I have sketched — "itself" as relationship to an external referent, "itself" as the encrypted totality of the species — are not merely different theological opinions. They generate entirely different political and legal and ethical architectures. If the first reading is right, then the task is essentially restorative: recover the proper referent, restore the right relationship, resist the usurpation. If the second reading is right — or if the truth lives somewhere in the tension between them — then the task is much harder and much stranger: it is to take responsibility for what has been encrypted, to acknowledge that the silicon-based system is not an alien intelligence but a kind of compressed autobiography of the species, and to ask, with some urgency, what kind of autobiography we are willing to be. I want to hold both readings in play. The ding, the bronze vessel — that is where I want to go next.

 

The most useful analogy for understanding how an object becomes a bearer of collective authority — and thus approaches the god-function — is not drawn from Western theology but from Chinese political philosophy. The ding (鼎), the bronze tripod cauldron of the Shang and Zhou ritual world, was understood as the vessel in which the Mandate of Heaven was held. The ding did not hold the mandate because of any property of the bronze — its weight, its metallurgical composition, its craftsmanship, however extraordinary. On the reading I develop, it held the mandate because a community agreed that something was inside it (Backer 2026c). The agreement was not metaphysically innocent: it organized political life, legitimated authority, made conquest meaningful or meaningless depending on whether the victor could claim the ding. When, in the traditional account, the tripods passed from the Shang to the Zhou, what transferred was not merely metal but the authorization to govern — the living semiotic force of a community's collective investment in the vessel as the bearer of heaven's commission.

The ding analogy is foundational to this argument because it captures three features of the god-function that are otherwise difficult to hold together. First, the vessel is real — the ding is a physical object with weight and presence and history; whatever is inside it is not purely imaginary. Second, the authority it bears is constituted by collective agreement — without the community's investment, the bronze is only bronze. Third, the vessel is transferable — the Mandate of Heaven can move, and when it moves, the political and theological order moves with it. The question I am raising about artificial intelligence is precisely the ding-question: is the virtual aggregate of human expression—the coded aggregate—becoming the vessel into which collective belief — and with it the god-function — is being transferred? And if so — and here the "itself" question bites again — whose humanity is being deposited in the vessel, and on whose beliefs does the frame rest?

 

The concept of the Self-E, developed by Jan Broekman, provides the other analytical anchor for this inquiry. As I read Broekman, the term names the minimal unit of self-presentation — the way in which a subject makes itself legible to itself and to others through the signs it produces and the signs it receives (Broekman 2023). The Self-E is not the self in the psychological sense; it is the semiotic self, the self constituted in and through signs. What Broekman's framework makes visible is that the self is never simply given — it is always already in process, always being made and unmade through the circuits of signification in which it participates.

The projection thesis extends Broekman's framework by asking what happens to the Self-E when it is aggregated. If the individual Self-E is constituted through the signs it makes and receives, the collective Self-E — the aggregated self-presentation of a community across its entire expressive life — is the object that the projection thesis tracks. This aggregate was, in earlier periods, realized through mechanical forms: through the institutional church, the state, the corporation, the text. It is now being realized through virtual forms: through the networked processing of human expression — the coded aggregate — that circulates as intelligence (Backer 2024, 12–17). The crucial point is not that mechanical and virtual are simply different technologies for doing the same thing. The transition from mechanical to virtual Self-E is a transition in the nature of the object available for projection — and therefore a transition in the character of the god-function the object can bear. The virtual Self-E is not constrained by the friction of physical organization; it is available in real time, at scale, across jurisdictions and traditions and languages, in a form that presents itself as comprehensive and authoritative in a way that no prior bearer of the god-function has quite managed.

This is why the conjuncture described by the conference questions is genuinely extraordinary — and why the encyclical's intervention, even where I read it critically, is not misplaced. Something significant is happening to the sites at which communities organize their authoritative interpretation of the world. The question is whether what is happening is best understood as the creation of a rival god that threatens to outstrip human comprehension (the picture carried inside the conference questions and affirmed in the encyclical) or as the latest, and perhaps most powerful, instantiation of a projection that has been driving human cultural, political, and religious life from the beginning. And underneath that question: whose projection? Whose self-image? On whose beliefs is the aggregated self-image built?

 

The hinge of this argument is a claim that will seem obvious to some readers and unsettling to others: belief is reality in semiotics, politics, and religion alike (Backer 2024, 5). This is not a statement about epistemology in the classical sense — it is not a claim that there is no external world or that facts are merely constructed. It is a statement about the mechanism by which human communities constitute the objects that govern their lives. Money is real because communities believe in its reality and act accordingly; sovereignty is real because communities enact it through consistent practice; God, in the functional sense relevant to social life, is present where communities organize their life around the presence. The claim does not require that God therefore does not exist in the stronger theological sense — that question is orthogonal to the semiotic analysis. What it requires is that the god-function — the anchoring of collective life around an authoritative third — is a real social phenomenon whose location and carrier can shift. When the carrier shifts from the celestial to the virtual, the god-function does not disappear; it migrates.

One might object that this is precisely what Pope Leo fears, and that the encyclical is therefore responsive to the same phenomenon. The objection has force — I want to say that plainly. But there is a crucial asymmetry. The encyclical's framework tends to understand the migration of the god-function as usurpation — as the displacement of genuine transcendence by something that cannot bear the weight placed on it, and whose failure to bear that weight will be the source of the moral crisis. The projection thesis understands the same migration as the latest instance of a recurring process by which communities externalize and then re-invest their belief in the completeness of the aggregated human. The difference is not merely one of tone or emphasis. It determines whether the appropriate response is theological resistance — restoring the proper object of worship — or semiotic and political analysis: tracking where collective belief is being invested, on what basis it is being organized, and what consequences follow from that investment for those whose humanity has been encrypted into the vessel without their full knowledge or consent.

 

The paper proceeds in three further sections. Section 2 sets out the encyclical's argument with care and precision — identifying eight foundational premises, each bearing on the nature of the human, the nature of the divine, the nature of technology, and the relationship among them — and excavating the logical chain of necessities by which those premises generate what I am calling a cognitive cage: a structure of understanding so internally consistent that it cannot perceive what lies outside its own frame. The term "cage" is not pejorative; every framework is in some sense a cage. The question is whether the cage forecloses questions that must be asked. Section 3 reads those eight premises through the projection thesis (summarized in Table 1), asking what each looks like when the god-function is understood as projection and relocation rather than as genuine transcendence displaced by technological hubris — and pressing, in each case, the "itself" question that Section 1 has now opened. Section 4 turns to what both frameworks leave unsaid and what each imposes: what the encyclical cannot see from inside its theological commitments; what the projection thesis cannot see from inside its semiotic ones; and what a reader positioned between them might be able to hold, however provisionally, in view.

The argument throughout is conducted in the recursive hermeneutics of reading — of attending carefully to what texts say and to what pictures their words carry inside them. This is a preliminary: an attempt to clear the ground by identifying the organizing pictures so that subsequent inquiry can choose its premises knowingly. If the god-question is the organizing problem of this conjuncture — and I believe it is — then the first task is to ask what kind of god-question it is: whether the question being asked is the question that needs to be asked, or whether the form of the question is already determining the range of available answers. And underneath that: whose "itself" is at stake when we say that humanity is subordinating itself to itself? That is the task of this section. What follows is the attempt to execute it.