[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.]
Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social and political turmoil: homogenization is pulling us one way, and tribalism is pulling us in a another. The intensifying of the second seems to be a reaction to the intensifying of the first. So two related questions arise:
1. Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?
2. Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?
Put that aside for now; I’ll come back to it later.
Now for our topic: “AGI, Hope and the Human Future: What Is Human Flourishing?”
First let’s define some terms. What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and what makes it different from AI and Generative AI?
AI can do things within one domain really well—like playing chess, facial recognition, music and movie recommendations, etc. Generative AI takes text, music, images, learns the rules that structure them, and generates novel text, music, and images. You can give the entire Bach opus to a Generative AI machine, and it could write a cantata that that would seem to be a genuine Bach piece composition that had never been known of before.
But such a new piece would be ‘novel’ and not ‘original’. What’s the difference? Originality requires having a soul. Having a soul doesn’t make you original, but it’s a prerequisite for originality. The fact that so many can’t tell the difference between what is original and what is novel is a sign of the soullessness of the world that technology is creating. As machines become more human, humans are becoming more machinelike. This is an essential part of the problem I want to explore in these talks.
Chat GPT is an advanced form of Generative AI. It scares a lot of people because it’s so human in its use of language. But it’s still pretty primitive.
AGI is still only hypothetical. If realized, it will have broad cognitive abilities, and it will be able to understand, learn, apply knowledge, and problem-solve across a wide range of tasks and domains—very much like a human being.
AGI will have “emergent” properties. It will develop capabilities that humans did not program into it. It will surprise us and do things that humans don’t understand. And that really scares a lot of people because these machines will be us, but much smarter and more powerful than us.
But will it be truly conscious? Will it have a soul? Will it be able to care?
Or will it just be like a human psychopath who can mimic these human attributes without feeling them?
The late Hubert Dreyfus was a professor of philosophy at UC Berkley and one of the foremost American interpreters of Martin Heidegger. In the early part of his career, he taught at MIT. He got to know many of the pioneers in AI—and he thought those nerds had no idea what a human being was. Good Heideggerian that he was, he argued in What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (1972, 1992) that in order for AGI to have human-like intelligence, it would have a body like ours, and social acculturation like ours. It would have to be a historical cultural being-in-the-world.
But what does being a historically acculturated creature in a body entail?
Will it have to gestate in a womb and experience birth trauma? Will it have months of breastfeeding? Will it go through the terrible twos and the hormonal changes of adolescence? Will it suffer? Will it grow old and die? That’s what having a body and being a human means to someone like Dreyfus. You see the point. There’s more to being truly human than just having human-like intelligence. It’s what gets left out that makes all the difference.
Embodied, acculturated human beings are particular, historical beings. They have biological and cultural constraints. Can those constraints be duplicated in AGI machines? Wouldn’t possessing those attribures be a requirement for any machine to have truly human consciousness? Isn’t therefore any AGI machine that we create without those constraints something that must be very non-human in nature. And so then mustn’t it be something that we could never really understand? Or it understand us?
But, you might object, why should anybody suffer, get old, and die? Can’t we improve what it means to be human by eradicating those limitations? That’s what Transhumanists would ask in response to Dreyfus. Transhumanist Aubrey de Grey wrote in 2008 that we will soon achieve “longevity escape velocity”. This is when life extension technology will outpace biological aging. He asserted that persons who will live to be a thousand years old have already been born. What’s wrong with that?
The is techno-optimism on steroids. He’s probably wrong about the timing, but who knows if he’s wrong in the long run? Should we all celebrate this possibility?
Transhumanists want to completely redefine what it means to be a human being purely in terms of human material flourishing without caring about what this does to the human soul. They either assume that there is no such thing—that humans are nothing more than biological machines. And If turns out that humans do have souls, they’ll adapt. But will they? Do these people have any idea about what they’re playing with?
So we’re seeing a convergence. Machines are becoming more like humans here, and humans are becoming more like machines over there. At what point do these AGIs stop being less machines and more human, and at what point do humans stop being less human and more like machines?
Do the people at the cutting edge of these technological developments see any significant downside here? Or have most of them become already the soulless machines they want to turn the rest of us into? And if that’s so, are those of us who think that human flourishing requires, indeed is defined by, one’s depth of soul, are we going to allow these soulless techies to restructure the world in their soulless image?
So the danger for me lies first and foremost not in whether these machines can become more soulfully human, but in whether we humans are becoming more like soulless machines.
But let’s return to the first question about the implications of successfully realizing AGI. Dreyfus didn’t think it was likely. But what if? John Vervaeke is professor Philosophy/Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. He’s read his Heidegger, and he’s familiar with Dreyfus’s arguments, and he accepts his criteria for what full AGI would require. But he thinks AGI is more likely that Dreyfus does.
He also has a very interesting series of lectures entitled “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, which I recommend to anybody who would like a crash course in Western Philosophy and how it relates to cutting edge developments in Cog Sci.
He, too, doesn’t know whether AGI is possible. Indeed, he hopes it isn’t. But he argues there are good reasons to think that it will be happen. And if it does, we better get ready for it.
What are the implications?
If AGI is really fully AGI, can we think of it anymore as just a machine? Or must we start to treat it as a person?
If AGI is fully realized, he argues, it will have real consciousness and will have real moral agency. And so he’s concerned about who will have the responsibility for educating these AGI newborns. And if they are indeed persons, won’t we have to love them and educate them as if they were our children?
This situation was imagined 220 years ago in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.
What was this story about?
Two things. Certainly the hubris of an overzealous scientist. But more importantly about the deeper moral failure of Dr. Frankenstein. He brought a new human-like being into the world and refused to care for it. Once the monster comes to life, Dr. F is horrified by the monstrosity of it, and runs away. The monster is not born a monster. He becomes one because of human moral failure.
So what responsibility will the creators of these AGI newborns have for their welfare? Will they just be perceived as chattel to be dominated and exploited? Is that even a question that people like Altman, Zuckerberg, and Musk are asking? Or what about the military? Will they, too, be creating monsters that will reflect their own moral failures? And are the rest of us then just doomed to live with however that happens to work out?
Who is there to push back against them on behalf of a richer more complex “humanistic” education for these AGI newborns? Are we even giving a rich, complex humanistic education to our own children anymore?
Vervaeke’s point is these machines/persons are us. They will inherit from us the entire deposit of human experience and achievement. We don’t know what these machines/persons will do with this legacy. Hopefully we humans will find a way to ensure that they will respect their elders and work to promote human flourishing rather than to impede it.
But do we understand enough about human flourishing to teach these new beings how to support it? How can we if there’s no consensus about what it means to be human? There are religious humanists, secular humanists, transhumanists, posthumanists, anti-humanists—and there are lots of people who think that the planet would just be better off if humans just went away.
But let’s say we had the power to appoint someone to be in charge of educating these newborn AGIs—whom would we choose? Would there even be consensus in this room about who would be best?
Hopefully what we do here over the next couple of weeks will be useful in helping us to think about that—if not for the machines/persons’ sake, for our own. At the very least we could develop some criteria about how we interact with these machines/persons and other technologies going forward.
So what does human flourishing entail? Can we come up with some baseline criteria?
Maybe it starts with identifying what human flourishing is not. What would these student AGIs learn about human flourishing by spending a week watching HBO or Netflix? They would see humans obsessed with power, greed, sex, status, fame, and winning at all costs. Is achieving those thing how most humans imagine human flourishing? I hope not.
There’s a strong Calvinist streak in American cultures that believes humans are utterly depraved. It’s certainly reflected in our popular culture. Is this how the AGIs will come to see us? Is that what they’d learn to emulate? And if we’re better than that, what evidence can we give them? What can we point to that would “inspire” them to emulate the best of us rather than the worst? And if there’s even the remotest chance that they will emulate the worst, why are we ok with that?
So if we can all agree that human flourishing is not, for instance, how Logan Roy’s family pursues it, what is it?
Well, I think we flourish most when we feel deep connection—when we experience joy in communion. Joy in communion with other humans, with nature, with our bodies, with our work in the world, with what is most deeply spiritual in us. All of us have experienced these moments of connection even if just fleetingly. And not nearly as frequently as we would like. Why so rare? What prevents it?
Alienation.
But hat is alienation? What causes it?
It’s the feeling of being cut off from one another, from nature, from our bodies, from our work in the world, and with what is most deeply spiritual in us. We don’t like being alienated. And we’ll do almost anything to relieve it. Like marching with tiki-torches in Charlottesville or storming the Capitol on J6.
“What’s wrong with these people?” you ask. Well, they’re deeply alienated, and they’ve found a way to relieve it. They are looking for communion and solidarity. And the New Right is offering that in a very robust way. And it’s intoxicating.
And this raises another question: How do you persuade them that they’re wrong? What does cosmopolitan Liberalism have to offer them that would inspire them to make better choices? The meritocracy and workaholism?
The most thoughtful people on the New Right see Liberals as suffering from the worst kind of alienation. Are they wrong? Are they really flourishing? It’s ironic that the New Right hates the same thing the New Left hated in the 60s and 70s—the homogenizing, soul-crushing effects of the Technocracy—what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
We’ll come back to this next week, but for now it’s important to understand how this alienation theme is so central to the human condition.
Were humans always alienated? Freud argues that it just goes with being civilized, but old myths talk about our alienation as if it were primal. It’s the story told in Genesis of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden. Or of Plato’s story about human beings use to be four-legged hermaphrodites whom Zeus cut in half so humans are forever feeling cut off from their other half.
They are stories of the beginning of longing and desire—desire for what we lack and longing for what we’ve lost. You cold say that this primal alienation is what gets history started.
So while alienation is baked into the human condition, it started becoming a more acute problem after the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. And by the 1700s, it became unbearable for some. Rousseau in France and the proto-Romantics Hamann and Herder in Germany hated what Enlightenment civilization was doing to human beings.
The revolt against the overly rational, civilized, Enlightenment order was well articulated in J. G. Hamann. He’s the most important German thinker you never heard of. He was well known to all the great German figures of his day from Kant, to Goethe, and Herder. Kierkegaard was deeply influenced by him. Isaiah Berlin in his The Roots of Romanticism says of Hamann--
He was against scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes…for Hamann, of course, creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalyzable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle.
Therefore the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which people wither and die.
It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no stress on that, that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not ‘economic man’, at any rate some kind of artificial toy, some kind of lifeless model, which had no relation to the kind of human beings whom Hamann met and wished to associate with every day of his life. Goethe says much the same thing about Moses Mendelssohn. He says Mendelssohn treats beauty as entomologists treat butterflies. He catches the poor animal, he pins it down, and as its exquisite colours drop off, there it lies, a lifeless corpse under the pin. (pp. 50-51)
He saw the enlightenment ethos as about trading deep, soulful cultural vitality for material prosperity, i.e., trading deep originality for overly civilized cleverness, novelty, and superficial baubles.
And Benjamin Franklin saw something similar in America at the same time:
“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”
--Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3).
No brainer, right? These Puritans in “going native” found something that was already very weak, especially in Calvinist societies like that in New England—a vital sense of connection because Calvinism for most produces alienation on stilts. What did they find when they went to live with the Native Americans: Joy in communion with other humans, with nature, with their bodies, with their work in the world, and with a richly symbolic, meaningful cosmos.
Now if you’ve been receiving this newsletter, you read or can read a more detailed exposition of Charles Taylor’s argument regarding “The Great Disembedding”. In what follows I present a summary of what I said there.
Taylor describes the significance of the shift occurred starting in the mid-millennium BCE called the Axial Revolution. It was the time when in a remarkably transcultural way from China throughout Asia and the middle east to southeastern Europe, great civilizations developed embracing in different ways some idea of the Transcendent Good. This is the age of Socrates and Plato, Taoism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Jewish Monotheism. And it’s the basis for later developments in Christianity and Islam.
Essential for this story is a separation between what Taylor calls the Immanent and transcendent Frames. All these Axial civilizations share a basic insight or intuition: at the heart of reality and sustaining it is a Primal Good. More about that in a moment, but first a few words about life within the Immanent Frame before the Axial Revolution.
Before there is any idea of transcendence, there is a human life within the Immanent Frame. Its primary concern is ordinary human flourishing—long life, good health, many children, bounteous crops, victory over one’s enemies.
All humans throughout history have a deep desire to flourish in this material way. We long for bounty. But through most of their history, humans have lived with scarcity, precarity, and the primal anxiety that comes with them. They developed two basic methods to minimize precarity and to maximize bounty: tools and religion. Tools to help them manage material precarity, and religion to help them manage psychological precarity.
Humans in pre-Axial societies lived in an enchanted world. The immanent frame was swimming with spiritual beings. There were all kinds of deities, nature spirits, elementals, demons. It’s the world of shamans, sorcerers, and sympathetic magic. But these beings have nothing to do with Transcendence. They were creatures contained wholly within the Immanent frame. They were creatures in the same way that humans and animals are creatures in the material world, but they inhabited a dimension that coincided with but was mostly invisible to humans. Some of these spiritual beings were malign, and some were benign. And this enchanted world was mostly a very scary place.
I think of these ancestors living in a world where what we think of as the unconscious wasn’t a thing yet. All the dark demonic forces that are lurking in the depths of our psyches now were unrepressed then. What we think of today as the unconscious was caused by the gradual process of repression that accompanied the ‘Great Disembedding. In a world where humans are still very much embedded, these beings are out and about—in the hypnagogic, quasi-dream world that was their day-to-day reality.
So to manage these anxieties, humans developed transactional religious economies designed to help manage these psychic threats posed by malign spirits. Sacrifices and temple offerings are all about enlisting the help of the benign spirits and placating the malign ones.
So let’s call this use of tools and religion Immanent Humanism. All of the cultural practices, material and psychological—that are designed to promote ordinary human flourishing: long life, good health, many children, bounteous crops, victory over one’s enemies. This is an essential component of human flourishing both then and now. Transhumanists today are just putting their own, postmodern spin on it, but what we find in Transhumanism is an attempt to revert to a Pre-Axial mode of being before there was any awareness of the transcendent. Transhumanism is, as I see it anyhow, a form of technological primitivism. It just uses tech rather than sympathetic magic.
The Axial Revolution introduced what gradually became what I’ll be calling Transcendent Humanism. Those who seek to inhabit the Transcendent Frame acknowledge that there is evil, suffering, and precarity, but they have come acquire a primal trust that at the heart of things, deeper or higher than all of fuss and fury within the Immanent Frame, is the Transcendent Good.
I think that most of us have had this “experience” of the Good one way or another. We acknowledge the suffering, but we also know in a very real way that it’s not the whole story. In the midst of all that seems to contradict it, there is still this possibility for Deep Goodness. You don’t have to be religious to have such an experience of Goodness in this sense, but often people who have it become religious. And that’s what happened for many people 2500 years ago. This was new. Morality before that was only about what have you done for the Tribe lately—any atrocity on committed against ‘barbarians’ was legitimated. Human sacrifice was legitimated as essential for promoting the well-being of the Tribe.
Now, while it was a transcultural phenomenon, there are important differences. Theistic religions understand the Good as having a face. Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Taoism all imagine the Good as faceless.
Now some of you might be thinking that these Axial religions are just something people invented to give them comfort in a world rife with suffering, danger, and anxiety. But what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what tools are for? But I would add that before the inventing, there was the discovery—or the revelation—and then came the inventing. The Good was first an experience, not a theory or a fantasy.
But wait a minute. Aren’t all religions just social constructions? Yes, they are. But first comes the experience of the Primal Good, then comes the social construction. Religion is not primarily about belief in some dubious propositions. It starts in an experience, then comes the theory and the praxis, i.e., the beliefs and the practices that give specificity to a religious tradition. So we see here the universal—the Transcendent Good—particularized in different cultures and societies.
Remember the questions I asked at the beginning?
1. Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?
2. Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?
Isn’t that what we see here a universal affirmation in a Transcendent Good particularized in different traditions? This is the argument that Thomas Plant makes in his book, The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World. He argues that these diverse religious and philosophical traditions preserved their particularity while they affirmed a universal Transcendent Good
So what are the consequences of the Axial Revolution? Post axial societies organize around the polar tension defined by the Immanent and Transcendent in their understanding about what human flourishing entails. They complement one another. Some people go into monasteries in total commitment to align their lives with this Transcendent Good. But most remain situated in the immanent frame as their ancestors did, the world of ordinary human flourishing.
In the centuries subsequent to the Axial Revolution, Plant argues, all the different peoples along the Silk Road had a lingua franca—a shared understanding of the Transcendent Good—that allowed them to respect and converse with one another. The pursuit of ordinary flourishing was still important—people were still greedy and power-crazed, but this new sense of the Transcendent Good had a leavening effect throughout the societies in which it took root.
So this new understanding of the Transcendent Good in all these civilizations creates a new dimension for human flourishing as liberation and salvation. Almost all shared an itinerary of ascent up the Chain of Being toward the One.
Christianity shares this human itinerary of Ascent, as in Dante, but it adds a Divine itinerary of kenosis and descent. This is an important difference, but my task in these lectures is to stress the similarities and where all people of good will have common foundations where they can stand together in solidarity to resist what is coming. The development of solidarity on a global scale it seems to me is essential, but doing it while preserving the particularity of local traditions and customs is as well.
What’s remarkable and significant about the Axial Revolution was itshere is the broad transcultural manifestation over a huge swath of the globe at that time. Why did it take root? Why wasn’t it rejected as stupidly, naively idealistic? This marked a huge shift in human consciousness. Sure, it probably had something to do with the development of alphabets and literacy at that time. And a similar shift into the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe after the invention of moveable type in the 1450s. And we’re currently adjusting to even more astonishing information technologies right now. Shouldn’t we be expecting a similar shift? If it happened before, why can’t it happen again.
And that’s why I’m not against developments in technology. The question is not whether these new technologies are good or bad, but what human ends they will serve. If they serve only the concerns only of the Immanent Frame, as seems to be the case now, we’re likely to go off a cliff. But if they can be brought to serve the concerns of both the Immanent and Transcendent Frames, then a true human renaissance might be possible. This is one of the ideas that Vervaeke is exploring, too.
How and when this might happen, I have no idea. But the infrastructure is there for us even if it lies dormant. And its reawakening is one way that some kind of resistance to the TCM might be effected. Expect the unexpected. So a part of what I want to argue going forward is that this could be the infrastructure for a globalized solidarity that offers some resistance to the homogenizing forces of what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. But more on that next week.
Plant tells the story about how the West gradually fell out of the Transcendence story starting about 700 years ago. That’s the main argument of his book--that we’ve lost our way in the West, but that we can find our way back to the Transcendent Good. Invividuals do it all the time. Is it possible for societies do so? I know how impossible that seems to most of us now, but it could change. It’s there as a forgotten memory, but it’s quite possible that it could be remembered.
As the Great Disembedding gradually progresses through the centuries, a third thing emerges at the same time, that I call The Deep. It correlates with what we think of now as the unconscious, but I think about it more in the broader Jungian sense than the Freudian sense. The Deep develops as the societies disembed from the enchanted world described above. Disembedding is the direct result of people focusing on the Transcendent and organizing their beliefs and practices around this new sense of the Good. Disembedding, in other words, is the process by which individuals and societies begin to look at the phenomena of the enchanted world as unreal and superstitious.
The tension between the transcendent and immanent concerns was always there, and with it the temptation to fall back into embedded, enchanted consciousness, but the cultural leadership of these new post-Axial societies was always exhorting the people to focus more on the Transcendent Good than on the local deities whose help they traditionally sought to promote their individual, material flourishing. We see this similar tension in Catholic societies where the Virgin and the saints are entreated to help deal with life’s material problems.
These mediators of grace made sense in the Neoplatonic framework of the Great Chain of Being.
There was the One at the top, and then all these mediating layers in the descending hierarchies below it. This is why the Radical Reformation takes Disembedding to an extreme. It banished all mediation between humans and God. There was only the individual human standing naked before God and his judgment. Sacraments, saints, angels, hierarchies of being, were all banished, and this cleared the way for the scientific revolution in a way that was unique in the West. It disembedded to a more extreme degree than any of the other post-Axial societies.
But Disembedding, even in the West, is not completed until the 20th Century. Embedded, enchanted beliefs and practices still persisted in the heath—out in the countryside where the old ways had not been completely forgotten. But even those redoubts of enchantment became all but eradicated in the years after WWII.
So the hybrid Transcendent/Immanent imaginary worked powerfully in the West culminating in the 1200s in Europe. It started falling apart in the 1300s for many reasons too complicated to get into here. But the presuppositions of Christian Neoplatonism are rejected and the interdependent dynamic between Immanent and Transcendent Frames breaks down. God increasingly becomes imagined to exist in transcendent remoteness having no intimate connection to his creation, and the earth, and everything on it becomes just stuff, no longer shot through with the divine as in the old Christian Neoplatonic synthesis, a synthesis that culminated in the intellectual and artistic achievements of Aquinas and Dante.
This clears the way for the Reformation whose theologians largely rejected Plato and Aristotle asserting that faith alone was enough without Greek metaphysics. And with Aristotle and Plato out of the way, the Baconian Project could proceed unhindered by a metaphysics that saw the earth and the cosmos as a neutral, unsymbolic, soulless stuff that could be manipulated by humans to promote their material flourishing.
By the Baconian Project I mean the new mentality for which Sir Francis Bacon, the Father of Empiricism, laid the foundation. And with this project is born a new idea that human progress could be effected through scientific knowledge. Nature becomes a thing to be dominated to meet human needs, and you can see how important this is in setting the stage r the co-emergence of Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution in a way that was unique in Europe. It also lays the foundation for what we call today Transhumanism, which has taken the Baconian project to it’s logical conclusion.
So the Baconian Project starts a chain of events that eventually leads to the amputation of the Transcendent Good as a structural principle in the Western metaphysical imaginary. The Transcendent Good is still there in the churches. But the churches delegitimated themselves during a century of barbaric warfare finally ending around 1650 in England and on the Continent.
And the Transcendent Good becomes reduced to a matter of faith understood as associated with implausible propositions rather than as something that the heart knows. And so now with a new empirical standard for determining truth, the propositional beliefs become harder and harder to believe, and the subjective personal experience on which such faith relied for its legitimacy became less and less relevant in the public sphere.
And at some point in the middle of the 19th Century the Transcendent Good stops being relevant altogether among most cultural elites. The Death of God becomes a thing—at first among intellectuals, but during the decades following WWII filters down throughout society. Now it’s a commonplace. And too often where faith seems to be important to the people who profess it, it’s a parody of faith, a form of nationalist idolatry that couldn’t be more distant from the spirit of the gospels they clearly have no understanding of.
But many ordinary people continue to “know” this Deep Good. Maybe even most intellectuals do, even if they don’t think of it as a transcendental. But it’s a subjective thing, a private thing that one does not allow to influence his behavior in the public sphere where his livelihood depends on his ignoring it. The Transcendent Good thus becomes a kind of phantom limb. It’s there as a kind of shadow but with little substantive influence in the way public affairs are managed. People talk all the time about how their opponents are immoral, but their own sense of morality has become reduced to moralistic abstractions, fashions that change from decade to decade. Morality is no longer about becoming Good, but about following rules dictated by prigs on the Left and the Right.
And so in the post-WWII period, the field is cleared for Transhumanism to emerge in ways I’m sure would have shocked Sir Francis Bacon. But it follows from many of his presuppositions. The term was coined by the biologist Julian Huxley in the 1950s, given a new valence in the 80s by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, and declared and organized movement in ’98 in The Transhumanist Declaration.
So with Transhumanism defines human flourishing within the Immanent Frame. The Transcendent Frame or any idea of a Transcendent Good has nothing to do with how Transhumanists imagine the human future. Transhumanists now endorses an ambitious program of species transformation. People should be able to reshape their bodies any way they want and use tech to empower themselves in any way they can afford.
All of these aspirations seem to be good things on the face of them. The problem is not whether using technology to reduce human suffering and prolong life are in themselves bad things, but rather whether they should be the only things that humans care about. What’s the point of living a thousand years if your life is fundamentally meaningless and rife with alienation in the way we described it above? The Baconian Project from its beginning has been happy with a tradeoff that gave us increased material flourishing and decreased spiritual flourishing, and was willing to accept that with the latter came greater levels of alienation, anomie, and meaninglessness.
Material flourishing is a good thing, but it should be pursued within the constraints defined by some idea of the human being as having a spiritual destiny, a destiny that is measured by the degree to which it lives in some alignment with the Transcendent Good. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Baconian Transhumanist Project, absent any considerations for the Transcendent Good, is seducing human beings into a mechanical prison of their own making.
Here's the last point I want to make. Knowing the Good does not require that you be religious. It requires that you have an awakened conscience. Jean Jacques Rousseau was not a fan of organized religion, but this is how he describes conscience in Emile:
Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man's nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts—nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle.
If humans have any hope for a flourishing human future, it lies in people of conscience stepping up to defend the human heritage. And it should be pretty clear that the machines will never develop a conscience if the people who educated them, whatever their beliefs—don’t have one.