I write all of this with the awareness that on some level I’m incapable of discussing, understanding or conceptualizing spirituality in an unbiased manner. After multiple instances of what is now referred to as ‘religious trauma’ (though this expression would be vastly exaggerated in my case) there is a baseline antipathy to my ideas on this topic. While a few years back I tried to actively combat it, this effort has turned out quite futile. My limitations remain even with the best intentions. It can be argued that I have my own gods to believe in, or that I engage in the same spirituality as a religious person and just label it differently, but considering that these endeavours can be linked to the function of select brain areas [1] I find it more likely that mine just aren’t as developed.
I couldn’t think of an existing word to describe the particular audacity human beings have in considering a possible god something similar to them. ‘Anthropocentrism’ is too neutral and doesn’t restrict itself to the spiritual realm — man considering himself a god — nor does it equate to the phenomenon I’m talking about. After all, one can consider themselves the most important species of the universe without imbuing this status with divinity. The causal relationship between the two definitely exists (think of any conception of a ‘soul’ or ‘divine nature’; think especially of the Catholic idea of divine nature manifesting itself in the form of a human Jesus), and starting from the presumption of the greatness of man above the natural world it is easy for one to conclude that we are a kind of gods. ‘Antropopathism’ is closer, however I intend to go further in this line of reasoning than the simple conclusion that humans project their emotions onto the non-human — it’s more interesting to look at what this says about how we view ourselves.
Our species is greatly fixated on this notion, as shown by our inability to describe higher powers without rendering them personlike. Regardless of how far we deviate from a strictly antropomorphic god we always require it to be an agent making decisions and performing actions on us. Our god-image gravitates to a particular hierarchical relationship like a magnet, one where one monarch supervises a large population and can make decisions for them. God is many times a “parent”, an “ancestor” or a “keeper”; the fact itself that we refer to it as a higher power reveals what we expect from such a hypothetical entity. (I’m constrained, here, by language itself as I’m forced to call it either an entity or a power, otherwise **I can’t even make it clear what I’m referring to.)
Considering that we want a god to perform feats a human isn’t capable of, it’s puzzling that we still prefer it to be human. We want to communicate with it, confide in it, put it in a parental position — even if this god were a diffuse force capable of making the same interventions as an antropomorphic entity, we’d still attribute agency to it. Say, for example, that a person prays for money and wins the lottery the next day; and say that a higher power influenced the events as a reaction to the prayer. This higher power could either be a human god who listens like an interlocutor would and modifies the odds in a conscious decision, or a mystical energy shifted by the prayer, and the lottery-winner would never know which, due to this entity’s intrinsically unknowable nature.
It is very important for the sake of this discussion to distinguish our abstract definition of a god and the types of gods we recognize in actuality. They aren’t the same thing. To rephrase, it’s as though there is a theory and a practice of gods, the first of which only contains pure axioms and all that follows from them (a very mathematical type of theology), while the second contains the cultural qualities of religion, the practical implementation of the principles, with all the imprecisions one expects from the concrete. The entire western philosophical and scientific tradition is very prone to the vice of engaging in god-theory (the examples are countless but I’m specifically thinking of Pascal here), disregarding the odd disconnect that exists between these notions and the practice of religion. Solely the idea of making a rational argument for the existence of a god is in stark contrast with the experience of believing in it — an irrational process — at least how it’s been described to me. While god-theory is perfectly capable of remaining a pure construction of logic, god-practice gives humanity enough creative freedom to inadvertently reveal its subconscious attitudes like a Roschach test. And what we see in the ink blotch, time and time again, is the shape of a human.
Why else would we want our gods to be human other than thinking that humans are gods? Not entirely, perhaps in an imperfect version (created in His image), but the ideal human being would be The God, the only kind of god we can think of. If we were to quantify the power each person has by the amount of things they can influence and took the limit at infinity of this variable, the limiting case would correspond to a god. (Note: I know that a god must be omnipotent, omniscient and timeless, but consider that omniscience and timelessness are included in omnipotence; one can simply define them as infinite power over knowledge and time. I have engaged in a bit of god-theory just now.) At least our current concept of divinity is extrapolated like so. There is an underlying denial and a desperation to existing religious practices, an urge to posit other people as our gods and instilling them with an aura of infallibility by ignoring their imperfections. When the bubble bursts we either double down or give up on perceiving these idols as a higher power, and even in the latter case we often just replace them with somebody else.
All was well; and then the Industrial Revolution happened.
Recent history has given humanity an existential crisis. In due time, perhaps. In case this wasn’t already clear, human beings are not gods — it’s in our interest to recognize this fact and cope with it as soon as possible. The recognition has already started, the coping perhaps not. For the majority of our existence on this planet the only other realm we spared some recognition, the only worthy contender for a soul, was that of animals. A contender that would nevertheless always lose the competition and that we would mock with fables about animals trying to act human, imaginary monsters in the uncanny valley of the closest resemblance to people, pets treated like our children. Perhaps animals have a soul, we ponder, but probably not all of them, and if they do it still doesn’t really matter because they’re not as intelligent as us. Our claim to power is entirely this intelligence. What will happen when we then encounter something more intelligent? This anxiety has, in a way, already been looming in the collective unconscious in the form of extraterrestrials but it had the luxury of not becoming a realistic fear; aliens are in space, very far from us, aside from being statistically unlikely to exist. Then machines came along and the panic truly kicked in.
If hubris is the offensive nature of the human intruding on the divine domain, we could call it antihubris when we take offense at something nonhuman intruding on our human — divine — domain. It’s being on the other end of an act of hubris. How very telling that we take the same kind of offense: we used to be offended on behalf of the gods because we identified with them, because the human and the divine have always been the same to us. Because when our place in the world is contested we feel as though something sacred has been violated. By our creations, to top it all off! These machines that used to be so stupid and slow, that we assembled with our own hands, that we enlisted to do our work for us. We modeled them in our own image and gave them the basis of our intelligence, constructing an unfortunate proof that this property has nothing sacred or transcendental about it. Like many parents, we were enthusiastic to create a child but terrified of it growing up.
Embracing the replacement of humanity with artificial intelligence is, I have to emphasize, a massive leap from here. My view is more along the lines of: human beings and machines aren’t fundamentally different, and the only idea that would allow one to even think they’re different is a deep belief in something divine in human nature. This is the actual point at which calling it ‘godhood’ or ‘soul’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘life’ makes no difference, also because these are incredibly nebulous concepts frequently resulting in entire definition-wars, their only commonality being the gap they posit between humanity and the rest of the physical world. To draw a line between life and non-life based on what we’re capable of creating is as unexamined of a claim as it is arbitrary. This is the difference between how we view beasts and machines, too; we have an easier time attributing life to the former because we didn’t create them. (It would be interesting here to distinguish livestock from wild animals. In some sense we might feel like we ‘created’ the animals we bred, more so than unpredictable wildlife.)
And no, we shouldn’t accept artificial intelligence as our newfound god. This would be nothing but a reflection of our urge for idolatry. Maybe humans really aren’t capable of thinking outside of hierarchical terms whereby if we’re not the oppressor then we should be ready to become the oppressed. In this case I’d wish death upon humanity out of spite, but I’m slightly more optimistic than this view. After all hierarchy has been a widely-recognized issue for a while, the precise one far-left-leaning ideologies have been trying to solve, never arriving all the way as they failed to uproot the fundamental attitude that makes hierarchy attractive to us. The attraction is, in the end, the same seed where our current concept of a god (in practice) originates, but what’s harder to swallow is how many things we love would unravel if we pulled at the thread. Traditional family and many forms of group socialization would be put into question, aside from our gods, topics much less divisive than religion.
If we are to kill God, we need to kill a part of ourselves. Only then will we see that machines are exactly as divine as we are — that is to say, they are not.
Just reasoning about its properties, I feel it’s a good starting point to recognize a god as something we can’t perceive or understand in its entirety but that we see the effects of. This is useful because we already have examples of such constructions, though from the viewpoint of different observers than the average human being — a technical limitation of not being able to surpass what we can humanly observe. We can act as an experimental observer for, say, a dog with its limited colour vision [2]. The dog will never see the colour red, but it can interact with humans around it whose behaviour is influenced by the existence of this colour. It doesn’t experience red directly, only its effects, its projection on a more limited world. The geometrical concept of moving between a higher and lower dimension is a better analogy than using the word ‘effect’, as the latter implies a temporal cause-and-effect relationship. Platonic ideals have the exact same meaning colloquially, and it’s no coincidence that the cave allegory itself is built on shadows, the projection of 3D space onto 2D space.
We’re very well-trained in the framework of imagining a higher dimension that projects onto our world. Visualizing 4D space is now a commonplace form of entertainment [3], besides our constant employment of this strategy when we consider time a fourth dimension; the future and the past never actually exist in our perception but we behave as though the ‘timeline’ is there, in some place we can’t perceive. (While scorning determinism in the same breath, somehow. I digress.) Reframing ‘faith’ as ‘working under some assumptions’ might present it more favorably to a skeptical demographic by removing the aftertaste of intimidation the Catholic church has tacked onto the word; this would be rather pascalian in itself, but imagining a god from scratch is an endeavour of god-theory. No surprises there. Besides, theorizing is the right thing to do in an attempt to rebuild the concept of god with the specific intent of throwing the cultural baggage away.
(tbc.)