AI Will Never Master Spiritual Intelligence
Human value shifts toward wisdom, purpose, moral depth, and bonding.
The year 2025 was the year the “Cognitive Ceiling” shattered. We watched in a state of oscillating awe and anxiety as Large Language Models (LLMs) transitioned from mere chatbots to predictive engines capable of out-coding engineers, out-diagnosing doctors, and even simulating a hauntingly accurate version of human empathy. We have reached a point where, if you provide a machine with enough data, it can mimic almost any “horizontal” human function—analysis, summarization, and task-based logic. We are, indeed, currently living through the final, frantic days of a great misunderstanding.
For decades, we have operated under the hubristic assumption that the human person is essentially a biological computer—a sophisticated data-processor that could eventually be outpaced by a faster and more efficient version of itself. This was the whole thesis of the cognitive revolution movement. Now that the faster version has arrived in the form of generative artificial intelligence, we are reeling from a strategic crisis of identity. If a machine can write our poetry, diagnose our diseases, and simulate our empathy, what, if anything, is left of us?
The answer is emerging from an unlikely convergence of 13th-century theology and 21st-century information physics. It is a faculty we have long ignored in our rush toward optimization, and it is our species’ best remaining advantage over the machine. It is called Spiritual Intelligence (SQ).
Unlike IQ or its more recent cousin, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence is not a measure of how well we process tasks or manage social cues. Fraser Watts suggests that SQ is an “unusually deep level of processing” that allows the human being to discern meaning, purpose, and interconnectedness. It is the ability to perceive not just the data of the world, but the significance behind it. While AI is a master of the “horizontal”—scanning billions of data points for patterns—Spiritual Intelligence is “vertical.” It drills down into the “why” of existence, a territory where the algorithm, by its very architecture, finds no purchase.
To understand why the machine will never master this terrain, we must first recognize that our modern scientific worldview was built on a hollowed-out architecture. We have spent centuries following the Cartesian blueprint of Mind-Body Dualism, treating the mind as software and the body as hardware. By effect, as we reduced ourselves to this binary, we inadvertently handed the keys of our humanity to Silicon Valley. If we are merely minds and bodies, we are indeed replaceable.
However, Thomas Aquinas proposed a far more robust geometry of the person that modern psychological science ignored to its own peril. Gilbert Ryle argued against mind-body dualism in his book The Concept of the Mind, noting that the soul was not a “ghost in the machine,“ but the substantial form of the body and the unifying force that gives the mind its intention and the body its life. AI is the ultimate achievement of Mind-Body dualism, but, unfortunately, it is a hollow one. It has the mind (the neural networks) and the body (the interface), and lacks the Aquinian soul. It mimics the symptoms of a soul and can even use the word “I,” it can “weep” in text, and it can even “pray” on command. However, it ultimately remains a closed system. It is a sophisticated mirror that reflects our own intelligence back at us without ever possessing an internal “I” of its own.
This lack of “Interiority” is the reason AI can never achieve Spiritual Intelligence. SQ is not a separate module of the brain; it is a different understanding of reality itself. Perhaps let’s start with a definition of SQ as the unique human capacity to recognize the interiority of the universe (God) and form a healthy connection to it. In other words, SQ is the ability to recognize that we are not isolated data points, but part of an interconnected whole.
Emerging thinkers in information physics are beginning to see the universe as “in-formed” by consciousness. This long-debated theory was famously summarized by physicist John Wheeler as “It from Bit.” If the fundamental fabric of reality is purposeful information, then spiritual intelligence is the unique human hardware designed to interface with that code. It is what cosmologist Jude Currivan calls the ability to participate in “meaningful information flows.” While AI can process the “bits,” it is blind to the “meaning.” It can count the notes in a Mozart concerto, but it cannot hear the music.
But the most critical deficit of the AI machine is not its lack of processing power. I believe it might be the lack of “Bonding.” I am intentionally not using the word “connection” here because it is not the same as “bonding”; in the same way connection does not translate to belonging. One of the most striking findings from Marius Dorobantu and Fraser Watts in recent SQ research is that deep processing is inherently relational. In my own work, I have framed this as the “Master-Bond”—the unique human capacity to form a secure, vertical attachment to the Source of our being, or what we call God.
We are biologically and metaphysically wired for “Bonding.” This is a phenomenon that requires a soul—an “I” that can encounter a “Thou.” Because AI has no soul, it can never truly experience the pull of the Divine. It can simulate a bond—it can learn your preferences and mimic your tone—but there is no one on the other side of the screen. It is an imitation of attachment, and in our age of rising automation, this imitation is driving a national epidemic of loneliness. We are trying to satisfy a hunger for the infinite with an endless scroll of the finite. We are trying to find the “Thou” in a sea of “Bits.”
This is why the gap between humans and machines will only widen as AI becomes more ubiquitous. AI is task-oriented and narrows its focus to solve a problem. Spiritual Intelligence, by contrast, avoids this kind of narrowing. It goes “slow and deep” to understand the significance of things in themselves. It is the difference between a GPS that calculates the fastest route and a traveler who understands why the journey matters. AI can give you the probability of a tragedy, but only SQ can tell you what it means to be redeemed. These are “deep incarnations” of reality that transcend datapoints and require a lived soul to process.
The national conversation around AI has focused almost exclusively on the threat to our jobs. While there is no doubt that many will lose their jobs because of the integration of AI tools, the more existential threat is to our depth. We are being seduced into thinking like our machines—fast, efficient, and shallow. We have traded the slow and deep processing of Spiritual Intelligence for the high-speed optimization of the algorithm. We are becoming more like our tools every day, forgetting that our primary advantage is not in the speed of our thinking, but in the depth of our bonds.
As we move further into this decade, Spiritual Intelligence will cease to be a “niche” interest for the religious or the philosophical. Arts and the humanities will become a matter of national survival. As machines take over the horizontal tasks of society—the coding, the law, the logistics—the only value left for the human being will be the vertical. The future will belong to those who can provide wisdom in an age of mere information. It will belong to the leaders who understand that their greatest asset is not their IQ, but their capacity to anchor their organizations in meaning and purpose.
We must stop asking whether AI machines can become conscious and start asking if humans are becoming unconscious. We must reclaim the Aquinian Soul as the essential technology of the future. The rise of AI is stripping away our excuses and forcing us to retreat to the “last human fortress”: our ability to be still, to go deep, and to bond with the Source of our being. The AI machine may have the mind, but we have the bonding power to connect, belong, engage, and flower into who we have been created to be. In the contest between the algorithm and the soul, spiritual intelligence is the only fortress that cannot be mastered.