From the digital frontier, Roman Yampolskiy brings a sobering prophecy drawn from his work in AI safety. He is the author of influential texts like Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach and AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Yampolskiy invites us to consider a staggering possibility: that our perceived reality may already be an elaborate simulacrum, a program running on a substrate built by intelligences we can scarcely imagine. Not a God, but a highly developed future civilization playing with us earthlings. His work is a stark warning flare against the unfettered development of artificial consciousness, arguing that a self-improving AI could become an inescapable maze, a power we eventually cannot control. Yet, he also offers a radical solution: rather than forcing a consensus of human values onto one AI, he proposes a future of “Personal Universes,” where each individual inhabits their own hyper-realistic simulation, perfectly aligned with their personal desires and values, thus solving the problem of conflicting human preferences through infinite customization.

From the realm of consciousness studies, Philip Goff offers a counterpoint that recalibrates the very premise of the conversation. For Goff, the mind is not a cold, calculative machine but a fundamental field of experience—a view known as panpsychism. He suggests that consciousness is not a late-stage product of complex computation but a basic property of the universe, akin to mass or energy. This spiritual approach challenges the core notion that AI, however sophisticated, could ever truly replicate the profound, intrinsic experience of being. Where Yampolskiy sees a programmable simulacrum, Philip Goff might see a universe inherently brimming with subjective experience, implying that reality’s “realness” is rooted in this fundamental consciousness, not in the fidelity of its rendering.

And from the silent, towering presence of the Italian Alps, Fleur Jongepier grounds our abstract fears and hopes in the immediate and the tangible. Having traded theoretical academia for the raw, direct experience of mountain life, her philosophy is one of embodied truth. Her newly published book, Berghonger, born from this journey, explores how reality is shaped not by algorithms or cosmic consciousness alone, but through unmediated engagement with the world—the wind on skin, the strain of rock, and the deep, wordless knowing that comes from such communion. She represents the empirical antidote to the AI-generated fake; in a world of deepfakes, her truth is found in the unshakeable solidity of a mountain, a direct experience that cannot be cloned or spoofed.