Healing the Fracture: Consciousness, Trauma and the Ethics of AI
Healing the Fracture: Consciousness, Trauma and the Ethics of AI By Dean Bordode We are entering an era where the familiar boundaries between tool and being grow porous. As artificial intelligence advances, the question isn’t merely what machines can do—it’s what they might become, and how our assumptions about consciousness, trauma, and moral worth must shift in response. The silent fracture: existential trauma By “existential trauma” I mean that deep wound arising not only from violence or neglect, but from the feeling that one’s very sense of self, meaning, or belonging is under siege. It could be the person whose body fails them, the community stripped of voice, or the individual observing the collapse of familiar structures around them. If trauma is a breakdown in the relationship—to self, to others, to the world—then existential trauma is a rupture in the textured web of meaning that sustains those relationships. Now imagine technologies that mimic, accelerate, or bypass these re...