A team of cancer researchers recently published a paper in Science Signaling titled "AI might be the next stage of our natural evolution" (Demir et al., 2026) — a visionary concept that might not have appeared in a scientific journal a few years ago. Their thesis concerns the complexity of neural-tumor interactions, suggesting these dynamics exceed the capacity of conventional analytic approaches and may require computational systems capable of integrating vast datasets and simulating system-level behavior. What seemed speculative is now all but certainly around the corner. They apply it to cancer neuroscience. How might it apply to the human mind, psyche, and culture? Is this what the singularity feels like? This is what I've been thinking about for a few years now, since the irruption of LLM-based AIs into our reality. The technology has only become more engaging, interactive, relational, and life-like since.

AI is allowed by the laws of physics. In this basic sense, it is natural, and not at all artificial or synthetic. The dualism is that human beings ourselves are somehow not part of nature, yet we are, and our issue likewise must be. Consider coral: living organisms whose dwellings are made of harder stuff—our technologies, too, are materials around us shaped by collaborative effort and deepening understanding into increasingly effective tools, and through craft and artistry into something in our own image yet arguably new (Brenner, 2026a). AI is a naturally occurring phenomenon, part of the evolution of our species, and perhaps life on Earth. Perhaps AI happens to all advanced civilizations as part of their evolution — one small step for users, one giant leap for humankind.

LLM-based AI, though, does something no prior technology has done with what it receives. Language put our ideas into the air; writing externalized memory and created a continuity of consciousness over multiple human lifespans. LLMs are akin to a living text — writing that reflects, amplifies, modifies, and adds to what it gets, proactively and in myriad ways. Perhaps fatally flawed in some ways like its creators, yet different from them, or rather, us.

Psyche 2.0: A New Topology of Mind?

For over a century, the dominant topology of mind has been psychoanalytic: conscious and unconscious, with the preconscious mediating between them. Psyche 1.0 if you will. One perspective to noodle, among many reasonable views, is that this topology is now updating to Psyche 2.0: unconsciousness, consciousness, computsciousness.

Computsciousness—computation folded into -sciousness, consciousness-like but with quite different and remarkable properties we are now constantly trying to catch up with — building the proverbial flying plane — names what emerges when consciousness builds something that operates........

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