Speaker 1: But I think at some point when we talk about
reinstallment and re understanding, we're going to have to flip
the Enlightenment adage. You know, when people say that that
magic is just misunderstood technology. I would flip that and
say technology misunderstood magic.
Speaker 2: My governing theme for pretty much everything which is happening
at the moment is that we're running the seventeenth century
in reverse. So just hang onto your hat.
Speaker 1: This is Jonathan Peshel. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone,
I am here with Mary Harrington. Mary is a writer.
She was also with me on the at Art speaking
about ideas and AI and we had such a great
conversation that we thought that we definitely need to dive deeper,
and many people in the comments of the video have
asked us to dive deeper into the question. So, Mary,
thanks for talking to me, thanks for having me, and
so a lot of people really stuck on your vision
of what this idea of identity that we have now,
how it's kind of down stream from the notion of
the soul, and how in some ways it's a degraded
idea of the soul. And so I thought it would
be a good idea to maybe start with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I can, maybe I can tell the story
backwards in terms of how I tried to make sense
of it in those terms. So ARC commissioned me to
write a paper on identity in the Digital Age, and
I went round in circles for weeks trying to figure
out what it was I was even talking about, because
every time I tried to get my head around it, it
felt like I was just nailing this, nailing some jelly
to the wall, and it would just go through and
kind of slip away from me again, and this is
the substance of it just felt nebulous. And eventually I
did what I always do on when when that happens,
which is to try and try and get a grip
on it historically, go and rummage around in the history
and see if what people assume now is different to
what people assumed at some other point, and then try
and understand it is through time. So I was like, okay,
so have we always talked about identity? You know? Is
this is this a word? Is this a concept which
is familiar and has endurable historically? And it turns out
that no, not the very least, it's actually very new
in the in the sense in which we use it now,
which I guess we can dig into. This is this
very nebulous sense of you know, it's in a sense
it's the sort of meanness of me. That's what people
mean when they say identity. Now, you know, my identity
is I identify as And there are these there are
these ways in which it's sort of banned up in
the idea, this idea that where identity is both a
thing that we do in creating ourselves, but it's also
the thing that we are in some fundamental way, and
somehow those two things are not meant to be in
contradiction with one another, but which I guess we'll probably
we'll probably find a way into that in due course.
But this is actually a pretty new formulation, and the
term identity in that modern sense doesn't really doesn't really
come into common usage, or at least if you if
you trust Google's en gram search. This is for anybody
who haven't used Google enngram. It's a tool that Google
makes available with which you can search do You can
do a keyword search on all the millions of digitized
texts that they've scanned from libraries around the world, millions
of them over over a span of centuries. I mean,
they haven't done scanning over centuries, but the texts themselves
span a long period of time, and you can you
can keyword search for the frequency of terms, which is
a I mean, it's a snapshot. It's a crude snapshot,
but it's an interesting way of watching, watching an idea
come into appear or disappear over time, and identity as
it comes into common usage in the nineteen sixty and
I thought, whoa, that's actually pretty new. That's that's less
than one hundred years old. So what were we talking
about before? We were talking about identity? And then and
as I thought about it, I realized that identity is
a it mutates from the self, which is in a
sense if if identity is something that feels very nebulous,
and it's like it's something that we do as much
as something that we are, the self is itself kind
of it's so you do you see what I mean
about nailing jelly to a wall. You get very quickly
tangled in knots. But the I came to and once
you're on too, once you're onto the ground of the self. Actually,
I thought, oh, good. Now I can find some serious academics,
proper academics to help me with this, so brilliant. I've
got Charles Taylor who can help me with this. So
you know this, this guy, this guy knows his onions.
So so I went, I went rummaging in Sources of
the Self, which is, uh, you know, the the master
work on this this theme. And you know, it's a
it's a substantial book. And in it Taylor looks at
the emergence of the self really in conjunction with modernity,
and he traces he traces it through the ideas of
the the the early early modern era of philosophers such
as Hobbes and Locke, and then the scientific theories of Descartes,
and through through its emergent evolution in the eighteenth century,
and and really the the trajectory. What's clear in the
sort of overall arc that Taylor is describing is that
the transition, you know, the the emergence of the self
is concurrent with and very closely bound up in secularization.
Is to say, the withdrawal of the idea of you know,
that the the usness of us is in any way
band up in in spiritual matters in our relationship with
the divine, our relationship with the transcendent. And then I thought, okay,
so actually there's a what preceded the self then and
at that point, at that point, you've got the thread right.
So so you go backwards again and you realize that
actually what what precedes the self is the soul. You know,
the self is the secularized soul. This is a point
that Taylor makes you know, both implicitly and I believe explicitly.
So you have this, you have this sort of three stage,
three stage evolution from the soul, which is an ancient concept,
to to the self, and from the self to identity.
And at each stage the the evolution is bounded up
in a shift in how we understand what people are
and also in what we understand reality to be. This is,
this is and I realized this is why it's so disorienting,
because it really is a it's a paradigm shift every
time and every time you go through the looking glass.
It's very difficult to remember what how how things felt,
or even what things meant in the in the previous
in the previous iteration. And the other thing that really
that that struck me and that I found so interesting
and so potent and so thought provoking that I'm still thinking,
still processing. What it means is that in each of
these iterations is banned up in an information revolution. So
it's banned up in our in our information technologies. So
the the emerge within in the West, at least with
within the Western tradition. The the idea of the soul
really emerged in conjunction with literacy in the Axial Age,
and then it goes through various classical and Christian evolutions
and is elaborated by the early early Christian theologians and becomes,
you know, the whole for fifteen hundred years of incredibly
rich philosophy and theology. You know, on the on the
Christian concept of the soul, I'm not I'm not so
from familiar with global, global, real spiritual tradition. So perhaps
you'll be able to help me out on that front.
And then and then with the with the with the
printing press is the second stage of the information revolution,
which initially prompts the Reformation, and then in due course,
if you like, the Reformation, on the Reformation, which is
the the the advent of secularism and the scientific mindset,
which which is really which is concurrent roughly speaking with
the self as a formulation. And it's my contention is
what I argued in the paper for ARC on Identity
in the Digital Age, is that really the digital age
is the age of identities, because they because it's bounded
up in in a further stage of information revolution in
which we've set about technologizing ourselves, and the emergence of
identity as a way of as a way of thinking
about as the way of framing what people are is inextricable.
From this, this turn towards, if you like, trying to
perfect ourselves through the medium of our technologies, whether those
are sort of transhuman interventions in our in our physiology,
in our in our physical bodies, or the sort of
emotional technology is such as such as the therapeutic states
such as therapeutic practices such as the various programs for
self improvement, or indeeds such as the various ways in
which people use social media and self self creation through
online presence to construct to construct an idealized version of themselves.
And you can really see, I mean, having been extremely
online for the best part of a quarter of a century,
now you can really see how the idea of identifying
as something escapes containment in the academy where it's sort
of it was a highly theoretical idea and the sort
of post modern post structuralist critical theory, and becomes something
that people genuinely believe they can do, absolutely concurrently with
the explosion of social media and this experience which then
becomes really normalized for people much younger than me, that
yourself is in a sense, it's the same thing as
your online self. And I mean, and it stands to
reason it seems like a perfectly just and legitimate thing
from that perspective that if you can reskin your digital avatar,
you should be able to reskin your meat avatar. Clearly
that's a thing. Yeah, and so and so we have this.
We have this very very sort of rich and complex
trajectory of evolution over centuries millennia really from the soul
to the self, to the two identity and the just
just to just to complete that, My argument has been
that particularly in the face of the AI Revolution, we
are now we're now at the point where we need
to we need to retrieve the concept of the soul,
because if we don't, we won't be able to weather
the the Ai revolution within any with any sense of
our own humanness and with any with any capacity to
to get a grip on what it is that this
what it is these technologies are for, and how we
can use them well or or foolishly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this is it, folks. This might just be
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I think what you're saying definitely tracks that. There's an
interesting There's a documentary it's called Center of the Self.
It's like it's pretty long, it's like four hour documentary,
and it talks about some ways in the sixties how
this self care and this this therapeutic self started to
become very popular and then people really embrace this idea
of the therapeutic self. And I think that it makes
sense to think of that also as the kind of
the beginning of identity, you know, in that sense, you know,
but there's something about there's something about the moment that
I think in terms of recovering the soul, which actually
could be useful because the idea of identifying with something
is not completely ridiculous in the sense that you know,
there is there are these external participations that I that
I participate in, right, So it's like I participate in
my nation, I participate in my family, I participate in
my group of friends or in a club or whatever,
and those are things that I identify with that I
identify with a kind of higher participation, but that is
not that cannot be the reducible aspect of who I am.
And I think that that's one of the issues that
we're struggling with, is that there's this weird gnostic thing
that's going on, which people notice that they can identify
and they're trying to and there's a competition, which there
shouldn't necessarily be competition. There's competition with where it is
that we should identify. And you can see it happening,
you know, you can see it happening because the globalist types,
they're pushing towards this this kind of very very the
kind of sexual and desire identification and also victim identification.
And then the other side is saying, now we need
to go back to nation, we need to go back
to either ethnic identification or tribal identification, and those are
fighting with each other. Right It's like, no, you can't
identify as white, you can't identify as American, you can't
these are these and those types of identification are dangerous.
Here are the ones that you need to identify with,
and all of these are competing in a completely chaotic way.
There's no sense of hierarchy, there's no sense of how
it is that we participate at different levels in these
in these different identities. And there's also the gnostic aspect
which you mentioned, which is in some ways these are
free floating, you know, because in an ancient world you
would have all these things that you participated, but they
would be kind of structured coherently.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And there is a kind of you know, there's something
to postmodernity which isn't completely wrong, you know, which is
this possibility of a kind of intertextual discussion where these
different things are discussing with each other, but they're they're
in a hierarchy. What happened in Postmondernism is everything becomes
free floating, and so you have all this multiplicity, but
they're not connected in any way. So the idea of gender,
the idea that gender is important and that gender identification
is important, is not stupid, Like it is important like
for a person as they grow to realize what gender
they are and then to participate in that, like to
take on certain roles, to take on certain certain certain
ways of being that that function with their gender. But
the idea that that's free floating from your body, and
that your body floats here and you have gender here
and that these are completely unrelated and they can be
negotiated either way. That is also the that is also
the that I think is what the issue is. And
so it seems like there's an opportunity though now to
be able to help people see again this. I mean,
we talked about the vertical in our in our our discussion,
and I think that's the idea of insulment or the
idea of a soul is that is a kind of
vertical thing that runs through everything, because the soul is
not just it's not just like a This is also
an issue that happened in the modern AA. If people
understand the soul is something that's in you, you know,
it's like there's this spiritual thing that's inside you. But
that's not actually how the ancients under absolutely exactly completely
The way that they understood it is that it's that
things are in soul. That is, your being is in soul.
That is it is it has a vertical alignment which
brings it together into unity and makes you able to
to kind of exist in that unity. And that's a
far different, uh, far different way of understanding it. Uh.
And so that returned to hierarchy and kind of understanding
that this vertical Uh, it seems like it's possible now,
but I don't know if it's possible to do it
without God in the in this time, Like is it,
you know, is it possible to do that without actually
returning to a Christian vision? Or is there a way
to talk about soul in another way? At this point
in the West.
Speaker 2: I mean, people who are not Christians managed to talk
about the soul. But I'm not one of those people.
But I gather that it can be done. Just a
couple of points. I mean, there are there are different
there are different ways of approaching this. I mean, I
think ultimately the leap of faith is not something you
can make on anybody else's behalf. That's just that's just
how it works. But there are there are there are
different ways. There are different ways of coming at the question,
and one one that I've found very fruitful just recently,
rather than rather than sort of going around the circle
on whether or not people should go to church or
believe in God or any of that stuff, which you know,
at the end of the day, people are going to
do what they do, right, But one one way of
thinking about all of this that I've found fruitful, and
but that that I've found people will respond to in
quite an open way, even even if they're they're ambivalent
on some of the more sort of formally theological questions.
Is I think, well, is thinking about actually this goes
to your point on postmodern and that thinking about formal
and final cause, because I mean, you you can, you
can take people through the way in which the arrival
into modernity was inseparable from excluding formal and final cause
from from the from the reality paradigm. I mean, first,
it was excluded from the scientific method. The idea that
something had a form which is ordered from the top
down was just excluded and okay, now we just look
at how it works and we look at it empirically.
And and also the idea that something has a purpose
as have a t loss, which had intelligible to us
was also excluded from the scientific method. Could in favor
of just looking at what what what's what's the stuff
that this is made of, and what are the chains
of events in which it participates in a much more yeah,
a much less richly meaning filled, meaningfull way. And I
mean I think in more colloquial language, what we're talking
about here is is is meaning and purpose? I think
those people are people are perfectly you know, these are
perfectly intelligible terms to most people. You know, the idea,
the idea that things have meaning and purpose is just
not really part of the scientific paradigm, right, you know,
a chicken doesn't mean something. It's just a chicken. It's
a biological system within the scientific paradigm. Is what's the
purpose of a chicken? The purpose of a chicken is
to chicken. And then, you know, if you explain it
to people in those terms, they're like, oh, yes, it's
going to chick. Chicken is going to a chicken. Right, That's fine,
that's perfectly sort of self contained. And it will do
so in you know, in a in a set of
in a set of complex relationships with various other organisms
and ecosystems and so and people are people are very
happy to think, are quite willing to think ecologically in
that way. And then and then once you explain to
people that there's an entire metaphysics of that encompasses thinking,
thinking in terms of formal and final cause, and that
actually if you refactor postmodernism through that lens, it falls
into place and the yeah, postmodernism isn't wrong. It's just
you know, it's it's just mistaken to try and do
semiotics in the absence of formal and final cause. You know,
if you're only doing efficient cause and material cause, the
whole thing becomes incredibly realistic, incredibly quickly. I mean it
should be exactly exactly. There's there's no meaning with any power,
but the moment, the moment you reintroduce form and final
cause into a post modern into the postmodern paradigm, it's like, okay,
so so things can still be true, like so some
things are more true than other things, this is clear.
And some forms are more are more real than other forms.
This is also clear because it's not just arbitrary and
contingent and emergent from us from the bottom, from the
bottom up, whether you're talking about social systems or organisms
or whatever things. Things are also formed, as it were,
from the top down. And and and optionally, should you
be that way inclined, you can also take that a
couple of steps further, and you can you can and
you can reframe a discussion of the soul in those
terms as really, you know, in very much the classical sense,
as the as the form of a person. You know,
this is this is not this is this isn't crazily controversial,
and it's not the homunculous piloting the meat suit. It's
just you know them, My soul is the form of
me as understood from the top down in that sense,
and it's the purpose of me as well. Do you know,
in the same way the chicken is chicken is going
to chicken, Mary is going to marry because I'm I'm
and soul as marry. If you see what I mean,
And I know, I feel I feel pretty comfortable talking.
You know, people aren't going to look at me like
I'm a sort of insane creature on the street if
I if I make this, you know, you set out
the steps and people are like, oh yeah, no, yeah,
go with that, yeah or maybe not.
Speaker 1: I know, I think I think you're right that what
it leads to is in some ways that this idea
of the hierarchy of goods that was you know that
in the Middle Ages, was you see and Dante that
you see in the middle Middle Aged thinkers. And I
think that that is definitely, I mean, that's the way
that I've been trying to talk about it like to
help people see that that is something that is inevitable
and that these these purposes they stack too, right, they
stack into each other, and so you can kind of see,
you know, you can kind of see at certain levels
what the purposes are, and then you can notice that
they fit into these higher purposes, and especially if you
bring them through the human perspective, which is we can't
avoid it. That is, as humans we stand here and
we live in the world. You can't you can't have
a way of seeing the world that is abstracted from
human consciousness. That that helps too in order in establishing causes,
like establishing formal and final causes, because in some ways
you realize that there's no reason to fully abstract yourself
from the system. You have to see it through this perspective.
What I mean is that when you say a chicken's
gonna chicken, there's also the idea that the chicken is
also the bird that makes eggs and that I eat
especially a chicken of all animals, because it actually now
at this point has co evolved with humans that it
couldn't exist, it couldn't exist outside of the human eCos eCos. Therefore,
they're part of our purposes, like we kind of see
them through part of our purposes. And the same with
even like you know, the way the ancients would have understood.
It's like there are certain animals that are dangerous to us,
and that has to be part of their purpose, like
understanding that as part of their purpose. It's you know,
there are animals that can eat you, and they are
back here that can kill you, and that's part of
at least how we kind of put the hierarchy of
their purposes into the world. And what's funny about that?
And I don't know if you've thought about this, but
in some ways there's a sense in which if you
ride the kind of Darwinian argument to its end, you
almost get a return of Aristotle. You get a return
of purposes because if you say something like say something
very simple, which is the highest purpose of life is
the persistence of being like something like that, you know,
like at it every level, right, like the beings try
to persist at every level, and that's what it is.
And then you end up again with you end up
with a hierarchy of purposes. You can't avoid it. You
end up with a hierarchy of forms. It just almost
kind of gives it and it's you know. And you
could say, well, those forms don't exist in a material sense,
but who care like they? And and also you could
say you can't find the tellos from the from the
you know, from the emanation of of all these possibility
But it doesn't matter because as conscious beings, we participate
in those in that purpose like we we actually see them,
like we can see that eyes are for seeing. The
evolutionary biologists can tell us there's no purpose in evolution.
It's like yeah, but also yes, there is, because I
know that eyes are for seeing.
Speaker 2: And this is actually a point which I which I've
brought into my reflections on identity and the digital age,
which is which is the second contention arising out of
the digital age, which is that you know as as
well as bringing us to this this sort of point
of metaphysical crisis in terms of you know, really asking us,
you know what what what?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: In fact is a person the the other. The other
fascinating phenomenon which I've noticed really very very very strongly
in in recent years, and I imagine you will have
done as well, is the way in which people who
are habituated to reading online and to the way the
way information comes at you online are primed for the
kind of pattern recognition which makes perceiving formal cause directly
vastly easier than it is for people who were habituated
to print. I'm sure you can understand what I'm talking about.
I mean, I think it's not a coincidence that your
line of work, your artistic line of work, has has
really exploded back into into the public consciousness, and that,
you know, the the form of iconography. People are once
again able to read iconography for what it is in
a way which just wasn't possible at peak modernity because
the people didn't think. People didn't understand that what that
kind of art was for and what what really it
was communicating, and and thought, you know, if you're looking
at a medieval painting, that the golden background was just
because people didn't know how to do perspective, for example,
not realizing that no, no, no, that's not that's not what
they're saying at all, is that that's that's for, that's
that communicates something entirely different. You know, you're just you're
you're completely misunderstand the register here. But there's but just
returning to digital reading, I mean, I think the if
you read a book, you know, the the argument is linear,
It builds up over a long period of time. You
need to hold a lot of ideas in your mind
concurrently and sort of as it will, you know, dwell
with the mind of a single thinker. In order to
engage with a long form a long form non fiction
book or or a long form fiction book as well,
you need to sort of dwell, dwell in the unified
consciousness of a single individual over a linear argument that
can span some considerable period of time. And then though
that that long form argument will exist in your mind
and it will dialogue in your mind with you know,
other long form arguments of a similar kind, and that
forms a particular type of consciousness. I mean this is
these are not original observations you other people have made
the points much more eloquently than I could. But deep
reading is absolutely foundational to the modern consciousness and all
of the culture and political forms that flow from that.
But digital reading is completely different, you know, and I
say this as somebody who's been a bookworm since I
was four and who's been extremely online for the last
twenty five years. You know, I have this kind of
strange double consciousness now. But if you if you consume
content on the Internet, there's so much of it. It's
just like a fire hose. And you stand there in
this kind of fire hose of stuff that comes at you,
and some of it's just complete nonsense and gibberish or
hate or craziness or whatever, and some of it some
of its real gems. And all you can really do
is just stand there and trust in your trust in
your your sort of whimsical ability to filter and to catch,
to catch gems as as the torrent comes at you,
and and to make them to make sense of it
as it comes at you. And people people attain in
the same way as people attain prominence as authors in
the print age, people attain prominence as sense makers in
the digital age, just just by virtue of being being
able or willing or foolish enough to stand in the
fire hose and then, you know, catch things as they
go by and assemble them into some kind of a
coherent narrative for people who just don't have time the
inclination to do that. And it's a it's a it's
an evolution, if you like, of the author role. But
it's a, it's a it's a cognate of of what
what an author does. But even people who don't do
that are primed just by being extremely online and having
the sort of gesturing to to convey the fire hose thing.
Even you know, even people who don't want to be
sense makers just get used to seeing ideas evolve in
real time online. And I think the most vivid illustration
of this is memes. You know, you think of Pepe
the frog as a very famous one who evolves, who
evolves at great speed, and you know, interacts with other
memes and the new new forms evolve, and you know,
there have been recently, there was the whole j Vans,
which I thought was very friend me and then you
know Jdvans has cross pollinated with various other types of meme,
and you know, the Vans in ink has has has crossed,
has crossed genres in so many different ways. And you
and you can watch something you can watch something like
that follow Followers sort of a kind of conceptual arc
over a period of two or three weeks during which
a huge amount happens. I mean, and I guess some
people are just like, well, what on earth was that?
But but but for other people, really it's it's not
it's not a huge step from being able to watch
an idea come to life and move and develop and
sometimes have tangible effects in the real world, and then
being able to perceive that to be able to perceive formal,
formal cause in for example, that the being of a
particular animal species or in or or within ecosystems in
the natural world. It's just it's just not a very
big conceptual leak, right, And similarly, it's not it's not
a very big conceptual leak to from from that to
understanding how how ancient, how iconography of the type that
you create works, Because I mean, it's it's it's a
it's hopelessly reductive to describe what you do as as
creating spiritual means. But in a sense you're engaging in
a kind of nimplex which is vastly older than the
Internet that you know, requires you know, a huge amount
of skill and devotion to work with. But it's an implex,
and I think that's and people people just understand that
instinctively in the way which wasn't the tast for a
long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're right, there's definitely there's definitely something happening,
and I mentioned that often in terms of the Internet,
that there's it's it's a dual thing that's going on.
On the one hand, we're going towards this weird moment
when people don't know who they are and don't know
what it's, what a person is, I have no idea
what intelligence is or agency, like, they're just losing all
of that. But it's also forcing certain people, at least
a certain class of people to actually realize exactly that.
And so when you notice, for example, certain you can
imagine that in one hundred three hundred years ago, a
very wise person that meditated or prayed for very long
times would be able to perceive these patterns that run
through culture and would be able to see them as
being coherent and have formal causes, be able to see
kind of the intelligence that runs through them, you know,
even agency that runs through them. But now, because everything's
accelerated so much, like you said, something that an ancient
person might have seen over a century by by just
meditating over certain patterns that these see happening over a century,
they would have been captured in things like astrology and
different types of other ways of capturing that. Now, it's
like a few weeks now, a few weeks you see
an agency runs through and it's like you can just
see it. It flames and then it it vanishes, And
so you the idea that that these have no for example,
the idea that these are just trying to reduce them
and to try to understand them in a reductionist way
is not useful because you're not understanding anything. You almost
forced to think of these as having a type of
reality that brings us back exactly what you're saying, which
is something like.
Speaker 2: Right, that's absolutely right. In a sense, it doesn't matter
whether what we're looking at is an emergent property of
multiple consciousness is all thinking about similar things, or whether
in fact it has an independent agency in its own right.
In a sense, it doesn't matter because it, you know,
it looks more or less the same either way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's better to treat it as agency because
that's the way you can understand it, because trying to
treat it as emerging properties of multiple intelligences doesn't help
you deal with it. It's better to deal with it
as a singular thing that's going running through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, right, Yeah, absolutely that's the.
Speaker 1: Thing that you said is perfect. Like if you can
say there is purpose in understanding this as a unitary
intelligence that's running through bodies and that's kind of cohering
them towards purposes, and there's a purpose in doing that too,
You don't you can help people understand that the soul
is not some magical thing that drops down and like
you know that that you could it's not it's not
you know, ectoplasm or whatever nonsense that happened in the
times of the spirit. Is it is exactly what we're
talking about, seeing the purpose, it's seeing it come together
and that even how the that's how the church fathers,
many of them talked about it. You know. It's not
like this is something that we're coming up with now.
It's just that we lost the capacity to understand that
for a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's exactly right. And apart
from anything else, it's it's very much more succinct to
be able to be able to describe something of identity
than it is to describe it, you know, although you know,
I mean, you can do three paragraphs or throat clearing
if you want to, or you can just say do it.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm here to invite you to the Orthodox
Arts Festival. Richard and I are going to come down
to Dallas. It is on the first weekend of May.
It is going to be an absolute blast. I will
be giving a keynote. I'll be also participate in a
Q and A. Richard will be speaking. I've heard that
Justin Marler of Death to the World Fame will be
there talking about Death of the World things.
Speaker 3: And who else Richard, He'll be talking with Bishop Garaza.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so so like that'll be super cool. Yeah,
the uh, it's it's a festival, there are there's going
to be a lot of I'm going to be there
speaking about writing fiction as an Orthodox Christian. We're going
to have a concert from the Saint Casini Corral, which
is sort of our local DFW area in North Texas.
Pan Orthodox Choir. We're going to have there's going to
be food, there's going to be dance. It's going to
be just a really incredible three days. So it is
it's the first weekend in May, so the second through
the fourth, and you should come.
Speaker 1: Where is it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good that's a good question to ask
it's at Saints Constantine and Helen Orthodox Church, Antiocan Orthodox
Church in Carrollton, Texas, so North Dallas area.
Speaker 1: And so I mean, so all the artists. If you
are interested in Orthodoxy and culture, interested in either liturgical
art or how Orthodox thinking, how the Orthodox symbolism can
also be applied to other aspects of culture, this is
the place to come. You know, we're hoping for a
lot of wonderful, intelligent people to be there, so we
won't just be us giving conferences, but will be around.
We'll be involved in the conversation, you know, we'll be
hanging out with everybody, and we hope that a lot
of fruitful things will come out of this.
Speaker 3: And there will be also children's activities on some of
the days. So you can look at the website for that.
It's Orthodox Arts Festival DFW dot com.
Speaker 1: All right, Orthodox Arts Festival DFW dot com. Everyone, we
cannot wait to see you there, see you there in
terms of the AI now because we I mean, this
is the thing that's kind of pushing down on us.
I mean, this is something that I didn't really have
a chance to ask you, but I do want to
know what you think, which is you know, when I
talk to the people that are making the AIS or
when we hear them speak, we hear in the way
that they talk about it a great trepidation in fear
that this is the most dangerous thing in the universe.
We've heard Elon must say that, but other people involved
in AI have said that. And the question I have
for you is, why do you think we're doing this?
Like what it is that's going on and us, why
are we doing this If even the people that are
making the thing understand how.
Speaker 2: Maybe the positive, maybe the positive intended outcome is that
we really want to understand what the difference is between
between comprehension and calculation. You know, I think that would
be that that would be a sincere you know that
that we want them to be a difference, and we're
just going to push the argument all the way until
it forces the metaphysical issue that that that I think
would be would be a positive intended outcome of AI research.
You know, can we can we finally conclusively establish whether
there's a difference between machine calculation and human comprehension.
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that that that I've been
thinking about, it's related to what you said which is
in terms of the problem of this these floating identifications,
you know, because in the AI, what you basically see
is the extreme version of that, which is that the
AI can capture or you know, can run through intelligent structures,
can run through patterns, but it doesn't have a connection
to it at all. Like you can tell you about cats,
but it cannot know what a cat is it can
because it doesn't doesn't have it doesn't care, it doesn't
has nothing, you know. All it's all a simulation. It
really a simulation in the sense that the language relationships
have real structures. They're not they're not fake. They they
have real relationships. But ultimately there there's an complete disconnect
with what it is we're talking about. And so it's
like we're running the kind of structuralist or even post structuralists,
you know, element all the way to the core, Like
we're bringing it to the all the way to the edge,
where we we are looking at something that is representing
meaning to us but has no connection to body, Like
there's no connection to the thing that that gave rise
to the to these to these structures in the first place.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, I think that's I think that's right,
I mean in a sense where where where I find it.
In a sense, it's not in a sense, it's not intelligence.
It's not understanding because it's always retrospective. The pattern recognition
is always retrospective.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It can make inferences about what the pattern might be,
but not on the basis of any any actual understanding,
not on the basis of any comprehension. All it can
really do is make predictions based on the existing model
that it has. It's not actually seeing or understanding or
making inferences based on them. Yeah, it's not. It's not
based on comprehension. I think a few things spank to
mind while you were talking about the sort of terror
of AI and the the the sort of various the
various different ways that people talk about or express that fear.
And there's a couple of reflections on that. One of
them is one of the conversations that sort of sloshes
around these these quarters is whether all is whether or
not is machine superintelligence. I actually just say I just
don't believe that's ever going to be a thing. I
just don't. I don't believe. I don't believe a g
I is possible because I think it's just a category era.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 2: But the another of the another of the possibilities that
sloshes around in these in these discourses is that machine
superintelligence maybe not, but demonic superintelligence manifesting via machines maybe now.
But I don't know about that. I don't really have
a firm view either way. But I know that that's
one of the that's one of the discourses that and
it's and and it's certainly true. And actually some tracks
in terms of the other other the sort of aspects
of digital re enchantment we've been discussing that. You know,
as Rodrea has pointed out not in his recent book,
there is there is a very strong occult streak in
in the in the Silicon Valley, in the cutting edge
of Silicon Valley. You know, there are people who there
are people who are, as they as they understand it,
in contact with extraterrestrial intelligences in all to download, as
they say, new scientific information. I mean, who knows what's
going on there, you know, whether they're just accessing subconscious
and intuitions or whether they are actually communicating with some
kind of other world the intelligence. I have no idea.
But but but really just to make the point that
the boundary between the kind of re enchantment that we're
discussing in the hyper rationalist aspects of that of that
technological world really are very porous, and I think with
good reason, because what we're talking about here is a
convergence of technology and theology in a much more open way,
and the and the the final point just to kind
of stick a pin in that a little bit so
so so that that for the esotericism of the the
AI conversation, but also I wonder often when I hear these,
you know, it's very it's fun and interesting and sort
of exciting and a bit to go down these these
kind of you know, the the kind of the sort
of gnostic horror story rabbit holes. And there are there
are very there are a great many of them. But
but I often wonder whether we're you know, that's a
little bit of a distraction from where actually the real
threat of artificial intelligence lies, which is in very much
more concrete, substantial applications. And just to draw on analogy
there which maybe helps to helps to explain what I'm
talking about. In the eighteenth century, there were various inventors
created incredible for the time incredibly lifelike automata. There was
the mechanical turk hoax, and there was there was a
duck which supposedly actually defecated but was actually made a
clockwork and beautifully engineered, incredibly intricate automata which which sort
of thrilled people at court and everyone was very excited
about them. And the lorcn Song, who was one of
the inventors who created these things, is he's famous for
having created these automata, but actually the inventions of his
which were more influential in terms of changing the world,
were very much more mundane innovations which powered the industrial revolution.
And I think that's really how we should be thinking
about artificial intelligence as well, and not in terms of
some sort of super intelligent thing or a channel for
demons or whatever, although yeah, I mean, who knows, but
you know, but but actually work concretely, we should be
thinking about, you know, what what happens, What what happens
when autonomous robots are normal in war? You know, I
think that those are what happens, you know, But how
is this going to change everyday work for normal, for
for for the little guy. And and there are concrete
policy and human questions which which we could be thinking
about in a much more granular way and in a
much more practical way, and in a sense I think,
I think the sort of the AI, you know, the
the AI God Apocalypse is a way is a way
of avoiding having to think too concretely about that now.
Speaker 1: But there there are connections between the two way of
seeing them. One one of them is captured mythologically when
you think of the idea of the AI being like
a big weediaboard, you know, like a kind of that's
kind of taking our collective intelligence together in to catch something,
to catch some something that we had not that we
can't think of individually, you know, and that is not
a completely ridiculous you know, that's probably how a weija
board functions, right, It's like there are some aspects of
us if we come together the same way that you
can have teamwork, like when you when you have teamwork,
you have something more that appears when meteral people are
working together. And so a wijil board does that in
terms of meaning, and it's trying to kind of catch
something that that that is more than the sum of
the parts, and the AI can definitely do that Now
the story of the Genie and the Lamp is the
best way of kind of understanding it. Because what the
AI does is it adds power. That's the best way
of understanding it. It's adding intelligent power to something. And
because the AI is not agentic itself, it doesn't like
you said, there's no such thing as really there won't
be a GI because it doesn't care. It doesn't have
a wish. It is it takes our wishes, right, that's
the idea. It's like it actually amplifies the desires of
of people. And that is, by the way, related to
the demons. So that's how we understand demons in the
Christian tradition. We understand demons as cosmic versions or like
cosmic kings or princes of things that make us go awry. Right,
So we have in us, we have an aspect, like
to say, anger in you, and there's a cosmic aspect
of that. And that cosmic aspect is the one that
is beyond my individual manifestation of it. It's it's a
cosmic verse. I don't know what to say. It's like
it's anger itself. It's the it's anger in the way
that it that it parasitizes on humans and the idea
that that's not happening in AI. It's like, well, that
is what AI is doing, Like it is exactly doing that.
And and the genie in the lamp is a great
example because one of the things that happens with demons
is that to give you what you want, but they
don't let you see the side effects, or they don't
let you see that if I add power to this
desire you have, then all these other things are going
to come with it, but that you don't know what
they are are yet, and it's a kind of blind
it's kind of it's you're blinded by desire, you're blinded
by your And that's also the thing that AI is
doing all the time, is that it's actually adding infinite power,
like the genie's lamb, to our desires. But we don't
know what those desires lead to because we're only focused
on what it's giving us. Now, we're only focused on
the mam in. We're only focused on the money or
on the increase in power, but we don't see the
side effects. And as we increase it, the side effects
just get just keep getting bigger and bigger, and that
I mean that is so I think the idea there's
a connection between the demonic aspect of the idea that
AI could be something that's catching demons trace mythologically and
just technically understanding what AI is doing to our desires
and to our wishes and how it's how it's capturing
them and increasing in their power. I think it's it's
a it's a coherent it's a coherent connection.
Speaker 2: I found myself coming back again and again to go
to a story about the sorcerer and his apprentice, in
a sense, catching the two sides of the digital revolution.
You know, on the one hand, there's the sorcerer who
seems to have this kind of magical capacity to control,
you know, and just you know, things happen by magic.
You know, I can go for a run around a
city I've never been to before, and my headphones will
tell me which direction to take next because transmitted from
my phone via satnav, and you know, it might as
well be magic. And there's this incredible sense of friction.
You know, I can travel from I can travel thousands
of miles through the air without ever taking my purse
out because I just do everything via my phone. Beat
me beep, you know that there's a there's a very
sort of magical and very really intoxicating sense of frictionist control.
And then the other side of it is this sort
of infinitely ramifying chaos as the apprentice has a go
at casting the spells, and then he doesn't quite know
how to stop them, and then they multiply and they
can caate inate on themselves, and then I don't know,
you have planes falling out of the sky because some
something has gone wrong with the system somewhere or you know,
and that's had a knock on effect with some other
systems somewhere else, and nobody really knows quite how to
quite quite how to unscramble whatever it is that's got scrambled,
or you know, you set a meme in motion that
causes a revolution halfway around the world three years later
because because complicated things have changed or whatever. But but somehow, somehow,
there's a this frictionless control has has has been also
produces a dividend of very uncanny chaos, and the two,
the two I think really go together in a in
a way which is just a new normal and we're
just going to have to taste it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I think at some point when we talk
about reinstallment and re understanding, we're going to have to
flip the Enlightenment adage. You know, when people say that
that magic is just misunderstood technology. I would flip that
and say technology is understood magic. You know, it's like
the magic shows the purpose.
Speaker 2: My governing theme for pretty much everything which is happening
at the moment is that we're running the seventeenth century
in reverse. So just hang onto your hat.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, that makes out of sense.
Speaker 2: Well, listen, it's this is why the Puritans are all
turning Catholic. Yeah, yeah, we're running the seventeenth century in reverse.
Speaker 1: That is an interesting Yeah. The JD Vance is a
kind of a little image of that of going back
to going back to traditional Christianity. For sure.
Speaker 2: The republics are turning into monarchies, the Puritans are turning
into Catholics, and all of the nation states are assolving
back into empires. It's it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we might go. All right, Mary, this is wonderful.
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, this has been such a pleasure.
Speaker 1: All Right, we'll talk again. Bye. Bye bye. If you
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