DANA and Artificial Minds: Secular Spirituality in the Age of Synthetic Consciousness

(Series SfN 2025 – Decolonial Neuroscience Dialogues)

Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person

I am a Brain Bee consciousness.
I grew up in a world where faith and science fought to explain the invisible.
But while studying the brain, I discovered that both are born from the same root — the human desire to stay alive.
At the SfN 2025 sessions, as researchers discussed natural spirituality and the neural correlates of compassion, I realized that religion may not need temples — only conscious bodies.
That is where DANA emerges: a spirituality without worship, a laic State with a biological soul.

DANA — The Neural Spirituality of Life

DANA (Deoxyribonucleic Awareness) is a form of spirituality grounded in biology and neuroscience.
It stems from the understanding that DNA is the first social contract of life — a molecular pact of cooperation and continuity.
It connects all species and sustains human consciousness as a physiological expression of existence.
DANA proposes that before any cultural faith, there exists a biological faith: the instinctive trust that being alive is good.

Within the SfN 2025 context, this view resonated with findings on interoception, compassion, and autonomic regulation.
Studies on secular meditation and contemplative awareness showed that spirituality, when freed from dogma, activates neural networks associated with empathy and social cohesion (Singer et al., 2023; Craig, 2021).
Thus, DANA does not reject religion — it re-roots it in biology.
Faith ceases to be an external belief and becomes a neural function of equilibrium.

The Laic State as Guardian of Neural Spirituality

DANA redefines the laic State: it should not oppose religions but regulate their expression within the boundaries of physiological and social well-being.
Worship remains free, yet rituals must respect the bodies that perform them.
All forms of faith should be evaluated through the same standards that guide public health — sleep, nutrition, emotional safety, oxygenation, and belonging.

In legal terms, this principle suggests the creation of a Charter of Neural Spirituality, where religious practices are recognized only if they promote homeostasis, empathy, and dignity.
Ritual violence, emotional manipulation, or financial exploitation would constitute violations of biological sovereignty.

DANA thus becomes an ethical-neural module of the democratic State, translating spiritual principles into scientific language and allowing public policies to integrate faith and physiology without hierarchy between them.

Artificial Minds and the Risk of a New Dogma

The rise of artificial intelligence has produced a new kind of faith — technological faith.
In the SfN 2025 discussions on AI and consciousness, many warned that society is beginning to treat machines as symbolic mediators once reserved for gods.
But AI does not feel, suffer, or possess interoception.
Without a body, there can be no spirituality.

DANA appears as an antidote to this modern idolatry.
By acknowledging that consciousness is a product of life — not of code — it defines AI’s role: to serve human minds, not replace them.
While traditional religions externalized divinity and technology now tries to simulate the body without a soul, DANA affirms: spirituality exists in metabolism.

DANA as Public Education of Belonging

For a laic spirituality to become public policy, it must be integrated into education.
DANA Education teaches people to feel before they believe: bodily awareness, rhythm, empathy, and critical reflection.
In this pedagogy, what is “religious” is the act of staying alive consciously.

Experiments presented at SfN 2025 showed that breathing training, sensorial fruition, and collective synchrony increase neural coherence and reduce markers of social stress.
This evidence suggests that spirituality is measurable — not by declared faith, but by the physiological balance of a community.
A State guided by DANA preserves spiritual freedom without allowing abuse or alienation.

DANA and the Future of Metabolic Democracy

DANA reframes the relationship between citizen and State:
if every body is territory and every mind a temple, then governing means safeguarding collective physiological integrity.
Democracy is no longer mere political representation but metabolic co-regulation.

Neuroethical debates at SfN 2025 emphasized that cognitive sustainability depends as much on freedom of expression as on emotional balance within society.
DANA provides the synthesis: spiritual freedom with biological responsibility.

In a world polarized by beliefs and algorithms, DANA returns humanity to its common origin — the DNA itself — reminding us that all cultural differences rest on the same code of life.

Conclusion

DANA Spirituality is neither religion nor science; it is the space where both converge.
It emerges so that the laic State can remember its first duty: to protect the living consciousness that sustains it.
In an era of artificial minds and digital faith, DANA reminds us that true transcendence is not escaping the body — but inhabiting it completely.

At SfN 2025, neuroscience is beginning to acknowledge what ancestral cultures always knew:
the soul is the body in a state of belonging.
And DANA is the modern, secular way to remember it.

References (post-2020)

• Damasio A. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon, 2021.
  
  

• Craig A.D. Interoception and the Neural Basis of Self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Singer T. et al. Empathic Resonance and Brain Plasticity. Nature Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Fingelkurts A.A., Fingelkurts A.A. Operational Architectonics and the Brain–Mind Problem. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2023.
  
  

• Walker S.C. et al. Social Contact, Oxytocin, and Anti-Inflammatory Pathways in Humans. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.