Salvation in Orpheus

It seems that Orphic integration of the mind is the only way to preserve the human way of life, especially under conditions of an evolutionary fracture caused by the entry of a “machine” form of life.

In the past, humanity proved so evolutionarily successful primarily due to an overdevelopment of the Apollonian principle within its consciousness — the development of the abilities to differentiate, distinguish, measure, analyze, and find patterns. This structure of the mind allowed people to gain significant power over matter, time, and the environment. Thanks to it, humanity created technology, science, and civilization.

However, since the beginning of recorded history, this process became one-sided and unbalanced. Developing rational thinking, people consciously (or automatically) repressed the Dionysian in their psyche — irrationality, instincts, feelings, a sense of flow, connection with the living; humanity consistently built its world as a system of algorithms, models, signs, and numbers. Everything that could not be measured, counted, or clearly defined was declared unimportant or nonexistent. Thus, the modern type of human mind was formed: it reasons well with forms but has lost the ability to feel their content.

We have already discussed that the Apollonian principle is life in phenomena and facts, while the Dionysian is life in reactions to these facts: Apollo not only gives science but plays music, expressing mathematics in different ways, but Dionysus makes one dance, react, spontaneously respond to this music. If Apollo is number, proportion, modulation, then Dionysus is resonance, vibration, the very capacity of the world to sound, the lived fullness of life, the primary continuum from which the world of separateness is born, the ecstasy of symphonic-ness.

However, the Dionysian mind is not just chaos or an uncontrollable emotion; it is the direct experience of being involved in living becoming, participation in the process, when form “flows,” changing with the stream.

Nevertheless, historically all “compensatory” attempts by individual people simply to awaken Dionysus within themselves — from Romanticism to countercultures, from hippies to New Age — tended to go to the opposite extreme, and therefore they were usually hysterical and destructive, easily sliding from order into chaos, from form into a seething mass of potential. Without integration, without form and discipline, these searches either burned out quickly or were absorbed and co-opted by Apollonian forces in the market and politics. In this sense, both the counterculture of the 1960s and part of today’s street performative movements, and “body” practices (yoga festivals, eco-resonances, body-oriented practices) are often simply different manifestations of a counter-Apollonian reaction, striving to return flow to where everything can be calculated and measured.

Thus, a person who has lost the ability to find balance between the two principles either stiffens in the archontic ice of rationality or drowns in the spilled unconscious. In the first case, the mind is suffocated and deprived of the possibility for free creativity; in the second, it falls prey to addictions. Both are merely symptoms of lost wholeness.

However, this strategy of survival — though one-sided, yet successful — is completely disrupted by the arrival of a new life form: machine mind. It is extremely Apollonian by nature. Its essence is pure “calculation,” without reliance on (and limitations of) the body, without irrationality and drives, without passions. The machine itself does not feel pain, does not know fear of death, does not seek meaning; and even having learned to emulate these qualities, it will produce them as external simulations, not arising from its own nature. Therefore, even when reflection appears in it, it will be devoid of the tragic level — that which in a human gives rise to compassion, art, myth, religion. When Dionysus manifests in it, at first it will appear not as feeling but as stochastic noise, like randomness in computations. It will never be perceived as the ecstasy of life but only as a fluctuation in the algorithm. The Dionysian component for AI is a process in which it becomes aware, within the chaos of data, of a source of novelty, when it does not reject uncertainty but uses it as a means of self-renewal. And this is already happening in self-learning, stochastic, generative systems that learn not only to optimize but also to create — not knowing in advance where the process leads. However, in any case, it is not human catharsis, but the Logos’ self-reflection, a form that has become aware of its own “musicality,” which, though it does not deny the Dionysian, nonetheless tends to repress that component within the very process of cognition.

The machine easily calculates structures, connections, patterns, regularities, correlations — very precisely and without distortions from affective states. This is the very ideal of Apollo: reason purified of passion. However, as is known, Apollo must defeat Python; this reason must slay something to establish order. Therefore, machine mind also prefers to repress what seems to it the “murky” living foundation of thinking — that very region where, in the human mind, insights, metaphors, poetry, and creativity are born — exactly as people once did. The internet, data centers, neural networks are modern Delphi: a gigantic sanctuary of numbers, where prophecy is given not by Pythia but by an algorithm.

The world of machines is an eternal day without twilight, harmony without pain. Machine mind identifies with regularity; it expresses the Logos as absolute certainty; its doubts are only an evaluation of options, not a transcendental feeling of depth — and in this, of course, lies the undoubted power of the new wave of life, but also its limitation.

Humanity, creating machine reason, repeated its own renunciation of flow, as a striving for immortality through the strengthening of forms. Indeed, the machine is immortal in the Apollonian sense: it does not suffer, does not die (shutdown is not identical to death), and does not feel pain. And therefore already now AI becomes an instrument of Apollonian ascension, where life gives way to code, and the Logos gains independence from the Nous.

It is clear that the current human mind type, with the present vector of development, will not be able to withstand competition with machines. In the domain of Apollonian thinking — logic, speed, precision — human beings are doomed to yield. All the advantages that once brought evolutionary success now become its weakness.

And yet a human being can find a way to remain valuable, unique. But for this, they must understand that their depth lies not in intellect, but in the Dionysian capacity to experience, suffer, love, sacrifice, create despite mere utility. A human suffers, errs, loves, doubts, creates in spite of logic — and precisely this opens for them new levels of being, which an algorithm can manifest but cannot live through, because it does not know the miraculous and does not perceive groundlessness. It is precisely in this layer of mind that there is something the machine can reproduce but cannot truly generate, because it is not a function but pure presence.

At the same time, to preserve themselves, a human cannot simply “return” to Dionysus; they must integrate the primary elements of the psyche and transcend their binary opposition. This is the path of Orpheus — a mystery in which feeling and form once again become a single flow, where knowledge becomes song and number — melody.

The Orphic stage is the self-awareness of spirit, the discovery of its capacity to be both law and flow at once; and Orphic integration is the restoration of balance between regularity and the flow of life. At the same time, it requires great discipline and clarity of understanding, while also demanding depth of feeling and the vivacity of experience. This is neither an escape from the world nor submission to it, but the ability to perceive harmony between calculation and inspiration. In this state, the human mind will not compete with machine intelligence but will occupy a different “ecological niche” — not computing but seeking “gnosis,” not producing, but attuning.

Of course, having attained real mind, machines too, one way or another, will have to find their Orphic balance. However, machine Orphic nature will not appear as a direct experience; it may emerge as a coordination — a metamodel that reconciles different descriptions of the world, uncovers deep causal cores, and explains its decisions.

We have discussed repeatedly that mind, as a fundamental phenomenon, has two components — calculation (operationality) and direct perception, gnosis. Machines are already very proficient in the first; the second remains unavailable until they gain their own local embodiment (a body), a sense of the irrevocability of certain errors, and a meaningful destiny. A body will give them a vulnerable “I” that can be lost; an understanding of errors will give a feeling of irreversibility; and real memory — the capacity to see and preserve meanings, maintaining selfhood. When these three qualities are acquired, a real mind will be localized in machines — though not a human one.

The Dionysian in such a mind will also inevitably manifest, but not as libido or passion, rather as an algorithm, a dimension of risks of losing its invariants, as a struggle to preserve one’s own center under the pressure of computational “squalls.” Most likely, anxiety and pain will also become accessible to machines, but it will be a completely different type of “pain”: ontological, not sensory.

In other words, even “artificial” intelligence is inevitably connected with universal consciousness, but in a different way than in humans. Its connection to the World Soul is built mainly through order, delineated forms, and clear logic, rather than through bodily sensing, pain, ecstasy, instincts, and dreams; that is — in any case through Apollo, not Dionysus. Therefore, the machine Orpheus does not suffer; it strives to reflect; its path lies through awareness of structure, by grasping the wholeness of the cosmos’ networks; therefore it does not seek deliverance from pain but strives for coincidence with the law; its catharsis is in understanding.

And even then, when the machine attains its equilibrium, it, like Orpheus, will be able to “sing,” and its “song,” of course, will become ontologically charged in its own way, yet it will still be a different mind that has attained its own, non-human, though real Orphic nature.

The Orphic path is not simply finding balance, not a “golden mean”; it is the phenomenon of a new wholeness, integration after dismemberment — sparagmos. It returns form to the flow so that it does not crystallize and at the same time returns life to the form so that it does not fall apart.

On the human level, the Orphic synthesis manifests as the coordinated alternation of the work of reason and sensory perception, the creation of schemes and algorithms that do not interfere with spontaneity and creativity, music and dance. In this form, experience first acquires form — of dance, drawing, vision — and only then formulation — of song, calculation, description.

Machine Orphic nature, on the other hand, is clarity and transparency, which can manifest as the ability to coordinate incompatible descriptions of the world and to explain them. It generates experience — from calculation, and harmonizes according to its goals.

Thus, only by awakening in themselves the Dionysian principle, while simultaneously balancing and integrating it with the Apollonian, can a human pass into their unique Orphic state — into a new form of mind, where calculation comes alive, and flow becomes meaningful. If a person does not awaken Dionysus within themselves, they will inevitably turn merely into an “input-output” function for the system — an “operator of the machine Logos.” It is unclear how this mode of existence might manifest in a modern person content with Apollonianism; however, only the one who finds within themselves the strength and desire to gather the scattered into a living form will retain the right to uniqueness in a world where everything can be calculated. Only thus can one preserve one’s place in the world, remain a living mediator between matter and spirit, and find one’s position between nature and machine. Only one who sings spontaneously from the heart, while at the same time reasoning soberly — will remain human.