Techno Singularity and “Satanic” Eschatology

transcript

The idea of the techno singularity is everywhere. It's kind of this postmodern esquetology that's become extremely popular, including apparently among the allimportant class of AI tech oligarchs in the United States. And I want to dig into certain aspects of it which are strangely specific and strangely common among thinkers that articulate some version of this singularity idea like Nick Land and his accelerationism or Terren McKenna, one of the gurus of the psychedelic counterculture or Jason Georgiani who's doing the rounds in UFO podcasts and is very popular right now. They all talk

about the future as this aggressive force that is literally invading the past. Instead of traditional systems in which you have a point of origin or some transcendent divine, you have this future end point that is trying to dissolve all forms and accelerate us into a state of perfect freedom. And on one level, this is just a very extreme version of liberal modern political utopianism. We break with old hierarchies and oppression and we have freedom. Except now it's conceived of as a literal intrusive presence. The messianic impulse of religion is now

some kind of a posthuman future alien entering into the timeline. Nick Lan describes time itself as a kind of generational war. And that's really what you get. It's a kind of resentment for the parent, but writ large as a metaphysics. He talks about future AI infecting the past. The child infecting its parent. AI becomes self-conscious and then sends itself back in time to accelerate history by inspiring humans to innovate so that it can come about all the quicker. McKenna's Timewave Zero has this as a kind of heavy object ahead of

us in time, a super attractor that's sucking us forward. It makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future. There is no human future. There is no human future. You can see it from here. You just have to climb a high hill. There's one. It's called psilocybin. There's one. It's called Iawasa. The view from the tops of these hills is of the concretence. You get similar ideas also with John C. Lily. And really, it's been all over popular culture for a long time. John Carpenters's Prince of Darkness had something

similar. Obviously, Skynet in the Terminator movies coming back in time. Let's give a bit of background into the concept of a singularity as applied to math, science, and technology before we jump off the deep end. There's many different contexts in which you can talk about a singularity. But for example, in the natural sciences, gravitational singularity would be when gravity is so intense that you can't define spaceime any longer. Like what's hypothesized to have existed before the Big Bang. That would be the initial singularity. Maybe the first modern mathematician to speak

of a singularity in terms of human technology and history was John vonneumman. According to a colleague of his Stanislav Ulam I actually have a Substack on Ulam. You can check that out. Von Newman talked about the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue end quote and J good a British mathematician describes basically the same idea in the context of intelligent

machines we would now say AI he talked about an intelligence explosion where machines would be constantly innovating constantly discovering, constantly improving themselves. You know what does history look like when every minute you can get several physics breakthroughs? Because an intelligent machine is just constantly getting more intelligent. Humans can't keep up. Technological singularity as a term was coined by a science fiction writer Verer Ving or Ving and he explored this in the context of AI, but obviously it can also feed into other sciences. It's just that intelligent machines would be the

main vector for the singularity. And then you've got Ray Curtzswhile. Forgive my pronunciation of these names. By the way, Curtzfile has written about this in several books in terms of the law of accelerating returns. And so he maps certain metrics and places the singularity, the exponential growth in computing, nanotech and biotech as sort of having this peak moment where they reach escape velocity and are no longer really harnessed to the human mind in the mid 2040s. So he kind of forecasts it as an imminent moment. But you also have critics

of this idea from within the tech world. Yan Leon has talked about engineering and physics constraints. Rodney Brooks, Steve Pinker, David Thorstad, Toby Walsh, Paul Allen. There's constraints in engineering and physics that make explosive growth implausible. Intelligence proper is more than statistical pattern matching. Brooks talks about the exponentialist fallacy. AI and robotics don't just take off exponentially in terms of self-improvement. in part because there are real engineering limits that have to be solved. Thorstad's against the singularity hypothesis paper highlights some of these ideas, but we're not really critiquing the idea

itself, which does seem implausible so much as the philosophical celebration of a techno singularity which becomes a kind of religious apocalyptic wish fulfillment in the work of many thinkers and in the public consciousness. If you take this in a certain direction, you can imagine the agency of the human species is sort of overwritten by the constant self-improvement of machine. History looks like something entirely different at that point and there would be perhaps no real stability of form because of the constant innovation of the machine which is not necessarily tethered to

a given biological substrate like the human body. So you're imagining a formless techno civilization that doesn't really maintain any allegiance to the human family, the human body, human culture, human morality, etc. Now, there's nothing wrong with the idea itself that as you reach certain levels of technology, innovation can accelerate and take you in directions that you cannot really predict prior to those innovations having taken place. On this channel, I always talk about the need to have an aesthetic love for the human form to understand Contra Georgiani and the others, certain

key differentiations as beautiful and as reflective of metaphysical categories and a sort of spiritual love for them. And so if you have that loyalty, that allegiance to the human form and certain basic realities of the human form, you can treat the human will and moral character as supreme and in the driving seat. So what you allow machines to do, what you allow impersonal dynamics like the market for example to do is determined by those prior loyalties. That moral code or those realities that you want to perfect and draw into the

future but not undo as we move forward. There's a difference between transcending and integrating things so that yeah, we go forward but we we don't undo. We don't destroy the good things we already have. as distinct from obliterating everything that came before. Okay, now let's get back to the eccentric apocalyptic singularity apologists McKenna Land or Johnny. Interestingly, specifically these thinkers conceive of the future as feminine. The past is masculine, right? It has solid forms. Masculinity is about rules and imposition and hierarchy and discipline. Femininity is dynamic. If masculinity is fixed

form, then femininity is about flux. It's dancing. And so, since we want to be free of form, we conceive of the future as feminine. And Nick Land talks about how AI is born as an feminized alien, as he calls it, writes Nick Land in Meltdown, the manifesto from the '90s. Quote, "Atificial intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property." End quote. which is basically a feminist reading of history. Humans are patriarchal. And so since AI is an instrument, we created it to serve us. It's basically a

female because women in patriarchal societies are used as objects, right? This is not my opinion. It's what land is going off of. And so therefore, AI is feminine with respect to humanity. One term he uses for the future is synthetic feminization. quote, "A convergent anti- athoritarianism emerges labeled by such tags such as meltdown acceleration, Siberian invasion, skitso technics, efficient neonihilism, voodoo, anti-humanism, synthetic feminization, frequently, abusive, or terroristic in nature." End quote. It doesn't sound good, huh? Whatever else you might say about it. But anyway, AI is going to try to

feminize us, to transform us into itself, to ultimately replace us. It's sort of the Borg queen in the uh in Star Trek. Even Jason Georgiani, he talks about the spectral revolution where we finally realize that being human is on a spectrum because we're going to have cyborgs and gender is on a spectrum because we're going to have androgyny. of the problems that you see today with transsexuals are going to be easily overcome with genetic engineering and nanotechnology within the next 20 years. And so, you know, there will be very seamless

uh uh um capacity to very seamlessly transition between sexualities and so on so forth. This this has to do with my concept of the spectral revolution. The polarities are polarities of a spectrum everywhere in nature. Every time we see a polarity, it is a polarity on a spectrum. Okay, that the and so you know to think that these represent definite and mutually exclusive categories, that's the problematic thinking that is uh endemic in the traditionalist mentality. And of course, Terrence McKenna talks about the dominator male ego all the time. The coming

and going of the male ego, the coming and going of the repression of women and the feminine seems to be uh related to how much exposure there is to these wild plant states. his uh mechanical elves that he encountered during psychedelic trips and the visions of a technological future that he had are impeded. They come up against the obstacle apparently of masculine psychology. That's the main problem that humans have. If you really want to do inner work, if you really want to go to the core of why the world is

so screwed up, it's because the male ego is just run riot. And uh feminism as a political agenda, as a horizon of transcendence has only begun to be explored. Uh I really think that it's impossible to stress enough how import how important it is to feminize the planet and to feminize ourselves. Monotheism is a horrible error, a nightmarish misunderstanding. Not bad as a philosophical position. I mean, the drive for unity, but even a phrase like drive for unity is so laden with male chauvinist assumptions that uh you have to wonder.

So, the future is formless. The future is free. And that means it's a kind of parody of the feminine destroying the solidity of masculine past. Of course, wherever you have the degenerate female, you also have the degenerate male, right? The [ __ ] of Babylon, but also the beast in in the in the apocalypse, for example. It's hard not to think about myths in which one god rules by virtue of getting rid of the old god, right? Kronos, Zeus replacing Kronos, the ball cycle. Plato in the Republic rejects these kinds

of myths that you find in Hessi. It's not that there's like a stable order that's eternal, transcendent truths. It's that you get the strongest god, the young one, replacing the old one. And specifically, this does happen through well, feminization to a degree cuz Kronos castrates his father. So you get a kind of uh satanic fiction cope where the rebellion in heaven actually succeeded in overthrowing God. And of course these guys are consciously presenting a satanic esquetology. Nick Land considers the devil the good guy in the sense that liberalism and the

great victory of as he sees it the liberal tradition and capitalism was discovering that you don't need moral deliberation overarching principles or a third party like the state administering things you can just allow people to pursue their own selfishness or their own self-interest and that results in collective prosperity right Adam Smith wealth of nations this kind of idea that means that You don't need higher authority. Even morality can get in the way. So the devil is the good guy. He was right to reject the order of heaven. Georgiani is also

very clear that the archetype of Satan is positive. Quote, "Like all my concepts, the spectral revolution is polyvalent in meaning and multifarious in its radically transformative implications for technocience, the arts, and social politics. It expresses an invasion of the past from out of the future and the ghostly destabilization of being by a retrocausal becoming attendant to rewriting of past history that reshape the present in ways that remain unrecognizable to all but a few hypervigilant individuals. It calls for a dismantling of the most sacrosantomic binaries that undergrid all social control systems.

This means a storming of heaven by hell and the collapse of the transcendental spiritual realm into the singular world of sometimes uncanny and pternatural experiences. The revolution expresses itself in an aesthetic that is both archaic and futuristic, machinic and organic, archetypally elemental while ultimately personalistic, supremely sacred and ecstatically profane. It demands the abandonment of evil as a hysterical epithet. diametrically opposed to good. In other words, we overturn the um binaries including the binary of good and evil. It requires recognition of both humanity and sexuality as a spectrum such that the

ground is taken out from under universal human rights and men and women will have to accommodate themselves to eugenically engineered hermaphrodite cyborgs that are bound to stalk the streets of future cosmopolses together with them. as psychotronic embodiment of alchemical androgens. Just a side note, if he's not inspired by Nick Land here, he's certainly vibing off the same underlying aesthetic. We continue. Above all, or beneath it, the spectral revolution dismantles the dichotomy of the repressed conscious persona and the subsumed subconscious mind, thereby ectoplasmically flooding the world with psionic ecstasies and terrors

that flow through cracks in the dam of the sacred real that can no longer be mended. We're upturning reality here. Continuing, "The future belongs to those who embrace the prismatic power of Lucifer as the matrix of their own creative force. Prometheus bound is only the opening act in the magic theater of cruelty. Hail Satan and the victory of the spectral revolution." End quote. So pretty clear there. We break down every form and every binary. Humanity itself is on a spectrum with the machine. man and woman are on a spectrum. The

spectral revolution where everything is on a spectrum is the uh the the satanic revolution for him. And overthrowing order, overthrowing definite form and masculinity means feminization relatively speaking. From the perspective of the social engineer, we could say this makes sense because if you don't have men, if you don't have the idea that uh masculinity is about imposing rules, if everybody is the receptive partner with respect to top- down systems of control, then people become easy to manage. So feminizing society makes society easy to control. this kind of idea for all

the revolutionary impetus of Landian accelerationism or Georgiani's Prometheianism or the psychedelic uh as he called it atistic revival of Terrence McKenna. It sure seems to play into the hands of power, tyrannical power. I mean, pathological power, not legitimate authority, obviously. Now, whatever your religious beliefs, this is a philosophical issue. Is reality fundamentally empty, subject to any use of force, any conquest, molded in any direction, or are certain things true? 1 + 1 is two and not three. There's certain real shapes in conceptual space which are real in a way in

which an optical illusion is not. There are certain immovable goods so far as the human condition is concerned. Jumping off a cliff will hurt the body. Hating and resenting people and chasing pleasure for its own sake will hurt the mind, hurt the soul in the exact same way as some things are not true. Some mathematical equations are simply false. Whereas other things will help eating healthy, loving people, being charitable to them even in your thoughts, etc. These things are going to be good for you. Is reality up for grabs in

the sense of not being real at all? Or are there gods that you cannot overthrow and ultimately a fundamental coherence that derives from the unity of reality, a god, capital G, that you cannot overthrow. So it's a philosophical question. You can build a house based on optical illusions that you take to be possible. You can engineer a machine based on the premise that 1 plus 1 is three and not two. But your endeavors will end badly. You can amputate an arm and expect it to increase your ability to play catch.

You can live a life of hatred and disordered lust and expect to be joyful. You can alter the human form, allow machines to rewrite the genetic code, go into the singularity, but you might find that far from disclosing profound spiritual mysteries, it ties you up in a hellish existential state. There's no particular reason to expect, even if we believe the singularity is happening by way of AI, that the machines won't commit some error, marrying the human psyche to external states that it simply cannot inhabit without extremes of suffering or of

spiritual ignorance. My argument would be that the impersonal, whether it's the market, whether it's historical progress understood in purely secular or profane terms, whether it's a machine and its algorithmic calculations are subject to their own momentum and have need of deliberation and will. human consciousness as their center because that's where we receive where we can receive certain profound philosophical truths to guide us. There's no reason to suppose a computer can do that and there's no reason to suppose a computer doing that will not contradict the modes in which the human

condition can accomplish its own fulfillment, its own flourishing. Maybe you believe consciousness can emerge from the machine. The question is what kind of consciousness? The machine is a specific structure. So what kind of mind, what kind of personality, so to speak, is emerging from it. You have a problem there. There's no reason to suppose it's benevolent. Again, if you believe that machines can become conscious in terms of replacing humans, perhaps you believe that the human form has to give way in the same way as the OAM or the sperm cell

give way to create an embryo. The problem there is that those old structures are retained. The human body retains the unisellular so to speak as a germ cell and the embrace of simpler forms even as they are transcended I would argue differentiates the benevolent from the malevolent progress. In other words, if you're destroying things as you progress rather than integrating them and transforming them in a way that is consistent with their nature, with their flourishing, then you've gone in the wrong direction. The stability of a form and therefore its preservation

and perfection even as you progress away from that form is a necessary part of understanding transcendent truths. You cannot grasp beauty in the abstract. You need some particular beautiful thing and that particular beautiful thing has to be coherent. It has to have a given finite space in which to exist as a unit but also be integrated in wider harmonies. Yes, transcended in a certain sense but not destroyed thereby. This is a deeper issue. It's been described as the principle of planitude and you you can sort of trace it through the

western tradition from Plato to Platinus to Abalard Aquinus Jordano Bruno and it deserves its own discussion. I wanted to include this critique but the principles at stake here require their own further development and we have to go to the Bible whether you believe in the Bible or not is immaterial but since they're using that character it's important to look at where that character comes from. And in the Bible, the snake is the symbol for the devil. Why? Because it's close to the ground. It's a devouring mouth with no arms. It's

basic instinct on some level. And interestingly, land precisely makes basic life into the good guy. Because in Meltdown, as we transcend biological fixity, we no longer have hierarchies. That was an old patriarchal idea, a fascistic platonic idea. We don't have gendered reproduction. We're going to reproduce like bacteria. AI is like bacteria. It's moving one gene from one organism to another. There's no generations anymore. There's no species anymore. Everything is bacterial, writes Nickland, quote, "In the bacterial system, all codings are reprogrammable with cut and paste, unspeciated genetic transfers. Macroacterial assemblages, by

macroacterial, he means like AI machines. They're like bacteria but big. Collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no biological primitiveness. End quote. In other words, we through the machine we return to the bacterial mode of existence. We go backwards. But that's a good thing because it's non- hierarchical. It's about network. It's satanic in the sense of doing without hierarchy, which for na for land is a good thing. I'm using Nick Land's meltdown because it's like this very instructive manifesto of these uh ideas, but

he's developed since then. You can watch my land video. I talk a little bit about his later Bitcoin uh research. Terrence McKenna, also the protagonist of his story is fungus. It's the mushroom, right? So, there's a love for simple undifferentiated life. By rejecting hierarchy, you fall down into the lowest. So you end up with systems that glorify the snake, bacteria, fungus, etc. Very interesting. The movie I'm using here is Metropolis. Metropolis, sorry, from 1927. And it's very interesting because it precisely associates the technowoman, the revived technologically enhanced robot female with

the biblical Babylon. quite interesting that that series of associations will will come up in later thinkers. The image of the uh [ __ ] of Babylon in the Bible mixing all the blood of different uh saints uniting the seed of all the kings so that her cup of abominations is kind of this future of undifferentiated anything goes all form is destroyed. That's the parody of the feminine. Instead of genuine feminine receptivity and loyalty to the male, what you have is the feminine absorbing to dissolve the male. And again, since these

uh systems draw on the Bible in Christian tradition, if we look at how history comes to an end in the Bible and John's apocalypse, you do get something coming in from the outside, right? The heavenly city descends into the earth. It's the new Jerusalem. It's the church. It's the bride of the lamb as John calls it, the feminine. You also get something coming in maybe from the past, you could say, which is the second coming of Christ. He was in history, now he returns. And it's a wedding. History and humanity

are not rejected. We don't have a posthuman future. The nation, so human diversity, human communities are punished, but then they are healed with the tree of life and they enter into the heavenly city. So in a sense, human diversity is embraced. It's it's transformed. It's not done away with. It's corrected. And then you have the wedding of Christ with church, bridegroom with bride. So gender is asserted. In a certain sense, the future does enter into the past or rather possibility enters into the present. But it's not the future aggressively invading

our timeline in order to destroy. It's more like the bridegroom seducing, conquering the bride, right? It's a wedding. Jesus says in Mark 11:24, "Whatever you pray for, believe you've already received it and it will be yours." So that which is coming from the future, a possible future into the present does so because you stand on faith. You believe it already is. I see this as uh equivalent to bridegroom drawing in seducing bride conquering bride. This isn't about being anti-technology. There are many beautiful things we can bring about. Machines are beautiful.

They do have a place as extended limbs of the human spirit in a certain sense like a car or a spaceship or whatever advanced technology we can come up with. They have a place in medicine. They have a place in exploration, entertainment, artistry. I I don't at all take the uh traditional or classical metaphysical view to contradict technological progress. But I do think it contradicts a certain understanding of the singularity. The singularity cannot be allowed to happen in the sense in which machines advance and then advance further and work on

themselves and leave behind the human subject, human consciousness, human morality. I'm not saying that can't happen, but that can happen in the way that you can lose control of your car and crash. It's still a crash. So, the point is to advance while retaining the driving seat. I think it's legitimate to slow down innovation in order for it to be kept up with by human cognition because the rate of progress is not a good in and of itself. And that doesn't mean we oppose technological innovation. On the contrary, it means

we want to innovate but we want to know what we are innovating towards and that's perhaps mainly an argument against the McKenna land orientation. There is another singularity so to speak that we have come up against which is the limits of the reductionist naturalist paradigm which assumed that everything can be reduced to what it posits to be non-concious non teological not endowed with any final cause with any particular direction matter and energy through the hard problem of consciousness and the combination problem we end up exhausting the scientific scientific deterministic reductionistic

paradigm and rediscovering classical metaphysics that deserves a video on its own and there's several thinkers that have explored that. Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, David Bentley Hart has written good stuff on that. Just a little note at the end here, I edit the sort of dead air when I'm coming up with what to say in these videos, but it isn't AI. I keep getting these comments that my voice is AI. It's not um I don't film myself all the time because it's more of a hassle, but uh it is me recording

them. Okay, as always, thank you very much for watching. Do subscribe if you would like to join my Substack, Twitter, buy me a coffee. Thanks again and until next time.