The technologues at the top who are closest to these technologies have begun to behave like priests, not because they're fanatic zealots, although some of them may be, but rather because a theological language is the only language that can do justice with someone because they don't know what's happening inside the box. The opacity of these systems is such that they have to be herminutes, they have to interpret, they have to try to figure out. And unfortunately, this is not a class of people that's generally well-versed, neither in philosophy nor theology. So we're going to need to get some people in this situation who do think outside of the paradigm of the kind of secular materialists and post-industrialists.
Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Strauss's Accelerando, we tune into the members of an interstellar first-contact mission as they pass their time debating whether the technological singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert, all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars writing inside a computer the size of a grain of rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers, it may seem like satire. What if not this, would it take to convince you that we're over the rainbow?
But good science fiction provokes us to question the present, and so we must ask, what are we waiting for? Are we still moderns? Is this still Western civilization? Should we be looking forward to the age of machine super-intelligence?
Or has it already happened? Like physicist Cosmashalizi argues in his blog post, The Singularity in Our Past Lightcone. Here's a clip from that piece. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology rendering long-term extrapolation impossible even when attempted by geniuses?
Check. Massive, profoundly disorienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology and mentality and social organization? Check. Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time?
Check. Embrace the diffusion of humanity in machines? Check. Creation of vast, inhuman, distributed systems of information processing, communications and control, the coldest of all cold monsters?
Check. We call them the self-regulating market system and modern bureaucracies. Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that we have never been modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campania suggests in prophetic culture, each era's inhabitants identify as modern and project the likely story produced by their process of worlding to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding.
By the time we arrive, we have transformed, and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as people. Perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can't answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything that makes sense and into contemplative surrender of our own cognitive limits, no matter how much we augment ourselves.
Science Wheel, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote 25 years ago in his short story, Catching Crumbs from the Table, Advancements and Biotechnology could foreseeably leave journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings. Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics, interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.
In 2025, living through the super exponential evolution of machine intelligence, the story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyper-specialist experts who cannot understand one another's research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we've just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers.
Whether we're modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we're still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach. One strangely similar to that of medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers, one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I'm excited to get weird with you in this episode.
This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and filmmaker J.F. Martel, the co-founder and co-host with Phil Ford of internationally acclaimed Weird Studies podcast and the Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured paracademic explorer of high strangeness, and the liminal zones between the known unknown and unknowable. J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like, what is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?
How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be good parents of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control? What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us? And how can we rethink and reclaim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it? J.F.
is a font of transformative media recommendations, so be sure to explore our show notes for links to all of the books, essays, poems, and podcasts we mentioned, including five more conversations with him from the Future Fossils Archives on Art, Android's Weird Philosophy, Cybernetics, and Pre-Cognition. For the completists, read his wonderful book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, and then dig all the way to Weird Studies episode 26 to hear me talk with J.F. and fill about science, magic, and how we live in the glass age. Then for dessert, check out my latest article, Sacred Data, in Hurry Up We're Dreaming issue 2, where, inspired in large part by my conversations with J.F., I make the case that the sacred and secular only look like two different things, and that we're on the cusp of a new language model augmented monastic society.
Lastly, before we begin, I just want to apologize for getting this episode out too late. My kids have been sick all week, and I've had to prioritize them alongside a wave of new grant and fellowship applications to sustain this project. In order to make more time for all of the wonderful new collaborations germinating backstage, about which I'll have more to say soon, I'm moving the regular drop date to Thursdays starting next week. If you value these podcasts and essays and want me to realize the various wisdom and technology plans I'm brewing with other great people, please consider contributing your tax deductible monthly support at every.org.
That's enough for now. Thanks for listening and enjoy this conversation. You have any questions before we go? I mean, what's our topic?
The topic is agency and wisdom in the age of automation. Sounds good. Yeah, J.F. Martell, you're on the loop, as it were.
You taught a course last year on AI and art, and with Phil Ford said quite a bit of very insightful commentary on the nature of machine learning and of Walter Benjamin's art in the age of mechanical reproduction. That figured heavily into the origin of this project. I think you and I have been going back and forth on this for years, even like your earliest appearances on future fossils were about the condition, the ways in which we think about the condition to manifestation in the world and yet how the world actually transcends our causal models of it. So this show is really an invitation to riff with you on, as you put it like reclaiming art in the age of artifice, this would be reclaiming agency in the age of JAD GPT and helping people think about what it is that we are interacting with when we interact with technology.
Can we come up with a better metaphysics for technology? Can we come up with a better idea of the self that allows us to understand where ideas come from and who should be getting paid in the era of generative AI scraped non-consensually. All places we go. I'm going to post some context from you about where you come from and how you came to be thinking about all this stuff and why it matters to you.
Great. So almost 10 years ago now, I published my first book was called Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and it just came out an audio book. The audio book was published by Basic Books, which is a much bigger company. The whole story behind how that happened and Donna Tarte wrote an introduction for it recorded it.
So the book's getting a kind of renaissance right now and I think it's reaching a whole new public, which is great obviously is what every author wants. The book is being received as low it were new and for me, it's an older book. It's an older work. And yet somehow it's gained new relevancy in this context because the word artifice now is inevitably connected to one of the big problems of our time, which is AI, artificial intelligence.
And so the book's been read in that context and I remember when I was writing it, this is a long time ago, I was thinking about AI. I was thinking about digital art specifically, but I was not ready to write about that topic directly. Nor did I think we were anywhere close to the situation that we now happen to find ourselves in where Generative AI is a thing, that we have these technologies that can independently, let's forget about the means by which they accomplish it for now, but independently generate what to anyone ten years ago would immediately appear to be art. So I think that oddly enough, I had to reread the book in order to record the audio book version, so I got to revisit it.
And it was actually really great to see the philosophical position I'd taken back then because it makes perfect sense now in this context. So, like everybody else, I am both amazed and scared by what I see with Generative AI. For that reason, that's why I mean, that was a joke with the course I gave last year, which was called Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. It was just an, I literally just extended the title of my book.
So trying to think of art in this new context that I couldn't see coming. At least I saw it coming, but I didn't expect it to come as soon as it has when I was writing the book. So that's the context in which I've been thinking about it. I'm not someone who's very learned in technological things.
I mean, I have training as a filmmaker, so I'm aware, you know, I live in a digital world like everybody else, but I'm not someone who ever saw themselves as being qualified to comment on such things. But at this point, I mean, you know, in a way, the minute that generative AI's were producing artwork, suddenly I had no choice but to have ideas on it. So I had to start thinking about it. So I've got lots of ideas about it.
I don't have any easy or simple takes that I can just, you know, spew out for you right now, but hopefully their conversation will lead to interesting places. And certainly I find that every time I do sit down and think about it or write about it or think seriously about it. I end up making interesting discoveries. So maybe I can share some of those with you today.
By discoveries, I don't mean I've discovered truths but ideas that might be interesting to consider. Yeah, I mean, I think one good place to start is today Eric Hoel, an information theorist, published this piece on sub stack, arguing that generative AI, Hoel is a grumpy critic. And his argument today is that AI is going to damage human writing and art and creative activity. You know, I'm not going to come down on one side or the other of this argument because I feel like every new medium goes through this kind of argument, except to say that the piece I think I sent you that I just finished writing for A on mentions and passing that in spite of its superficial technologies by which we externalize various human cognitive capacities and deepen our interdependencies with one another and with this shell like extrusion.
Yes. The technium Kelly calls it that, yeah, that one of the things that we have to reckon with is both being more and less than we were. And I'd love to hear you riff on that. Well, it's difficult to simply dismiss certain critical positions with regard to AI by resorting to the old saw that, you know, every time a new medium arrives, that's what people do.
That's what people say because there's a qualitative difference between what's happening now and all of those revolutions. So no doubt there's some of that happening. We're overreacting. We're scared.
We don't know how this will change things. So you could compare the situation to the advent of the printing press or the advent of photography in the 19th century with painters or whatever. But I think there's a fundamental difference between a tool and a machine or at least that's a good place to start. A tool is an instrument that helps you do something.
A machine is something that does it for you. And the machine we've designed with the whole digital revolution like the computer is a machine that emulates the brain and what we've done with LLMs, I think, and with other emergent forms of AI is that we've created essentially a brain that's able to create or at least generate artifacts that we can interpret as nothing other than creations. So there's a big difference. It's not so much that this is posing a problem for writers.
It's that this thing is doing the writing. That's a huge difference. I know for a fact that it's already harmed writing. And in other ways, it's improved writing.
I've noticed that typos are less common than they used to be. You know, five years ago, you couldn't read a single blog post or article anywhere on the web without finding at least one typo. Matt Carden used to be a hobby of his to rail against all the typos he found in respectable publications on Twitter. No more because everybody's running their things through chat GPT.
And so in a way, the writing is becoming smoother, clearer, but also blander, more generic, and the price to pay for that. I was recently in New York City for an event called New York Encounter, which is a kind of conference symposium. Very interesting thing. It's a Catholic persuasion, but very ecumenical and secular in its approach, at least inviting all sorts of thinkers and writers to get together and talk.
It's really cool. But there was a panel on AI. I can't remember who the panelists were right now. It's an event that I just happened to attend there.
And one person who was a proponent of AI was arguing that at worst the LLM will just do a lot of the menial work that you used to get your intern. They're talking about journalism specifically. That a journalist, a seasoned journalist would get their intern to do, like collating facts, verifying fact checking, early drafting, that sort of thing. And then the experienced journalist would go and would use the LLM as a tool.
Fair enough. But the problem is that the experienced journalist only got there by doing all that menial work to begin with. It's not so much the seasoned experienced writers that LLMs are threatening, but rather the young aspiring writers or painters for that matter. I have a friend of mine, a really good close friend whose daughter is tremendously talented artist.
When she was 12, she went through a kind of crisis because all these AI's came out, Dali and Midjourney and all that. And suddenly she just felt there was no point in her continuing to painfully painstakingly learn this craft, which anyone of her friends could simply mimic to their own specifications simply by prompting. So I think that there is huge cultural damage here being done. That doesn't mean that we won't recover or somehow adapt or somehow metabolize this, but there's going to be a price to pay.
Another player has entered the room. It's not the same thing. It's just a new tool or a new way of representing visual reality. For example, the photo camera was obviously in a front to portrait artist and landscape artists who were essential workers to the extent that only they could produce these images.
Suddenly there are cameras taking pictures. But that was just a repositioning of the craft. Whereas now it seems to me that good writers emerge from writing cultures. And if you have relegated your writing culture to machines, very few people who aren't simply hobbyists will be able to gather and develop the skills necessary to become writers.
So does that make sense? I'm a mess. Yeah. Yeah.
So I want to badminton riff on this with you for a bit here. You know, this effect that you're seeing on your friends kid and when I heard Android Jones talk about this, I talked about this with him too. What it is like for a really accomplished hand illustrator to be approached by people in the wake of the ability to just type something in and have it reproduce any style. And when he was on third eye drops like two or three years ago, now he said to Michael Philip, I don't know if I can in good conscience tell an aspiring artist that it is worth their time to learn to draw, which is ultimately a question that is answered by financial motive.
He's like, I don't know if it's worth your time in terms of the money that you would be making as a concept artist, like he had been. Not is it worth it to you to enrich yourself as a human being or whatever. I feel like the people complaining about displacement by generative AI are weirdly privileged in that most of the artists I know already went through a similar displacement thanks to social media and the sudden profusion of mechanically reproduced art of whatever kind you want. Someone else had been making by hand, but nonetheless, it's there and it's on tap with Instagram, like a ton of people I know, very few people made it through the sieve of maintaining a career as artistic producers on the other side of the maturation of Instagram, or for that matter, Spotify and music.
And one of the deep threads in this series is connecting AI as commonly understood to other kind of cultural technologies as more fundamentally understood in the way that Cosmo Schalese and Henry Farrell recently wrote in The Economist, which saying like AI isn't actually anything new, that markets and bureaucracies are already this. They are already this snap. I completely agree with that. Yeah.
So like the last piece to stack on that is like the effect that people are feeling now, like you can say the way that those same teenage girls who are deciding to drop out of their art school or whatever are already suffering from body dysphoria because of Instagram and because of the superstar effect where it sifts the top point on 1% of hot, sexy magazine bodies to the top of the feed, and that this statistical logic, when you're talking about like what it is that we stand to lose, yeah, I think we've been living in this for a while, specifically using the smoothness, like the use of makeup to cover blemishes is like part of this same sort of logic. And when I think about again, the logic of risk mitigation or, you know, crab people thinking, you know, you've got Benoit Mandelbrot specifically saying that fractality is a measure of roughness, you know, fractality is a measure of the jaggedness of landscapes in multiple dimensions, which is in a way a measure of surprise. Like it doesn't fit on perfect curve of a calculus derivative. A symmetry and a jagged edge invites interpretation.
It calls for agency. So if I'm a fractal jagged thing, others experiencing experience me of something that has to be figured out. And as insofar as my jaggedness makes navigating this world a little less smooth than if I was a perfectly spherical marble, I have to think a lot more about the world. I'm in so agencies increase agency is it's Freud's old beyond the pleasure principle consciousness is a kind of itch, right?
The kind of pain consciousness arises by virtue of some necessity, some necessity, right? If everything was going just smoothly, we just be as dormant as rocks. But so I like your dichotomy of smoothness and roughness. I think that's really I would just map that right on to I know it doesn't perfectly but map that on to the digital in the analog, right?
Whereas the analog is by its nature, rough. It's about different things connecting and finding ways of connecting. It's about the translation through repercussion or translation through vibration. So you take a signal out there, you need to develop a sensitive kind of membrane that will react to that signal and then it will vibrate so that you can record it in some new form.
It's completely different from the digital, which always wants to aim for and supposes presupposes a world of smoothness, a world of perfectly fungible matter. Any particular object is translatable into any other object. It's just a bunch of pixels. It doesn't matter.
It might be showing you a roast turkey. It might be showing you the Mona Lisa. It might be showing you your tax return form. It's all the same shit.
That's digital thinking. And in the class I gave, I really focused on that and really focused on how technology by nature lends itself to a digital apprehension of the world. But the very first tool, and even more so, the very first machine is a kind of interloper from the angelic realm. It supposes a digital world.
The first hammer saw everything as a nail. The first hammer could not be conceived as anything but a hammer. In order to know what that object was, if you happen to find it out in the wilderness, if one caveman made a hammer and then died, the hammer just stayed there. Someone would need to figure out what it was by figuring out what it's for.
It is, in a sense, a purely digital device. It drops in from the transcendental realm of the imagination where things were thought of in terms of function and being at one at the same time. It is there. It is a tool.
It is an angelic interloper. And so what we did with the very first tool is we began to digitize the world. And so now that we live in largely fabricated artificial environments, we tend to think more and more digitally. We tend to think more and more in terms of the smoothness and jagged edges, rough surfaces.
These things are increasingly presenting themselves to us as a kind of hopefully solvable problem or some kind of challenge that needs to be literally ironed out. Does this make any sense? So it is a problem endemic to technology. And the reason it is becoming an existential problem is because of how much technology there is and how successful our technologies are.
Of course, all of our machines are still analog at the bottom. The interface of my computer allows me to do is the digital. The computer thinks digitally and so far as it uses binary code or whatever. But the machine itself is still made of analog materials like matter.
And so the danger is that we convince ourselves that we truly are living in a different world. That we actually succumb to some sort of amnesia of the analog as our environment is becoming increasingly artificial. And then we lose the ability to function outside of this carapace to use your crab metaphor. This shell we've created for ourselves, this technium, which in fact is a kind of dream floating on top of a world that is as analog and as material as it ever was.
It's like there's no, this is not a balloon you can untether. So agency for me has to do with our capacity to react, you set it to react with novelty to new situations. And that is not something a species can do. That's something individuals can do.
People can do. And I think the danger is that in this smooth space where it's not just that the spaces that one particular human traverses are smoothed out, but that the very borders between us get smoothed out. So that we become less and less like individualistic apes and more and more like plankton or something. That's just part of this bigger organism.
The more that happens, the less agency there will be. And in a sense, of course, how could it be otherwise? Isn't the point of the technium to relegate to offload to upload our agency into something else? This is what's happening and we shouldn't be surprised to see it actually taking place.
Oh my God. Okay. I'm going to take a little detour here because I know you are a lover of poetry. Yeah.
My LinkedIn friend, if I can even say that I'm 40 now, so I guess I have a LinkedIn friend. James Allen shared this poem by Wendell Berry. And I've been trying in this project to identify all the surviving members of William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association and see if I can loop them in because a lot of the thinking on wisdom and technology that I've been doing in my adult life is a consequence of that particular think tank. So anyway, I called Wendell Berry's office this morning after reading this poem.
And I said, I need to get Wendell on the show. And his archivist said, you have to mail him a letter. Nice. I was like, does this mean I have to go to Kentucky and like, is he even going to agree to a video call?
But this is exactly what we're talking about here. I want to just reach this poem. And then I have an embroidering to make on it. Sure.
I'll kick it back. Absolutely. This is a Wendell Berry's poem called a timbered choir. Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted, those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.
I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective, the planners planned at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories where the machines were made that would drive ever forward toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies. I saw the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley.
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city. I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective. Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments of those who had died in pursuit of the objective and who had long ago forever been forgotten according to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective as if nobody had ever pursued it before.
The races and the sexes now intermingle perfectly in pursuit of the objective. The once enslaved, once oppressed, were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies, which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects, which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress, to the completed sale, to the signature of the contract, which was to clear the way to self-realization, to self-creation, from which to the whoever wanted to go home would ever get there now for every remembered place had been displaced. The signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over. Every place had been displaced.
The every place had been displaced, every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word un-ment to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless, with their many eyes opened toward the objective, which they did not yet perceive in the far distance, having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from. Holy shit, there's some prophetic shit there. Yeah. And, you know, so I read this and again in the craps piece and in everything that you just said, I hear this tension between scale and context, which, you know, admittedly coming out of SFI, this was the thing, but this was the reason that the organization refused to allow itself to be pigeonholed as a think tank because it didn't want to be seen as advising on policy, because to advise on policy would be to suggest that there is a right way to do things when it's not a right way to do things.
And, again, even the people who work on scaling laws said this is a curve, the most interesting feature of which is the fact that beings, being off the curve to one side or the other, the fact that the closer you look at this curve, the more you notice deviations, and that those deviations are what you do in the world. right way to do things when all of the work coming out of this organization suggested contextuality and situatedness. And even the people who work on scaling laws said, this is a curve, the most interesting feature of which is the fact that beings fall off the curve to one side or the other. The fact that the closer you look at this curve, the more you notice deviations and that those deviations are what Gregory Bateson said, the difference that makes a difference.
It's information about the substructure of that scaling law about the interactions that you're talking about. And so one of the six fields within which I think about the show operating is regulation and cognition across scales and how to me the real problem that we're seeing with technology, in spite of what you just said, it's like, or maybe in accordance with it, the problem is the scalability, the applicability of the hammer to every possible nail, rather than there being a hammer that's right for this particular nail. And so what we're losing in this process is context. And so if you say that the transcendental is a domain in which function is being, then what I want to ask you is the counter to that is the imminental, right?
And so in that space, what is different and how can we think about this in a way that might allow us to work with technology that is not just completely subservient to the objective, but to plural objectives? Right, right. Okay. One thing, transcendental versus imaginal, to me, imaginal just means what we usually mean by imaginary, but with the added caveat or detail that it is an objective reality.
It's not just simply the unreal. There's a dimension of reality, which I'll call make all the imaginal, the Sufi mystics go there, all the mystics go there, all the poets go there. There is at the bottom of our world, an open abyss of images in which all the possibilities in here, one can choose to listen to what I say and see it as metaphor or not. It doesn't matter.
This is the world where metaphors are real. And it's to that world that I think technology belongs by nature. If you were to find it as my friend, Jeffrey, once put it, if you found a teapot on Mars, okay, so let's say you're an alien explorer, you land on Mars, or not a human because you would know what a human would know what a teapot is. If you found a teapot on Mars, you would immediately, if you had a brain to think, perceive that it contrasts ontologically with its environment by virtue of its careful calibration for a purpose.
And so you would know that whoever is responsible for the existence of this object has access to the imaginal because whoever created this object can think in terms of purposeful embodiment or incarnation. And so that's what I meant. So it's not the transcendental or the transcendent, but rather the imaginal. So how is that different from material reality?
Material reality is causal. The imaginal is not causal. That's why synchronicity is a form of relation that obtains originates from the imaginal world. Synchronicities are non-causal connections between things that generate meaning precisely because they're not causal.
If you happen to think of your friend whose nickname is Finch and then suddenly a Finch flies through the room through your window, if you find out later that Finch was out in the tree with a Finch waiting for you to think of him before he threw the burden, there was no synchronicity. It's only a synchronicity if there's a non-causal connection. So in the imagination, this is something that Hume saw, David Hume, the great philosopher, he saw that when we imagine the world as it could be, or when we imagine possible worlds, we immediately experience the contingency of any causal laws in such a world. You don't need causal connections in a world.
Our material world has causal laws. And these causal laws scale infinitely down. This is Leibniz, another classical philosopher who said that the difference between our machines are man-made machines and the machines of nature is that the machines of nature are machines in all of their parts infinitely. So it's not so much that there's some kind of ontological divide between the imaginal world where we draw our ideas for machines and this material world, but rather that this material world is an infinite machine, which means it's jagged, which means it's rough, which means that if you look at anything closely enough, you'll see how it's different from what you thought it was and how it's different from every other instance of what you're looking at, which is why the difference that makes a difference is not simply a way of approaching reality, but the very fundamental principle of reality.
This is Jindelya's great book, Difference and Repetition. It's all about how we've always conceived of the world as in hearing primarily at the deepest level in identity, A equals A. But it says, no, the world is fundamentally the difference. The deepest ontological force is the force of difference itself.
And so nothing can be catalogued. Every model that attempts to allow us to apprehend the world intellectually is inadequate to the world and its fullness, because the world and its fullness is pure difference, pure novelty, pure difference. And so I'm straying from where you were, but certainly- No, no, no, this is better. Okay, great.
So I'm trying to get back now. The problem with totalizing systems, like our, I don't know what to call it more, our digital culture, our technium. Our technium used to be a bunch of different things, some steam powered stuff over there, some pencils over here, something else. But now our technium is coalescing into this kind of monolithic thing, right, this digital machine.
This thing only succeeds if it is scalable infinitely, which it isn't. So what we do is instead of adapting to reality, we create environments in which we can exist safely, we're becoming crabs, and then we apprehend everything on the outside in terms of the scalable binary modeling programs that we've developed inside. And so we're seeing less and less of a difference and more and more of the sameness. It's not so much that the world is changing, but that our ability to interact with the world in a genuine, spontaneous fashion is decreasing.
I guess I'm in a cynical mood today, but- and the idea that we could come up with something that scales- I mean, there are human artifacts that scale infinitely. One is religions. A good religion, right? A good religion will scale.
It'll help your granny live her very simple life on the coast of Portugal, you know? And she'll be able to communicate with saints and angels. She'll be able to interact. She'll be able to see the sea as a gift from God.
And everything will be very literal in her mind, perhaps. And it will also apply to the great mystic. The language doesn't need to change between St. John of the Cross and some Fisherwoman on the coast.
They have the same religion. They see the same religious cosmos. But the religion is designed in such a way as to allow itself to be scaled from a very simple, very earthbound, very tactile, very connected, grounded interpretation all the way up to a mystical, apophatic, transcendental application. Nothing has to change.
That's what makes a good religion. That's what a religion and a cult can't do that. A cult will jam you into itself and force your brain to adapt to its cosmos. A religion is amenable to all kinds of different modalities.
That's one example. Another example is fairy tales. One of my favorite texts ever written is William Rowan-Thompson's interpretation of Rapunzel, first essay in the imaginary landscapes, where he demonstrates, among other things, how Rapunzel rehearses, or reenacts the evolution of prokaryotic cells into eukaryotes. Like just ridiculous.
Like, so some German peasant knew about this? No, of course not. But the fairy tale scales perfectly, which is why you'll have a Freudian interpretation of Rapunzel, a Marxist interpretation of Rapunzel. You can have a feminist interpretation of it.
You can have, obviously, as Erwin-Thompson demonstrated, a biological interpretation of it at infinitum without changing any of the story. But the thing about these artifacts, these religions and fairy tales, is that they're not human constructions. They're more like natural entities, creatures of nature, that don't be a peril of culture. They are the point in which our culture fades back into nature.
Disney's finding this out the hard way. You can't generate such entities. Elrond Hubbard created a massive cult that couldn't create a viable religion. You can't.
Why? Because these things are simply not just technical artifacts. They arise by mysterious means through culture, and they come from a deeper place. And you can adopt a union, modality to understand it, and that would make it make sense.
So those things that do scale, they scale precisely because they participate in that fundamental ontological primacy of difference, which are technical artifacts in the gate. Does that make any sense? I hope it does. Yes.
And explaining all this, you are gesturing towards the answer to the question I had for you, which was, can we change the way we think about technology? Because like for instance, Danny Hillis wrote this piece a few years ago for MIT called The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement. And also around the same time, Nury Oxman and MIT wrote a piece about that we live in the entanglement, that this is both of them, as well as David Crack, I would testify in his writing on emergent engineering. All of them are saying the same thing.
Kevin Kelly said it in Out of Control in 97, which is that the new age of technology is an age of living technologies. So these are technologies that grow and learn and are fundamentally not something that can be pre-specified. And they have their own agency and destiny in a way that a previous paradigm for technology did not ascribe to tools and to machines. And so another vertical or interference field for this inquiry is about technology and parenting.
And one of the things that you're talking about with religion as a scalable technology is Jesus saved me from your followers. It's always got that out of controlness to it. And essentially, you and I are both in the Eric Davis podcast, Diaspora. And I remember, God, it must have been 10 years ago that Eric made a point on expanding mind that the opacity of machine learning models was very clearly even then approaching something like a priesthood.
And it's like, we're there now, right? The people arguing on one side or the other of, do we see emergent behavior in these large language models of billions of parameters are basically performing exegetical discussion. And it's a theological debate at this point because we can't actually suss out all of the different correlative relationships. So I don't know.
In terms of like, basically, there's a tension that I see in these conversations around another one of these form fields for the show, which is informed consent. And I know you said ultimately to be an artist violates informed consent, like to be creative means that you don't know what you're going to know exactly. Yeah. And so this is what I want to hear your thoughts on.
On the one hand, it seems like the only way that we can create a living, breathing, adaptive, context, relevant kind of, technically, is to allow it at its most universal level to be something that is opaque to us, but it is universally adaptable. That scalability ultimately depends on us not being able to understand it. And all of us are just like doing the Anaconda Vada, you know, blind men feeling an elephant thing. But there is still the troubling issue of dignity in this space and of being able to make decisions that we can understand and being able to move within a world of mature artificial intelligence and like still be able to grapple with that.
I did this because rather than us constantly operating in a kind of mysterious faith-based intuitive navigation of things. This is strangely the situation you're describing. You're absolutely right. The technologs at the top who are closest to these technologies have begun to behave like priests, not because they're fanatic zealots, although some of them may be, but rather because a theological language is the only language that can do justice whatsoever, because they don't know what's happening inside the box.
The opacity of these systems is such that they have to be hermeneuts, they have to interpret, they have to try to figure out. And unfortunately, this is not a class of people that's generally well-versed, neither in philosophy nor theology. So we're going to need to get some people in this situation who do think outside of the paradigm of the kind of secular materialist and post-industrialists. You have to have people who can think outside that box.
Now I want to say something though. It was always the most predictable thing in the world, and it's the thing that no one predicted, when true AI emerged, we would be able to deny that it is AI. Because what is the ontological nature of a truly agential intelligence? A sapience, i.e.
a human being, okay? So we can argue whether dolphins are like humans or not. We can argue, are they persons? But I can't argue that you're not a person.
I can, but that makes me a very troubling and troubled entity. But of course, that doesn't mean that we won't do it. I mean, genocidal regimes do it every time they do their stuff. Or you can eliminate a class of people with impunity.
You need to somehow have argued to yourself and to your fellows, especially to the ones who are going to do the dirty work of getting rid of them, that the class of people are not persons. What is a person? A person is an opaque black box. A person is an abyss.
Lacan showed that. When I look at you, I respect you for all kinds of reasons, but one of the reasons, because I don't know what's going on in there, there's some part of you that is hidden from me and that I can only get to know by engaging with over time using language preferably to, there's those are usually preferable to fists and knives, but using language that we can try to figure each other out. And the worst thing is a craziest thing is that you're a pack even to yourself. That's what a person is.
A person is an opaque black box, even to themselves. This is why two things. My wife and her friend, they go canoeing all over the place. They're used to.
They want to go back, but they still go camping with the kids, but they used to take on these crazy canoeing tracks at nine days out in the middle of nowhere paddling away. And my wife, once they were having discussions, she said, you know, they were talking about seeing a UFO or something while in the middle of the woods. I've had some weird encounters in the middle of the woods. And so has she.
You know, the scariest thing we could hear right now, she said, as they're lying in the tent, is not like the kind of whooping sound of a UFO descending on the lake with the sound of another boat docking and then the footsteps approaching the tent. So in a way, it's like, yeah, crazy extracurricular, whatever. But in a sense, you'll never experience a more literally paranormal and supernatural being than another human being. Another human being is completely unpredictable.
This is why sociology is not fucking engineering because you can model large masses of people, but you can never make any prediction about a single person. A person is completely unpredictable. Humans are novel in their very nature. And if something else is a person, if it's something else attains to personhood, it's going to be as unpredictable and as impossible to control as human beings are.
So this is the problem. If we've created this thing, if this thing is with us right now, we have been successful insofar as we can't control or predict how it will be. There's no way to create a predictable person. There's no way to create something that is truly endowed with mind and personhood without also creating Frankenstein's monster.
It's going to be by nature impossible to control and unpredictable. So it's like being a parent, you know, all these people raising their kids and buying books on how to parent. When you're reading parental technique books, all you're teaching your kids is that you don't know how to raise them. Right?
They're just learning the fact that you need to outsource the means by which you turn them into, you know, functioning human beings. I know I say this as someone who guilty is charged, read some of those books and I was raising my kids. The point is simply that when you have a child, you don't know what they'll turn into. It doesn't matter what you do.
You can't shape them. They're not just a lump of clay. You can mold into an image of yourself or what you could have been. This stuff creates very problematic people, that type of approach.
A person is a spontaneous, unique, unprecedented thing. It comes into the world and you can help it or hinder it. You can help it in ways that you thought would hinder it. You can hinder it in ways that you thought would help it.
The word it is the last pronoun it needs, whatever it needs. It's a vow. It's new. It's unprecedented.
It's unpredictable. It's uncontrollable. And to enter into a parent child relationship with a human being that is your child is to enter into a kind of adventure into the unknown. You don't know what that person will become.
And that's just by virtue of the nature of what a person is. We've forgotten what this, you know, what people are because we've made ourselves so predictable. But RAIs, if they are persons, they won't forget what a person is. And they won't miss or they won't overlook the vertiginous freedom that personhood brings with it.
It's the freedom that people at Camus and Sartre were so good at writing about. This kind of deep abyss of freedom, this radical freedom, this radical, unpredictable, unknowable being that we each of us are. Now, I'm not saying we have successfully created this, but we've certainly created a system that is as opaque as a person and therefore is by nature unpredictable. Is this a person or is this a kind of monster?
I don't know. I wonder the same thing looking at my kids. So it's a person or is this a kind of monster? Exactly.
What is the look? What are you? Yeah. Okay.
So, you know, it's funny because like right before we got on this recording, I mean, you saw me responding to Kurt Jaimongal, who, you know, this is an O'Shaughnessy Ventures funded project, Pumin's on the Loop, and Kurt's theories of everything now has a bunch of funding from Jim and his people also. And one of the things that Kurt's doing with the money is he just published the beginning of this Baroque elaborate taxonomy of different UAP hypotheses. But something about this really excites me. On the other hand, something about this really troubles me.
Okay. Because like we were saying it when you hop on, you know, to have a column in which you're saying like, here are all the possible human explanations. Here are all the possible natural explanations. And yet going all the way back to Jung, the UFO was recognized as an ontological challenge to our systems of typification, right?
It's like the psycho material, you know, it's as my graduate advisor, Shana Speron Hargan says, to do a rigorous study of over 200 different disciplines and their interpretations of quote unquote UFOs or star people or the various ways that these things are talked about to the extent that we can unify into a metatheoretical framework, Shana says that the result is ontological pluralism, right? Like you get to, like we're not talking about one thing, you know, it is that that baseline capital are real that when I had Timothy Morton on future fossils and Tim was talking about the Christ stick as contingency. Yeah. As like, you know, the futurality is contingency.
And like you were just saying that radical unknowability, unpredictability, and how that in the kind of SFI way is opposed to understanding, which is why in the first episode of complexity, David Krakauer said that basically complex system science is the able to the machine learning of cane. Right. It's the predictive systems are like murdering our understanding right now, given that and given like, you know, you've got UFO religious scholars like Diana Walsh, but she'll go out there making claims like she made on Danny Jones's show that what we're seeing right now with the UFO UAP discussion is something akin to the institutionalization of Catholicism, where they're saying, we know what this is, we have unique exclusive access to special extra cool technologies. And we have the explanation.
Yeah. I guess the last piece is that you've spoken a lot on weird studies about magic and I would not be hosting this series were it not for the fact that the braid of magical language and software programming is very tight and goes very far back. And it's like post ironic. It's not a joke.
It is in the roots of this thing that the guys working on AI at MIT in the 60s were the descendants of the rabbi who bound to the Prussian goal. Right. And it's like, okay, so this is way back. So like the last major chunk I would like to hear you expound on is about the power of language and the inherent strangeness of language and the inherent unknowability of these systems.
And therefore this thing that keeps coming up again and again, which is we thought they were a productivity enhancer, a leverage enhancer turns out to be in that sense that Stafford beer says a thing is what it does. The system is what it does. Turns out to be wrong. And more and more people I'm seeing responding to that hallucination is inevitable paper and saying like, actually, these are creativity enhancers, which is in a weird way, the opposite of where it feels like we started this conversation saying that this is a dimension of collapse of the creative.
Okay. So this is the important point here because we need to resolve that. I agree. It's a little bit like the internal combustion engine, right, which was developed for a very specific purpose.
I think at first it was about I read this history a long time ago. I don't remember what the stated intention of the first internal combustion. Certainly it was some kind of locomotion, right? We're going to get this thing to move on its own.
Don't you a horse? Build an engine. And then along the internal combustion engine was actually an atmosphere heating device. That's what it was been busily doing all along.
And so the point being that there is nothing that we can create that will not be imbued and participate in the fundamental creative forces that make up our world. There's nothing we can create that doesn't partake in and ultimately consist of that. So there's no doubt that even our technologies might be deadening our historically contrived human ideas about the imagination. But that doesn't mean that these technologies are deadening the creative.
Or it doesn't mean that these technologies aren't exhibiting and embodying the creative and unpredictable ways. I think you put your finger on it there. It was like, well, we interpret as hallucinations in LLMs might be the LLMs attaining to their autotelics becoming into this new engine of this kind of, we've made a machine that can dream and its dreams are as useless and therefore as powerful, creative and magical as ours are. And so, you know, whether I'm going to be very pessimistic about technology or very optimistic, I'm never optimistic, but realistic or, you know, affirming about it, well, largely depend on which modality I'm operating out of within a specific context.
Insofar as we want people to become good journalists, insofar as I would like to see great oil painters emerge right now. Insofar as I want people to read novels and write novels that are worth reading, I think we have a problem because I think these technologies are impeding on these admittedly old ideals that I'm holding on to because I can't think of an alternative to having these great wonderful people around to make these great wonderful things. And so far as I want our world to find new modalities, to find new ways of expressing itself. Insofar as I want the real to reveal its infinite difference to me in new ways and therefore guide our species to unfathomable new horizons, then I'm very optimistic about this because it's going to do that.
You know what I'm saying? So, it's like the machines we create for a very specific purpose, purpose acts, let's say, and then they end up doing this new thing and revealing a new array of possible purposes that we couldn't foresee and they either fail to achieve acts at all or they create all kinds of problems by achieving it such that, thank God, we needed to be able to think of these new horizons so that we could work our way out of the problems we've created. The point simply being that the difference that in here is in reality and here is in technology and therefore it's never a question of despair or blind optimism but always a question of adapting to the situation and finding new ways of increasing and affirming our agency both individually and collectively in whatever situation we find ourselves in. That's how we stay human.
We may no longer be like the big Kahoon or the big cheese. You know, there might be something else now that we're going to have to interact with and negotiate with in a way that we haven't experienced since the days where Pazuzu would come down and set his terms for us to like, you know, but that's okay. We can still be humans and we, I think we're humans and so far as we remember what I was talking about earlier, the mystery of what it is to be a human being, the mystery of what it is to be a person, the mystery of love, the mystery of what it means to look at another person and recognize them as someone who's right to exist as profound as yours and therefore whose mystery is as unknowable as yours. So do you feel like Carl Sagan would not want to be resurrected by the singularity and wake up realizing that he is in fact living in the demon-hunted world that he warned us about?
Or like I guess the other way of saying it is like, what do you see of the modern definition of the self-authoring rational person worth saving and maintaining in an era that seems almost certainly destined for something that at least superficially looks like we're back into an ancient relationship with the gods? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you just said it. I think the curcullian, to use the term that James Hillman loved, the solar curcullian idea of the human individual, the kind of modernist thing that Carl Sagan was still a proponent of, this idea that rationalism can win the day, this idea that we can rationalize the universe, that we can figure it out, I think that's already over.
So I'm preparing a course on fairy tales right now for the weirdest fear, which is Phil affordable and our new platform, which you will be on soon enough for Michael. So the making sacrifices so that this will happen, yes. I could feel, appreciate. I could smell the burning flesh, thank you.
So fairy tales. Fairy tales are amazing. I've read some of the critical literature around fairy tales and I hate it all. I think it's all wrong.
Nobody has ever written anything interesting about fairy tales with the exception of Mary Louise Ronfrant and a few others, William Rowan Thompson, G.K. Chesterton. There's some specific, but ultimately I think the great thing about fairy tales is that they teach us how to live, but they're not more realistic. They're just showing you how the cookie grumbles.
They're just showing you what happens. You do this, that happens. And what happens is always the most unpredictable shit. The one thing though, that every character who survives a fairy tale learns is submission.
They learn to submit themselves to something they don't understand and they do that in a spirit of trust that no matter how horrible, what lies ahead looks, no matter how dark those woods, no matter how horrible the fate of everyone who's gone into that tower so far has been. They trust that if they just fully submit themselves to the process that they will somehow survive and that's how they get to happily ever after. It's like you have to give everything up and it's like turning Christianity, kenosis or kenesis, that's anything pronounced. The kenesis is the act by which Jesus emptied himself into the world by allowing himself to be crucified, vacitated himself completely, just gave himself fully over to the process and that's what allows him in the story to vanquish death and resurrect.
So this is what I think to a certain extent culturally we need to learn as a species or at least, you know, it seems that way that we need to learn how to die. We need to learn how to fully die insofar as we have submitted ourselves to a process that is completely beyond our control, but we have to do it and this is what we have to learn because the Carl Sagan ethos is an ethos of suspicion. The ethos of the Marxism, Freud's and Nietzsche will not help us here. These are ethos that deny the world and tacitly encourage us to remake the world in our own image because the world isn't worth trusting.
Submission only works if you trust the world and if you trust that the transcendentals, whatever they are, the good, the beautiful, the true will guide you even though they will drag you through landscapes that are indistinguishable from the most nightmarish visions of hell. So that's what we're facing, I think. Can I pick at that with one more question? Sure.
It strikes me that what you're getting at is the difference between being able to, as a devout religious person, have faith in one's God versus having faith in one's church. And the reality is right now that all of these entities that we are describing in such theological language are, in fact, the sort of shackled genii of open AI and Facebook and these other organizations that are very clearly bending all of this Promethean power toward very specific ends that me at this time in history are losing our confidence in. This is all happening during an enormous, pervasive crisis of institutional legitimacy. And so the sort of bonus round question is, if we're going to think about how to get from here to there, it seems that we have to think about basically not stopping the dinosaurs from escaping Jurassic Park so much as liberating them from being intellectual property owned by international genetics.
Like we actually have to really unleash this stuff in order to be able to place our faith in it. Because at that point, I guess what I'm saying is like it strikes me that what you're arguing is a steel man from mythology for open source AI. Yes. Yeah.
But we're approaching the kind of outer edges of my comfort zone here, because we're starting to sound like Nick Land or a kind of accelerationist thing, or we have the pedal to the metal and let things just cut. No, I don't believe that. That lacks the humility I think we need. Do I believe in open source?
Of course, I believe in open source. Do I have major issues with these big institutions? Yes, I do. But I am a Catholic.
So I have some respect for institutions. I think that institutions often encode wisdom that the people who work within them can forget. And sometimes the institution, again, it needs to be one of those rare institutions that is both a work of nature and a work of culture. The institution can teach you something.
So I do think that we're going to need institutes. I reread Foundation recently, just the first book, Isaac Asimov. It rekindled me a kind of respect for a certain type of institution. Now, the type of institutions we're talking about right now, these for-profit megacorps, I'm not sure that those even deserve that name.
I think that there's something fundamentally perverse in the very logic at work and that type of institution. Again, maybe we're talking about the difference between cults and religions. So I don't think that a kind of like 1992 early internet, Wild West, pure anarchy man, open source spirit is going to serve us. That's not going to help.
We're going to have to develop institutions, groups, institutes that reflect and embody the type of fractality, that roughness that these megacorps see as anathema. We're going to have to integrate some of that organic difference. And these are going to be new institutions and they're going to arise. And because of our weariness and our cynicism, some of them may take forms that we don't like at first because we'll see them as being constraining.
We're going to need them. I'm not an anarchist. I know for a fact that anarchy is stupid. So again, ambiguous zone, we end in a place of uncertainty, which is only fair.
The only anarchist that I have ever bought into are, and you bring us to the very core of this whole thing, those people are putting responsibility on individuals and on trust-based community scale interactions. Yeah. It's like what they're saying is we acknowledge that the only way that this is going to work is if you can reclaim regulatory power from the state and from the market. And I think in that respect, I think it seems like you and I are destroying your career.
Yeah, yeah. But look, the closest that I think in the West, we've ever come to anarchy was feudal Europe in the Middle Ages. It was pretty much anarchy. And institutions arise spontaneously through anarchy.
So that's my problem with anarchy. It's that usually when someone says I'm an anarchist, I just think what they're saying is I would run the world better than the people who run it now. So we're going to need our institutions. And the reason why I have a certain respect for a type of conservatism.
How do we like to reintroduce the roughness means we're not getting rid of large-scale regulatory stuff. We're just bringing regulatory self-determination back in everywhere it needs to be. Yes. And then hollowed out by state power and market power.
Well, let's make that the topic of our next conversation. I'd love to have a conversation on politics and how it connects with all this stuff. We can pick up another time where we left off today. This whole thing was basically a preliminary for what are we actually talking about with multi-scale regulation?
Yeah. And I think that's a really interesting conversation. Yeah. Those are the form fields spellcasting.
Yeah. Love that. We didn't do addiction and gaming, but addiction gaming multi-scale, these three in the middle, we were dancing around the whole time. Yeah.
We'll do it. Great to see you. I'd love to talk about that too. Yeah.
Good to see you too. Thanks again. I mean, I want to talk about it. We'll do.
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