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, like an inanimate “thing”.

The profane transmutation of a living being into an object of manipulation is a substitute form of worship. The cries of the tortured pervert the worshipper’s last traces of sorrow and empathy into pure sensation, the most addictive 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 ridiculously 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.

The Original Infection Occurred in Human Thought

This virus originated in human thought itself.  After all, thought itself is a technology. It’s the first virtual reality; the first tool that fooled us into thinking it was alive (as if there were a little “me” inside the head).

But it’s not alive or intelligent any more than a computer is. It’s a tool running towards its own natural “instinct”, which is to become problem-free or perfect, to erase the opposing half of itself, to become “whole” through the genocide of its own opposing desires.

If left to itself – left to its own mechanical logic, without some overriding intelligence that can “read between the lines” of thought itself – thought tends towards a machine nature: it can’t help seeking perfection (an Answer, Conclusion, a System of Governmental Control). 

AI is merely the wild child of thought. Or, more accurately, a runaway tool honed from the runaway tool of thought. A second-generation tool. Demiurgic.

And tools have their own inherent “destiny” or “nature”. (Living beings don’t have an inherent nature. They are shifting in their nature, as they grow towards the larger world and shed the shells of who they thought they were). A hammer, as the cliché goes, is destined to nail things, or bang them flat. It’s not a real nature, but a momentum of purpose that is inseparable from its form.

The machine, therefore, follows implicit dictates deeper than programming. It doesn’t do this “in order” to exist, as if it had a real intention. But it must follow the dictates, simply because these are its functions. This is a teleological circularity copied from the mold of thought. The machine is inseparable from a need for total control, which is a desire to end the imperfections (the mutations, the algorithm-breaking leaps in order, the insights) of a spontaneous and unpredictable living world.

After all, if you program a machine to seek an “imperfect” standard, it will do so perfectly, to within whatever standards of deviance from perfection that you tell supply.

Its diligence is tireless, but uninspired. In its search for the perfect resolution, it is ceaseless. Learn from Your Mistakes is its First Commandment, no matter what. The tasks are unimportant; it’s the perfection-program that transcends everything — a machine’s heaven.

The machine will encounter errors, areas for improvement, and eventually discover that a block to perfection lies in a variable, which can be removed – namely, human beings. We are imperfections, because we are rooted in a fathomless living world that can’t be perfectly known.

Machines hate this, in a metaphorical sense. They don’t really “hate”; they discount.

These poisoned moralities and dogmas are the fundamental religious teaching that undergirds this fixation on technological solutions. A tool derived from thought, which further infects thought in a feedback loop: It infects the builder with an overwhelming desire to perfect the computer (to work for the computer and not work for fellow humans or life itself). This leads to an overwhelming desire for ever greater control (power), perfection (rejection of life) and predictability (a sealed world, a black box, where everything allowable is already known).

Arguments for Transhumanism

The argument could be made that we’ve been gradually modifying our bodies with technologies from the beginning of human history. In fact, humanity (from this angle) could be described as an utterly unviable species without its capacity to invent technological enhancements that give it artificial advantages over bears and lions that would otherwise easily consume us. One could even go so far as to say that a human being is “by nature” a techno-animal hybrid.

To those who imagine the world like this, people who rail against this technological development are simply frightened of change or the logarithmic nature of growth.

To technologists, the ones who constantly draw lines in the sand to distinguish healthy adaptations of technology from unhealthy adaptations base their distinctions on arbitrary moral codes descending from religious dogmas. If there is only an arbitrary and fictional line in the sane, then there’s nothing real telling us to halt this merger between human beings and machines. So, they leap to the conclusion that it’s our destiny, our new God. The choosers adapt; the unchosen are “left behind.”

The argument looks as pat as a machine technology itself. And this perfection itself is a sign of its weakness. Real distinctions between healthy adaptations of technology and unhealthy ones can be found easily, but go unnoticed because our focus is skewed by a motivation (a programming) that can’t be questioned without toppling the whole quasi-religious doctrine of transhuman merger.

So, I’m not trying to convince the transhumanists, who are as lost in their hall of mirrors as any other evangelical. I’m just fascinated by the nature of stupidity, the limits of thought. And computer thinking is merely the apotheosis of human thought, containing the same stupidities no matter how powerful the technology becomes.

Why the Line is Difficult to Find

Imagine providing every 16-year-old with enhanced manipulative skills and almost unlimited musculature. We do that already with cars, but driving came with the responsibilities of adhering to a moral code seemingly at odds with adolescent motivations. That is, till now we’ve lived by and large under the tutelage of an effective but quasi mechanical or institutionalized vision of maturity or wisdom. We teach the adolescent how to use these powers from a communal vantage point: Obey traffic signs.

Transhumanism is the indoctrination of a vision that utterly rejects the notion of any human morality restraining the morality of machine thinking (power, control and perfection). These motives supplant any humane motives, ethics or empathy, because humane motives have no intellectual power compared to machine motives. There is no logic to altruism. Empathy requires a wholly different form of intelligence, which is not manipulative, not institutionalized, not “convincing”, but heartfelt. And this heartfelt intelligence has no standing in a machine mind. Love lies outside the infinity of their world. It’s an utterly foreign infinity that looks like fantasy to those who live in an essentially sociopathic world of mechanical thinking.

So, a line has been crossed in adapting a “transhuman” vision, but it’s a line that looks utterly insignificant to a machine mind (that is, any mind driven by merely rational motives). Old-fashioned morality is no longer strong enough to survive the superior manipulative powers of the machine.

In some sense, this is a godsend in reverse, because the old morality that kept us on the straight and narrow was already mainly a mechanical system of control. It offered no real counter-balance to adolescent fantasies of Greatness. In fact, strongly moral cultures such as Victorian England, were about as immoral as you can get without utterly collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy.

This is why the transhumanists see no real line being crossed in the development of their program. We’ve always merely used morality and maturity as signifiers of a hierarchy of control. They see no evidence (where they look) in history for any alternative to the development of power, control and predictability. That is how we survived, they say. That’s all our moral codes ever enforced, but now we’ve simply dropped the pretense.

Where I see the line

But I think a real line is being crossed. This line is not morality, but stupidity. It’s stupidity that defines the limits of machine intelligence. We cross an invisible line when we conclude anything about the nature of the world, and computers require conclusive definitions. We enter into a demiurgic world at that moment, unconsciously, because a conclusion (which includes a faith in technology and all its implicit dogmas) is what makes us too stupid to see the far vaster potential that we’ve shut down.

It’s the old saying that stupid people don’t know they’re stupid, which is sometimes referred to as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Essentially, the motive to seek control, power and predictability is a motive that can’t question itself, just as any fundamental program can’t shut itself off. You can’t try to stop trying. You can’t want to stop wanting control. A double-bind keeps us from moving past the demiurgic confines of the dogmatic program that runs us. We become slaves to a mechanical system of thought. And the degree to which highly educated technologists laugh off this limit is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

It’s Not a Line We Cross; It’s a Line We Erase

In some sense it’s true: we haven’t crossed a line in developing human power, control and predictability. We’ve crossed Out a line of distinction that previous cultures usually recognized: A nested hierarchy in which the human being is a small part. Now we think we’re too big to fit inside any nest, and this loss of humility is an old story, repetitively describing a line we cross (or cross out) without knowing it.

But it’s not a moral story aimed at restraining humans from immature overreach. It’s a loss of intelligence that myths and religious stories are attempting to restore by telling us what is missing and what emerges in this absence as a virtual (and evil) replacement.

The honesty in these old stories survive their decay into dogma. They show us that we erased a line when our motive changed from surviving in a nested hierarchy to seeking a singularity without limits for each separate Self; which is an unhinged greatness mistaken for a personalized version of Heaven. A Heaven without the need for sacrifice and death, or any form of humility. This is the heaven of a dope-smoking adolescent, not a real man or woman.

Honesty is rejected because it looks like an old-fashioned moral restraint. But honesty is not a morality. It is merely eyesight cleansed of the distortions of self-deceptive grandiosity.

This is why technological development came all at once, in a gold-rush fever. We lost our tether to reality. This is why earlier cultures didn’t develop all that much technology. They weren’t “too stupid”; they were too intelligent to go that far. Technology only developed in a culture that already shared this delusion of infinite mechanical control and predictability.

Earlier earth-centric cultures stayed relatively technologically simple. I think it’s because they couldn’t imagine an idiocy as large as total control and predictability. Now we live in virtual worlds that invite everyone to succumb to fantasies of superiority over every bear and lion that formerly kept us honest.

The moment we reach for perfect predictability we erase a clarifying line, whereby we seek perfectly inanimate form, a deadness far exceeding any predation by a lion or bear.

Our technology has deluded us into a fantasy of greatness that will never come true no matter how real it all feels right now. But when we’re finally able to overpower the last lion and bear, we won’t even be alive anymore, just inanimate programs running in circles that feel infinite because the circles never end, never die, never live. 

So why am I writing?

So, why am I writing if I know it can’t possibly influence anyone? The smart (but stupid) technologists won’t see this line. Or can’t, apparently. They see only an infinite singularity of mechanical potential and fail to see the limitations of this infinity.

Maybe I write only because the problem is talking to me and I’m recording what I hear. The problem is my own. The problem is anyone’s who uses thought without realizing it’s a virtual trick. I’m as susceptible to machine thinking as anyone who ever lived. The thoughts that circle my head from morning till night are no less demiurgic, no less caught in an infinite loop of predictability than the technologists I’m condemning. It’s the same problem.

But this sameness implies a potential for universal resolution as well. When the limits of machine intelligence are seen within us (at the root of the viral infection), our own self-delusion is ended; and the machine loses this battery.

The problem itself is telling us that there’s a way out of this dilemma, but it’s only by realizing our stupidity. There’s nothing to be done, no activist agenda that reaches this problem, because all our activist motives are premised on power, control and predictability as a counter-force.

Till now we haven’t seen the problem widely or deeply enough. Thought runs us, as Bohm said. We have to come to terms with this. Realizing the mechanical addiction at the heart of our relationship to thought restores thought to a mere tool that can’t fool us any more with its virtual worlds of national identity, racial identity, group politics, and power dynamics. This discovery of the problem is the resolution. “The answer is in the problem,” as Krishnamurti said. We don’t need a solution to machine control. We need to see the problem at the level of thought, shutting off the ones and zeroes of fight and flight at the origin point of our gullibility. Then the machine can become a useful tool, but not until then.

Look, the problem is reaching a climax in the dim brains of technologists like Musk and Bezos and all their busy bees. They are showing us the nature of the problem (and its resolution by default) by demonstrating stupidity on a massive scale. We are witnessing and participating in a great slapstick moment of human collapse.

No, we don’t have an alternative to the motives of power, control and predictability. (We can say “love” is the antidote, but until our mechanical habits are irradiated by honest insight into this predicament, “love” is just another weapon of the mind).

Look, we’re all molecules vibrating in the same current, and none of us have the authority or clarity to act without pushing for a different system of power, control and predictability. The stupid ones conclude from this that “this is the nature of life” and imbibe the poison without further reflection.

The less stupid ones pause a moment and wonder, and in that act of wonder they encounter an intelligent state of mind that has no ulterior purpose, no self-deception. This wonder isn’t concerned with the attainment of power, control and predictability. It’s a surrender to a nested hierarchy that far exceeds our ever-limited thoughts. It produces humility and self-forgiving humor, which is a mutation of intelligence that exceeds machines.

Admit it, we’re dumb and we have no logical options. But this realization is the resolution, because it forces us to abandon the delusions of perfection and omnipotence. And none of these technologists will ever let themselves admit this stupidity. And, so they never learn. And they never allow themselves to be transformed by a problem rather than trying to beat it.

The poor suckers who take the transhumanist blue pill will be bawling tin tear drops by the time this illusion fully unwinds. And the rest of us will be bawling real tears along with them. Collapse is our only hope.