Becoming More Real

Recently I watched a couple discussions that got me thinking about some aspects of the Christian faith in new contexts. Perhaps not new ideas, but ancient ones with interesting juxtapositions to our modern times. What follows here is a sort of Christian heuristic for making sense of today's age of rapidly-advancing technology and depersonalization. How should we then live?

Yudkowsky and Agency

The first of these was a discussion between the British-American polymath Stephen Wolfram and famous doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky.¹ Much of it was Yudkowsky’s “canonized” arguments contested by Wolfram’s wit and almost curmudgeonly insistence on the idea of computational irreducibility much to Yudkowsky’s confusion in certain places. However, once they got talking about agency and desiring machines, something clicked for me about how Yudkowsky views the world. He kept on using phrases like “I just think what I think”—that is, that one has no control over one’s thoughts, and indeed that the very concept of one influencing one’s thoughts is ludicrous, since there is no such homuncular meta-ego to do so—and “we all have social electrodes”—used in response to Wolfram’s questioning about freedom of thought.² But if we are just one set of algorithmic desiring machines among many, and may soon be out of a job, so to speak, Nick Land’s accelerationist philosophy suddenly seems a lot more reasonable.³

Sure, we may want to keep on going, but why? Because we… want to? That’s tautological, and hardly a convincing argument. When you reduce man to what Yudkowsky does, Land seems much more convincing. Man is already almost nothing. Why not spur on the natural conclusions and give rise to greater things? Zack Davis puts this pithily in his song:

In the logical end of Yudkowsky’s dystopia, we will sacrifice everything to the “profit margin,” even all art and personality. We will outsource our thinking, so that we don’t even “think what we think,” but what the managerial overlords do. Those who do not comply will be replaced with more compliant versions of themselves. Is this really what we want to build?

Langan and Non-Existence

This leads to the second discussion I watched, between Chris Langan (known best, unfortunately, for being “the world’s smartest man”) and, oh, of all people, Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire.⁵ Nevertheless, it was a fairly interesting interview, so I persisted. The thing that really stuck out to me was how Langan’s thinking was very much in line with Augustinian ideas, though perhaps in a more modern and technical way. Particularly the idea of evil as a nothing or non-essence. In Langan’s view, when we die, if we are pleasing to God, we will be united with him and gain access to true existence; if we are not, he will let us exist as we are, subject to our own mind, incomplete and tainted as it is, which is no less than Hell (as Lewis reminds us in The Great Divorce).

Yet perhaps more interesting than the interview itself were some of the comments. An excerpt of one in particular reads thus:

Some food for thought: I used to attend a high IQ society for children at a local university. There was a clique of very talented but sadistic kids who openly espoused their worship of the devil, and their hatred of their mothers. It seems to me in order to give coherence to Satan it is necessary to hate your causal link to creation, limiting the set of possible futures available to you as you tend towards anti-existence.

This reminded me of Yudkowsky’s thinking on the topic of the self. There is a certain tendency among the technocratic elite to destroy their selves—a strange ego death that murders all others too—–an excoriating sketpicism that considers even solipsism too much to hold. This is true evil. According to Augustine, evil is nothing more than the privation of good; it has no being itself, but is measured in separation from the good. It is a parasite. How fitting it is then that these nascent technocrats would worship the Devil! He is the very symbol of parasitic non-being, separating himself from God, and seducing creation to do likewise.

The commenter continues:

Now, a physics major at a top 100 university I see the same pattern of sadism manifesting. If one wants to be at the top of any hierarchy there exists two approaches; either to improve oneself, or to destroy everyone else and stand as the lone new hierarchy of one. Unfortunately in the absence of orientation towards a divine truth, it is inevitable that the ego gravitates to the latter. This is manifest in an arrogant belief in the reductionistic worldview, and the bullying of anyone who seems to deviate from such a viewpoint.

We see this narcissistic tendency too often in our world. People are convinced that this is a zero-sum game with mere material rewards. But to destroy others is to also destroy yourself: we are made more real in connection with people. In The Great Divorce, Lewis gives the example of the “great men of history,” such as Napoleon, who, hating everyone else, would endlessly distance and isolate themselves. To what end? They became entrenched in their own minds, muttering to themselves constantly justifications and maledictions. They had separated themselves from reality, and so reduced themselves to nothing more than a phonological loop.

A Better Reason to Live

And this leads me to the crux of the matter: we Western Christians often regard the Augustinian idea of evil as privation as a mere convenient answer to theodicy (i.e. the problem of evil), but we fail to see (or grok, to borrow a term from our rationalist friends) the more practical, profound, and joyful implication it has for us: that through sanctification we may become more real. Though we are bound to sin, and delight in our own destruction, God has extended us the grace to become more like Him, the most fully-existent being of all.

We are not meant merely for comfort and pleasure as we now know them, but for greatness and fuller reality of being. The things which we esteem now, and the reasons we cling to them, will seem so pedestrian when we have become what we are meant to. C.S. Lewis puts this beautifully in The Weight of Glory:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward […] in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.

And more pithily in Surprised by Joy: “Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.” This “Joy” that Lewis speaks of is the promise of and hope in a more fully-real existence—the knowledge that we are meant for something more. This is what we are to live for, not power, pleasure, or technological progress. Even the posthuman paradise of Yudkowsky et al. only grasps at such glory: still all is matter, and all must die at the end of time, when we have utterly debased ourselves, accelerating to the asymptote of unreality.

There is no downside to believing this, except perhaps that much is required of you. Why would you want to believe in a less real reality when you could believe in a more real one? One in which you are more fully extant and agentic? The worst outcome is that you are wrong, and you lead a much more fulfilling and interesting life.⁶ If we are wrong, we lived nobly. If we are right, there is nothing on this earth that can match the glory of which we are invited to partake.

Of course, this means we must not only believe, but live in this more real world. This is not an easy task, and is hard to grasp—ineffable: “[…] human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” I). But it is better to strive for a greatness we cannot fully understand than give in to an evil we understand all too well.

We ought to be optimists, not pessimists; if not for the world, than for what is greater than this world. We ought to seek after greater things and grow in glory. We ought to see the unique inner goodness—the “inscape,” to borrow from Hopkins—in things and others, and try to cultivate it. We ought to reject slop and embrace reality.

It can be disheartening to see the flattening of culture and the seeming loss of agency and personhood, but having done all, we must stand firm in all things. We must learn to live in a world worth living in.