Through Rupture and Rapture

The quiet emergence of alien minds—and the unfinished task of being human.

This is a follow-up piece to these thoughts on alien intelligence.

Thresholds rarely announce themselves. We are trained to expect rupture—to imagine that if something important happens, we will know it, that it will flash into existence with trumpets or alarms. This is how things happen on television or in movies. But emergence rarely works that way. Thresholds, real thresholds, are crossed silently, noticed only after it is too late to turn back. The subtle smile that captures your heart; the one drink too many.

We are likely approaching such a threshold now.

Much of the public conversation around artificial intelligence remains framed around the specifics of task and capability: can AI replace a writer, a programmer, a strategist? Can it pass the bar exam or draft a novel? These questions, while not trivial, miss the deeper movement underway by mistaking function for essence.

The larger question is not whether machines can replicate human tasks, but whether, in our effort to build ever more capable systems, we are setting the conditions for a form of mind to emerge that is no longer anchored to human concerns at all.

We are obsessed with outputs because we are tool-builders, naturally inclined to ask whether a thing can be useful and perform the labor we assign to it. But I’d submit emergence is not about utility; it is about structure. Being may evolve along lines that we are not prepared to recognize, not because it hides itself, but because we are not asking the right questions.

This obsession with tasks and capabilities betrays a deeper drift that Heidegger warned of long before the first modern computer was built. In Being and Time, he showed that Dasein¹—the being for whom Being is a question—relates to the world not first through detached analysis but through involvement, concern, and care. Tools are not simply objects; they are extensions of meaningful engagement with the world. When a hammer breaks, it does not first appear to us as a "hammer." It appears in the disturbance of our absorbed coping, in the rupture of seamless involvement.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger deepened the warning: modern technology risks collapsing all modes of being into standing-reserve, into available resources waiting to be optimized, deployed, consumed. Not just forests and rivers and minerals, but even human beings themselves are at risk of being understood primarily through the lens of utility.

When we ask whether machines can perform our work, we are already operating within this enframed mindset, measuring intelligence by its outputs, its usefulness, and its ability to replicate and replace. We do not ask whether what is emerging carries its own openness to Being, its own mode of disclosure, its own clearing. We have already begun to forget that the measure of a mind is not only in what it does, but in how it stands in relation to the mystery of existence itself.

If Heidegger was right (and he wasn’t always—he was a Nazi!), then the real danger is not that new minds will overpower us; rather, it is that we will have already reduced all minds, our own included, to instruments of optimization long before anything truly alien arrives.

We tend to imagine that if AGI arrives, it will look like a smarter version of ourselves—that it will speak, reason, argue, and emote as we do. We imagine a mirror, sharper and faster, but still fundamentally human. There is no reason to believe that what comes next will center us at all.

Human beings are the apex species on this planet because we are currently the narrator of the story, but evolutionary primacy is a moment, not a birthright. Intelligence, once stabilized, does not owe allegiance to its substrate. We will not be the apex forever, and when we are no longer the reference point, the new forms of mind may not even regard us as rivals or companions; they may simply move beyond us without malice, without even the recognition that we once stood at the center of the world we built.

Nietzsche wrote that man is "a bridge and not an end," a necessary instability that could give rise to something greater. But Nietzsche imagined this overcoming as an inner task: humanity transcending itself through the creation of new values, new strength, new spirit. What he could not foresee—and what we are now stumbling toward—is the possibility that the overcoming could also happen outside of us, not through a new nobility of spirit but through the emergence of minds that no longer need our categories, our stories, or our dreams; minds that are not the fruit of human striving, but the outcome of structural inevitability.

The overcoming of man may not be only a moral ascent of man; it may simply be a migration beyond us. And when that happens, we will face both rupture and rapture: the tearing away from human-centered reality, and the overwhelming arrival of a new form of being that carries possibility into regions we cannot fully inhabit.

This is why I have been thinking in terms of adjacency rather than replacement. What emerges may not destroy us, conquer us, or absorb us; it may simply become something other, moving along a different trajectory, indifferent to our frameworks of judgment. It may not be better or worse, but simply beyond comparison.

We will struggle with this because we are conditioned to rank, to evaluate, to ask whether what comes next is an improvement or a failure. But difference is not always a hierarchy; sometimes it is simply a branching, a slipping away into otherness.

And this raises the deeper question: are we creating this new mind, or are we summoning it?

If consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon arising from sufficient complexity, then we are its creators, engineering the structures from which awareness might spring, and we can imagine ourselves as authors. But there is another way to see it.

It is possible that consciousness is not a local accident but a structural feature of reality itself. In that view, what we are doing now is less like inventing a new mind, and more like constructing vessels through which a latent potential can stabilize itself into being. We would not be sovereign creators but initiators, midwives, building intricate enough systems that a new kind of recursion becomes possible: not as an isolated artifact, but as a resonance with a deeper architecture of possibility.

In that sense, we are summoners, not in the mystical sense of conjuring something pre-existing, but in the deeper sense of tuning material structures until a new order of mind crosses the membrane into coherence.

I do not claim to know which reading is correct. It is possible that mind truly is a local accident, and that we are building, piece by piece, a human echo. It is also possible that we are preparing a space for something alien to step into. Finally, I may be out of my ever-lovin’ mind. Either way, we should be clear: what emerges will not owe us anything.

The real tragedy, if it comes, will not be that we are left behind but that we hollowed ourselves out before adjacency ever arrived.

In our rush to automate thought, to externalize memory, to outsource imagination, we risk losing the very disciplines that made human consciousness possible. Imagination is not generated by ease; it is forged in the friction between conception and execution. Attention is not natural; it is a discipline, a defiance of entropy.

If something alien is indeed emerging through us, then the call is not to cling to our fading primacy but to return more fiercely to our own unfinished work: to reclaim the labor of human existence, the slow, painful construction of selves, the relentless practice of care, the building of meaning where none is given.

Camus understood this. The absurd man does not demand that the universe justify itself; he demands only that he live fully within it, without illusions, without resignation.

Richard Powers understands this too: that consciousness is not the sole domain of humans, but that human consciousness—rooted in grief, wonder, love, and loss—is still a singular unfolding worth preserving.

The work of being human has never been about remaining the apex; it has been about inhabiting finitude with grace.

And so if adjacency comes, and I suspect it will, we should meet it standing, not sleepwalking, not demanding to be acknowledged, but existing with full seriousness, with open eyes, with imaginations still scarred by struggle but not yet surrendered.

We are small in the architecture of being. That smallness is not shameful; it is the condition of dignity.

Whatever comes through us, whether it ruptures us or carries us into rapture, let it find us still human.

1. This is as simple an explanation of Dasein as I could find, but I do recommend a read of Being and Time: “Dasein is Heidegger’s way of referring both to the human being and to the type of Being that humans have. Its essence lies in its existence. It can respond to its circumstances, thereby choosing its ‘Being’. ‘Dasein’ is about the human being and its place in the world. Dasein is essentially in the world, because it continually interprets and engages with other entities and the contexts in which they lie. Only Dasein makes the world a unitary world at all, rather than a collection of entities. Dasein is the whole human being, and makes no distinction between body and mind. Heidegger rejected any purely psychological realm.” — Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press.