Is the machine spirit real?

[Eldrin]

In the lore of 40k do all the machines actually have spirits? Or are the tech priests just lunatics?

[His Divine Shadow]

Yes

[Vaatihastur]

Some are AI som are just chatgtp. and everything in between. Some machines are just missing oil for pneumatics.

[~ Fabulous ~]

it is purposely made vague by GW, but then again...even the Greater Good become something thanks to the few humans auxiliaries in Tau empire, so imagine what happen when billions of fanatical Magos think it is real...lol

[Terminal Velocity]

Originally posted by Khorvale:

"Machine Spirit" = Janky code made by someone else 10000 years ago

I like to think Milton coded it after this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRjwbrP9wKw

It should be canon.

[Katabolic]

That's a difficult question to answer, it *is* known that a lot of advanced tech has AI fragments still in it from the dark age of technology and the AI revolt and some computer systems mounted in tech can be semi-conscious and tempermental but at the same time they'll be placating the machine spirit of a frickin tractor which probably isn't nearly complex enough for that, so it's part dogma, and part legitimate problem going back millenia, the underground of mars is a mess of nightmarish tech, runaway AI, and anything of note they find down there *WILL* have the instruction manual maliciously rewritten to cause as much damage as possible, which is part of why the mechanicus works the way it does.

[talkslow4me]

Much like all the lore in 40k its meant to be unknown.
I think GW's policy with books/lore is to try to avoid objective truths. Stories and lore are usually told through a biased perspective.
If a novel was to ever reveal the truth of the machine spirit being fake it would pretty much crush the Mechanicus faction.
Plus its kind of fun to entertain the idea of a machine spirit. Could be basic luck and janky code. Could be advance AI that reached the level of godhood. Could be the Warp interacting with the material world. All are equally possible.

[Genocidocles]

Yes

[BeeTee Beats]

From my understanding yes and no. Like some the more complex pieces of tech like a Titan or something, they have sentientish AI still ploppin about in em which would fall under being a machine spirit. But the mechanicus kinda take it to an extreme with everything like gun and cogitators and whatnot prob don't have much going on in there but they are still going treat it like it does.

[Illudium]

Probably the latter, but it's more a case of "nobody in the setting is actually entirely sure how or why it works, so they've come up with their own explanations." Those explanations don't actually make sense, but the results tend to sort of work anyway. It's like a math problem where you get the right answer with a completely wrong method.

Think of it like medical knowledge prior to the advent of germ theory: They knew that eating shellfish or uncooked pork makes you sick and die, and they knew that if they did this thing in this way they could increase a sick person's odds of success, but they didn't really get the science behind it. Far as they could tell, it was just God getting mad at the person for eating unapproved foods, or those herbs and oils they anointed the person with must have special effects when you prayed over them.

They couldn't have known the prayers and sigils and whatever weren't an essential part, and they weren't about to just "stop doing them" to see what happened. Look at leeches: They worked, but now we know the reasons they work. On the other hand, sometimes you get stuff like trepanning, which was just a bad idea, but they didn't know, and every once in a while they got lucky, so they kept doing it. 40k basically takes that principle and applies it to tech.

[Drake]

The machine spirit isn't just the AI fragments, it's also a personification of a machine behavior. Like oiling your bolter to make its machine spirit happy, can just be translated as cleaning your weapon so that it doesn't jam. And a weapon blessing is just a mod.

It's pretty much a religious approach of science.

[Gnouman]

Burn this Heretic !

[urartu]

This thread questioning the wisdom of Omnissiah is borderline heresy. Overseers of this machine babble should command their machine spirits to punish the assailant immediately.

[lazarusblack]

Originally posted by Illudium:

They couldn't have known the prayers and sigils and whatever weren't an essential part, and they weren't about to just "stop doing them" to see what happened. Look at leeches: They worked, but now we know the reasons they work. On the other hand, sometimes you get stuff like trepanning, which was just a bad idea, but they didn't know, and every once in a while they got lucky, so they kept doing it. 40k basically takes that principle and applies it to tech.

Trepanning is a better example than you might think!

Encephalitis is an uncommon illness, often caused by viruses, bacteria or fungus. The brain would swell and in medieval times it would often be fatal if your immune system didn't fight the infection in time. Trepanning was the only method of reliably relieving cranial pressure from brain swelling. Sometimes, it gave the persons immune system time to fight off the infection.

Why then did they use it on "crazy" people? Because people with Encephalitis often act out of character or erratically. A trait that was shared with someone with mental health issues. So since trepanning worked on some people (who likely had Encephalitis) it didn't work on people with mental health issues. But the "barbers" (the dude that cut your hair, was also your doctor, yikes) noticed that it was effective, some of the time.

The odds of surviving trepanning were quite small but it did work (Encephalitis) and people didn't really understand why, so they made up the belief that the hole allowed Demons to escape the head and from this misunderstanding all kinds of barbarity ensued.

Great example. That feels exactly how the Machine spirit should be interpreted imo.

[lfseeney]

Do not forget much of the code is running on parts of human brains.
So that adds another factor to it.

[BeeTee Beats]

Here's also a vid on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4HyS7Tz7a4