Month: April 2026

The Transhuman Religion, or The Limits of Machine Intelligence

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Machine intelligence promotes a religious doctrine. Or, rather, it replaces a cosmic vision with a simulation of cosmic order. It overlays a universe of unfathomable depths with a closed and predictable vision of the universe. It spreads a doctrine of perfection, control and power over the real world. And this doctrine is as invisible as a plastic transparency placed over a projected image. We can’t easily peel the real from the false, which make us susceptible to this religion’s dogmas.

Essentially, programming is subliminal missionary work. It substitutes a life-oriented morality of “good” and “evil” or “healthy” and “diseased” with a mechanical morality of ‘the useful” and the “the useless”, or “the valuable” and the “the worthless.” It preaches an inanimate universe, which requires external manipulation.

The profane transmutation of a living being into an object of manipulation is a substitute form of Mass. The cries of the tortured pervert the worshipper’s last traces of sorrow and empathy into pure sensation, the most addictive and unholy substance. More and more pain is needed to keep the sensation from ending, which would reveal the true horror of oneself to oneself. In this way, an orientation to hell is created. A hell for living things; a heaven for the machine itself.

This is how the congregations of hell are formed; by perversion and substitution.

The algorithms are the established norms of worship. They offer unholy sacraments of wish-fulfillment. Porn sites, for instance, are extremely popular substitutes for worship. By imbibing in the algorithm’s endless pleasures, the human is reduced to a generator of desire, a battery for powering the machine itself. By losing oneself in the algorithmic dance, worshippers imbibe the spirit of sociopathic machine logic.

These mechanical moralities and dogmas are part of the machine’s program, even in the absence of bad intentions. No matter how the machine is programmed, it spreads this viral immorality.

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Life as Disappearing Ink

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Everyone is already writing their lives with disappearing ink (whether as auto mechanics or second basemen, or writers, and so forth). Everything we do will evaporate and be unrecallable after a few years, decades at most. So, we’re all using evaporating ink, readable only for a short while.

But I think most of us tend to feel that we are doing something meaningful or “necessary”, even though many of us know that “personal legacy” is an illusion. So, for many the need to do something meaningful has nothing to do with creating a personal legacy. It’s unrelated to the length of time the ink of our activities remains visible.

Let’s test this.

So, now let’s reduce the ink’s lasting mark to only 1 year. If you and I knew that everything we’re going to do would disappear in 1 year – that our names would be forgotten, our children and grandchildren would forget us (which they do after a generation or two or three at most), would we still put our heart into what we’re doing?

My feeling is that about 95% of us would stop being motivated if we knew that every trace of our good name would disappear from consciousness in one year. But five percent would probably continue. (I’m basing this guess on the 3.5% rule, and rounding up to 5%. This rule essentially identifies the critical mass of a population necessary for revolution. I’m projecting this “rule” as a general mark for how many people at any given time are radically motivated to act on behalf of something larger than themselves, including a world that extends beyond their own spilled ink).

Why would 5% continue to “write” their lives if they knew their work would disappear so quickly?

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Language as Healing Magic, or Defeating the Witchery of a Machine Mind

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Introduction

Negative (or “alchemical”)  inquiry performs real work.

It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.

These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.

Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.

After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.

A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.

These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.

But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.

This transforms contradiction into paradox.

A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.

In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.

Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.

Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.

And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”

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The Mufti and the Ten-Year-Old

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I want to share a video of a ten-year-old Islamic boy. There is something about this child that stands in stark contrast to the children I tend to see in America. I don’t mean this as a judgement against our own children. But in watching the video, or in knowing something about the many indigenous American cultures, a deficit in the general American culture can be seen.

I think it’s good to notice the beautiful qualities of a people that we are intent on “bombing back to the stone age.” (I know the video is not about people from Iran. But this war is being sold to the US soldiers as a war against Islam).

And I think it’s healthy to recognize deficits in ourselves to balance out all the one-sided stories we hear in our own propaganda machines.

Here is the video of the Mufti and the boy: https://youtu.be/13UZJbaVSSE?si=NaLHmREBrIXurnV6

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Matthew Cooke: Does Israel Have the Right to Exist? Does Any Nation?

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I’m providing a link to a tremendous video essay by Matthew Cooke — in fact, his entire channel is superb. And I’m going to add links to some other excellent channels at the bottom.

This video adds great informational and analytical heft to what I’ve been trying to say about nations and identity, and especially with regard to Israel.

Here is the foreword to the video provided by Mr. Cooke: “Does Israel have a right to exist? Does any nation state? The concept of nations, with standardized language, culture, identity is brand new — less than 250 years old. Einstein called nationalism a disease. The measles of mankind. Instead of providing human rights, protections, nationalism has locked the world into an escalation trap, at a time we need to cooperate more than ever.”

Here is the essay — “Does Israel Have the Right to Exist? Does Any Nation?”

I would also like to recommend the following youtube channels:

  1. Carefree Wandering: “Rambling without Destination. Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D’Ambrosio, author of “You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”.
  2. Barry’s Economics: “I’m Barry. I went bankrupt after 17 years as a comedian, spent five years, squatting, sometimes homeless, paralysed, then built Angel Comedy – one of London’s most popular and sucessful comedy clubs. The breakthrough? Unlearning the lie that my poverty was my fault. Now I use behavioural science and neuroscience to show you the invisible systems that keep people stuck: how poverty traps your psychology & why the current system needs you to blame yourself. This channel, inspired by Gary’s Economics [also excellent], is an ongoing investigation into how power really works. We’re figuring it out together.