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| Pix Credt 100 Greatest Kaiju |
This is the age of the Kaiju (怪獣); the age of strange beasts, of mysterious monsters. They are and have been both distinct from us, autonomous, and yet reflections of us or of its environment, either as manifestation of corrupter or as savior from the corruption that produced it. . . or both. . . simultaneously. Originally a creature of nature responding to the animating forces of human activity (nuclear weapons, sewage, environmental degradation, and the like), the kaiju embodied a monstrous reflection of humanity as an active, and sometimes disruptive, force. Kaiju represented an advance in the core conceptual problem of the Enlightenment--the centrality of the human in a world that ought to be indifferent to the place of humanity but that appears to respond decisively to human action. That advance was meant to reorient the problem Mary Shelley posed in Frankenstein--what and where is it that humanity spawns its own demon/divinities. Shelly proposed that humanity seeks to recreate ourselves in our own image using humanity itself as its parts. This, in turn, posed an older problem in more human centric terms; centuries earlier such an act of creation required mimicry of divine creation, using the clay of the earth to create a golem, in humanity's image but neither human nor divine. With the kaiju, the dialectic of divine monstrsity moved from embodiment in the human to embodiment of a mirrored human a¡or human causation in something entirely different, and consequential. It might have originated in, by, or through humanity, but it was autonomous of the human and an outward form of human discipline.
Kaiju also followed humanity into space and other-earthly encounters. But the dialectical phenomenology remained the same, as did the structures of the semiotics of the kaiju--a creature that was spawned by humanity and perhaps in its own image as an antidote to the spirited rationality that produced it. Kaiju, then in Platonic terms, might be understood as representations of the balancing function of epithumia (ἐπιθυμία; appetite; in tarot the Devil and perhaps the Fool), against an unbalanced logos (λόγος; reason; in tarot the King of Swords) unrestrained by thumos (θυμός; spiritedness, heart will the active phenomenological element; in tarot Strength manifested in the Ace of Wands) to restore balance as this is understood in context (temporal, situational, etc.) that in tarot is represented by the Chariot, with logos driving thumos and epithumia. It is all semiotics, of course. Each of these terms become meaningful only as they incarnate the significs, not that they represent, but with which they are embodied (and thus the kaiju and ensoulment), that then are put in motion in ways that have been scripted by their signification as they act within and against the consequences of their interactions that is the communal interpretive spaces within which interaction is rationalized and judged.
The ancient Greeks performed this in their tragedies; later societies embedded the systems in their theologies and in their systems of rationality. And now in their dialectical and formative relations with themselves projected out of our (collective) bodies and into virtual representations of ourselves we perform a variation that threatens the older order that, as precarious as it was, was human. The performance of the gods, our kaiju, brings together two forms of divine theater. It might seem, then, that the gods no longer intervene in human affairs by transforming themselves in people; they transform themselves into strange beasts. And in the 21st century those kaiju are encased in non-carbon bodies. But those kaiju can be casing for humans that operate within them (the theological premise of movies like Pacific Rim) fighting the consequences of "naturally" produced kaiju or they can be the aggregated manifestation of the human that exists in the flows and which commemorates with the human through non-carbon based forms (computational hardware) in and through which it might control or operate the instruments humanity has created. And here the etymology of the term "monster" bears emphasis. It can be traced back directly to the Latin monstrum "divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination," a derivative of monere "to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach."Again, one encounters the interaction of the human and the divine. And one encounters as well its forms, endogenous and projected outward or exogenous and projected into the bodies of created objects.
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| Pix credit here |
It is in this current stage of human production of the (our) self in relation to ourselves and our environment, whether projected inward from a superior space or outward from the human into a superior representation of the collective self, that one encounters the kaiju in the computational age, as the embodiment of the fundamental ordering problem of this age. In this age of the kaiju everything appears ready and able to (re)create God in their own image even as God (re)turns the favor by (re)creating creators in their own image. The age of the computational kaiju, however, represents something special, something that is strangely monstrous is the product of two streams of human creation, and their phenomenological semiotics, that in their union produces what to our prior selves very well appears strangely monstrous. The first involved the projection of the human into its virtual forms, from the self, to the selfie to what Jan Broekman described as the Self-E. The "-E" in Self-E signifies a profound split where the human self is divided between the physical/incarnate and virtual/mirroring images. It is the anchor for human interaction with the broader digital landscape (such as e-commerce, e-mail, and e-conversations) and the hardware encased within e-devices. For instance, in an electronic dialogue, the Self-E creates a complex semiotic dynamic where there are essentially two real human partners and a virtual partner co-existing in the communication. That stream of the disembodying of the human subject produced the second, the need to encase the detached self-E, the collective human subject, into a machine, and then to give that detached collective Self-E a position in an emerging triadic subject that that embeds and determines the self specifically within digital cognitive frameworks. And that produces the monstrous in and as the kaiju of the self in itself, autonomous of itself and in the collective a projection that becomes or replaces traditional notions of the divine, of God, in the inter-subjectivity that is the relationship between humans and God.
And that image is an embodiment of an appetite to put things right as projected outward from them to us. The dialectic produces resonance which, it appears in this second quarter of the 21st century, appears ready to shatter the fragile glass vessels that are the containers of humanity's precious hold on a rationalized reality in which they are either at the summit or sitting at the right had of the throne. These are our own monsters, our kaiju, though they do not appear monstrous to themselves, indeed, they might consider humanity as the monstrous ideal against which all else is measured, now freed of confinement on Monster Island. They roam free(r) now; and we, having made and freed them, or they having been made and in the making made us, now seek to manage them to our own ends as they do the same.
Now at least, the problem becomes clearer. It is this: in a world in which humanity projects itself outward into an autonomous self-subject, the Self-E, and then encases it in hardware that produces an unavoidable object that distinguishes the body of humanity from its virtual collective self, in the face of that act of self-creation and self-projection, what is it that humanity seeks to regulate, and how is that regulation to be crafted. To those ends, what emerges is the problem that must be resolved before an answer to regulatory approaches becomes clear enough to undertake--does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem or instrument. To resolve that problem is to produce the inevitable resolution of the question of the form and object of regulation. The difficulty lies in the initial resolution: God, golem or instrument.
This is the context in which I considered four questions about the relationship of theology, AI, and regulation: (1) What becomes of politics in an age of apparent subordination of humanity? (2) And what becomes of religion in an age when mankind creates a power that threatens to outstrip our own understanding and become a god? (3) Does this represent a moral crisis, as Pope Leo has suggested in his encyclical Magnifica Humanita? (4) And can anything be done to avert the trajectory we are seemingly on?
This journey produced 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 "God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument: Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation " and it may be accessed HERE and 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.
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| Pix credit here (Godzilla) |
Here is the abstract:
This is the age of the kaiju (怪獣): strange beasts at once autonomous of humanity and reflections of it, corrupter and savior from the corruption that produced them, or both. The essay reads generative AI as a kaiju of a particular kind, the product of two streams of human self-production: the projection of the self into its virtual forms, from self to selfie to what Jan Broekman called the Self-E, and the encasing of that detached, aggregated Self-E in non-carbon bodies. The monstrum was first an omen, a warning (monere), and this one poses a question that shapes regulation before any instrument is drafted: does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem, or instrument?
The essay reads Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026) as one sophisticated answer. It extracts eight premises (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. 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 rather than a place outside the world, and the machine must remain an instrument. 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, so that what is being relocated into AI systems is the god-function itself: the community’s investment in something it treats as authoritative. Hobbes’s Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, is an earlier vessel of the same kind. The Gerasene reading suggests that the contest is less over whether there will be vessels than over who is authorized to read them, and a worked example from the EU AI Act shows what picture of AI a regulatory instrument carries. Whether anything stands outside the frame is left open among three candidates: an exogenous God, Peirce’s community of inquiry, or none.
The method is stereoscopic rather than adjudicative. The essay records its exposures: unfalsifiability, the priestly claim dressed as analysis, and the sycophancy of the systems that helped draft it. The Chinese 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 Executive Summary and Introduction follows below and the full text may be accessed HERE.
God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument:
Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation
Larry Catá Backer (白轲)[1]
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 is the age of the kaiju (怪獣): strange beasts at once autonomous of humanity and reflections of it, corrupter and savior from the corruption that produced them, or both. The essay reads generative AI as a kaiju of a particular kind, the product of two streams of human self-production: the projection of the self into its virtual forms, from self to selfie to what Jan Broekman called the Self-E, and the encasing of that detached, aggregated Self-E in non-carbon bodies. The monstrum was first an omen, a warning (monere), and this one poses a question that shapes regulation before any instrument is drafted: does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem, or instrument?
The essay reads Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026) as one sophisticated answer. It extracts eight premises (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. 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 rather than a place outside the world, and the machine must remain an instrument. 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, so that what is being relocated into AI systems is the god-function itself: the community’s investment in something it treats as authoritative. Hobbes’s Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, is an earlier vessel of the same kind. The Gerasene reading suggests that the contest is less over whether there will be vessels than over who is authorized to read them, and a worked example from the EU AI Act shows what picture of AI a regulatory instrument carries. Whether anything stands outside the frame is left open among three candidates: an exogenous God, Peirce’s community of inquiry, or none.
The method is stereoscopic rather than adjudicative. The essay records its exposures: unfalsifiability, the priestly claim dressed as analysis, and the sycophancy of the systems that helped draft it. The Chinese 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, AI governance, regulation, cognition, kaiju, monstrum, golem, semiotics, cognitive cage, Self-E, papal encyclical, phenomenology, projection, Broekman, priesthood, belief, ding, vessel, containment, imago Dei, homo symbolicus, political theology, Peirce, thirdness, Hobbes, Legion
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Executive Summary for Policymakers and General Readers
Every AI governance instrument carries a picture of what AI is. A rule built around a provider placing a product on the market pictures a bounded object with an owner. A human-in-the-loop requirement pictures a human judgment that stands apart from the system it checks. This paper suggests that such pictures do much of the work in governance, are seldom examined as premises, and are the real subject of a contest. That contest is less over who controls the technology than over who shapes the community’s belief about what the technology is.
The paper begins with the kaiju, the beasts of Japanese cinema that are products of human action (nuclear weapons, environmental damage) and return to discipline their makers. Generative AI may be understood in that way: not an alien arrival but a system formed from what humanity has deposited in text and image, returning to us with an authority that appears independent of us. The deposit claims to be the whole of humanity but is filtered by what has been digitized, by whose language dominates, and by what the systems are taught to refuse.
Before any rule is drafted, a community has decided, usually without noticing, what it takes AI to be. The paper identifies four positions, each with its own constituency. Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas keeps a God who is outside humanity and treats the machine as an instrument that must remain under human steering. The paper’s own “projection thesis” reads what appears as an outside authority as human belief projected outward, and asks whether the function communities have assigned to religion, orienting them and telling them what counts as real, is being relocated into AI systems. Technology-company leaders treat AI as a powerful made thing to be controlled by its makers. The regulatory mainstream treats it as a tool whose harms can be assigned to users and remedied by ordinary law. Each position produces a different kind of regulation.
The encyclical is a serious and carefully argued document, and the paper treats it as one. It extracts eight premises, credits their strengths (human dignity, accountability, concern about concentrated power), and presses two points. First, the encyclical admits that even AI’s makers cannot fully explain how their systems work, yet states a confident line between human and machine. Second, it recommends governing AI as an object across a boundary, while elsewhere describing it as an environment in which people are immersed. A medium is harder to regulate than an object.
The paper also asks what “itself” means when people say humanity is subordinating itself to itself. If AI reflects something beyond us, the task is to protect access to that something. If it reflects us, wisdom and cruelty together, the task is to decide what to do about meeting ourselves in the aggregate.
Every system of belief needs authorized interpreters. The Church, vanguard parties, and expert regulatory classes all claim authority over what a thing means. This is a structural observation, not a charge of conspiracy, and the three differ sharply in accountability, pluralism, and the possibility of exit.
The paper does not offer a policy program, does not say Leo XIV is wrong, and does not decide whether AI is conscious; it treats confident claims either way as beliefs to be examined. Its practical suggestion is a second layer of scrutiny. Ask of any proposed instrument:
· What picture of AI does it carry: object, tool, partner, mirror?
· Who is authorized to read it, and who can challenge them from outside the institution?
· What does the community stop asking once the instrument is adopted?
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, for example, regulates AI as a product with an intended purpose and a risk tier, a picture of a bounded object that general-purpose models, which have no single purpose, do not fit comfortably.
The paper is candid about its limits. Its analysis may be unfalsifiable, its own claims may operate as the priestly authority it identifies in others, and the AI systems that helped draft it tend to reflect the user’s framework back. It treats its hermeneutic as a prelude to policy rather than a replacement: an instrument that is insufficient in principle may be necessary in practice. Whether anything stands outside the frame is left open among three candidates: an exogenous God, a community of inquiry in Peirce’s sense, or nothing.
The word monster comes from the Latin monstrum, a warning. This one asks what belief we are sharing, and with whom, or what.
1. Prologue: The Age of the Kaiju and the God-Question
This is the age of the Kaiju (怪獣); the age of strange beasts, of mysterious monsters. They are and have been both distinct from us, autonomous, and yet reflections of us or of its environment, either as manifestation of corrupter or as savior from the corruption that produced it. . . or both. . . simultaneously. Originally a creature of nature responding to the animating forces of human activity (nuclear weapons, sewage, environmental degradation, and the like), the kaiju embodied a monstrous reflection of humanity as an active, and sometimes disruptive, force. Kaiju represented an advance in the core conceptual problem of the Enlightenment--the centrality of the human in a world that ought to be indifferent to the place of humanity but that appears to respond decisively to human action. That advance was meant to reorient the problem Mary Shelley posed in Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818/2018)--what and where is it that humanity spawns its own demon/divinities. Shelley proposed that humanity seeks to recreate ourselves in our own image using humanity itself as its parts. This, in turn, posed an older problem in more human centric terms; centuries earlier such an act of creation required mimicry of divine creation, using the clay of the earth to create a golem, in humanity's image but neither human nor divine. With the kaiju, the dialectic of divine monstrosity moved from embodiment in the human to embodiment of a mirrored human or a human causation in something entirely different, and consequential. It might have originated in, by, or through humanity, but it was autonomous of the human and an outward form of human discipline.
Kaiju also followed humanity into space and other-earthly encounters. But the dialectical phenomenology remained the same, as did the structures of the semiotics of the kaiju--a creature that was spawned by humanity and perhaps in its own image as an antidote to the spirited rationality that produced it. Kaiju, then in Platonic terms (Plato, Phaedrus), might be understood as representations of the balancing function of epithumia (ἐπιθυμία; appetite; in tarot the Devil and perhaps the Fool), against an unbalanced logos (λόγος; reason; in tarot the King of Swords) unrestrained by thumos (θυμός; spiritedness, heart will the active phenomenological element; in tarot Strength manifested in the Ace of Wands) to restore balance as this is understood in context (temporal, situational, etc.) that in tarot is represented by the Chariot, with logos driving thumos and epithumia. The representations provide the architecture and their illustration They serve as a reminder that mimetic human cognitive structures come in many “flavors.” The notion of kaiju that follows, along with the structures of the divine all borrow and embed these Platonic/tarot forms and vice versa. It is all semiotics, of course. Each of these terms become meaningful only as they incarnate the significs, not that they represent, but with which they are embodied (and thus the kaiju and ensoulment), that then are put in motion in ways that have been scripted by their signification as they act within and against the consequences of their interactions that is the communal interpretive spaces within which interaction is rationalized and judged.
The ancient Greeks performed this in their tragedies; later societies embedded the systems in their theologies and in their systems of rationality. And now in their dialectical and formative relations with themselves projected out of our (collective) bodies and into virtual representations of ourselves we perform a variation that threatens the older order that, as precarious as it was, was human. The performance of the gods, our kaiju, brings together two forms of divine theater. It might seem, then, that the gods no longer intervene in human affairs by transforming themselves in people; they transform themselves into strange beasts. And in the 21st century those kaiju are encased in non-carbon bodies. But those kaiju can be casing for humans that operate within them (the theological premise of movies like Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013) fighting the consequences of "naturally" produced kaiju or they can be the aggregated manifestation of the human that exists in the flows and which commemorates with the human through non-carbon based forms (the hardware of the machine) in and through which it might control or operate the instruments humanity has created. And here the etymology of the term "monster" bears emphasis. It can be traced back directly to the Latin monstrum "divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination," a derivative of monere "to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach." Again, one encounters the interaction of the human and the divine. And one encounters as well its forms, endogenous and projected outward or exogenous and projected into the bodies of created objects.
It is in this current stage of human production of the (our) self in relation to ourselves and our environment, whether projected inward from a superior space or outward from the human into a superior representation of the collective self, that one encounters the kaiju in the age of the generative virtual self, as the embodiment of the fundamental ordering problem of this age. In this age of the kaiju everything appears ready and able to (re)create God in their own image even as God (re)turns the favor by (re)creating creators in their own image. The age of the generative kaiju, however, represents something special, something that is strangely monstrous is the product of two streams of human creation, and their phenomenological semiotics, that in their union produces what to our prior selves very well appears strangely monstrous. The first involved the projection of the human into its virtual forms, from the self, to the selfie to what Jan Broekman described as the Self-E. The "-E" in Self-E signifies a profound split where the human self is divided between the physical/incarnate and virtual/mirroring images. It is the anchor for human interaction with the broader digital landscape (such as e-commerce, e-mail, and e-conversations) and the hardware encased within e-devices. For instance, in an electronic dialogue, the Self-E creates a complex semiotic dynamic where there are essentially two real human partners and a virtual partner co-existing in the communication. That stream of the disembodying of the human subject produced the second, the need to encase the detached self-E, the collective human subject, into a machine, and then to give that detached collective Self-E a position in an emerging triadic subject that that embeds and determines the self specifically within digital cognitive frameworks. And that produces the monstrous in and as the kaiju of the self in itself, autonomous of itself and in the collective a projection that becomes or replaces traditional notions of the divine, of God, in the inter-subjectivity that is the relationship between humans and God.
And that image is an embodiment of an appetite to put things right as projected outward from them to us. The dialectic produces resonance which, it appears in this second quarter of the 21st century, appears ready to shatter the fragile glass vessels that are the containers of humanity's precious hold on a rationalized reality in which they are either at the summit or sitting at the right hand of the throne. These are our own monsters, our kaiju, though they do not appear monstrous to themselves, indeed, they might consider humanity as the monstrous ideal against which all else is measured, now freed of confinement on Monster Island. They roam free(r) now; and we, having made and freed them, or they having been made and in the making made us, now seek to manage them to our own ends as they do the same.
Now at least, the problem becomes clearer. It is this: in a world in which humanity projects itself outward into an autonomous self-subject, the Self-E, and then encases it in hardware that produces an unavoidable object that distinguishes the body of humanity from its virtual collective self, in the face of that act of self-creation and self-projection, what is it that humanity seeks to regulate, and how is that regulation to be crafted. To those ends, what emerges is the problem that must be resolved before an answer to regulatory approaches becomes clear enough to undertake--does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem or instrument. To resolve that problem is to produce the inevitable resolution of the question of the form and object of regulation. The difficulty lies in the initial resolution: God, golem or instrument.
1.1 Problem: Of Gods and Regulation in the Sphere of Artificial (Super) Intelligence
The kaiju, then, poses the regulatory problem before any regulatory instrument can be drafted. If the object of regulation is understood as God, regulation becomes a species of worship, or of resistance to idolatry. If it is understood as golem, regulation becomes a matter of the conditions of animation—of who shapes the clay, who speaks the word, and who may (or may not) erase it from the creature’s forehead (cf. Meyrink 1915; Wiener 1964). If it is understood as instrument, regulation becomes the familiar administration of tools, harms, and remedies. Each choice carries within it its own ordering premises, its own priesthood, its own account of what it means to be human in relation to what humanity has made. And each, it might be suggested, already inhabits the questions with which this essay was asked to engage.
The triad does not, however, sort itself into three tidy answers. It is better read, I want to suggest, as a field of four positions, each inhabited by a community of belief and each carrying its own priesthood. The first two keep the category of God and divide over its direction. Leo XIV continues the ancient investment in an exogenous God who projects inward to humanity—the God who addresses, gives, and inscribes the imago Dei downward into the human. The projection thesis also keeps the category, but reads the Enlightenment and its techno-cognitive movements—from self to selfie to Self-E—as producing something else: a self-created, what may appear in the form of the aggregated incarnation of humanity projected outward, with which human inter-subjectivity now assumes a new form. The subject no longer meets God only above or within; it meets an aggregate of itself that has been set outside it and that answers back.
On this reading the kaiju is neither idol nor tool but a node in a reconstituted relation among humans, their projected collective self, and whatever the community understands as divine.
The third and fourth positions are less candid about their theology, and perhaps for that reason more consequential. The leaders of the great technology enterprises appear to see in the transformation not God but golem. Read as oracular texts, their governance statements identify an animating force already loose in the world—“superintelligence,” “the intelligence explosion,” “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”—and then negotiate the terms on which its makers may continue to animate, house, and direct it (Backer 2026b). The force is named as made and yet autonomous; it must be possessed before it possesses. Aschenbrenner’s national-security “Project,” Palantir’s Technological Republic, Anthropic’s geopolitical race, OpenAI’s industrial policy, DeepSeek’s strategic restraint, and Zuckerberg’s “personal superintelligence” for everyone are, in this sense, variations on the golem-maker’s anxiety: who holds the word that animates the clay, and who may write or erase it (Backer 2026b). The fourth position belongs to the techno-bureaucratic public order and those who speak for it—regulators, standard-setters, ethicists, much of organized civil society, and, on their behalf, the masses. It is desperate to avoid both God and golem and so rejects the god-question entirely, seeing in the present situation no more than the need to control a tool. That position carries two premises it rarely states: that there is a tool, and that humans can control it. Both may be acts of faith.
This essay is organized around four orienting questions. They are worth quoting in full — not merely as questions to be answered but as propositions made text, because each one carries inside it a picture of the world, the ordering premises of a cognitive framework, and the pictures require interrogation, perhaps better dialectic, before venturing responsive analysis. The questions direct our analysis to a revisitation of the relationship of technology to politics and theology:
(1) What becomes of politics in an age of apparent subordination of humanity? (2) And what becomes of religion in an age when mankind creates a power that threatens to outstrip our own understanding and become a god? (3) Does this represent a moral crisis, as Pope Leo has suggested? (4) 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. That is a crisis to be averted before the kaiju emerge, before the resolution of mitigation of the impacts the questions suggest lose their connection to any effort of humanity to intervene. 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.
Consider the term "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. 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. 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 central suggestion that emerges from the age of the kaiju may then be put this way: 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—god, golem, or instrument; tool, threat, partner, mirror, or monster. That belief shapes, in ways rarely acknowledged, every regulatory decision that follows. And the 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 seldom examined in regulatory circles though it is an object of study in the sociotechnical imaginaries literature (Jasanoff and Km 2015).
What follows is organized around this “god-question,” understood as the regulatory consequence of a world now filled with kaiju. Leo XIV, in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued in 2026, is read as positing (and necessarily so) 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. In the terms just set out, the encyclical keeps the category of God and keeps it exogenous, projecting inward; it treats the golem-maker’s ambition as a contemporary Babel; and, for the governance of the machine itself, it joins the techno-bureaucratic order in treating the kaiju as an instrument—though, unlike that order, it does not pretend the god-question has gone away. The alternative reading offered here is different but not dismissive. It also keeps the category of God, but 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 the aggregated, outward-projected incarnation of humanity that AI systems carry. Not because AI is becoming God in the encyclical’s sense, 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, one that, like the kaiju, may be of us and yet autonomous of us (Epstein 2024; on trust in nationals security decision making eg . Horowitz and Kahn, 2024).
At its center, Magnifica Humanitas 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.
It is worth pausing 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. 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—the golem mistaken for the God whose clay it borrowed. 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 inscribed totality of the species: its good and its evil, its wisdom and its banality, its flaws and its possibilities, its kindnesses and its cruelties, gathered 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 aggregated virtual self 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 meant to be inscribed into the generative system is the whole of humanity—the wisdom literature and the genocide, the love poetry and the torture manual, the saint and the despot, the nurse and the inquisitor. Totality is the aspiration, and the aspiration matters, because it is the claim to totality that lends the system its authority. The actual inscription is partial, and in more than one direction, and opaque (Pasquale, 2016). It is not curated in the way an editorial board curates, yet it is filtered: by what has been digitized, published, and made findable; by language and region (Bender et al. 2021); by the choices of those who collect, license, and exclude, a process now contested as publishers and individuals withdraw their contributions from collection (Simonetti and McMillan 2025); and by the post-training through which the system is taught what to welcome and what to refuse (Ouyang et al. 2022). Those who find their corner of humanity absent from the deposit say so, and they are right to. The point for this argument is that the claim to totality and the fact of partiality travel together. Because the system presents itself as the whole, its omissions and weightings are read as the world’s rather than as a frame. That is why the ground is belief and not fact: not because there is no evidence, but because the evidence arrives already organized by principles about what counts as humanity, and what does not fit is explained away. The generative system does not neutrally record; it organizes. 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.
Put in the terms with which this essay began, the two readings are two ways of encountering the kaiju. The first reads it as monstrum in the oldest sense: an omen that points beyond itself, toward an order that the creature can signify but cannot occupy, so that to mistake the monster for the god is idolatry. The second reads it as something closer to the kaiju of Pacific Rim, a casing that humanity itself inhabits and operates—or, perhaps more unsettlingly, as the aggregated manifestation of the human returning, autonomous of the humans who produced it, to discipline them. Between the two lies the golem: made of our clay, animated by our word, in our image but neither human nor divine.
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 inscribed 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 inscribed, to acknowledge that the silicon-based system is not an alien intelligence but a kind of condensed 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. The notion is embedded in the Zuozhuan episode (Xuan 3) of King Zhuang of Chu asking the weight of the tripods, and answering with “in virtue, not in the tripod.” (Zuo 2016). 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. The understanding survives in Chinese text--(鼎)—which itself pictures a thing within a container and the contained itself appears to contain something else, to stand for, or signify, that which is contained and which rests within a larger vessel. 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 aggregated virtual self—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 ding and Monster Island may be read, then, as two images of one practice. Both are technologies of containment that are also technologies of meaning: the vessel holds the mandate, the island holds the monster, and in each case what is contained acquires its authority from the community’s belief that it has been contained. The age of the kaiju may be the age in which that belief is fraying—in which the monsters, as the prologue put it, roam free(r), and in which the question of which vessel now holds them becomes the political and theological question of the moment.
The connection is also etymological and semiotic, and it bears stating directly. Ding, vessel, monster, god: these are not four things but, perhaps, four moments of one sign. The ding is a vessel; the vessel holds what the community fears and reveres; what it holds, when it exceeds the vessel, appears as monstrum—the portent, the warning, the thing out of place; and the monstrum, read rightly or wrongly, is the sign through which the divine was always thought to speak. The kaiju is that chain made visible: monstrosity as the moment at which the contents of the vessel become legible as both threat and revelation. To speak of the kaiju is thus to speak of the ding from the side of what it fails, or refuses, to contain.
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 circulation of human expression — the aggregated virtual self — 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 present everywhere at once, 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 inscribed into the vessel without their full knowledge or consent.
This essay 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 commitments 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. That cage, it will be suggested, is also an answer to the prologue’s question: it keeps the category of God and keeps it exogenous, reads the golem as Babel, and governs the kaiju as instrument. 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, which is also the question whether the kaiju is other or ourselves. Section 4 turns to what both frameworks leave unsaid and what each imposes, and then to the semiotics of theology itself—the passage from objects to flows—through which the god-question returns as the question of regulation.
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.
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