Speaker 1: Oh hoos me with us.
Speaker 2: The Hell.
Speaker 3: Of the the Who Today, I want to talk about
a topic that you've heard covered, but we don't often
hear people with academic expertise covering this topic.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think to a.
Speaker 3: Degree I have that, But what about the issue of
transhumanism as an academic discipline as a study.
Speaker 1: Today I have one of.
Speaker 3: My good buddies as the guest with me. His name
is David Patrick Harry. You can find him on Twitter
under that as well as on YouTube under Church of
the Eternal Logos. And David, I want to talk to
you about transhumanism because this is a subject that you
know very well. I think you're studying this at the
academic level. Before we get into it, I'm going to
let you give your take on it. What I understand
is kind of an agenda that we have been under
for many decades.
Speaker 1: We can go back to people like HG.
Speaker 3: Wells, who wrote a book called The New World Order,
the Open Conspiracy, Bertrand Russell, other people in those circles.
Speaker 1: They said they wanted to go back to Plato.
Speaker 3: Utilize Plato's philosophy of techney and make it into a technocracy,
a world government ruled not by nation states, not by
firewalls of the family and borders, but rather a global
federation of world citizens where nobody has identity other than
what the system gives you, ultimately by some sort of matrix,
some sort of thing to be plugged into.
Speaker 1: And as we progress up into the future.
Speaker 3: Beyond the designs of people one hundred plus years ago,
we see books like Between Two Ages by Brazinski outlining
this world government we see that's run by technocracy. The
book is called the Technotronic Era. We see people like
Zhaka to the Kissinger of France writing books about transhumanists
as the tip of the sphere of the revolution. We
find people like Klaus writing books like the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
where he talks about how we're going to be LinkedIn
to Skynet.
Speaker 1: We see his understudy You.
Speaker 3: Noah, you of all Harari basically saying the same type
of stuff. What is transhumanism? Does it have a predecessor
in the ancient gnostic cults and mystery religions?
Speaker 1: And is it kind of ultimately something gnostic?
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jay, I really appreciate the opportunity,
and this is a topic that I've been really concerned
with and is the primary focus of my academic research.
And as you highlighted, you know, we have a lot
of conversation, and you do incredible work talking about many
of the globalist elite books and the technocracy and how
transhumanism fits into that.
Speaker 4: But what I think most people aren't aware of is that.
Speaker 2: The sort of philosophical presupposition that give an undergird transhumanist
philosophy in the contemporary period.
Speaker 4: Actually have pretty old roots.
Speaker 2: And I would argue that you can look back to
early philosophers like John Scotis Origina. He was an Irish
Neoplatonic Christian deemed heretic by the Church, but he was
considered one of the leading philosophers of the Carolyn Gian era,
and in the eight hundreds he talked about this new
concept of the useful arts as redeeming the abilities.
Speaker 4: That were lost to Adam due to the fall.
Speaker 2: And so what's interesting, and a handful of scholars have
made this argument, and I actually agree with it, that
transhumanism and transhumanist philosophy actually emerges out of heretical belief
systems within Christianity, specifically Western Christianity, and that from the
Scholastic period forward. This idea that technology and technological or
mechanical means are going to divinize man and regain total
universal knowledge over nature, which they believed Adam had before
the fall, is therefore us moving back to the New Jerusalem.
And this is generally characterized as a millenarian perspective as
opposed to a more traditional Christian perspective would be more
of an apocalyptic and that would ebb and flow.
Speaker 4: There'd be good and bad periods.
Speaker 2: Throughout history, but ultimately the eschonological vision of traditional Christianity
is that things are going to get worse in one
sense or another. Where many of these heretical views that
we can see moved through the Scholastic period through people
like Yakima Fiore, and I'll speak a little bit more
about that in just a few about why he is
so influential, Roger Bacon moving into people like Paracelsus, the alchemist,
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, moving into somebody like Francis Bacon, who
also wrote a book called The New Atlantis. And after
the Reformation period, there is this energy that was really
characterizing Protestant Northern euro Pan ideas that was sort of
blending hermetic ideas, esoteric Western esoteric ideals with Protestant Christianity
and undergirded by this belief and technological progress which ultimately
is going to lead towards the transcendence of man and
go to the New Jerusalem. And so much of the
sixteenth century in the seventeenth century was characterized by this
enlightenment utopian thinking that we were going to redeem ourselves
through technology. And I would argue, and even Nick Bolstrom,
we'll talk a little bit about. He's one of the
leading current philosophers of transhumanism. He has an article on
the history of transhumanism and he even highlights that many
of the aspirations of transhumanism actually comes out of Western
esoteric alchemy. But I think we could make a strong
argument that it even emerges before that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like the Tian there was going to bring
up her meticism. You know, there's a famous book by
Dame Francis Yates on the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and she highlights
the beginning of that book the philosophy of Say.
Speaker 1: John D right the first Double O seven.
Speaker 3: John D was very interested in the notion of man
achieving apotheosis through ritual magic, and a lot of the
esoteric stuff that you're talking about that we think about
today comes out of this tradition of hermeticism, and even
scientism itself actually has a lot of its origin in
the hermetic tradition of the fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred
and seventeen hundreds. Many of the famous scientists were involved
in these esoteric lodges where they can conduct alchemy. Newton
was a famous alchemist. Most people don't know this, and
it ties in as well with the rise of Marxism
and socialism because a lot of the groups that you're
talking about jokeam of Fior and his radical Franciscan philosophy.
It was a very imminentizing of the esketon, and that's
just a fancy word for saying, we can bring the
Kingdom of God into time and space through human works,
create a kind of human kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: And later groups picked up this idea.
Speaker 3: Thomas Munzer and the Munster Rebellion was an earlier the
next phase of a kind of socialism. And as we
get up into the period of Marx, Marx himself has
a very technocratic bent in his writings he thinks that
technology could be the key to the creation of what
would quote liberate man and bring about the utopian state.
Speaker 1: We see this in other philosophers after Marx who also
speak this.
Speaker 3: Way, and then we get into the technocrats and they
share this idea. But like you said, it goes back
to the ancient world of the idea of creating an
ideal world, an ideal government. But it also wants to
transform man. And I think when we mentioned gnosticism, why
do you think they want to transform man? Is it
something like out of the Garden of Eden, like the
promise of that, you know, you can be like God,
you can be your own God, And it almost sounds
like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I would argue, again coming at it as an orthodox Christian,
that it really is this sort of misinterpretation of scripture
being Genesis three. But really, many of the thinkers throughout
history that I would highlight regarding this trajectory of transhumanist
undergirded presuppositions all believe in this linear progress that technology
and rational apprehension of nature is what's going to transcend man.
And the traditional Christian understanding is the way that we
unite with God is through a moral behavior, a moral
living of our lives that reflects the teachings of Jesus Christ,
and it's through that embodiment of the teachings of Christ
and the uncreated energies as an orthodox Christian that we
become synergized by God. But this worldview is specifically about
you could argue it has gnostic elements because of this
emphasis on the rational apprehension of knowledge, which when we
move into the twenty first century with somebody like you.
Speaker 4: Val Norah Harari and his philosophy of dataism.
Speaker 2: Which I would argue is a central core to transhumanist philosophy.
He actually argues in favor of asophy data ism, where
the only thing that truly exists in the world is information,
and therefore the only thing that's important is the ability
to process and cipher information. And he makes the claim
towards the end of that book Homodeus, that we are
just algorithms, and everything that's living is an algorithm, and
therefore there is no real ontological distinction between a digital
or computerly generated algorithm and us as biological entities, and
the only thing that's important then is how much can
we process?
Speaker 4: And therefore, if you are upgraded with.
Speaker 2: Hardware in your brain, or essentially totally transcend human nature
through transhumanism, that you are going to be at an
ontologically a higher state than you.
Speaker 4: Could ever be as a human entity.
Speaker 2: And that really is gnostic in the sense that one
it's a transcendent of nature for them, it's part of
their post evolutionary philosophy. But that focus on rational apprehension,
I think is something that can't be underappreciated, that it
really stems out of spiritual idea is And when we
look at the twentieth century, somebody like Arthur C. Clark
and his famous quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic. You know, my research is really focused
in the realm of new religious movements in Western esoteric traditions,
and I would argue that transhumanism is a new religious movement.
It sort of challenges the categories of what religion is,
but it's built on many presuppositions.
Speaker 4: Despite transhumanists now would.
Speaker 2: Say, oh, we're atheists, we're rationalists, we don't, you know,
have any sort of spiritual worldview, But in fact I
would say that they do. And these are ancient roots
and Yakima Fioria, as you mentioned, was an abbot who
believed that there was these sort of three different ages
that reflected the Trinity. There was the Age of the Father,
which was the Old Testament, the Age of the Son,
which was the incarnation of Christ.
Speaker 4: And then he believed, as most.
Speaker 2: People do, that in his life, then they entered into
the Age of the Holy Spirit. So he just happened
to be at the precipice, and that this Age of
the Holy Spirit then was all about the regeneration of
man back to the Adenic state, and that technology and
knowledge are the ways in which that occurs. And when
we look at somebody like Roger Bacon, who was also
an English Franciscan friar, we see the exact same thing.
And there's many legends regarding Roger Bacon. He was obviously
considered an alchemist, but there's a big legend about his
mechanical or necromantic brazen head that he was able to
conjure and that he could then ask the questions to
this mechanical or a necromantic head and it would give
him all sites of responses. It's a sort of an
all knowing entity, and it's like, well, that's in the
thirteen hundreds, and we can already see a sort of
precursor in what many people believe that AGI is going
to be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the idea of a mimicked logic machine that mimics
the human brain. This is origins of modern computing. If
you if you look at Leibnitz. Leibnitz in some of
his writings, you know, the co founder of Calculus at
the same time as Newton. He has essays where he
talks about the possibility of building on the basis of
his kind of neoplatonic philosophy, a machine that mimics the
logic of the human mind, and it.
Speaker 1: Kind of sets the stage for the rise of the computer.
Speaker 3: I think the medieval Gollum mythology also plays into that.
There is an overlap two with a medieval cabbala and
her meticism and scientism that emerges out of that as well.
So there's a lot of strains that go together absolutely.
And one thing you talk about a lot in your videos,
and you have a channel, Christy.
Speaker 1: Eternal Logos over on YouTube.
Speaker 3: You talk a lot about boundaries and that men and
the masculine spirit is very interested in erecting and protecting boundaries.
That's part of what it is to be a man,
and I appreciate that because this is overlooked today. I
just did a stream, kind of piggybacking your masculinity stream.
And this relates to the transhumanist stuff, because transhumanism is
really about going beyond all boundaries, and it ties into
the trans agenda in terms of biology, because the idea
that when you're mentioning these esotericists, when we look at
something like the image of Baphomet, we notice that it
has both genders, and in some of the occult circles
and traditions, there's this idea that to have both of
the genders, or to be non binary, to go beyond
that is to return to this original primal monadic state,
which is not in any kind of division or differentiation. So,
for example, to go from the original source primal monad
state to male and female is somehow a fall into
a lesser state of being. And they have an assumption,
and you can actually read some of the esotericists and
the occultists and the Crollians, they'll speak this well, they'll say,
we need to get back to some kind of non
gendered supra state beyond man and woman or being both.
That statue that they unveiled in one of the Nordic
countries where it was a man with genitalia having breast
feeding a baby. That is a form of the Baphomet
imagery here. How does that relate to the transhumanist movement though,
And this idea of transcending boundaries.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you highlight that transcendence of boundaries or the
dissolution of boundaries. Terrence McKenna was famous for arguing that
that's exactly what psychedelics do. And I would argue that
much of when we look at the agenda of the elites,
the dissolution of national boundaries, the dissolution of boundaries between
man and machine, the dissolution of boundaries between man and animal,
the dissolution of boundaries between male and female, that these
are actually attacks on the psyche. These are attacks on
the reality of God's creation. These are attacks on our
ability to logically and rationally apprehend and process reality. And
if you can't see what's in front of you and
understand it, well, then you're going to be very malleable
by powers that be to reinterpret the phenomenon that is
occurring in front of your face, and I think that's
something that we're seeing right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, human nature is believed to be plastic. There's no
such thing as nature's there's the plasticity of man.
Speaker 1: And this goes back to ah C. Wells's Island of
Doctor Moreau.
Speaker 3: He was actually a way ahead of the curve in
this idea because his idea was that you can sort
of turn man into whatever you want him to be,
because he's sort of like putty, right, and so you
can mold him into the future entity that you want
to be. But this is interesting because one of the
flaws that I see here. We have a new live event.
We've been having a blast doing these live events all over.
Speaker 1: Will be in.
Speaker 3: Las Vegas June twenty second with our good buddy Jamie
Kennedy from Scream, the Jamie Kennedy Experiment, an awesome comedian.
We have a great time doing these six hour events.
They're not it's not just stand up, it's not just
boring lectures. More like a party. I know my buddy
David here has been to one of our events. It's
a lot of fun. It's June twenty second in Las Vegas.
Heading over to my Twitter page, Jay dire Twitter. You'll
see at the top there is the post and you
can go over to the event bright link and get
your tickets right now June twenty second in Las Vegas.
We'll also have with us our buddy Isaac Bishop. You've
seen him on the podcast with Sam Tripoli Temple Hat
many many times.
Speaker 1: So my wife Jamie will also be there with us.
Six hour event.
Speaker 3: Be sure and get your tickets now, there's a limited seating.
So we're talking about this dissolution of boundaries. We're talking
about weird contradictions in the worldview of transhumanism. And before
the Breakthore I was trying to get into the point
of this element of On the one hand, we want
no boundaries.
Speaker 1: However, all of reality in.
Speaker 3: This quantification perspective is seen to be somehow information. Well,
to have information requires sitting some kind of boundaries. We
have this piece of information, which is the sink from
this piece of information. So having in no information requires boundaries.
Yet at the same time we're told that there are
no boundaries and man must sort of step beyond all
boundaries and somehow achieve his own divinity.
Speaker 1: And it's always.
Speaker 3: Based on weird fallacies, weird illogical contradictions. Claus and Harari,
for example, say that there's no such thing as consciousness,
there's no such thing as the mind. However, we're going
to upload the mind to the cloud. How are you
gonna upload something that doesn't exist? It makes no sense.
Man is going to be god, of course, but man
is meaningless muck from the pond skam of the ancient,
primordial world of the soup. So it's always a contradictory
story and narrative. Yet they're selling us on this myth
that technology will somehow make us into.
Speaker 1: Gods or Marvel Universe. Soy men, superheroes.
Speaker 3: Right, what's the root of this in terms of what
they really want? So we've talked about the ancient history,
but what's the real goal of the transhumanists in your view?
Speaker 2: Well, it depends on who you ask in regards to
some of these contemporary philosophers. You know, if you look
at one who is a co founder of Humanity Plus,
which is sort of the rebranding of the Transhumanist Association,
the World Transhumanist Association that was rebranded in the early
two thousands as Humanity Plus by philosopher Nick Bulstrom and
David perce and David Purse describes himself as a negative utilitarian,
and that philosophical worldview is interested in the elimination, or
at least the limiting to the most significant extent, suffering.
And so he is a vegan who promotes a hedonistic
transhumanism which is about the engineering. This is a direct
quote of paradise engineering. So he believes that this hedonistic transhumanism,
what they're going to do through the technologies is engineer paradise.
And in so doing, he goes so far is that
he wants to redesign the total globe mobal ecosystem.
Speaker 4: I kid you not.
Speaker 2: And in his own writings, he would want to re
design predatory species so that they would no longer eat
other animals and therefore eliminate suffering. And the one of
the ways in which he postulates we might be able
to do that is through a brain implant.
Speaker 4: And so what would.
Speaker 2: Happen is when you experience suffering, this would be sort
of transmutated into a sense of pleasure, but.
Speaker 4: It would be it would be the way.
Speaker 2: He describes it is, it would inform you that you
would be suffering. It'd be a different type of stimulation
but therefore when you experience suffering, you wouldn't actually feel it.
Speaker 4: Well. From a Christian worldview, that is demonic.
Speaker 2: And we've talked about sort of providing everybody with their
hedonistic desires and living in you know, podlike entities with
their ubi, all their you know, kibble, and their their
bugs ready there to eat for them. And he's very
much in favor of a utopian worldview like this where
you talk with other major transhumanist thinkers.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Max Moore is really kind of considered one of the
premier philosophers and founders of contemporary transhumanism, and he owns
the Alcore Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is
focused on cryogenics, and so they are currently freezing human
bodies right before death. So this is a sort of
assisted mediated death where they will you'll go there before
you die. And he's actually recently on the THEO Vaughn
podcast talking about what they do at Alcore and you
have to obviously sign waivers, it's very expensive, and then
they'll place your body in a form of liquid nitrogen
or you can just put your brain in there, so
you have kind of two options and it's been speculati.
I don't know for sure, so somebody will have to
fact check me. But Bill Gates and some of the
elites have been very interested in cryogenics, and his wife
Natasha Vitamore actually participated in an experiment at the University
of Seville in Spain where they were able to prove
that there was no memory loss in multicellular organisms when
they were cryonically frozen. So what they did is they
froze neurons and tissues from a multicellular organism and then
were able to unfreeze it.
Speaker 4: Although it's a little bit.
Speaker 2: More technical because obviously if it was just frozen in
the way that we think something in the freezer, it
would the water would be a major problem for the
tissues and all this different stuff. So there's a different
process for it, and they're very emphatic to explain this
when everybody brings it up. But what they did prove
is that the memory of something before could be maintained
after it was sort of resuscitated. And so the whole
point of Alcore Life Extension Foundation is for what they
deem and what they even describe explicitly as a form
of resurrection, and that people who pay for these services
that eventually, at some point in the future, whether we're
able to, in their opinion, upload our brains or our
minds to a computer, or be able to totally technologically
augment the human entity, that they'll be able to revive
somebody right on the brink of death before they're frozen,
and they would be able to sort of transfer them
to a new body. And this is something that they
believe they're making headway in, and this is something that
a lot of money is being pushed for. And when
you look at their founders, it's many of the same
global movers and shakers that you would suspect funding a
lot of this research.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just weird to me.
Speaker 3: The way the thought process of a lot of these
people is that they give the appearance of being very
logical and very rational and sort of almost worshiping mathematics,
like some sort of weird Pythagorean cult or something. And
yet at the same time, if I were to say,
you know, I brought the number seven with me, would
you like to talk to him? Would you like to
talk to the number seven? People would think you're insane,
They think you have a mental problem. You can't talk
to the number seven. And yet when we think about
what a computer is or what AI is, it's really
nothing more than a.
Speaker 1: Bunch of nerd code.
Speaker 3: There's there's no consciousness there, and yet they'll treat well.
Speaker 1: If we just put.
Speaker 3: More nerd code in there, eventually it'll like become it's
like a magical thinking if you like, more algorithms somehow
equate to consciousness.
Speaker 1: And I was I.
Speaker 3: Recently did a lecture on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass,
which is a sequel to Alice in Wonderland, and we
went really deep into the philosophy of that book. He
was a mathematician, and in certain ways I think some
of his thought uh sort of sort of presages where
we are now, because he was a pretty strict determinist
and he put his mathematical determinism.
Speaker 1: Into the Alice stories.
Speaker 3: And when you get into the the later chapters of
the copy that I have, there's a there's a reprinting
of what the tortoise said to Achilles, and this is
a famous logic problem in the history of logic. But
it all it overlaps with mathematics as well, because it
sort of makes the point that following upon.
Speaker 1: Zeno's paradox that.
Speaker 3: You kind of can't encapsulate some things in sets or
in math or in logic, and it overlaps with Girdel's
in completeness theorems where the sets appeal outside of themselves.
And the reason I bring all that up there's a
famous paper that was written some decades back.
Speaker 1: I think it's at Oxford. It's called Mind.
Speaker 3: Machines and Girdell, and it's making the point that some
of these mathematical principles and philosophical logical principles that we're
talking about that you see in some of Lewis Carroll's writings,
it kind of demonstrates the impossibility of numbers or sets
ever becoming self aware or self conscious.
Speaker 1: It's not possible. It makes no sense yet, So much
of what.
Speaker 3: We're talking about with AI and transhumanism is premise on
the idea that it can just become conscious. So how
do you see an overlap maybe with evolutionary philosophy and transhumanism,
the idea that we're evolving, maybe even humans and robots
or robots are not on become conscious and we're going
to meld with them.
Speaker 1: Like how in two thousand and one or.
Speaker 2: Something, right, I think most people in regards to that
question are gonna be familiar with like Wernervinge and Ray
Kurzwell's theory of the singularity, which is built on this
idea that there's going to be this ex dimensional growth
of technology based on Moore's law, and that we're going
to reach this sort of apex and it really is
a sort of eschaeological vision of transhumanism. And this is
one of the reasons why I think it really gels
well with many of these medieval Renaissance Enlightenment ideas of utopia,
because transhumanism does fit into that quite well. And when
we you know, and I think it needs to be
said that transhumanism and that term and the way we
understand it was actually first said by Julian Huxley, and
he wrote a book in nineteen fifty seven called New
Bottles for New Wine, describing what he articulate as the
religion without revelation. And that's what transhumanism essentially is, is
that we don't longer need to deal with revelation because
revelation is occurring through our rational apprehension of the world.
But you mentioned earlier Again, this sort of dissolution of
boundaries in this emphasis on unity is very much a
neoplatonic presupposition and it's characterized throughout transhumanism because they are.
Speaker 4: Focused on this unifying principle.
Speaker 2: So Ray Kurzwel, for example, in his books I Believe
It's the Age of Spiritual Machines literally believes and he
promotes this idea that we will all be interconnected and
there will be essentially a global hive mind of humanity.
And again that's another dissolution of boundaries. And this is
why transhumanism so much in favor of androgeny, and they
use the rhetoric.
Speaker 4: Well, they're very very.
Speaker 2: Supportive of the LGBTQ enterprise because of what they deem
as bodily autonomy, and so if you can transition and
you can change genders, this one shows a sort of
nominal reality that these universal characteristics don't really exist and
we can augment ourselves. But it also highlights this push
towards it doing a way with traditional masculinity, as we said,
is very much principally oriented around boundaries and the maintaining
of boundaries, whether it be men that went to war
to defend national boundaries or religious principles, or the tribe
itself or their wives and children. These were all boundaries
to some extent in which men defend. And that's also
done through ideology, that's done through religion and culture, and
what we're seeing right now through multiculturalism and globalism. All
these things are sort of dissolutions of boundaries to some
degree or another. And post evolutionary theory is essential to transhumanism.
So I have a handful of philosophical presuppositions that really
characterize transhumanism. The first one I would say is post secularism.
Actually the Frankfurt School Urgen Habermas. I'm not a big
fan of the Frankfurt School, but Urgen Habermas had really
a great criticism of what he saw as genetic engineering
and the development of crisper technologies and stuff like this,
and he highlighted how this was part of the decadence
of liberal democracies in the West. But he described transhumanism
in this enterprise as a post secular phenomenon. So what
post secularism means is that secularism, as most people probably understand,
is this distinction between the religious ultimate meaning and then
the sort of secular enterprise and the sort of public
sphere and stuff. Well, because of whether it be postmodernism, posthumanism,
or post secularism, all these things are a collapsing of
boundaries again, and so post secularism is the collapsing of
the boundary between the religious and the secular. And Habermass
highlighted that what transhumanism is is because of the postmodern turn,
it really is a form of post secular meaning making,
which ultimately is a religious and he argued that it
really is a secular faith, and multiple other academics have
made this argument regarding transhumanism as a post secular faith. Now,
posthumanism is also essential, and there's kind of a couple
competing schools within posthumanism. There's more of the ecological bent
that's very radical and doing away with an anthropicentric view
of the twenty first century. And so the idea is
to reorient our perception away from what benefits mankind generally speaking,
towards like the earth or nature or the cosmos or
something like this. And so they are wanting to end
the sort of enlightenment project of man being the sort
of measure of all things. And transhumanism, though posthuman because
they want to sort of transcend the limits of biology.
They do compete with these people because many of these transhumanisms,
like Max Moore and Natasha Vitamore, Nick Bolshrm, they're very
outspoken of how much they stain postmodernism, because they view
themselves as these sort of technological scientists, philosophers that are
highly rational, that are actually doing real things in the
world with their research, compared to these postmoderns. So transhumanism
believes that it is the sort of epitome of the
Enlightenment project. They are the endpoint of the Enlightenment, and
so they're very clear Max Moore and Nick Bostrom that
they are sort of the fulfillment of man is the
measure of all things, and that transhumanism then is the
ability to transcend biological constraints, and that leads into then
if you transcend biological constraints, that leads into one of
the other pillars, which is post evolution. That they believe
that the of course they're very Darwinian Wallace theory evolutionarily
oriented in their mindset, but they believe that by transcending biology,
they're going to transcend the selective pressures of evolution itself,
which is for them a sort of spiritual transcendence. It's
a release from the suffering and the constraints of the world.
And that all then, how is that accomplished? That comes
to this fourth pillar of dataism. It's about the processing
and ciphering and understanding of information, which really is I
would argue a sort of a gnostic core to transhumanism,
although they would certainly not explain it that way, but
I would argue that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking to.
Speaker 3: A lot of the essays that I wrote some years back,
and I remember writing about the overlaps between even though
there was some disagreement between Gnostics and Plotinus, the basic
idea here is that we're escaping this world, escaping.
Speaker 1: This reality, to go back to the source, the One,
the monad, the unit, or whatever.
Speaker 3: So what a lot of the transhumanist ideas have done
in regard to things like the metaverse and where they
want to take us with this idea of the matrix
is to really put that into the here and.
Speaker 1: The now in a technological sense.
Speaker 3: So even though there's they may not believe in an
afterlife or a higher transcendent reality, the idea is we
can put man into his own sort of virtual god
world of his own. It makes me think of that
movie The Cell with the Jennifer Lopez where she goes
into this the mind of the serial killer and in
that world he's sort of his own god and he
wants to be worshiped in that virtual world. I think
that's the ultimate offer here for the breaking down of
all boundaries is well, what if you could be the
god of your own virtual mental world, wouldn't you want
to live.
Speaker 1: In that world and not in this world?
Speaker 3: So they're really sort of offering this, you know, divided
fake simulacrum as a pseudo heaven. You could say almost
would you agree with that? And that's really where they're pushed.
Why they're pushing a lot of the brain ships in
the virtual.
Speaker 1: Reality where they want to take things.
Speaker 2: And you brought up Baphomet too, which again the most
tracings of the historicity of sort of veneration of Bafomet
kind of goes back to the Knight's Templars, which when
we look at Yakima Fiore know his mentor was Bernard
of Clairvaux, who is by many considered the sort of
spiritual father of the Templars and the Templars, I've done
research looking into esoteric spirituality and the sort of mystery schools,
and they participated in very interesting homoerotic initiation ceremonies for
the Templars, and they were reviving of gnosticism generally speaking.
Speaker 4: So when you look at this ultimate.
Speaker 2: Transcendence and a gaining and attaining many of these divine
qualities like omnipotence, omnipresence, omnipresence is one that Ray Kurzwell
is very interested in regards to the sort of digital
interconnecting of all mankind that essentially then we become one
man or one entity around the world, and because of
that then we have attained the sort of divine ability
of omnipresence. And then obviously, through the AI and that
becoming essentially your brain, you're going to have omnipotence. And
this is for them him always the sort of smashing
together of opposites. This is the way in which they
view this sort of neoplatonic presupposition of unity over multiplicity,
that they worship unity, and I think from a spiritual perspective,
it becomes that they worship themselves as you highlighted, so
you're only one person and there's a I think it's subtle,
but it's an important point to make that because they
worship themselves, they tend to worship pure unity or pure monad.
And I think this could be characterized in regards to
New Age religion various forms of narcissism, neoplatonism, but transhumanism,
I would say, is characterized by the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, speaking of the Huxleys, I mean Alu Suxley's book
Perennial Philosophy says that we need to concoct or sort
of create the religion of the future of the world
technocratic order, and he says that what it needs to
be is some kind of ultimate big blob where everybody
just worships collectivity in some generic natic sense, and the
purpose is more of a geopolitical strategic agenda of control
than it is some sort of you know, well, we
really want to see people be enlightened.
Speaker 1: I mean, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: If you go listen to the clip of Terrence McKenna
on YouTube, I think when I found this clip is
really it really showed me everything about Terrence McKenna. Look
at the clipperies where it's it's the discussion of what
the mushroom said to me, and it's not what you think,
because he says, well, when I spoke to.
Speaker 5: The mushroom, the mushroom told me that we don't need
less brown people in third world countries. It's the white
soccer moms that need to stop having babies because it's
killing the planet.
Speaker 3: So he literally says that we need to stop having
white kids because that's what's killing the planet. So there's
a geopolitical strategic agenda behind this same thing. If you
listened to remember years ago listening to Manly P. Hall's
lectures on esoterica and astrology, and the last lecture of
that whole series was him saying, oh, by the way,
the purpose of all this is that we need a
socialist world government led.
Speaker 1: By the United Nations. So we're not getting esoteric mysteries.
Speaker 3: We're getting a geopolitical agenda of a one world government
and technocratic agenda. I think the same thing is going
along with the transhumanists who want to promote things like collectivism,
New Age, all this so that everybody can be merged
into the high mind, right absolutely.
Speaker 2: And you know we kind of mentioned some of these
early players in regards to setting the foundation for transhumanist thought.
And I'd like to just mention one further connection I
think is really interesting in regards to how they understood
mechanical technology as the extension of divinity. And so we
highlighted in the eight hundreds John Scotis a Regina. Then
we talked about Yakima Fiore and his dates are eleven
thirty five to twelve oh two. Then we get Roger
Bacon into the thirteenth century. Then Henry Cornelius Agrimpa. This
is after the Italian Renaissance. This is after the translation
of the Hermetic Corpus, which was deemed by Cosmo actually
more important than Plato at that time, even though Latin
in the West didn't have a full reading of Plato.
And he has a quote that it was precisely this
power over nature which Adam had lost by original sin,
by which the purified soul the magician.
Speaker 4: Could now regain.
Speaker 2: And he highlighted this in the sixteenth century, and this
was sort of echoed by Paracelsus. Both of those individuals
or followers of Yakima Fiore, they're called Yakamite prophecies or
Yakamites who followed this idea that technology was going to
gain the capabilities of God and this was the point
of mankind.
Speaker 4: Francis Bacon then also echoes this.
Speaker 2: But the book that Francis Bacon has called The New
Atlanta is one of the things that's really interesting.
Speaker 4: It's subtle, but it.
Speaker 2: Has a lot of symbolism related to the Rosicrucians, who
also had the same idea in their esoteric spirituality that
they were going to blend Protestant Christianity, hermetic, magical, esoteric,
cabitalistic ideas with science and technology itself to create utopia
because the millennium was at hand. Because they also believed
in the prophecies of Yakima Fiore. And so you see
books like Thomas Moore, he has a book called Utopia.
Tomaso Campanella has one called The City of God, which
literally enshrined the worship of science and technology for the
social and moral perfection of man. And then you look
into the seventeenth century with Johann andre He who was
a alchemist esoteric thinkers. He claims that he wrote the
Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencrouz.
Speaker 4: The foundation.
Speaker 2: Fends yeah, and he wrote a book that was again utopianistic,
called Christianopolis, which literally and this is what I think
is so interesting. He argues that mechanical technology was the
way that man's soul would unfold itself. So man's soul,
in his image of God, his divinity, would unfold itself
through technology, therefore making technology the sort of ladder that's
that were going to climb out of the detritus that
we're in.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 2: We see then, and you've mentioned this before about the
Royal Society, but the Rosicrucians had the concept of the
invisible College and this actually was the precursor and many argue,
many scholars have argued the foundation for the.
Speaker 4: Actual Royal Society itself.
Speaker 2: That the rose acruci manifestos and many of these manuscripts
were saying that there was this invisible college that was
already underway, that these men were working to manifest this thing,
and then it connected to the royal society.
Speaker 4: I think is really interesting.
Speaker 1: It is. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Hegel plays a key role in that too, because Hegel's
hermetic philosophy talks about everything sort of gradually converging into
pure spirit, which is the idea of transcending physicality and
bodily limitations. My books you can get those that Jays
Analysis signed copies. If you find today's topics interesting, there's
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Speaker 1: Church of the Eternal Logo thank you for joining me
today