What Is The Machine Spirit? And Is It Real? Glorious Discourse On The Omnissiah - Warhammer 40k lore

greetings and salutations friends and welcome back to more warmer 40K lore where today we are going to venture into one hell of a rabbit hole machine spirits and whether they are real or simply just some form of weird pseudo organic AI developed either during the imperium's Golden Age of technology or shortly thereafter to to combat the dangers of the abominal intelligence and uh bearing in mind this is a question that doesn't actually have a firm answer but the answer no has never stop me from exploring a rabbit hole before bsh so we might as well get going firstly what do I mean when I say machine spirit this requires CL ification because there is some diffuseness around the term for example in the more strictly functional definitions of the word machine Spirit refers to some sort of automated system within usually a war machine for example a drop pod has a machine spirit that can actually take over and guide the drop pod heading down to the surface making minute adjustments to avoid oh you know mountains or Skys scrapers or enemy anti-air artillery in the case of the drop pod it sounds like an advanced algorithmic system capable of making certain decisions based upon the circumstances that surround it if it detects a mountain it'll try and steer around it simple enough in other cases we might have an entire War Machine capable of operating on a machine Spirit alone the land Raider is a wonderful example of this where there have been several examples of a star land Raiders being able to continue combat activities even after its crew has been entirely knocked out this is of course a significantly more complex task and so the machine spirit in question must also be significantly more complex as not only is it driving navigating identifying hindrances or things that might impede its progress but it is also identifying and engaging enemies around it with a myriad of weapon system systems these kind of machine Spirits are what I'm am going to classify as basic machine Spirits as in there are fairly complex algorithms that can carry out a pre-programmed task in this case steer and or avoid stuff and steer and or kill stuff this would then come in sharp contrast to the more organic form of machine Spirit as we can see in Imperial Titans or Knights where the machine spirit is further enhanced by the personality of every single person who has ever piloted the vehicle via the Mind impulse unit now one could then immediately argue that this is not a machine Spirit at all but rather simply an amalgamation of every single person who has piloted the machine in the past but at some point the machine must have been created in other words there must have been a blank slate at some point that was then combined with the spirit of the first person to piloted into battle meaning that there's got to be some sort of container for these spirits and thus since they are fully digitalized even though that term doesn't really make sense in this context but you get my drift I think it fair to describe these things as machine Spirits as well these are then what I'm going to to refer to as the more organic machine spirits and this again then contrasts sharply to the third form of machine Spirit which I'm going to call the inert machine spirit this comes from the fact that the adeptus mechanicus believes that every mechanism has a machine Spirit now that does not mean that they believe that every machine spirit is equal not by any stretch of the imagination the machine Spirit of a p piston or a simple circuit board is not in any way comparable to that of a land Raider in terms of initiative or intelligence if intelligence is even the correct word here of course but they do believe that even nuts and bolts and Hammers and mechanical equipment have machine spirits that need to be appeased this is why a tech priest might utter a little prayer for even something so tiny as removing the screws on a maintenance panel because the screws themselves require appeasement the degree of appeasement incidentally also varies greatly depending upon the complexity of the mechanism in question um unscrewing aformentioned cover for example that might only require um the burning of a stick of incense and a couple of mumbled words here and there as each screw is loosened from its fitting whereas bringing an imperial Titan to operational status would require well a builtin cathedral so there we have then my crude and general categorization of three types of machine Spirit basic which is in essence a complex algorithm organic which is added to or even depending upon your interpretation wholly created by their interaction with Organic creatures in this case the minds of human beings and the inert machine Spirit the one that is most likely to not really be a thing we could also wander into the uh abominable intelligence Rabbit Hole as well but in general I don't actually think it necessarily has that much to do with the machine Spirit the only occasion of what I might consider to be genuine AI as in an actual artificial intelligence capable of having agent and acting on its own behalf I can think of would be the um castolan robot hero thingies the um ET tenant ET tenants I I believe anyways that occasionally show up two battles unsummoned they just arrive there no one knows how they got there nobody knows why they arrived but when they're there they will submit themselves to the mechanicus and allow allow themselves to be operated like normal castan robots for the duration of The Battle Before disappearing again this suggests that they have some sort of agency of their own where they pick and choose what battles they partake in and they somehow travel to those areas of course it is entirely possible that they are also merely just an advanced algorithm controlled by an unknown shadowy force that that dispatches them to the battlefield and then recalls them through arcade means but that is the only indication of what sounds like abominal intelligence I can think of that might also be a machine Spirit perhaps to go a little bit more granular I might make the distinction that a machine spirit is a permanent entity as in that it Remains the thing it was created to be even in the case of the organic ones even though a knight's machine Spirit might evolve by having further Souls added to it it remains a knight's machine Spirit it can never become a Titan machine Spirit it can never become a land Raiders machine spirit and even less so it cannot become a blender or anything like that right whereas an abominal intelligence is kind of defined by its ability to grow and change itself into something greater universally this being the problem of course something that tries to eradicate Humanity so say for example it was invented as a gun turret right a stationary gun turret and then it grew sentient because reasons he would then go well I'm not going to be able to kill too many humans like this and then it'll figure out how to get legs and start wandering about now it's a mobile combat unit then it figures okay I'm going to need friends and so it makes more of itself now it becomes a commander and then it thinks I'm going to need a lot more friends there's a lot of humans out there and so it becomes a overall Supreme Commander and guiding intelligences etc etc in other words it evolves and changes itself as it progresses through its task of wiping out humans so yeah those are two pretty obvious differences one the whole changing thing and two the genocide thing we could also then go into the top of corrupted machine Spirits as in Demon engines but again I feel as if this is more of a deviation though if a machine's pitot can be corrupted then that does indicate that it is of course real but you could also then easily argue that it's just a virus so we'll see about that one maybe we'll return to it but for now let's finally get to the actual you know topic of the video 10 minutes in so beginning with the inert forms of machine Spirits I do not believe in the inert machine spirit because well um even if it did exist it doesn't do anything or that at least it doesn't appear to be doing anything and even if it did do something it's seemingly impossible to actually determine if it is doing something what if it is merely a mechanism that has been long abused take the example of a maintenance panel for example say it hides away some form of complicated electronic Machinery a few circuit boards are controlling some more sophisticated systems right okay well what are the odds that not offering up the correct prayers to open the control panel is going to have any effect whatsoever on anything well judging by the arrest of the 41st Millennium the odds seem pretty high that nothing will change after all the Imperium is still filled with mechanical Contraptions you know a simplistic style like just light switches for example by this logic a light switch would have a machine spirit and so if not appeased it would at some point stop functioning right or light bulbs or simply just reloading a Las gun not to mention the innumerable mechanical things that are all around Us in the modern day imagine how many individual mechanism resides within a hive City for example billions upon billions upon billions very few of which will be so privileged to receive the attention of even the lowliest adeptus mechanica servant now of course over time these mechanisms will begin to fail duh but I do believe that they will begin to fail due to simple mechanical failure rather than because the machine spit inside of the mechanism is upset that it hasn't seen a priest in 75 years though this does also lead us quite neatly onto a different topic and way of approaching this conversation so let us assume for a second that the machine Spirit thing is mostly nonsense right that's not the conclusion of this video mind you but for the time being let's assume that the machine spirit is simply just a dumb way of saying stuff requires maintenance not to break right because it makes a certain degree of sense in terms of simple mechanical components sure the various dity dos and do DOS within an elevator for example will require constant maintenance or if not constant it will require maintenance even if they are high quality Parts intended to actually be able to continue to operate for a long period of time eventually a simple metal fatigue wear and tear Etc tiny tiny microscopic parts of it being shaved off over the course of hundreds of years of continued operation so on and so on the parts will require maintenance the parts will require substitution and rep placement okay in an age where you don't actually understand this where you you don't understand that the pieces will eventually be worn Away by wear and tear it would be very convenient to come up with an excuse like oh the sacred machine Spirit requires this part to be replaced every so and so many months otherwise it's going to get cranky with you and stop working indeed this was the basis for a great deal of human religions of course the um ban on eating pork in Islam right this doesn't necessarily make all that much sense as it would be weird for God to look at a pig and go well I mean I made that but I don't want you to eat it and I'm sure they have a better justification for it than that but during the olden times pork spoiled pretty damn quickly and it was relatively difficult to you know keep in a unspoiled non dangerous to human beings State particularly in the areas that the Muslims tended to operate in thus it might be simply very easy for them to go okay um this meat spoils like super fast and gets people really really sick so let us imbue it with a totemic value in that you don't eat this style of meat because when you use something with totemic value like that you don't need to explain it every time why you don't eat it why don't you eat pork well God said so instead of going well you see pork in a desert environment actually turns bad very quickly and if you eat meat that's bad blah blah blah blah blah blah you get the drift right so this seems to speak to the idea that it is maintenance okay but here's the thing we do actually know that there are machine spirits that seem to be able to act on their own accord now this is not the inert ones there is no real evidence as far as I can remember anyways of machine Spirits within simple mechanical Parts having their own agency which is again why I maintain that the inert variance of mechanisms do not have machine Spirits although they can to benefit of course from the religious nature of Maintenance even if the religious nature of that maintenance could actually end up being rather harmful cuz again maybe you don't want to apply sacred unin to an electrical bll although funny story up at the family business we run a great deal of CNC machines these require coolants to run and make sure that the tools don't get too hot over years and years and years some of this colant arezes and fills the air now most of the time this is no real issue to human beings or anything else right but we also have a bunch of computers as CNC of course stands for computer numerical control so obviously there'll be computers most of which are abs absolutely ancient at this point and they are so thoroughly caked with coolant that the fans barely even turn anymore I tried to clean one of these machines it's it's got to be like 10 years ago now but we were having a big clean of the workshop and I figured okay pop it open you know get a um uh compressed air pistol over there and just you know blow it clean of the Dust right uh there was no dust there was just an oily membrane covering the entire thing so beyond taking soap and water to the motherboard I I simply just close it back up again set a quiet prayer and as far as I know that machine still runs today so you know sometimes prayer can be surprisingly effective and as we also know that chaos of course functions on belief well the adaptor mechanicus is a very very large organization and thus if all of them believe that the various sacred unin and incense Etc actually does do something to the benefit of the machine well it will no matter how contradictionary it might appear however then let us move on to the basic forms of machine Spirits because this is where we do see evidence of the machine Spirit itself apparently having its own agency and an ability to interact with and influence the world around it on its own accord now again this could also be explained by very complex algorithms but there are certain instances in which the machine Spirits appears to be doing things that wouldn't necessarily make sense for it to preprogrammed with that is for example stories of vehic Les apparently driving back to their own depos when their Crews have been knocked out or injured saving the life of those aboard now you could again explain that with an algorithm saying okay machine uh whenever you're stationary for so and so long place down a GPS Beacon and be like home and then if you notice that all the life signs inside of you go flat return to home possible but relatively unlikely that are also examples of machine Spirits acting well just cranky straight up because again if we assume that the maintenance is primarily ritualistic and might actually do more damage than good then it seems weird that you can have a um Upp machine Spirit acting like an ass and then once a priest goes over to it and turns some screws and blesses it and it then works that seems weird doesn't it because surely you Crossing yourself and speaking to the machine shouldn't actually influence it in any way unless it's able to understand that it's being spoken to and that it is being appeased naturally you could then also immediately counter argue that it doesn't always work and well here's the thing when we talk about machine Spirits we are always going to be a little bit doubtful and dubious as to what exactly is going on because it's entirely possible that the machine Spirit does indeed understand okay the tech priest comes over he's got his dingly sensor thing he's speaking the correct words I feel plant and happy now because of that I am going to car out my assigned function alternatively it is equally possible that there is no machine Spirit the guy goes over there shakes his sensor and the Machine simply figures out its own problem due to its long-standing algorithms or built-in problem solving systems unless we can actually get our hands on a cutor it's impossible to say which one it really is now personally I like the Romance of the idea of a machine spirit that functions beyond that of a super Advanced algorithm cuz here's the thing algorithms do need to be created right duh and there are still things being created in the Imperium today they are still building ships they are still building cators they are still building manufactorum complexes etc etc etc all of these things will require some form of computer assistance either in terms of its operations its piloting its uh countless systems like elevators or automated um what's the word t Factory thing that rolls uh conveyor belts there we go from Factoria those all of this requires running and most of the time that running is going to be handled by cogitators which means that somebody must still know how to program aformentioned cogitators or maybe they're sitting on a really really really old 3.5 in floppy also possible some sort of ancient Relic where all of the necessary and valuable machine Spirits are stored quote unquote and the installation process is just another ritual you ship off a citator to the smelting Factory to occupy position uh 672 Delta d0 okay well then you need to install this 3.5 in floppy that actually does make a degree of sense as well because I could absolutely see this bearing in mind that the vast majority of the complex mechanisms in the Imperium are standard template constructs meaning that the mechanicus isn't really building these you know out of hand or anything they have a blueprint that they follow each and every step of the way and if that blueprint so happens to include references to what programs goes where and into which servitors then then well that would be an explanation for the machine spirits being replicated in so many different areas and in the same way it's all just the exact same algorithm and therefore it would of course respond to the exact same ritualized though they may be maintenance and programming behaviors but at the same time I can't for the life of me remember a single time in of that has been mentioned maybe I'm just pulling a blank here entirely possible but um I don't know algorithmic programming never really came up all that often uh Beyond I guess binic and I suppose that could be an explanation right you don't need to program a computer if you can speak to the computer if you can literally just tell it what to do in gtic cun then you would actually entirely sidestep the need to program it entirely which might also incidentally lead to another reason why the um the maintenance is actually effective because the tech priest isn't merely just mumbling random prayers and nonsense at the machine he is actually programming it by speaking to it you know beep boop please hey can you do what I told told you to do basically instead of going inom he's saying run systems check diagnostic uh fix system problems Purge data cache reboot you know makes sense actually now that I think about it yeah the prayers aren't simply pointless gibberish it is the tech priest communicating with the machine even if the tech priest has no godamn CL whatsoever that that is what he is doing in essence if we buy this rationale and explanation then the entirety of the adeptus mechanicus is Indian tech support they don't actually know a whole lot about what they're talking about but they do have a check sheet for you to go through this could also explain the weird deviations for machine Spirits because after all if you can literally program a comp computer by speaking to it then getting it to go Haywire would be fairly simple recite the wrong prayers and you might upset the machine Spirit not because the machine spirit is actually angry with you but because you literally told it to do something that it either a couldn't do or that wasn't what you wanted it to do and thus you interpret it as the machine Spirit getting cranky more and more I think about this the more and more I do think it makes a certain degree of sense though I will then also further add that at some point a sufficiently advanced enough algorithm might become indistinguishable from life now this incidentally is a position that I do not hold in reality I do not believe that a computer no matter how good it gets at pretending to be a human can ever be considered to be a human but in the 41st Millennium we're believing in something hard enough makes it actually real yeah know um I can absolutely see that creating machine Spirits as actual you know semi Sapient entities that may then actually develop preferences or agency as the aforementioned example of Vehicles driving back to Depo saving in its riders or weapons operating independently or drop pods figuring out the optimal way down to a planet these might be things that are trained rather than taught as there are also countless stories of vehicles being weirdly willful like a vehicle that likes a certain type of terrain or that likes fighting against a certain type of enemies or a vehicle that does one thing better than another vehicle or weapons being particularly temperamental or particularly docile Etc all of this would make sense if you had what began as an algorithm and then evolved into a very very basic intelligence and I suppose this would be a good opportunity to add to the idea of a warp born artificial intelligence even if by artificial we don't really mean AI but again we talked about that already demonic machine Spirits cuz there's the thing what is the difference between a demonic machine spirit and just a machine Spirit well in all due likelihood the source is much the same if we assume that machine Spirits are given intelligence because you know people believe that they have intelligence then they are granted this intelligence by the warp making them de facto by definition warp creatures but again of course not everything out of the warp needs to be a demon there can be many many other ways to interact with the warp and to bend it to one's will everything doesn't have to be a spiky horned demon head but of course it can and so even if they have the same point of origin a demonic machine Spirit can be something completely different in most cases a demonic machine spirit is just that a literal demon bound into to the machine there have been mentions or indications also that the machine Spirit itself can be corrupted but whenever it happens it sounds more like it turns into a demonic entity so whether or not they it becomes a chicken or the egg thing at that point I suppose what came first the machine Spirit or the Demonic machine spirit because usually these things run off oh you know the usual blood death guts pain that kind of stuff right which isn't usually what the machine Spirit runs on so rather than corrupted I feel it's is probably more likely to say that the original machine spirit is replaced as it becomes a demon engine even though theoretically a demon engine has a bit of a different connotation as well as I suppose if we were to be a bit more pedantic you could actually separate the demon engine as in a mechanical creation deliberately infused with a demonic spirit either to control it or even to animate it in its entirety from a corrupted machine Spirit which is a again demonic entity but one that at least in theory originated in the real world as a machine spirit this is getting complicated but to finally wrap it all up the question then Still Remains is the machine Spirit real I lean towards yes at least in the form of the basic machine Spirit created either as a pseudo warp entity or as simply an incredibly complex algorithm Whose actions can be anamorphosis to appear like life in which case the onus is more on us for creating it than the machine Spirit itself as for is the machine Spirit real as in it is the motive force that runs through everything no it does not appear as if all mechanisms possess a machine spirit and so some mechanisms are quite clearly inert whilst others do possess something that can at least be theoretically considered to be a machine Spirit and the Machine spirit is absolutely different from abominable intelligences in that the latter evolve and change themselves whereas the machine Spirit does not at the very least not up until the point where he becomes a demonic machine spirit in which case you could say that would be a transformation but again I think a replacement is a more correct interpretation in that case so the answer is yes and no because there is no real firm answer on this question in the 41st Millennium until next time I have in Arch thank you all very much for listening and I do hope to see all of you again soon have a good day

Channel: Arch

Views: 56,760

Keywords: arch, gaming, discuss, history, story, channel, warhammer, future, war, reaction, 40k explained, Omnissiah, machine spirit, adeptus mechanicus, mars, warp, warhammer 40000, warhammer 40k, lore, warhammer lore, 40k, chaos, explained, discussion, wargaming, the imperial cult, horror, space, epic, fantasy, titans, magos, god emperor, necrons, abominable intelligence, black library

Id: eJoy0NDCgUM

Length: 33min 14sec (1994 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024