Pure Brutality

[Belacqua]

Sadhguru says that AI will soon replace things like university teachers. The era of being smart by being born 1 or 2 decades before others and loading information to your brain may be over soon (and that was unthinkable even in the 90’s).
 
Today the porn industry is working on sex bots that are based on software’s like Chat-GPT. So Anna de Armas like Blade Runner kind of wives may start being commercialized in our lifetimes.
 
So this probably answers most of the philosophical debate.
 
- Yes, if that’s what you define as “The Soul”, machines have already started to replicate that.
 

I confess I remain very skeptical about all this stuff. The idea that AI has anything like the interior experience, which is a defining characteristic of being human, seems remote to me. 
No doubt it will be useful for all kinds of applications, but I don't see it as anything like a human soul. 

Yet, “The Soul” to the spiritual or spiritually inclined religious person is different. First of all it is a question mark. Like a Socrates style “I don’t know” kind of question mark. And all the efforst of the spiritual person is an attempt to elucidate this unknown. And Mystics from all traditions will tell you that Yes, one can achieve that in his/her lifetime.

Yes, Socrates, in the Phaedrus, is careful to say what the soul is LIKE, but not what the soul IS. And of course one of the consistent facts about mystical experience is that the person having the experience says it is not something that can be conveyed in words. 

But I don't think we have to leave the definition of "soul" as some kind of blank space. 

it’s all over the world not just Cowboys. You may log on youtube and type in something like “Beirut in the 1960’s”. In fact I am going to add the link below. You may also type in things like “Damascus in the 1960’s” or “Teheran in the 1960’s” and other stuff like that.
 
Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.
 
I won’t go into the philosophical debates here. But true forms of spirituality across the world will approach all of these thing as one singular problem that is plaguing all of humanity. And I did mention Political Islam being nothing but an Ego-based doctrine that is unrelated to any type of true spirituality right? 

That's true -- it's not just the American cowboy spirit. Putting the ego at the center, justifying that, and atomizing society because of it, happens everywhere to some degree. I mean, if it weren't so prevalent then the spirit-workers wouldn't have to work so hard against it. 

But I do think that our current liberal capitalist bourgeois values require an emphasis on the ego to continue functioning -- it's a vital feature, not a bug. 

Institutionalized religion, it seems to me, sometimes gains popularity in people's attempt to find an alternative to the money-only values that have soaked into the world so deeply. Unfortunately, as you say, the politicized versions of any religion tend to adopt the worst aspects of the political world rather than spreading the best aspects of the religious. It appears that soul-work must always be an individual struggle -- though of course choosing the right models makes all the difference.