How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere by Andrew M. Davis

Author:Andrew M. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

8. Panentheism and Technology: The Immanence of Rage

Loriliai Biernacki

In a recent popular article in Scientific American Mind neuroscientist Christof Koch offers a vision of humanity’s future that would have been virtually unthinkable for most of humanity’s past. Future humans will merge cyborg-like into symbiotic relations with our machine creations. Indeed, it’s happening already. Driverless cars are here to stay, he tells us; computer algorithms like DeepMind can teach themselves new game-playing techniques and soon artificial intelligence will surpass human capacities.1 Along these lines, iconic physicist Stephen Hawking went on record warning against just this. One of the greatest threats to human survival, he admonished us, is in fact, artificial intelligence.2

Meanwhile this same man, Stephen Hawking, one of our greatest scientific minds, was saved from a mute death by a technology that allowed his thoughts to echo through an artificial black box. The eerily mechanical voice we heard became iconic, a brilliant disembodied mind speaking unmetrically through technology. It itself seemed like a transcendent voice from some beyond—but not like what we might imagine to be a voice from heaven, from a god or angel. Rather instead it sounded with a syncopation that recalls the hacker group “Anonymous,” a nameless collective (perhaps like the Elohim? Or the myriad deities functioning in the Tantric cakras lining the human spine?). This voice from an uncanny beyond displayed a plethora of machine-modulated sound bits conjoining to make flat tones conveying the weighty thoughts of this great man.

Does the future of humanity bode such a fusion of human and machine? Perhaps we might venture that Nietzsche’s infamous obituary did not quite get it right. God is not so much dead in modernity, but rather, not quite yet born. Instead, some spark transferred from silicon circuits, like a disembodied ghost, awaits us, even if only as zombie technology. This, of course, is on everyone’s mind, wildly rampant in pop culture from the attractive and deadly robot in Ex machina, to Scarlett Johansson’s sonorous Her. Koch points to a 1954 science-fiction short story by Fredric Brown. When the supercomputers of the galaxy manage to connect, God will finally awaken—“Yes, now there is a God.”3

The zombie conception of human-turned-computers follows a trajectory of transcendence all too familiar to the history of religions. In this narrative, the body is a vessel for the soul and the goal is to lift the soul out of the body into a purer transcendence from the material world into some safe space beyond the suffering of here and now. Ray Kurzweil’s hopes for his own machine-enhanced immortality as he downloads his consciousness onto the mainframe, follows this same logic. Call it nirvana, or heaven, or kaivalya, or immortality in a robot body; it’s always about leaving this place here and now.

However, what all this bleak forecasting of human evolution into cyborg leaves out is a counter-narrative of human evolution, less loudly broadcast to be certain, yet one finding roots in a panentheist spirituality. This panentheist spirituality offers us a different story, one that

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