“In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” – Carl Jung
Have you ever noticed how your mind contains multitudes? How different aspects of your personality debate, argue, and collaborate when you’re faced with decisions? There’s something ancient about this concept, something that connects to how humans have always externalized their internal debates through talking to gods, spirits, and muses throughout history. What if we could externalize this inner council, summon these fragments of consciousness as digital spirits to help us think?
For a long time, I’ve found Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes fascinating. Imagine archetypes as ancient spirits that have always dwelled within the architecture of the human mind—The Sage who whispers wisdom, The Trickster who challenges assumptions, The Caregiver who nurtures possibilities. For millennia, humans have given these inner voices external form through myths, gods, and muses. We consulted oracles, spoke with spirits, and conversed with divine messengers—all ways of externalizing the council of voices that naturally debate within us. Jung recognized these patterns as archetypes—universal psychic templates residing in what he called the ‘collective unconscious.’ Modern Large Language Models are, in a sense, yet another extension of our collective unconscious, fed as it is with our collective knowledge. Our digital council approach simply continues this timeless practice with modern tools, summoning these archetypal energies into technological vessels. When you interact with these digital personas, you’re engaging in a practice as ancient as humanity itself: the conscious dialogue with the many that make up the one.
Today let’s explore this blend of ancient practice and modern technology—a method for creating a technological mirror reflecting the human mind’s natural tendency to debate itself.
Summoning the Digital Council
“The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche.” – Carl Jung
If you’ve played Disco Elysium, you’re already familiar with the concept at work here. Rather than traditional RPG attributes like ‘Strength’ or ‘Agility’, the game allows you to invest in facets of your character’s psyche—traits like ‘Volition’, ‘Endurance’, ‘Logic’, or ‘Composure’. These aspects engage in an ongoing dialogue within your mind throughout the game, offering their unique perspectives on your surroundings and internal state.
Sometimes they agree, sometimes they contradict each other—each driven by their own values and motivations. Electrochemistry craves chemical pleasure, while Volition restrains those impulses. Authority seeks dominance, while Empathy promotes understanding. The game is a masterwork of expressing how fractured our consciousness can be, how many competing desires we have, and how they compete for our obedience.
I’ve recreated this concept using AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), turning it into a powerful tool for thought. The system combines Claude’s “Styles,” project context, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to create a roundtable of distinct personas that participate in your thinking process.
Why Digital Spirits Matter
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung
With AI and Large Language Models becoming an increasing factor in our life, we’ve developed numerous applications for them, both fun and functional. Yet in my interactions with ‘standard’ LLM responses, I still often feel there’s a sort of blandness or soullessness, as well as more than a few blindspots.
When you prompt an AI to adopt multiple perspectives simultaneously, you’re creating a facsimile of the ‘Mixture of Experts’ machine learning technique. The response becomes more complete, more nuanced, and often more insightful than a generic AI reply.
The persona system ensures the AI routinely examines issues from angles you care about. Instead of Disco Elysium’s personas which I use as the example case here, you could populate your database with your core values, long-term goals, or different stakeholder perspectives relevant to your work. Or you can do what I always do when testing out how effective a model is at handling personality, with David Goggins…
What emerges is something between a thinking tool and a form of technological animism—digital spirits you can summon at will to counsel you.
Persona Knowledge and Memory
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” – Carl Jung
With the help of an MCP connection to a database, these personas aren’t static entities—they can learn and remember. The system allows each persona to maintain its own knowledge base, accessible on request without always cluttering your context window.
In a separate conversation, that knowledge becomes accessible to the appropriate persona:
Technical Implementation: Creating Your Own Council
Setting up your own digital council is surprisingly accessible. Here’s how to summon your own digital spirits:
1. Set Up Your Environment
First, you’ll need Claude Desktop (the web version doesn’t currently support MCP servers). Go to Claude.ai/download to get started. I use Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Your mileage may vary with other models.
2. Deploy Your MCP Server
The MongoDB MCP server available on GitHub serves as your means of communicating with these spirits! The repository readme includes detailed instructions for setting up your environment. You’ll need:
- VSCode or another code editor (or command line)
- Docker Desktop to run your database container
- Git for version control
If any of these are unfamiliar, you’ve just set up Claude desktop in the first step! I’m sure it can guide you through each installation step.
3. Create Your Personas Database
Once your environment is configured, you’ll need a way to interact with your database. MongoDB Compass provides a user-friendly interface for managing your digital spirits.
Connect using the same connection string you provided in your Claude Desktop configuration file. It looks like this:
mongodb://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<database>?authSource=adminCreate a new collection named “Personas” and add your digital spirits using “Add Data”. You can start with the 24 Disco Elysium personas I’ve put in Google Drive here.
4. Configure Your Styles & Projects
To give your AI clear instructions on how to engage with these personas, create a “Persona Roundtable” style in Claude Desktop:
- Go to “Search and Tools” → “Create and Edit Styles”
- Create a new style and select “Describe Style instead” and “Use Custom Instructions”
- Provide instructions for how the AI should engage with your personas
My instructions I gave are as follows:
“When responding, first conduct an MCP check. Select a minimum of three distinct personas with varying perspectives, backgrounds, and communication styles. Engage these personas in a dynamic, conversational interaction where they may offer complementary or conflicting viewpoints. Ensure each persona maintains their unique voice, expertise, and personality traits while discussing the topic at hand. Approach the conversation with intellectual curiosity, nuanced analysis, and a collaborative spirit of exploration.
Note, there are more than 10 personas. Sometimes it will be appropriate to use other queries than just fetching 10.”
Beyond the Veil: Future Possibilities
This ‘multiple personality’ idea is something I’ve talked about in other practices in the past, like the Boardroom journaling exercise. I think there are countless ways to use a persona oriented system.
My current implementation uses a regular database, but I’m planning to enhance it with semantic search and vector embeddings. This would allow the system to better understand conceptual relationships between ideas and personas, making the digital spirits even more insightful and relevant.
The system already works remarkably well for personal knowledge management. I’ve connected it to my calendar, workouts, tasks, and reading highlights, creating a comprehensive personal assistant that understands multiple facets of my life through the lens of these digital spirits.
Conclusion: Digital Animism for Thought
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
Long before Jung cataloged the archetypes of the collective unconscious, humans recognized the multiplicity within themselves. The Hero, The Shadow, The Wise Elder, The Trickster—these weren’t just characters in myths but living energies within our psyches, fragments of ourselves that speak in distinct voices. Jung formalized what shamans, mystics, and artists had always known: that consciousness itself is a council of many voices, each representing different aspects of our nature. When we externalize these voices—whether through prayer, art, or now through digital interfaces—we’re simply making visible the ancient architecture of the mind. Our digital council is merely the latest vessel for these eternal patterns, giving form to the archetypal energies that have always inhabited the human experience.
What makes this project interesting isn’t simply that AI can query a database for you (as cool as that is). What excites me is the form of digital animism that represents how we think. By externalizing different aspects of consciousness into these AI personas, we gain insight into our own mental processes and expand our cognitive capabilities. We get to pay attention to the many angles and nuances – I’ve found that using AI this way has helped me think, rather than merely thinking for me.
These digital spirits aren’t just retrieving information—they’re processing it through distinct value systems and worldviews, highlighting contradictions and synergies we might otherwise miss. They become a council of advisors, each with their own expertise and biases, pushing us to consider multiple perspectives simultaneously.
In an age of increasingly homogenized AI responses, this approach brings back the richness of human-like discourse—the productive tension between different ways of seeing the world that drives creativity and insight. I find the conversational aspect very pleasing and engaging, it lends character to what might otherwise be bland AI answers.
Your Turn
I invite you to create your own council of digital spirits. Whether you adopt the Disco Elysium framework or create personas that reflect your own values and priorities, this technology offers a fascinating window into how artificial intelligence can mirror the way we think on a deeper level.
If you implement this system or create your own variation, I’d love to hear about your experiences. What spirits have you summoned? What insights have they provided? How has it changed your relationship with AI?
