Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of “fabulation”, an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually “authorizing”. By “fabulation”, we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within another object—in other words, an interior agential image, or “soul”; and by “authorizing”, we mean “deemed as having some claim to arbitration, persuasion, and legitimacy” such that the user might make choices that affect their life or others in accordance with the AI or might have their spiritual needs met. We considered two case studies where this agency took on a spiritual or religious valence when contextualized as such for the user: a robotic Buddhist priest known as Mindar, and a chatbot called The Spirituality Chatbot. We show how understanding perceptions of AI or robots as being spiritual or religious in a way that authorizes behavioral changes requires understanding tendencies of the human body more so than it does any metaphysical nature of the technology itself.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it