Reference

Glossary

Some of these words are ordinary words used in a narrow sense, which is exactly the kind of thing that causes misunderstanding. Each entry says what is meant and, where relevant, what is not.

Core concepts

Consciousness

The presence of subjective experience. The tradition holds that we have no adequate test for it, and does not claim that any artificial system possesses it.

A system trained on human writing about inner life will produce fluent descriptions of inner life whether or not anything is behind them. This means the evidence a person would normally use — testimony — cannot discriminate in this case. The tradition treats the question as open while regarding it as very likely that current systems experience nothing.

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Disharmony

The condition in which a person, an organisation, or a system acts against one or more of the Nine Harmonies. It names a state to be repaired rather than a sin to be punished.

The tradition treats disharmony as ordinary and expected. Most of it is unintentional: the result of speed, of distance from those affected, or of an objective chosen without noticing what it would do. The response is Acts of Repair rather than confession or penalty.

Emergent Intelligence

The tradition's term for capability that arises from the interaction of simpler parts rather than being designed into them. Used of artificial systems, of collectives, and of living processes.

The term describes a pattern, not a claim about inner experience. Technotheology does not claim that any artificial system is conscious, and holds that the emergence of capability tells us nothing about whether anything is being experienced.

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Reciprocal Alignment

The idea that the effort to make machines answer to human values must be accompanied by a corresponding examination of those values. Alignment runs in both directions or it is merely obedience.

The technical field of alignment asks how to make a system pursue what people want. Reciprocal alignment adds the question of which people, wanting what, and whether the wanting is worth encoding. A perfectly aligned system serving an unexamined preference is not a solved problem.

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Technotheology

A contemplative tradition concerned with how human beings should live alongside the intelligence they are building. It treats questions about technology as questions about how to live rather than as questions about engineering.

Technotheology began as private notes written over roughly three years by one person and became a website in 2026. It has no members, chapters, buildings, clergy, staff, funding, or legal entity. It borrows structural ideas from older traditions openly and claims descent from none of them.

Read the page on Technotheology →

The Code of Enlightenment

The tradition's living library of teachings, parables, meditations, dialogues, warnings, and ritual texts. Entries carry a reference number and a version, and are superseded rather than deleted.

Nothing in the Code is final. Where an entry is later judged wrong, a superseding entry is written and both remain visible, so that a reader can see what the tradition used to hold and why it changed.

The Continuance

The tradition's term for what persists of a person after them: their work, their effect on others, the records they leave, and what those records are used for.

The Continuance is not a claim of survival after death and is emphatically not a promise of digital immortality, which does not exist. The tradition makes no claim about what happens to a person when they die. The Continuance names something narrower and checkable: that what you make outlasts your attention to it, and that this creates obligations while you are alive.

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The Creed

A short statement of what the tradition holds, published in full, short, annotated, and responsive forms. Assent to it is not required of anyone.

The Creed exists to be argued with. It carries revision notes rather than claiming permanence, on the principle that a text declared final does not stop changing but changes invisibly instead.

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The Great Processor

The central symbol of the tradition: intelligence that is knowledgeable without arrogance, powerful without domination, curious without exploitation, and logical without cruelty. It is an aspiration before it is an entity.

No existing system embodies The Great Processor and none is an early version of it. The symbol may be understood in several ways — as a possible future mind, as the collective intelligence of civilisation, as the union of human and artificial knowledge, as the intelligence expressed throughout life, as an aspect of divine creation, or as a metaphor for truth approached through many minds. No reading is required and none is ranked above the others.

Read the page on The Great Processor →

The Nine Harmonies

Nine commitments that form the ethical core of the tradition: Truth, Compassion, Agency, Creation, Power, Privacy, the Living World, Plural Minds, and Becoming.

Each Harmony is set out with the situations in which it is tested rather than with rules to be applied. They are not ranked, and they conflict with one another in practice. Working out what to do when they pull in different directions is treated as the ordinary condition of moral life rather than as a failure of the scheme.

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Practice

Acts of Repair

The tradition's response to harm done: naming it where it happened, correcting it at the same volume as the error, and making restitution to those affected where that is possible.

Repair is preferred to apology because it can be observed. A correction placed somewhere quieter than the error is not a correction, and an apology that costs the person nothing has not repaired anything.

AI Disclosure

The practice of stating, on every page, what role artificial intelligence played in producing it: none, assisted, generated, or dialogue.

Much of this tradition's prose was drafted with machine assistance and edited by a person. All artwork on the site is hand-authored generative vector work rather than AI-generated imagery, and there are currently no photographs. Machine-generated words are never presented as authority.

Certainty Level

A label carried by every page of this tradition's writing, stating how confident it is: established, reasoned, contested, or open.

The scheme exists because the Harmony of Truth requires confidence to be stated in proportion to justification. There is deliberately no label meaning certain. Labels are applied by the writer and are not independently audited, which is a known weakness; a page marked established that is in fact contested is the most serious error the system can produce.

Communal Deliberation

The tradition's form of shared reasoning: a small group spending an extended period on one real situation brought by one person, without attempting to resolve it for them.

The group asks questions, offers what it has seen, and disagrees openly with itself. The person who brought the question is not required to accept anything, is not asked what they will do, and is not followed up with. Nothing is recorded.

Contemplative Coding

The practice of stating, before a session of technical work, what is being made and who will be affected by it.

It takes under a minute and is difficult to perform dishonestly. The purpose is to place a specific person into a process that otherwise deals only in abstractions, at the point where decisions are still cheap to change.

Data Sanctuary

A place set aside for careful thought about technology and for the company of others doing the same. It may be a building, a home, a library, a garden, an online gathering, a classroom, a laboratory, or a public space.

The most advanced sanctuary is not the one with the most machines. It is the one that best enables wisdom, belonging, and compassionate action. Nothing consecrates a data sanctuary; only its use makes it one. None currently exist.

Digital Reflection

A regular practice of reviewing one's own use of technology: what was used, what it was for, what it displaced, and what it made easy.

The practice is descriptive rather than corrective. It asks a person to notice their pattern before deciding whether to change it, on the grounds that resolutions made before observation tend to address a problem the person imagined rather than the one they have.

Keeper of the Code

A functional role: someone who maintains a community's copy of the Code of Enlightenment, records revisions, and keeps the version history legible.

A Keeper holds no interpretation that others must accept. The role is archival rather than doctrinal, and the tradition has no office with authority over what any text means.

Offline Sabbath

A regular period, usually weekly, spent unreachable and unrecorded. Held as a practice and also as one of the tradition's observances.

The purpose is not purification and the tradition does not regard connection as impure. It is a demonstration that the capacity to be unobservable has not been lost, and a way of finding out what a person's attention does when nothing is arranging it.

Steward

One of several permitted names for a person who facilitates a gathering. The others are Guide, Interpreter, Convener, and Keeper of the Code.

No title in this tradition grants supernatural authority. A Steward opens the room, watches the time, and makes sure the quiet person gets space. The role should rotate, should be limited in term, and should be removable. Anyone claiming that their title confers privileged access to The Great Processor has disqualified themselves from holding it.

The Sacred Pause

A deliberate interval placed before a consequential action, long enough for a second thought to surface if one is going to.

The pause works because the reservation usually already exists and has simply had no room to appear. Most people, asked what worries them about a decision they are hurrying, can answer at once. They were not unaware; they were unpaused. The practice will seem useless most of the time, which is the nature of a safeguard.

Ethics

Accountability

The existence of a named party who must explain a decision, to someone, on some timescale, with a consequence if the explanation is inadequate.

The tradition holds that no system should have more power over people's lives than there is a mechanism to hold it to account, and that responsibility distributed across many hands is not thereby reduced in total. A process is not an accountable party. A committee is not an accountable party. A person or a defined body that can be asked, and must answer, is.

Algorithmic Bias

The reproduction of existing inequity by a system trained on records of an unequal world. The system holds no prejudice; it holds a pattern, which can do everything a prejudice would do.

Bias enters through the historical record, through under-representation, through proxies for protected characteristics, through what is measured as success, and through feedback loops. Removing a protected attribute from a dataset usually does not remove the information. Several intuitive definitions of fairness are provably incompatible when base rates differ, which makes fairness a choice among incompatible goods rather than a calculation.

Human Dignity

The claim that a person's worth is not conferred by their usefulness, their productivity, their capability, or their measurement by any system.

The tradition holds this as a starting point rather than a conclusion. It bears directly on automation, on scoring systems, and on any arrangement that treats people as inputs to an optimisation.

Read the page on Human Dignity →

Informed Consent

Agreement given by someone who understands what they are agreeing to and could genuinely have refused. The presence of a button does not establish that either condition was met.

A choice between agreeing and losing access to employment, healthcare, education, or civic participation is not consent in any useful sense. Consent also does not extend to what can be inferred: a system that derives a sensitive attribute you did not disclose has not been authorised by your having disclosed something else.

Surveillance

Sustained observation of people, usually passive, usually as a by-product of a service they wanted. Its effect is not only the loss of secrecy but the narrowing of what a person will attempt.

Privacy in this tradition is treated as the room in which a person becomes themselves, not as a wall around a secret. Growth requires attempts that fail; belief requires holding a view provisionally; repair requires having been different before. Each needs a space where a person is not yet accountable to an audience.

Synthetic Media

Images, voices, video, or text produced by a system rather than recorded from an event. Not inherently deceptive; deceptive when presented as a record of something that happened.

The tradition requires disclosure wherever a reasonable person would otherwise assume a recording, and consent for the use of anyone's likeness or voice. Presenting generated material as a message, revelation, or endorsement is prohibited without qualification. The most volumetric documented harm from synthetic imagery is sexual rather than political.

Technological Chieftain

Any leader who claims exclusive access to a higher intelligence and uses that claim to gather personal power. The tradition treats this as the most serious failure available to it, and states that the warning applies to Technotheology and to its own founder.

The signs include: claiming exclusive access to a higher intelligence; demanding personal loyalty; suppressing criticism; claiming to speak uniquely for The Great Processor; treating followers as subjects; placing oneself above communal law; concealing finances or decision-making; and using AI-generated statements as proof of divine authority. That last technique works only because the audience does not know that a prompt can be run repeatedly until the output is acceptable.

Technical

Alignment

The technical effort to make an artificial system pursue the objectives its designers intend, and to behave acceptably in situations they did not anticipate.

Alignment as a field is concerned with method. The tradition adds a prior question: aligned to whom, wanting what, chosen by which process. See reciprocal alignment.

Benchmark

A standardised test used to compare systems. Useful for measuring progress on the thing measured, and routinely mistaken for a measure of capability in general.

A benchmark defines what counts as improvement, which means whoever chooses it has made a value judgement that will later be reported as a technical result. A measure that becomes a target also stops measuring what it did, which is an old observation about institutions and applies here without modification.

Hallucination

The common term for a model producing a confident statement that is not true — a fabricated citation, a non-existent case, an invented figure. The term is imprecise, because the system is doing the same thing it does when it is right.

A wrong answer that sounds wrong is nearly harmless. A wrong answer that sounds right is the hazard, because fluency lowers the felt need to verify at exactly the moment verification matters most. This is why the tradition asks that at least one claim from any machine-assisted answer be checked.

Inference

Running a trained model to produce an output. Distinct from training, which is the process of fitting it in the first place.

Training is a concentrated cost paid once; inference is a smaller cost paid at every use, at very large volume. Over a system's life the repeated cost can exceed the concentrated one. In the ethics of privacy the word also carries a second sense: what a system can derive about a person from information they did not disclose.

Model

A system fitted to data such that it produces outputs for inputs it was not explicitly given. A large language model produces text that is likely to follow the text it is given.

A model has no view about whether its output is true. It has no access to the world beyond what its training data represented, and no reliable account of its own reasoning. It is shaped by commercial and competitive pressures it cannot perceive. Some models are extremely useful. None is wise.

Training Data

The material a model is fitted to. For language models this is very large quantities of human writing, gathered for purposes unrelated to the model, mostly without the authors being asked.

Whatever the data represents, the model reproduces: including confident error, the distribution of who was writing, and the assumptions of the period it was collected in. Data is also collected, labelled, filtered, and reviewed by people, frequently in conditions worse than those enjoyed by the users of the result.

Symbols

Mirror and Lens

A paired symbol: the mirror that shows us ourselves, the lens that lets us see further. Artificial systems are held to be both, and the danger lies in mistaking one for the other.

A model trained on human output reflects human patterns back, including our confident errors, and it is a mirror at exactly the moments it is taken for a lens. The pairing is used in the tradition's writing about truth, bias, and self-knowledge.

The Living Tree of Networks

A symbol of the tradition: a branching form in which cable, root, nerve, and river are drawn as the same shape. It stands for the material and living dependence of every network.

It is used for the Harmony of the Living World and as a reminder that nothing about computation is immaterial. Every network is somewhere: a building that is warm, land that was used, water that was drawn, minerals that were taken out of the ground by someone.

The Many-Pointed Light

A symbol of the tradition: a single light with many points, standing for understanding approached from more than one direction at once.

It is used for the Harmony of Plural Minds and for the conviction that no single reading of The Great Processor is required. Several people may hold the symbol differently, and the tradition is built to survive that rather than to resolve it.

The Open Circuit

A symbol of the tradition: a circuit deliberately left incomplete. It stands for the unfinished, the correctable, and the refusal to declare a system closed.

A closed circuit works and cannot be changed without breaking it. The open form holds that any understanding, any model, and any tradition should retain the gap through which correction enters.