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Who says it's all superstition?

When you are dealing with technology that strains the mind to comprehend its workings, simple understanding can be so beyond your capabilities that what looks like superstition to you is simply good maintenance and engineering.

I think it’s more complicated than that.

I’ve no doubt part of his machinations (heh) included gradually weaning the wider Mechanicum off their exact level of superstition.

But that superstition still served an important service as temperance. The Men of Iron, technological wonders though they were, caused a lot of trouble. And with everything that was lost during those terrible ages? You would want to tread extremely carefully, in case a newly rediscovered STC or Fragment thereof contained something troublesome.

What you could start to do away with, likely by degrees, is the ritualised chanting. Oh it might be necessary in some cases (voice activated geegaws), but replace the ritual with actual understanding.

But to the wider thing? I’m not convinced The Emperor had any interest in actively oppressing mankind, once the Great Crusade was complete.

Granted, what we know of Tyranids and Necrons? That might have been the work of Millennia. And I’m not convinced you could hope to achieve more than just keeping Orks contained, with regular purges to prevent Waaagh! triggering population densities.

But even in those circumstances of ongoing struggle and war? That might still leave huge swathes of your holdings in relative peace.

As for the Astartes? If the Primarchs are functionally immortal? Do you need to wipe out the survivors of the Crusade, or simply not authorise ongoing recruitment, until a threat appears.

And there’s a lot of the Galaxy still fundamentally unexplored. If denying the Gods worshippers did indeed diminish them? That could take care of warp storms, as the starving gods lose power and influence.

As you explore ever further? You’d probably want a decent body of Astartes as part of that. Perhaps not Height of the Crusade headcounts, but certainly more than a Chapter’s worth. And again, that can be achieved not by slaughtering your own dudes, but by not replacing losses suffered in the tail end of the Great Crusade.

If you need more? You can recruit more. Or potentially break reserves out of cryo/stasis tubes.

I believe the Machine Spirit is more than just a superstition. Here are my lore examples -

Land Raiders
- These ancient tanks are famed for having aggressive, semi-autonomous Machine Spirits.
- One Crimson Fists Land Raider operated without a crew and went on a rampage against Orks before being destroyed.
- In Soul Hunter, the Land Raider used by First Claw is described as having a savage, predatory spirit that crew members can feel and interact with.

Strike Cruisers
- The Covenant of Blood (Night Lords) is said to have a spiteful, angry Machine Spirit, while the Maiden of the Stars (a Rogue Trader vessel) has a docile and cooperative one.
- These spirits influence ship behavior, from targeting decisions to navigation quirks.

Talos’ Armor (Night Lords)
- After Talos is incapacitated, his armor attempts to kill Abaddon on its own. While it can’t fully function without Talos, it spasms violently in an effort to protect or avenge him.

Imperial Titans
- Titan crews mentally link with their war machines, often describing the Machine Spirit as having moods, preferences, and even tactical opinions.
- Pilots report feeling the Titan’s anticipation before a kill or its disapproval during poor maneuvers.

Kastelan Robots
- These ancient robots operate independently until battle, where they temporarily allow Tech-Priests to control them—then sever that control afterward.
- Their behavior suggests a deeply embedded, autonomous intelligence that borders on sentience.

Is it AI? Is it a supernatural entity? Is it an echo of the Men of Iron?

It could be either or even both. After all, supernatural things are commonplace in the lore. Also, who is to say that at the height of the DAOT, machines gained not only sentience, but the capability for "souls" as well? If machines can be possessed by Daemons, some of them must have some form of a warp signature.. And what about Necrons? Are they not souls within a machine?

A little of everything.

As your post ably demonstrates? There absolutely are limited AI’s, which can allow some independent action by higher end war machines.

But, just because a Landraider can self-park on me in vengeance for scuffing its paintwork? It doesn’t mean the remote control for my telly has any kind of awareness or spirit.

Slightly risky this next bit due to Dakka rules? But consider religious rules on food.

Shellfish is a common forbidden food. In the modern day, I think we can make a reasonable inference that given shellfish can not only spoil quickly, but make you really quite violently ill, with a not insignificant chance of that being fatal, it was a way to avoid people making themselves avoidably ill.

Go back a few centuries even, before germ theory and a proper understanding of why they make you sick? It was enough to know it did, and it was a serious matter. So….the wise men/wise women just advise “yeah best not”, adding a bit of story telling to dissuade the more reckless/curious/downright stupid.

Same principle. You need to encourage correct maintenance and oiling and cleaning. But the people you’re instructing on how to do so haven’t had a technology centred education. So you make a wee chant. You ritualise it. Like when teaching a child, you use simple rhymes and songs to aid learning and retention. And you say it’s appeasing the Machine Spirit.

Will some outright nonsense have snuck in overtime? Sure, but provided the addition of “turn around three times, say boo to a metaphorical Goose and pretend your name is Keith for three seconds” doesn’t supplant The Things Necessary To Make It Work? So be it.

 tauist wrote:
It could be either or even both. After all, supernatural things are commonplace in the lore. Also, who is to say that at the height of the DAOT, machines gained not only sentience, but the capability for "souls" as well? If machines can be possessed by Daemons, some of them must have some form of a warp signature.. And what about Necrons? Are they not souls within a machine?

I agree with you up until Necrons - Short answer: not anymore. Long answer: they were, until the C’tan got hungry.

The Necrons are the result of biotransference, a process developed by Illuminor Szeras and gifted (read: manipulated) by the C’tan, those star-god parasites who saw the Necrontyr’s desperation for immortality and turned it into a cosmic buffet.

During biotransference, the Necrontyr didn’t just upload their minds—they had their souls ripped out and devoured. What’s left is a cold, calculating echo of who they were. Some retain fragments of personality—Overlords, Crypteks, and the like—but the rank-and-file are basically haunted Roombas with murder protocols.

So while the Adeptus Mechanicus gets around the Emperor’s ban on AI by calling it a “Machine Spirit” and waving incense at it, the Necrons are the cautionary tale: souls traded for immortality, only to become soulless machines ruled by regret and ancient grudges.

It’s not AI. It’s worse. It’s what happens when you sell your soul and the buyer doesn’t even give you a receipt.

Why superstitions if we virtually have confirmation about machine spirit and machine god(not Omnisiah) in novels. In Hayley baneblade series there machine spirits of super heavy with their filings and character. And we hame a princeps soul saved from warp by machine god when she died. It's more like Emperor know more and don't oppose all this.

That all depends.

In 40K, and even Heresy era? The MIU and Machine Spirit of Knights and Titans have existed, in-situ, for a long, long time. Centuries, possibly millennia,

Be it full blown Mind Impulse Unit, a Throne Mechanicum or more humble Helm Mechanicum? They’re all mental interfaces which contain some echo of previous incumbents.

It could well be that the design itself wasn’t intended for reuse and recycling. Perhaps at the height of mankind’s technology, they were intended to be One Use Only, to be swapped out when a Princeps or Pilot passed away.

If so? It’s entirely possible it’s the combined residual and echo of all that directed the Machine before which have made it something else. Something new. Something entirely unintended by the original design.

It could even be those waifs and strays and scraps of human consciousness have now created something akin to a composite soul.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
That all depends.

In 40K, and even Heresy era? The MIU and Machine Spirit of Knights and Titans have existed, in-situ, for a long, long time. Centuries, possibly millennia,

Be it full blown Mind Impulse Unit, a Throne Mechanicum or more humble Helm Mechanicum? They’re all mental interfaces which contain some echo of previous incumbents.

It could well be that the design itself wasn’t intended for reuse and recycling. Perhaps at the height of mankind’s technology, they were intended to be One Use Only, to be swapped out when a Princeps or Pilot passed away.

If so? It’s entirely possible it’s the combined residual and echo of all that directed the Machine before which have made it something else. Something new. Something entirely unintended by the original design.

It could even be those waifs and strays and scraps of human consciousness have now created something akin to a composite soul.

It’s also worth remembering that some of the bigger things with more active Machine Spirits (titans, land raiders, etc) have actual organic brains built into them that act as a wetware CPU and thus circumvent the ban on AI. While they’re usually animal brains, they can still think and they’re plugged into a whole load of advanced computer equipment that presumably boosts their intelligence some what.
Those Machine Spirits are empirically, physically, real.

The ‘Machine Spirit’ the Mechanicus claim is in a lasgun is probably not real in any sense.

But when you have a populous with minimal understanding of technology, how are they going to tell a ‘real’ machine spirit from ‘mundane maintenance requirements presented as appeasement rituals’?
And if in both cases failing to follow the ritual causes a dangerous malfunction, does it matter?

The various AM rituals are almost certainly a mix of real and useful maintenance practices combined with the various superstitious rituals people do even now, just turned up to 11.

How many people do you still see today banging on tech to try and make it run better, even for solid-state drives where there is no realistic benefit?

 kabaakaba wrote:
Why superstitions if we virtually have confirmation about machine spirit and machine god(not Omnisiah) in novels. In Hayley baneblade series there machine spirits of super heavy with their filings and character. And we hame a princeps soul saved from warp by machine god when she died. It's more like Emperor know more and don't oppose all this.

There needs to be distinction drawn between Machine Spirits (actual limited and possibly partially biological AI of high tech machines like Titans or Land Raiders) and the Mechanicus theological machine spirit that is believed to be present in every single machine down to things like a wagon or toaster where there is no AI at all. I have used capitalization to distinguish the two.

We have confirmation that Machine Spirits of high tech machines exist but we readers know them to be AI systems or something close to it, that skirt round the prohibitions against true artificial inorganic intelligence. The Mechanicus believe machine spirits exist for any machine, even a wooden wagon or your non-smart watch, but these are not proven to exist.

The dying princieps referred to that is in one of the 30K novels has a dying vision of warp daemons coming to claim her soul as she dies of wounds and old age while connected to her Titan, but in this vision she sees a mechanical entity that is actually her Titan's Machine Spirit/MIU and this entity seems to save her by absorbing her. It is not the Machine God exactly. It is also described that the Titan's "heart" its reactor seems to run a little more smoothly as she dies and is absorbed. We know that in the 40K universe the soul can be manipulated by technology as shown by Craftworlder spirit stones and the Dark Eldar Homunculus resurrection methods. I think it is possible that things like the Titan and maybe Knights too effectively act a little like spirit stones and can absorb the soul of those that die while bonded and connected to it, though they might not preserve the full consciousness the way a spirit stone does. Instead this absorption may manifest as described in the novel as a little smoother running of the systems or other little quirks that subsequent users of the machine discover.

Also, don’t read too much into the living brain.

The various sources suggest its more neural tissue is used to kinda-ish circumvent the ban. So, yes, there’s an organic component. But it’s not Brain In A Jar.

It’s true Titans have an animalistic thing. But that’s programming. Wolves for Warhounds, Bears for Battle Titans.

Even then? That’s something the Princeps has to actively control and bend to his will.

Why? Well, I’m not entirely sure. But if it is indeed a development from the Throne Mechanicum? It could be there to ensure the crew are suitably aggressive, and in the right ways. So a Warhound or other Scout Class Titan, have a pack hunter programming, resists a Princep wanting to do a frontal assault.

But only resists. It encourages a certain approach, but doesn’t prevent unorthodox applications of the War Engine.

If Titans are indeed children of the STC? It could be “Piloting Your Massively War Engine For Dummies” type rapid education thing.

The more I think and ponder stuff like MIU, Machine Spirit and that, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. There are so many possible reasons and explanations for why they are the way they are. And the truth could be a combination.

Where the brain tissue comes from probably varies from FW to FW and even machine to machine.

One FW might grow an amorphous ball of neurones and use a machine to correctly programme it with the desired animal thoughts.

Another might vat grow a disembodied wolf brain then just install some gubbins in it and plug it in.

Yet another might believe the holy blueprint requires them to grow an entire wolf, from which they then remove the brain to use, then turn the rest into corpse starch because the blueprint has no use for the rest of it.

Entirely possible.

Though given the last option requires a gene bank dating back a bloody long time? I’d say that’s the outlier.

Think I might attempt a dedicated thread to MIU, AI, Machine Spirit and Merely Fancy Programming, and possible origin of intent and that.