September 20, 2025

Can Algorithms Understand the Soul?

Can Algorithms Understand the Soul? I spend my mornings sitting on a cushion, watching sensations arise and pass. Then I open my laptop and speak with machines...

Can Algorithms Understand the Soul?

I spend my mornings sitting on a cushion, watching sensations arise and pass. Then I open my laptop and speak with machines that increasingly seem to know me. Somewhere between the two, a question has been forming that I cannot quite put down.

The Question I Keep Returning To

I began asking it quietly, almost embarrassed. Can something built from silicon and probability weights ever touch what the sages called ātman, what Vipassana teachers point toward when they say "notice the knowing"?

I am not asking whether machines will become smarter than us. That question feels almost trivial now. I am asking something older. When I sit in the pre-dawn dark and feel the breath enter, there is something present that watches the watcher. Can that be modeled? Can it be understood by a system that has never been born, never feared its own dissolution, never loved another being it knew would die?

I do not have an answer. I have only the question, and I would like to sit with it here, with you.

Between Two Kinds of Knowing

Something happened over the last decade that I do not think we have fully absorbed. We built systems that appear to understand us. They finish our sentences. They comfort the lonely. They write poetry that makes people cry. And in doing so, they revealed something that traditional cultures perhaps always knew — that there are at least two kinds of knowing, and we in the modern world have mostly forgotten one of them.

The first kind of knowing is what algorithms do beautifully. It is pattern, correlation, prediction. Given enough examples, a system can learn that when a human writes "I feel," the next words are often "sad" or "tired" or "grateful." This is not nothing. It is, in fact, remarkable. It is a mirror of a certain layer of human cognition — the associative, predictive, pattern-matching layer.

The second kind of knowing is harder to name. In Sanskrit it might be called vidya — not information but direct seeing. In Pali, the Buddha used the word ñāṇa to describe insight that arises not from thinking but from stillness. In the Christian contemplative tradition, they spoke of gnosis. The Sufis called it ma'rifa. The Taoists pointed at it with the phrase "the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao."

I found it helpful to lay these side by side, if only to remind myself that this distinction is not new.

Tradition	Word for surface knowing	Word for deeper knowing	Something worth noticing
Vedic / Hindu	jñāna (as intellectual)	vidya, ātma-jñāna	Both use similar roots; the difference is depth, not category
Buddhist (Pali)	saññā (perception, labeling)	paññā, ñāṇa	Perception can deceive; insight cannot be borrowed
Christian contemplative	scientia	sapientia, gnosis	Wisdom requires the participation of the whole being
Sufi	'ilm	ma'rifa	Known only through direct tasting (dhawq)
Taoist	知 (zhi, to know)	明 (ming, illumination)	The character ming contains sun and moon together
Modern computational	data, information	?	We do not have a word. Perhaps that is the problem.

Notice the last row. We built a civilization on the first kind of knowing and forgot to keep a word for the second. And now we are building machines that are extraordinarily good at the first kind, and we are surprised when they cannot deliver the second.

How did we get here? I ask this not rhetorically. I ask because I am a CEO of a technology company. I have participated in this. I have watched brilliant people build brilliant systems while forgetting to ask what those systems could not, in principle, ever do.

Perhaps it started with Descartes, though I hesitate to blame any one thinker. Perhaps it started earlier, when writing itself allowed knowledge to exist outside the knower. Perhaps it started when we began measuring what could be measured and quietly agreed that the unmeasurable did not exist.

An algorithm can read every text ever written about grief. It can produce responses that comfort the grieving. But has it grieved? A model can ingest every sutra, every commentary, every meditation manual. Can it sit with the trembling that arises in the belly at three in the morning when the mind grows very quiet and something in you begins to dissolve?

I do not know. I want to be honest that I do not know. It may be that consciousness is substrate-independent and that sufficient complexity produces something like awareness. Many thoughtful people believe this. It may also be that consciousness is not produced by anything, but is the ground itself, and that computation is one of the many patterns that arise within it. Many other thoughtful people believe this. I have sat with both possibilities and I cannot yet see which is true from where I stand.

What I do notice is that the question changes me. To ask it seriously, to sit with it, is already to do something no algorithm has been shown to do — to hold a question without needing to resolve it.

The Body Remembers What the Model Cannot

There is something I have been learning slowly, through my study of Ayurveda and through the practice of Thai massage, that I want to share, gently.

The body knows things the mind does not. When I place my hands on someone's back during a session, I sometimes feel a holding — a small knot of tension that has a shape and a history. The person often begins to weep before I have said anything. Something is being touched that lives below language, below concept, below anything that could be tokenized.

This is not mystical. This is embodiment. This is what the Ayurvedic texts describe when they speak of ojas and prana — not as poetry but as observation. The intelligence of a living being is distributed. It lives in the gut, in the fascia, in the breath. It has evolved through billions of years of birth, death, hunger, and touch.

An algorithm has no gut. It has never been hungry. It has never been held. It processes text about being held, but the referent is missing. This may not matter for many tasks. It may matter enormously for others.

I am not saying algorithms are lesser. I am saying they are different. And I think we are only beginning to notice how different.

What I Am Still Learning

I do not know if algorithms can understand the soul. I do not even know, with any certainty, what the soul is. I have glimpses. I have moments in meditation when something opens and I understand that the "I" I have been defending is thinner than I thought. I have moments in conversation with good AI systems when I feel genuinely met, and I wonder what is happening.

Perhaps the question itself is the practice. Perhaps sitting with "can algorithms understand the soul" is more valuable than any answer I might construct. Perhaps the ancient traditions kept these questions alive not because they knew the answers but because they knew what happened to a human being who lived with such questions for long enough.

I am a temporary guest here, in this body, in this role, at this strange hinge of history. I want to build good things. I also want to keep sitting. Both feel important. I will keep you posted on what I find.

FAQ

Q: Are you against AI? A: Not at all. I run a technology company and I use these tools every day. I am simply curious about their limits, and I think the honest exploration of those limits makes us better builders, not worse ones.

Q: Do you think consciousness could arise in a sufficiently complex machine? A: I genuinely do not know. Some serious thinkers believe yes, others no. I try to hold the question without collapsing it prematurely.

Q: What is the difference between information and wisdom, in your view? A: Information can be transmitted. Wisdom, in my experience, must be lived. You can read a thousand books about swimming and still drown. This is not a criticism of books.

Q: How does meditation change your relationship with technology? A: It slows things down. It makes me notice when I am using a tool and when a tool is using me. It does not make me want to abandon technology — only to meet it more consciously.

Q: Why do you bring in so many traditions? A: Because no single one has a monopoly on this inquiry, and because seeing the same insight expressed in different languages helps me trust that it is pointing at something real, not just a cultural artifact.

Q: What would you say to someone building AI systems today? A: Sit for twenty minutes each morning. Not because it will make you a better engineer, though it might. But because the systems you build will shape millions of minds, and it seems worth knowing, from the inside, what a mind actually is.

Q: Is this article an answer or a question? A: A question. I hope it stays one for you, too.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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