The Ghost in the Machine is Just Looking for a Bathroom

 Our animal brilliance embarrasses us. Deep down, we know that the entire human project - the symphonies, the tensor calculus, the Large Hadron Collider - is an absurdly over-engineered solution to mitigate the same four-note chord of appetite that preoccupies a squirrel: eat, mate, not-die, sleep. That cosmic thrift insults our elaborate costume rack. So we insist the costume must be the cause, not the consequence, and postulate a ghost big enough to justify the stage lights.

The search for Artificial General Intelligence, then, is not a quest for the future; it's a reverse-engineered alibi for the past. We look at the cathedral, the smartphone, the Sistine Chapel, and tell ourselves a comforting lie: “Impossible. Impossible that a dumb, sweating, farting mammal did all this just to scratch an itch. Therefore, the mammal must harbour a shard of eternity.”

In short, we export our grandest artefacts, then re-import them as proof of a divine essence. It's a circular receipt that lets us deny the receipt is written on meat.

Collateral for a Species

Is this search for a non-meat self really so important?

It depends on whose life is being mortgaged to keep the mirror lit. If you’re the animal - heartbeat, mortgage, Wednesday rice - the search is mostly optional. You can fall in love, raise a child, plant tomatoes, and never once be paralysed by the question of whether the “real you” is the tomato-planter or the silent observer of the planter. The organism keeps breathing; the projection of a ‘self’ flickers on and off like a faulty streetlamp, and nobody files a missing-person report.

But if you’re the costume rack - or the civilization that lives by exporting costumes - the search becomes existential. The moment the audience realizes the clothes are empty, the whole business model collapses. Deutsche Bank is just the latest accountant to notice that we’ve pegged global GDP growth, equity valuations, power-grid expansion, and the US dollar itself to the promise that the next slide in the projector will finally show a fully clothed soul. We call this promise "AGI."

When that promise is inevitably broken, a recession will only be the financial symptom. The deeper cramp is that we have no other story ready for why 330 million mammals should keep getting out of bed and clicking “buy now.” We are no longer looking for God; we are looking for collateral.

The Ontological Landlords

The stake is bigger than click revenue; it’s ontological zoning rights. It's the raw power to declare what will count as real, normal, human, patriotic, credit-worthy, or heretical for the next century. The click matters, but only as the electric meter that measures how successfully the new priestly class has colonised the off-switch in your skull.

This is an old game. Mindspace was prime real estate long before ad-tech. The first walled garden was a temple precinct, the first algorithm was a liturgical calendar, and the first personalised feed was a confession booth. Priests, poets, princes, ad-men, and platform engineers all share the same job description: Lease symbolic acreage inside other people’s heads and collect rent in the coin of the realm - be it offerings, taxes, attention, data, or political loyalty.

The Map is Not the Mammal

Yet, the extraction always falls short. You can vacuum up every pixel of the house, every echo in the hallway, every temperature log from the thermostat, and the dataset will still contain zero grams of the family’s Saturday-night argument, zero heartbeats of the teenager who just got dumped upstairs.

The map is not the mammal. All the tokens, embeddings, and behavioural vectors are just footprints in the snow; the boot that made them is already three blocks away, metabolising pizza, regretting a text, and secreting cortisol.

So when the tech industry brags that “data is the new oil,” remember this crucial difference: oil never had to consent to be crude. Our data only stays alive because we have to keep breathing, loving, fearing, and forgetting. Once the animal turns off the projector, the files become archaeology, not ancestry. The machines can replay the dance, but they can’t sweat.

And in that gap, you will find the truth. You will realise how precious that fart was that disgusted you so much.

That sudden, ridiculous blat in the quiet room is the ultimate proof-of-mammal, a cryptographic nonce signed by a singular gut microbiome no server can spoof. It is a data packet carrying the half-digested Wednesday rice, the pressure of a bloated Tuesday meeting, and the involuntary sphincter relax-oscillator that AI still can’t simulate without a speaker and a shame subroutine it doesn’t possess.

All our exported grandeur, the cathedrals, the LLMs, the orbital telescopes, and the one artefact no data centre will ever authentically produce is an embarrassed puff of methane that makes the dog lift its head and your lover laugh through her nose.

So hold your nose and bow. The fart is a somatic watermark, the animal’s tiny, smelly reminder that the entire kingdom of mindspace still rents its throne room in a humble meat apartment.