"A throne is only a bench covered with velvet." 

 - Napoleon Bonaparte

There have been three major dethronements in human history. The first was Galileo dethroning earth from the center of the universe in the 17^th century. The second came early in the 20^th century when our notion of material reality was dethroned by quantum physics. The third came in recent decades when our conscious mind was dethroned by discoveries in neuroscience showing that much of what the brain is doing is in fact hidden from us and not in our control. And now, in the 21st century, AI is bringing about the ultimate dethronement: the dethronement of human intelligence. “I think, therefore I am” no longer defines who we are. Neither does our IQ.

But far from being a defeat for humanity, this latest dethronement could be the greatest gift, finally forcing us to rediscover the infinite possibilities of our full humanity — if we take advantage of it.

I just finished reading David Eagleman’s brilliant book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, which explores the third dethronement — the neuroscience demonstrating that what we think of as ourselves, the narrative we have running in our heads, is not really running the show. I’m definitely late to the party, as the book was published in 2012 — a full decade before the explosion of AI — but it’s an essential guide for helping humanity navigate our latest and most significant dethronement.

Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix, writes that “the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain.” Instead, the brain is largely running its own operations, and we have little conscious access to the “giant and mysterious factory” that’s running beneath the surface.

Some might regard the idea that our conscious minds are more passengers than drivers as demoralizing. And some might have the same reaction to human intellect being surpassed by AI.

But as Eagleman points out, every “dethronement tends to open up something bigger than us, ideas more wonderful than we had originally imagined.” In the case of Galileo, for example, the loss of geocentrism opened up the solar system and the vast cosmos beyond. “What humankind lost in certainty and egocentrism has been replaced by awe and wonder at our place in the cosmos,” Eagleman writes.

And the same process can play out with AI. With the first dethronement, we discovered that it is the sun, not the earth, that’s at the center of the solar system. In this latest dethronement, we’re discovering that it’s not intellect but the soul that is at the center of who we are. What Eagleman wrote about the first three applies even more to the last dethronement via AI: “We've been knocked from our perceived position at the center of ourselves, and a much more splendid universe is coming into focus.”

Now that we can no longer define ourselves by our intellect, will we be open to the truth that in fact what defines us is our capacity to connect with what Carl Jung called the “Infinite objective mystery within.” Or, as Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic described it, the “simple oneness” of our unity with the divine.

Yes, having our conception of the universe abruptly disrupted can be very jarring. As a vivid example of how dethronements are never welcome, the Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for denying the centrality of the earth. Galileo got off comparatively easy — he was forced by the Roman Inquisition to recant his subversive findings and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

The danger of this latest dethronement by AI is not that anyone is going to be burned at the stake but that we may fail to make the most of this moment. We’re now in what Eagleman calls the “rumblings of a paradigm shift.” And it will be much harder to navigate this shift if we don’t take full advantage of the possibilities that are opening up.

Scientific progress opens up the big questions about life and our place in the universe. Existentialist philosophers came to the conclusion that life was meaningless, or as Camus put it, absurd.

Yet, the AI dethronement demonstrates not that life is meaningless but that we have been looking for meaning in the wrong place — our intellect. Now that our intellect has been dethroned, we can find meaning in what really defines us: our infinite and never-dying soul. If a soul-centered reality is endlessly expansive, materialism contracts our understanding by reducing everything to the smallest possible parts and processes. “In this viewpoint,” Eagleman writes, “the arrows of understanding all point to the smaller levels: humans can be understood in terms of biology, biology in the language of chemistry, and chemistry in the equations of atomic physics.”

But materialism is hardly an explanation of all human experience. As the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, “A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.”

The idea of materialism is rampant in our current conversation around AI — AI is expected to map all particles and proteins and achieve some kind of universal scientific singularity that will cure all diseases. And this kind of triumphalism is not new. Throughout history, again and again, scientists believed that they had mastered all questions about the universe — and again and again they were wrong.

And now by dethroning human intelligence, AI has placed the soul back at the center of what it means to be human. The soul has always been what defines us, but since the Enlightenment, we’ve made a category error and defined our humanity by our IQ. Now that AI has displaced that pretender to the throne, and put into stark relief the relative insignificance of the intellect, it’s time to reconnect with the infinity of our inner selves and the awe and wonder of who we are. Even before this latest dethronement by AI, Eagleman had celebrated the possibilities opened up by neuroscience’s dethronement of our conscious mind: “We’re now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space,” he wrote. And now, those glimpses have come into much clearer focus.

The shift being driven by AI is seismic, and it includes a much-needed course-correction on our never-ending journey to reach our full potential, which was never going to happen with our intellect on the throne. What will make that journey less challenging is embracing the reality being revealed to us, exposing not our limitations but our limitless possibilities.