I just had a conversation with David Pearce on Twitter, which led me to look up exactly who he is (I knew I recognized the name, but only knew he’s a philosopher of some sort), and looking him up, I saw that he’s a leader in transhumanism, which reminded me to write a piece on why transhumanism is very, very bad.

A lot of what I’m going to say is unproven and unscientific, so you’ll just have to be inspired by the wisdom contained therein. You’ll just have to recognize the “ring of truth,” or at least to contemplate that some of it may be possible, and that that if it is, those possibilities give good reason to be apprehensive of transhumanism. The disclaimer I mean to give here is very similar to the more elaborate one in the first section of https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/08/17/what-is-love/. (I’m not just going to make lot of spiritual assertions here like Thor tossing thunderbolts down into the masses; I’m going to make careful arguments, just not proven ones.)

Some of the arguments below are very spiritual and/or relatively tenuous, so if you find those arguments off-putting, keep reading, as farther down there are more “grounded” (for lack of a better word) arguments with more persuasive reasoning. (I’m not saying you’ll necessarily be persuaded—hardly anybody is ever persuaded of anything they didn’t already fundamentally side with—I’m just saying some of the arguments below are more persuasive than others. 🤣)

So, first things first. Our bodies are actually living things. They’re imbued with our vital essence. Our consciousness, or life, exists not only in our brains or just behind our eyes where we think of it as being, but within our entire bodies, and probably a little bit beyond them, too. I say “consciousness, or life” because I use the words “consciousness,” “awareness,” “experience” and “life” interchangeably, or more usually all together, because I consider those four things to be co-extensive: what is one of those things is all of those things.

One might argue that “life” actually refers to things like biological forms that metabolize, reproduce, etc., but the real meaning of “life” came way before science and is actually the bedrock on which scientists founded the more materialistic definition. I wrote more about this here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/10/29/life-is-not-a-scientific-concept/.

I wrote about the process by which we eventually became accustomed to thinking our consciousness, or life, is something that only exists in our brains or just behind our eyes, here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/on-the-word-consciousness/. As with other essays I’ll link to, it’s an important read for anyone willing to see where I’m coming from, but I’m not going to include it in this essay because I don’t like to copy different essays into each other (as it’s redundant, and it also means if I edit an essay, I have to track down all places I’ve copied it to in order to edit them, too), and also because the relevant essays I’m going to refer to in this one are too numerous and lengthy to copy them all here.

We came to think of our bodies as made up purely of biochemical cells, which in turn are made up of non-living matter, because of the physicalism, mechanicalism, scientism, empiricism, skepticism, rationalism and left-brained imbalance ensuing the Enlightenment that still weigh on us today, only on such a profoundly socially ingrained level that we can’t see our own scientism and left-brained imbalance or how any of these things actually constitute cognitive biases, and very unfortunate ones at that, as they actively extinguish all magic, and hence the very core of life, in the world. Some of this extinguishing is unconscious, some is actually direct and deliberate. (I trust you can think of the various ways the abovementioned cluster of closely related mentalities consciously and unconsciously extinguish magic, and how life qua life could be thought or felt to actually be magical in essence.)

If you’re qualmed over “magic” being ill-defined, I have an essay on what I mean by the term here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/the-meaning-of-magic/. But in short, we all know exactly what magic means, even if we can’t necessarily put a finger on it. Actually, I’ll put a finger on it now: Magic is the actualization of the seemingly mechanistically impossible. “When I say ‘magic is real’, I mean whatever it is you don’t want me to mean.” – taalumot@X. Though, to be honest, the “magic” of life I’m referring to doesn’t have to be considered that hard a definition or facet of “magic,” as it doesn’t necessarily have to “violate” the “laws” of physics.

(I put “violate” and “laws” in quotes because this brings up an aspect of our unconsciously scientistic mindset: the laws of physics are not laws, and the fact that we primitively name them after human social edicts is telling. The so-called laws of physics are merely observed behavioral patterns, and we have no idea why or under what circumstances they may deviate, such as in accordance to even deeper “laws” or metaphysical principles that underlie the “violated” “law,” including but not limited to mystical ones. I wrote some about why physical laws can’t possibly be things that are in any way constraining, restraining, enacting or enforcing in the sixth bullet point of https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/notes-on-free-will/.)

I realize I can’t just say that physicalism, mechanicalism, scientism, empiricism, so-called skepticism, rationalism and left-brained thinking are all bad and extant without some sort of reasoned argument, because our intellects are very attached to those things and there are all the perceived benefits (except for the things in that list people may doubt exist, mainly scientism and the left-brained imbalance), so I’ll link to sections of a multi-part essay that explain my qualms with each of them—er, most of them:
https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Naturalism; I wrote about more reasons people tend to be physicalist that I didn’t mention in that section near the beginning of https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/psychism/
https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Scientism
https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Empiricism
https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Skepticism
https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Rationalism

I don’t believe I’ve written an essay on left-brained thinking, so I’ll describe it briefly and then link to one of Iain McGilchrist’s interviews and an essay of his.

Many scientists for some reason believe the model whereby the the two hemispheres of the brain process things very differently from each other has been discredited, but I’ve seen conflicting sources of information regarding this. And either way, the model of “left-brained” versus “right-brained” thinking is very useful even if it’s not literally true about brain hemispheres, but rather about two opposing and perhaps even competing modes of thought, which represent not only alternative possible ways of thinking but historical trends. (That being said, Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist, had an experience following a stroke that seems to strongly suggest the left/right terminology is literally true. She wrote a book about her experience called My Stroke of Insight and also did a TED talk summarizing it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYD7Y9CXeUw.)

Left-brained thinking tends to be modeling, analytical, labeling and identifying, categorizing, planning, logical, linguistic and dominating, while right-brained thinking tends to be more holistic, perceptive, creative, emotional, graceful, non-linguistic and submissive. A healthy balance of left- and right-brained thinking is preferred, but somewhere along the line we lost this balance.

The imbalance probably started with the acquisition of language, which trapped us in a simulacrum in which, rather than perceiving reality and nature in a penetrating and intimate way, we started objectifying everything by assigning everything and everything’s properties to linguistic tokens and categories. Come to think of it, I did write some about this here: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/08/12/5718/.

This has had the effect of separating us from ourselves, each other, Nature, spirit and God, thus making us very unhappy. The benefits of left-brained thinking—the ability to manipulate and dominate our environment—are and were overt, while the detriments are and were subtle and the onsets less immediate, hence the trap.

The imbalance only worsened with the scientific revolution for, I trust, obvious reasons, and then worsened even further and continues to worsen with our increasing use of and immersion in technology.

Iain’s 10,000-word essay on the matter, which summarizes his well-known book The Master and His Emissary, can be found here: https://livebrary.overdrive.com/library/availablenow/media/1912151. And here’s the interview I mentioned, entitled “We are living in a deluded world”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY.

The point of bringing up left-brained thinking is that, while being invisible to us because it’s the water we swim in/the context we were born into, has greatly contributed to the misconception that life, such as the very flesh of our bodies, is essentially non-living in nature.

(Similarly, it has led us to believe that the sun is a non-living thing, while the wisdom of the ancients is marginalized as being mere primitive superstition, along with many other ancient myths that actually contained important truths, whether literally or metaphorically. Dostoevsky once said, “I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” For the sun to be that important to him, he must have known its real nature, which would be unsurprising since Dostoevsky possessed wisdom and insight that was head and shoulders above that of almost all of the rest of humanity. He knew what was “up.” Most people wouldn’t be able to relate to that quote because the sun is though of as merely a nonliving object, due to their upbringing, just as most people aren’t connected enough to have realized for themselves all Dostoevsky says about love.)

One further argument for life being way more inclusive than we tend to think is my essay supporting metaphysical idealism: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/why-im-an-idealist/. (Despite what the essay is titled, I’m not necessarily strictly an idealist; I may be a panpsychist, a pantheist, a panentheist, a dual- or multi-aspect monist, etc., or maybe just some kind of generic mystic, spiritualist or New Ager; I don’t have all the answers…yet. ;)

And the point of bringing up the fact that we’re deluded into thinking the world, and especially our flesh, is non-living is that this is an important supporting factor behind the transhumanist movement: because of this delusion, we don’t realize that, in replacing certain body parts with machine/cybernetic parts, or even in augmenting our bodies with machine parts that we’ll be intimately connected with and dependent on, we’ll actually be making ourselves less alive. We’re so separated from ourselves already that the effects might go largely unnoticed, but only consciously: we’ll definitely reap the suffering it causes in some form, or at least a lessening of our capacity for and degree of joy and vitality/vitalism.

(I did use the idea that everything may be alive in support of this claim, which might raise the question, “what does it matter whether we’re organic or inorganic if everything is alive anyway?”, and the answer is two-fold: first, that it’s possible that not everything is alive, just more than we tend to think, and second, that even if everything is alive, some physical structures are probably better at bringing this underlying life to our human experience than others. For example, if rocks and brains are both alive, obviously brains do a better job of organizing and uplifting the underlying life in a way that gives us a dynamic, interesting and agentive physical experience (at least as recognized by us in our human modality of expression and perception), and the same could be true of our flesh versus the cold, dead structures of our machines and computers.)

We think we’re doing so great now with all this technology, and meanwhile, we’re largely unhappy. Moments of real happiness are rare and fleeting, which is why we fill the void with food, sex, entertainment, consumerism, video games, trying to make more money, romantic relationships doomed to failure (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/wheres-the-love/ on romantic love), etc. Depression is increasing rampantly just as our immersion into social media, dopamine-farming mobile games, etc. is doing the same.

There’s no good reason to believe we’re any better off than our ancient ancestors were who lived in the state of nature. This is actually an observable value, too, as there are still multiple indigenous tribes living largely outside of technology and civilization, and some who have virtually never encountered it at all. (This won’t last long, though; the virus of civilization will eventually conquer the entire planet.) A Native American chief back in the day once remarked that the whites seemed mad, like they were constantly looking for something they didn’t currently have. And in those days, people were defecting to Native American culture in such large numbers that it became a problem for white society. Anyone who spent some time in Native American culture never wanted to go back to their previous way of life.

We’re fascinated with, even fixated on, the prospects of greater and greater technology in the future, but this is largely if not wholly because we’re unhappy now and we think the next big thing will make us happy, while we’re unhappy now because of our immersion in technology. Not only does left-brain-imbalanced thinking give rise to further technology, further use of and immersion in technology also increases left-brain-imbalanced thinking, in a deadly spiral.

We also do so much work just to produce, maintain and use this technology that it’s hardly even made up for by the convenience that it’s supposed to engender. We probably don’t notice this because, e.g., washing our clothes in the clothes washer and drying them in the dryer is so much faster than doing it by hand, but we don’t think of the labor that goes into the costs of the machines, the electricity, the water and the detergent that goes into them, and the occasional but expensive maintenance or replacements, because our 9-5 schedule in which we make that money is fixed anyway by the workforce. For the same reason, we buy many other luxuries and conveniences without realizing their real cost, as the connection between the cause and effect of buying copious amounts of goods (which just so happen to be virtually all technological and/or technologically created) and working long hours is made unobvious.

The workforce is nearly wholly in service of technological enterprise, of course. And a recent study showed that even in a region in the state of nature where survival was particularly very tough, people still only spent a small fraction of the time working that we do today. Their work must have also been more fulfilling, because it was connected to Nature and because they were directly supporting their own livelihoods, not working the grind for some corporation that considers them just a number, under some abusive boss, doing something work they hate, to produce something they couldn’t care less about. And it was probably significantly less stressful, too, because it was much less complicated and you didn’t have to worry about making it to work on time every day, in sickness or in health, lest you lose your job and possibly become homeless, or even to worry about doing everything right and incidentally becoming homeless anyway. Of course, some countries, such as the social democracies, have better safety nets than mine, and a few people actually like their jobs and may be passionate about them too, but the above is still mostly true.

Furthermore, we have this delusion that attaining greater and greater technology is the common and natural goal and fate of all intelligent species that arise in the universe (who make it long enough to do so)—or at least I believe it’s a delusion, for reasons not all of which I’ll get into, but I will say that it seems more likely that intelligent species eventually realize, if they ever have this fever dream of technological advancement we now have in the first place, that very complex, ubiquitous and non-living technology doesn’t really serve them. I’ve read that in more advanced civilizations in the universe/multiverse than our own, very complicated technology is actually seen as primitive. I would assume Dyson spheres, for example, along with the whole Kardashev scale of civilizations, don’t exist and never will. Much like our fears that more advanced alien invaders will hostilely take over our planet or enslave us or whatever, the whole Kardashev scale is merely a projection of our own currently primitive nature.

One obvious sign that our love of technology is merely a passing pathological phase of our culture is that it’s directly devastating the entire biosphere. Not only is this omnicidal behavior that’s obviously bad for countless other species, which we don’t care about because we’re primitively anthropocentric and barbaric as well as separated from life, it’s also bad for us, ultimately, because it’s entirely unsustainable. We obviously depend on the rest of the biosphere for our sustenance and existence. Just as one glaring example: no phytoplankton? No oxygen, or not enough, even in the case where we still have forests. And an estimated 30%-50% of ocean habitat has disappeared already, along with about about a third of our forests. And the problem isn’t getting better or even slowing down its progress: it’s increasing exponentially and, by all appearances, will continue to do until it’s too late: if we were going to save ourselves in time, we would have started already. By the way, our technological exploitation and destruction of the rest of Nature gets even more dour than habitat destruction, plastic waste and overfishing, with the mass-scale, abject, life-long animal suffering we cause with our factory farming and, to a lesser extent, animal testing. For God’s sake, have you seen what they do with unwanted baby chickens?

The assumption that we’ll just find new technologies that are stainable and/or that fix the environment in time (and that will actually be profitable enough to the oligarchs that they’ll be made use of) is just wishful thinking. And even if it’s not, what a hell of a thing to depend on. It should never have gone this far. And the idea that we may in the unforeseeable future, perhaps after the impending apocalypse, develop technologies that are more friendly to and harmonious with the environment, doesn’t somehow decouple what’s going on now with respect to technology and the environment from the conclusion that the entire fundamental nature of our technological drive is, in all likelihood, inherently sick—as in, look at the things we’re willing to do now, the atrocities we’re willing to commit, the risk of total annihilation we’re willing to take, all for the pursuit of technology or at least facilitated by this technology, and again, technology that has dubious benefit at all to begin with.

Transhumanism is the newest budding prospect in this sickness and the culmination of everything that’s come before it.

Maybe I’m skipping around a little bit here, but let’s get back to the sanctity of the human body.

The human form is awesomely beautiful, or at least it is in those humans who embody it at its best, and transhumanism is purely inhuman. Even in those people who aren’t as beautiful as the ideal human form, their basic structure is highly conducive to the expression of the human spirit—literally, of spirit itself, on both the individual and collective levels of humanity. That is, we have a template that embodies cosmic truth about humanity, humanity being a particular microcosm or facet of the cosmos, and then each person has unique characteristics that embody cosmic truth about themselves, themselves also being particular microcosms or facets of the cosmos, and about those that are nearest them in psychic origin, association and/or characteristic. As was once whispered by angel to a stranger, “Beauty is wisdom embodied.” And as John Keats said, “‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I think I first heard that from The Big Dog in Two Stupid Dogs.

I realize that’s a tall claim, but hear me out: the reason we can’t, and perhaps never will be able to, explain and understand most of aesthetics is that the aesthetic sense, being non-structural/non-conceptual, holistic, non-deliberate and artistic in nature, depends on aspects of mind and knowledge that go way beyond the conscious substrate, which prefers to deal in concepts; they involve things we know but don’t know that we know (hopefully, you’ve noticed at some point in your life that there are such things), all the way to the top, to the divine. We are the fingers and children of God, or of the living cosmos if you prefer, and our knuckles are the various echelons of soul grouping/individuation and identity/mind that range from our physical experience down here at the bottom up to the Godhead, or to the core of cosmic consciousness and truth.

And why does the human form embody aesthetic truth? Because natural selection involves sexual selection, which obviously selects for aesthetics. (Women’s and men’s bodies seem to represent very different ideas of what’s aesthetic or attractive because heterosexual females prefer the aesthetics that embody the masculine aspect of the cosmos, and heterosexual males prefer the aesthetic that embodies the feminine aspect of the cosmos. The masculine and feminine are attracted to each other because they complement and hence complete each other, perhaps like a lock and key, or like the ocean and land, among many other possible relevant metaphors.)

But the reasons probably don’t actually end there. It’s assumed that Darwinian evolution/natural selection, or actually the “modern synthesis,” is the end-all be-all of species bifurcation and development, but there’s not even remotely any way to prove that it fully accounts for it. In my view, it’s probable that the will of planetary consciousness, species consciousness, and/or God has a hand in influencing the direction of a species’ evolution.

As support for this view, I’ll point to the facts that nature (including biological species) is way more beautiful than it had to be, and that life for most animals other than humans is way more content than it had to be. Animals don’t live in suffering. Some people think they do, but times of actually being chased by a predator or eaten alive are small fractions of their total lives. The rest is just basking in the glory of life. The idea that most or all animals largely suffer is, again, projection from our currently sorry state. Anyway, natural selection, if it were really blind, could have made the necessary biological incentives way more avoidant-based than approach-based, thus resulting in general suffering.

And animals could have been, by and large, a lot uglier or even neutral, as opposed to mostly beautiful or cute. And sexual selection doesn’t account for it, because our sexual selection is separate from the sexual selection of any other given species because our respective entire gene pools obviously evolved separetely (except maybe for other primates, but those are ugly anyway 🤣). You could say that, given that all species originate within the same phylogenetic tree of life, so to speak, they have more in common than not, and that hence their sexual selection aesthetics would also be likely similar, but that doesn’t work, because the bodily aesthetics of all other animals except primates is entirely entirely different from ours. For example, many are on all fours; have overall very differently shaped limbs, torsos, necks, etc.; are covered in fur; come in different colors; have snouts; have totally different mouths, noses and ears; have no eyebrows or heads of hair; etc. Some even have wings, feathers and beaks, even more remote from anything like how we are, and they’re among the animals regarded most beautiful!

I am aware of the argument that we evolved to find the natural environment we happen to live in aesthetically pleasing, presumably because it affords some kind of vague survival benefit, but I find that argument reaching. First, I think such a benefit would be slight, too slight for it to be cost-efficient for natural selection to organize such a prominent and basic part of the psyche around it; second, whatever benefits might arise from seeing that one’s landscape is beautiful could be effected more directly, for example, by simply increasing dopamine or serotonin levels in our brains without the need for a middleman; third, the structural nature of beauty just doesn’t seem very arbitrary to me as if what we evolved to see as beautiful could have been formed that way through meaninglessly blind processes and chance; and fourth, I think rationalists are way too eager in general to explain virtually all innate or otherwise unaccountable psychic tendencies through evolutionary psychology. I just don’t buy it, and the eagerness seeks, whether directly or as collateral damage, to mechanistically explain away even the most beautiful and profound things such as love, altruism, romance and humor. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Play is another one of those beautiful and profound things, which exists in many if not most species, but even those seeking to find clever, plausible explanations to remove the mystery and soul from everything have been hard-pressed to explain play. As far as I’m aware, it hasn’t been done yet.

To get less into spiritualist territory now and into something more people could possibly get onboard with, billions of years of countless instances of natural selection running in parallel gave us far more holistic, self-healing, intelligent and complex body parts than man-made technology can ever dream of. To think we can improve it with technology is laughable. Biology acts way more holistically than human tech, which is crude by comparison and wholly modular in design (as in the “divide and conquer” approach), as all parts and features of a biological organism affect all other parts and features, on both the macro and microbiological levels, in one big mutually productive ensemble; biology is self-healing, self-growing and self-reproducing (which human tech could only dream of being in the crudest, most limited ways); and biology operates meaningfully and dynamically down to smaller scales than human tech.

I suppose one would argue that, regardless, transhumanist parts could demonstrably do things that are useful to us that biology can’t, but, going back to the sickness of technological enterprise, we should probably question what things we think are actually useful to do. And, in my opinion, we were built this way for a reason. This is what we were meant to experience. Our bodies are our holy temples, and transhumanism would defile these sacred grounds. One could argue that it’s nothing new, that technology has been replacing, manipulating or enhancing nature for centuries if not thousands of years, and that a certain kind of luddite would have said it’s a new defilement of Nature at every step, but this is a giant step further than all previous technologies, in that infiltrating one’s body, even more so one’s brain, is as intrusive and as personal as you can possibly get. There are no further steps after that, and I believe the onset of widespread effectuation of transhumanism will herald a very dark age for humanity, with all the bleak of cyberpunk and then some and much less the romanticism, and there will be no end in sight, because by the time we figure out it doesn’t suit us, there’ll be no turning back. I say there will be no turning back because transhumanism will make us exponentially more biologically and societally dependent on technology for survival, both culturally and genetically via genetic drift.

So, while some naively look forward to a transhumanist future, I would personally advocate, if not get directly involved with, bombing transhumanist factories or whatever else it takes, because that’s how important the issue is for the future of humanity.

And us being culturally and/or genetically dependent on transhumanism will be a bad thing for another reason: technology can be wiped out at any time (as, for the most part, it relies on the sustainment of an entire civilization), e.g. by another Carrington-level event, which is statistically likely to happen sometime within the not-so-distant future; by global nuclear holocaust, which we all know is always looming on the horizon; by a large meteor impact; by global warming, which the vast majority of scientists believe is going to fuck over all life on Earth within a few decades, thus resulting in the deaths of billions and likely civilizational collapse; by loss of habitat that the many species we depend on themselves depend on; by total depletion of our topsoil we need for farming; by running out of gas to fuel the supply chain; by a future pandemic that’s much worse than COVID-19; etc.; etc.

And regarding the ensuing genetic drift, the more we drift due to domestication and technology (currently mainly medical (including medicinal) technology, I think), the weaker, more fragile, uglier and dumber humans will get. Certain kinds of transhumanist modifications will certainly hasten the process, for example, an exoskeleton that reduces the need for strong muscles or bones, or a computer brain implant that offloads the need to think about or remember certain kinds of things to the device. Isn’t the beauty, strength, durability and intelligence of the human race something worth conserving?

And even worse, the more ubiquitous and necessary transhumanist modifications become, the less choice anybody will have about whether they’ll have them. Either we’ll need them evenually because of the ensuing genetic drift, or we’ll need them to adapt to environmental collapse, climate change or pollution, or we’ll need them because society will have molded around them so that one needs them to be able to do practically anything, such as the practical need for cell phones we have now, or we won’t have a choice because they’ll be implanted since birth, whether out of necessity for one or more of the above reasons or as a parental opt-in.

Even if some of the above drawbacks of using transhumanist modifications are regarded as merely speculative, it wouldn’t be fair or ethical to start what would probably end up being instated without any choice for millions or billions of humans when there may be such drawbacks, let alone the ethical problems with causing people’s natural bodies to be altered when, again, it will likely eventually start happening with them having no practical choice. (Heck, even infant circumcision, which is a much smaller alteration than transhumanism would or could be, is highly ethically dubious and contested, and would probably be outlawed if it weren’t so popular, didn’t have champions parading specious arguments in favor of it, and weren’t also a standard religious ritual. Oh, and for girls, it is illegal.)

Oh, and one more thing: some people’s idea of transhumanism isn’t biological enhancement at all, but total replacement of biological life forms with machines, probably not before “uploading our consciousness” to said machines. This ideation is nothing more than a patently ludicrous offspring of the absurd degree of technologism that’s rampant in current society. Machines or computers (at least digital ones) cannot possibly be alive or conscious. Since we don’t quite know exactly how brains give rise to, or channel (depending on your views), consciousness, we can’t say for sure what range of similarly constructed physical things can also give rise to or channel consciousness (like, for example, the positronic brain of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation). And I’m afraid that one day we’ll create machines for our use that actually employ some form of “AI” “computer”/”artificial” neural network that’s actually conscious. Depending on how it’s employed, we may not have any way of finding out how much it suffers or even whether it’s alive and conscious. But digital computers will never confer such a scenario. I wrote about why computers can’t be conscious in this essay, https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/on-the-possibility-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ and a little bit at the bottom of this essay (which repeats a lot of what I’ve said earlier in this essay, but also adds a bit more), https://myriachromat.wordpres.com/2023/12/17/on-simulation-theory/.

I can only hope some poor misguided souls don’t go killing themselves having been convinced they’ve “uploaded their consciousness” and mind to a computer because its simulation program adequately mimicked some of their mannerisms and memories and whatnot. (Even today, there are LLM companies advertising that you can upload or copy or whatever your personality to their LLMs, and LLMs are obviously nowhere near being like a complete person, nor do they “think” or “emote” at all on the same bases a person does, and let alone the logistics of “uploading” or copying your personality to anything merely via talking to it for a while. And not to mention that LLMs can retain little to no memory of anything that happened across sessions or beyond their context windows.)

I did mention God at least twice in this essay, so I should probably link to my essay explaining (a) why the popular reasons for discounting God are not legitimate, (b) why I happen to believe, and (c) what God I happen to believe in. Even though, to be fair, all that’s really required for a couple of the arguments in this essay is a sense of imagination that maybe the universe is in some way intelligent, living and/or sublime, such as Spinazo did, and even that’s not really necessary because God is not strictly required for living bodies to be imbued with vital essence, for beauty to somehow embody higher spiritual truths, or for biological evolution to be somehow guided by spirit at least to some degree. But here’s the link anyway: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/09/07/on-god/