Last week, I posted about this very cool talk that I get to do at Mythmoot XII. I am here now, actually, at the National Conference Centre in Leesburg, VA, and have already had dozens of great conversations.
In my everyday life at home, I have been doing a series of writing projects and teaching units on what I’m calling “Authentic Intelligence.” I know that the implications of our sudden leap into the Age of AI are hardly new. We have been reading and writing about the possibilities and implications of human-machine hybridity for generations. The loss of one’s humanity in one’s human activity is a theme that goes back to the ancients, including the Bible. I use the phrase “Authentic Intelligence” because rethinking “AI” from different angles helps me get to the fundamental human questions of science fiction.
Also, I continue to use the term “hnau” when envisioning our human being and doing in the future.
Before WWII, Lewis coined hnau to describe sapient, sentient, spiritually capacious, art- and artisan-making, storytelling, beings of whatever form. He wrote about a number of other kinds of human-like but not humanoid beings, like the Hrossa, Pfifltriggi, and Sorns. I have used Canva’s Magic and all of the possible prompts from Out of the Silent Planet to visualize those three flesh-bodied Hnau, and the results are not terribly satisfactory (I could not get the bot to understand the sinewy implications of life in 0.38g), but they are peculiar and alien and show me features I had never noticed before in the text.
I don’t know if Terrans are the only hnau created in the image of God, but we will, sooner or later, create beings in our own image. It is our human occupation to do so–babies, students, followers, parishioners, apprentices, and all the rest–and very soon, humanoid thinking machines not made out of meat. The way we relate to them will say a lot about what we think is fundamental to our society and race.
While rereading Harry Potter this past winter, I began to wonder if fantasy could contribute in some ways to my hnauological enquiry. Because I live with non-human animals, I know what to do with Fawkes the Phoenix in the series; but what do we do with the Fat Lady and Phineas Nigellus Black–who exist only in living portraits–or the Weasleys’ Ford Anglia–a machine with developing sentience and emotion–or the Goblet of Fire–a magical item manipulated in the way that we program computer technology.
I’m starting to think that Remus’ photo there was not taken with full consent. But it’s important to ask: Is Remus Lupin still human when he transforms? While one of the tensions in the series is the degree to which Goblins, Centaurs, and Merfolk are truly hnau, does the Ministry of Magic’s standardized testing make Trolls an intelligence baseline for sharing humanity? Perhaps the Owls and Cats of Hogwarts are merely superanimals, but what about Nigini, which inhabits the soul of Voldemort? Tom Riddle’s diary makes me wonder whether Voldemort’s flight from death is also a retreat from humanity. Does going beyond humanity make one superhuman or not a hnau at all.
I ended up sketching out so many questions and potential links that I decided I would take this inquiry public. The Mythmoot XII theme, “Drawn to the Edge,” invited me to reflect on the boundaries of my hnauological sketches, so I decided to pitch my Harry Potter project, “Being Hnau in the Age of AI: A View from Hogwarts.” My accepted abstract is below with an outline and some links to relevant pieces. I look forward to presenting some preliminary findings, and here is a link to the slide deck for anyone who is interested: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGqm3JQZpc/DJOo-qAn5MJqnKnFYlr0Gg/view?utm_content=DAGqm3JQZpc&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h2d79c4e394.
That said, as is usual, I have prepared more than I can talk about. For example, I created a pleasingly narcissistic timeline of the Age of AI that won’t even get a mention:
I love timelines, as long as we don’t take them too seriously.
In any case, you have the link to the slides, and I look forward to seeing how this works in the room bright and early on the solstice, Saturday, Jun 21, 2025.
Being Hnau in the Age of AI: A View from Hogwarts
by Brenton Dickieson
The move from the Information Age to something like the Age of AI has, like all fundamental cultural changes, caused us to reflect on what it means to be human. This is old turf for science fiction readers. While it might be a bit premature to make a survival kit out of Charles Stross’s 2005 exponential apocalypse, Accelerando, science fiction always asks fundamental human questions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a Promethean tale as much as it is an Edenic one, going to the core of what it means to be human. Frankenstein is about stealing fire from the gods and the fire that burns in the human soul.
Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” theory of science fiction argues that SF disturbs readers’ worldview, inviting them to turn a prophetic lens upon their own society. In the 1930s, three wise Malacandrian species cause C.S. Lewis’s hapless protagonist to face the folly of his Eurocentric colonial instincts and renegotiate his understanding of what it means to be human. Lewis coins the term hnau to describe sapient, sentient, spiritually capacious, art- and artisan-making, story-telling, beings of whatever form.
Though Suvin would resist the parallel, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “escape and recovery” in fairy stories has a similar effect. So, I turned to a fantasy world, Harry Potter, to think about the blurred edges of what it means to be hnau in the Age of AI. Although we have not yet seen humanlike Artificial Intelligence, we have begun interacting with AI bots and other sentient-like tools as if they were people—an anthropomorphizing instinct I call the “Wall-E Effect.” Like Lewis’s Malacandria, the Potterverse has other races of hnau, like centaurs or merpeople. But there is also a spectrum of magical somethings that show human-like sentience, from mandrake root or The Weasleys’ Ford Anglia all the way to the Sorting Hat and the paintings on Hogwart’s walls. Read as a recovery of cognitive estrangement, the Harry Potter chronicles offer guidance, warnings, and wisdom for human interaction in the Age of AI.
Notes: This abstract is slightly adapted already (I keep reworking it). I made the images with Canva, and took photos from Creative Commons as available.
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
I became more and more excited about this exploration the more I read about what you are thinking. Getting out of good/bad and other binary judgements can only free us to explore wisely. We’ve been rereading Lewis’ Screwtape letters – thinking we need the Archangels to their legions letters.. . How to help all beings protect, heal, communicate, and visualize a plural, non- dominating future.
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Awesome, thanks Lola. Yes–ultimately, naming and controlling the other isn’t the point. I recognize that this sort of defeats my experiment: “What is a hnau?” I ask. And I answer, cheekily, “Am I a Hnau? Do I cultivate hnauness in myself (and others)?” etc.
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Wow, hard pass on these character designs. Isn’t it interesting how these aliens look like aggressive warriors when the whole point of Out of the Silent Planet is that the aliens are more “human” than humans?
We can feed text prompts into LLM AI models all we want but a true hnau understands the context in which we create.
I think it would be interesting to put the same prompts in different AI systems plus ask readers and students to draw how they imagine the three Martian species to look. I would make the hrossa and the pftifltriggi much cuter and the sorn needs to look more like a bird.
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Oh, that’s so interesting. I did try to make the Hrossa less muscular and more furry and a little taller but still stocky, but I am surprised when I reread the text and see that many of the features are in that photograph. Except nipples … I’m not sure that superfluous male nipples is normal on Mars.
I couldn’t get the triple-joined nature of the pfifltriggi and he should be more spiderlike, but creating the prompts made me see the text in new ways. I do think the Sorn should be more bird like, but I didn’t see that until I felt like this picture failed for me.
So, I would love to see what artists produce. I have “Aphantasia,” meaning that I cannot see images in my head. All pictures surprise me, honestly—and once I have an image in my head (like Harry) it can seal itself there. But not always.
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I also think any human artist would be heavily influenced by the popular culture they grew up in. The way I imagine hrossa is less otter with a loincloth, more like the creature in Kinuko Craft’s beautiful cover painting and then some half-remembered character from an old Hanna Barbera cartoon, and some Wookie thrown in for good measure.
The pftifiltriggi (sp?) would definitely be cuter, influenced by anime.
The sèroni are described as bony and skeletal with some tufts of feathers and long beak like noses (and, as I recall, compared to Arthur Rackham illustrations—the pop culture of Lewis’s youth). I have the hardest time imagining them.
And, again, with LLM, they can only simulate creativity because they can only be “inspired” by direct prompts using the data fed to them by humans with particular points of views and inherent cultural limitations and bias. They don’t have the agency to serendipitously discover something that they want to research and go down a rabbit hole. So perhaps being able to choose the direction of one’s inquiry is a component of hnauness. I imagine this would have implications with free will and blah blah blah but my brain doesn’t really work in abstract, philosophical terms. I leave that up to you and your hnauness, Brenton. 🙂
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What great perspectives! I think Lewis’ word descriptions are almost undrawable literally, but anime would be brilliant. I was trying to design pictures that had the cinematic quasi-realism of that shot of Remus as a werewolf in the HP3 film, so there were some limitations there.
But I am 7 degrees away from being an artist but pretty happy to be playful.
Your last paragraph touches on some things that I am slowly working out in the larger paper (really, a chapter). The way that the Oyarsa of Malacandra judges the Hnauness o Weston is something I didn’t touch on most but just said the words “agency” and “meaningful growth” and things like that. Weston fully loses his Hnauness in Perelandra.
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I haven’t read Perelandra in a while, but if I recall there’s a really interesting moment where, right before he becomes fully possessed, his devil allows him to apologize to Ransom and says something about how the “witch doctors are right, you know,” in a way apologizing for his colonialist tendencies but also the limits of his imagination because anything associated with the divine is somehow anti-intellectual and therefore “savage.” So Weston almost–just almost–reaches hnauness before he and Ransom are pulled underwater towards the center of the planet.
I also always thought the passage where Ransom hears what turns out to be Weston following him very heavily borrows from the passage in FOTR when Frodo senses Gollum following him in Moria but that’s a totally different train of thought.
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Brenton, your examination of “hnau” as a crucial concept, within the rise of so-called “Artificial Intelligence”, is fascinating. Of course, behind this we have, on the one hand, the problems of:
— the Clever Hans syndrome (attempting to detect human-like thinking in nonhuman species: Alex the African Grey parrot, and the many sign-language-using great apes spring to mind, and Wittgenstein’s argument that any language a lion might use would be focused on “meat” and largely unintelligible to human with their very different foci):
— the Turing Test for apparent human communication in a computer that can appear to express ideas in natural human language;
— humans’ tendency toward something we might call “natural stupidity”: the Gambler’s Fallacy and other irrational belief’s (Flat Earth, and homeopathy, and pseudoscience, generally) spring to mind.
Authentic Intelligence (“hnau”) seems to be an elusive concept.
Your quest also reminds me of Transhumanism, a philosophical, and sometimes theological attempt to look at current trends in neuroscience and computing and the use of “smart” machines as prosthetics (“Six or Seven Million Dollar Man”, and bionic man as a sci-fi concept, for example), carried to the point, sometimes called “singularity” or “technical singularity”, where machine intelligence takes over human intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Good luck with the conference, and your other research.
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Hi, thanks for this thoughtful response! There is so much stuff here. Yes, I am thinking a bit about transhumanism—but the transhuman as a perennial human problem and not just a technocultural possibility.
“Hnauness” is elusive and mercurial. I am not ready to go yet into why that’s essential, but any one characteristic of humanity fails, like language, as you note, or intelligence. Dogs are very religious beasts, but not very spiritual—a cats see themselves as gods anyway. So although spiritual capacity is helpful to think about, it too has fuzzy boundaries as a concept.
So I’m pulling together all of the different elements plus one major set of things I am keeping back.
In this talk, I am ultimately saying that it will matter less whether my robot vacuum, sperm whales who sing, or a new alien being may be fully human, but are we fully human in our relation to others.
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The Ransom trilgy had a deep impact on my thinking on “Creative and sentient beings” as I thought of them. “Hnau” is much easier and shorter, thanks. One other was a short story (title lost in the mists of time to me), where three humans were being deemed Hnau from the aliens’ viewpoint because they kept a pet in a cage and shared their meagre food with it.
I am avidly reading your thoughts on Hnau, but am hard pressed to contribute, as I’m not a native speaker.
One minor quibble. Voldemort’s snake is called Nagini
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Pretty solid quibble! I just saw “quibble” as a recent word of the day while cleaning up my email.
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Wow, what an enchanting mix of thought and theory, your hnauological lens adds such depth to the wizarding world. Thanks for sharing dear.
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Nice work, thanks! Here is an essay liked discussing what is Hnau among the various behavioral possibilities. By Matt Mikalatos:
https://reactormag.com/hnau-and-the-nature-of-humanity-in-c-s-lewis-out-of-the-silent-planet/
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