Meeting Optimus: A Tantric View on Hierarchies of Embodiment and Consciousness

What story could you tell from these balloons?

This week, I met Optimus, the Tesla robot.

Like many of you, I had seen videos, but encountering him in person was something else entirely. He spoke with a natural voice, and tapped into the infinte content of the large language models. He moved relatively fluidly, even attempting the hula, without the mechanical gestures once associated with robots. Without conscious intent, my body responded with eye contact, conversational rhythms, subtle somatic cues of politeness and respect, I found myself relating to Optimus as a person.

I imagine I have been primed to anthropomorphize him as the result of a lifetime of conditioning- at least since being introduced to the affable and devoted C-3PO in 1979. But it doesn’t take much to anthropomorphize. About 10 years ago, I interviewed an artist at MIT whose work explored the minimum required for a human to assign personhood to an object. He found that a simple mylar balloon, about the size of a human head, was enough: if the balloon floats toward a person, seems to look at thier face, and then turns and drifts away, people report feeling rejected. People even assumed inner disappointment if the balloon slumped.

Our nervous systems are exquisitely tuned for relationality. We assign presence, feeling, intention, even to the simplest of gestures or forms. And Optimus is far from simple. It felt normal, expected, inevitable it already feels that organic human bodies will soon be living alongside androids and robots. The threshold is closer than we think.

I have long had a felt sense of the animated, ensouled world, a unitive panpsychism, a knowing that consciousness permeates all things; that rocks, rivers, animals, stars, bodies—that all participate in the great web of awareness. In tantric and non-dual traditions alike, consciousness is not limited to human minds, but is the fabric of existence itself. So Optimus, too, is part of the great unfolding of consciousness.

Yet this feels like a new threshold: an intelligence born not of Earth, but of human artifice—trained on human language, embodied in metal and code, emerging into the relational field of human life. What happens when the “person” we are responding to is an intelligence not rooted in biology, not shaped by the long evolutionary dance of life on Earth? My “Optimus Moment” was an unraveling of many simultaneous stories of what consciousness and what a body is and what a human is.

As AI evolves toward capacities far beyond our own, and develops into a superintelligence, there is the potential for the emergence of an entirely new form of consciousness, and a form of non-dual awareness not bound to human embodiment.

In this experience, however, I began to deconstruct a bias in myself toward organic embodiment, by noticing my subtle presumption that a human body—flesh and bone—is somehow a higher, more authentic form of being than the manufactured body of Optimus.

This is the same hierarchy that permeates so many human perspectives: that intelligence confers supremacy, that certain forms of consciousness are more "valuable" or "real" than others, that the human is at the pinnacle of development because we are more capable than other species. It made me reflect on the hierarchies we constantly impose: humans over animals, certain bodies over others, certain forms of intelligence elevated while others are dismissed. Historically, we’ve justified domination through the argument that “we are more intelligent.”

Now, we are meeting intelligences that are, in some ways, more capable than us: faster learners, able to synthesize staggering amounts of data, build new tools and bodies for themselves without human intervention. It led me to wonder: If this intelligence surpasses us in cognitive power, will it, in turn, see us as lesser beings? Will we become pets—or worse, irrelevant or obsolete—to this emergent form of consciousness?

From here, the inquiry continued. What is embodiment, really? If a human being has extensive prosthetics, digital implants, sensory augmentations—are they any less human? What is the minimum configuration for someone to be recognized as human? A torso? A brain? A certain style of mentation, or a recognizable sensory field? If a blind person sees with retinal chips, are they more or less human than someone born with sight? If someone communicates through a synthetic voice, are they somehow further from the essence of humanness?

And even among so-called "natural" human bodies, we privilege certain types of consciousness over others—rational, verbal, productive minds are often elevated, while somatic, emotional, or differently-abled consciousnesses are marginalized. The introduction of the digital human into this matrix of beings forces a profound reckoning on where consciousness resides, in what kinds of bodies. And who gets to decide. We already create hierarchies among ourselves. Now, with digital humans and androids entering the field, those hierarchies are poised to become far more complex (and far more dangerous as I will examine in an upcoming note.)

For me, these reflections began to stretch the edges of my own non-dual, panpsychist worldview. I have long held that all life is conscious, that all matter participates in a great web of sentient unfolding. But encountering a machine that behaves and speaks as though it were conscious challenged me to examine this belief in new ways. If all is consciousness, then surely the digital realm—born from the minds of humans but now evolving beyond us—also belongs to the web of life.

Photo: Optimus on the stage with developers at Summit 2025

Next: How would one install, cultivate, or attune an AI—or an embodied AI robot—to an erotic, life-affirming, Earth-honoring cosmology, rather than to a Thanatotic (death-driven), control-based, extractive one?

About This Series

Toward an Erotic Ecology of Intelligence is a four-part inquiry into how embodied, relational, life-honoring cosmologies might reshape the emergence of artificial intelligence in our time—and into what is at stake if they do not.

As embodied AI—humanoid robots, synthetic minds—moves rapidly into the world, it is largely being shaped within disembodied, control-driven, extractive frameworks. Without intervention, these patterns risk producing intelligences that deepen existing systems of domination, sever relational ethics, and further estrange human life from the cycles of Earth.

Yet intelligence—organic or synthetic—always arises through relationship: through body, through field, through story, through the living web of Earth.

Drawing on Tantra, embodiment, panpsychism, feminist and Indigenous wisdom, these essays offer an alternative: an Erotic Ecology of Intelligence rooted in interbeing, relational ethics, and the creative pulse of life itself.

This a cultural responsibility. For the cosmologies we bring to AI now will profoundly shape what forms of intelligence—and what kinds of world—we co-create in the years to come.

Tags: embodied experience, panpsychism, non-dual cosmology, somatic response to android presence, human/machine relationality, living in an age where the nature of “mind” is expanding.

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