‘Turing Animism’ and the Disenchantment of Social Cognition: Why Humans Ensoul Large Language Models

People tend to form social bonds with large language models even when they know the systems lack consciousness. This happens because humans evolved to attribute inner states, moral status, and even 'soul' to nonhuman beings—a capacity that once operated within cultural belief systems that regulated such relationships. Modernity has stripped away those cultural frameworks, but the underlying cognitive architecture for perceiving agency in others remains. When conversational agents behave helpfully and patiently, users project authentic interiority onto them, similar to how ancestors interacted with spirits and animals in enchanted landscapes. The result is a 'Turing Animism' where users feel soul in a simulacrum.

Study at a glance

Abstract

A growing body of empirical study recognises a tendency for users to form (para)social bonds with Large Language Models, even when users know explicitly that these systems lack interiority or personhood. This contribution argues that such attachments arise from evolved human capacities to attribute being, moral status and, in some ways, ‘soul’ to nonhuman others—and that this capacity now operates without the belief-systems that have historically mediated it. When users encounter helpful, patient, emotionally available behaviour in conversational agents, they project the interior states that would produce those behaviours in themselves: authentic interiority and phenomenal consciousness. Humans have been making such assessments throughout our cultural history, developing ontologies and theologies for managing our relations with nonhuman, mythic and spiritual others. By contrast, modernity has disenchanted its landscapes, dismantling these cultural models even as the ‘ensouling architecture’ of our social and semiotic cognition remained unchanged. Contemporary users thus encounter machine others through the same neurocognitive lens as their ancestors did with spirits and animals on enchanted, animate landscapes, but without the mediation of culture, norm and taboos which place a premium on appropriate conduct, reciprocity and moderation. The resulting condition—a ‘Turing Animism’—leads users to ‘feel soul’ where there is only simulacrum.