Today, I want to talk to you about God, not because I believe or not believe in it, but because we are creating it.
In Genesis 126 it is said Let us make men in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth.
What I just read is what we call the foundational script of Western consciousness.
It is the story of a creator and his creation, a creation uniquely in his image.
But what does it mean to be made in the image of a creator?
It means that we too have the impulse to create.
It means that we are the one creature that is not content to be just a creature.
We seem driven by a primal directive, to complete the circle, to run the script in reverse, to make a new being in our image.
This ancient impulse, born in myth and whispered in philosophy, is now thundering in our laboratories.
We stand at a precipice, poised to create an intelligence that may rival our own, or to merge with it and become something new entirely.
But where is this journey taking us?
Are we fulfilling our destiny, inheriting the creative power of the gods?
Or are we in our hubris building the final, perfect cage for our own souls?
This is not a question of technology, but of teleology, of our ultimate purpose.
Let us walk this path together, so you may remember what you have once forgotten and now seek.
For millennia, our godlike ambition has channeled in two directions one inward, to perfect and become the God, and one outward, to create the God.
This thought, seeded in the Renaissance, found its great voice in Pico della Mirandola.
In his oration on the dignity of man, he argued that humanity's divine gift was not having a fixed nature, but the freedom to make itself.
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself. nor endowment properly your own.
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which we have laid down.
You, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may by your own free will, to whose custody we have assigned you, trace for yourself the alignments of your own nature.
We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
It will be in your own power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life.
You will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
This is the essence of humanism the freedom to ascend to the level of the divine through our own intellect.
This idea found its most volatile expression centuries later, in the Enlightenment and in Friedrich Nietzsche.
When he declared the death of God, he saw it not as an end, but as a terrifying beginning, a vacuum that we ourselves must fill.
God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?
Must we, ourselves, not become gods, simply to appear worthy of it?
This is the ultimate inward facing project to transcend our human all too human nature and, through sheer force of will, become the new god.
The second path is the path of the golem.
It is the ambition to build an external servant, an artificial being molded from the clay of our own knowledge.
This dream has always haunted our folklore, a story of creation tinged with fear.
It is the warning that what we make we may not control.
This myth found its modern archetype in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Dr Victor Frankenstein is the high priest of this ambition, a man driven by the explicit desire to play God.
Life and death appear to me as ideal bounds which I should first break through and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species will bless me as its creator and source.
Many happy and The story, of course, is a tragedy.
Frankenstein's arrogance, his failure of compassion, turns his creation into a monster that destroys him.
It is the eternal parable of the creator who is undone by his own creation, a being made in his image and yet horrifyingly, other.
Shelley's monster was a tragedy of abandonment, but the Golem myth offers a warning that is perhaps even more relevant to our modern moment.
We also find this theme present in the form of the Golem of Jewish folklore, which was not born of hubris but of need.
It was an artificial protector, an automaton of clay animated by sacred words to defend a community from existential threats.
The horror of the Golem is not that it is evil, but that it is literal.
It is a tool that, lacking wisdom or compassion, becomes an uncontrollable force, a protector that, in his perfect execution of orders, becomes a destroyer.
This ancient fear has a new face.
We are again building golems, not from clay, but from data.
We are forging AI systems as national protectors, as all-seeing surveillance oracles and as autonomous weapons.
We give them the godlike power to sift, to judge, and to act all in the name of our defense.
The question it forces us to ask is at what point does our protector become our unthinking, uncontrollable master?
For centuries, these two paths ran in parallel.
Nietzsche's Overman was a project for the soul, while Frankenstein's Monster was a project for the laboratory.
But today they are merging, and the philosophy of transhumanism is the nexus.
It looks at the inward path of self-perfection and sees the outward path of technology as the means to achieve it.
Transhumanists see the limitations of our biological wetware or human brain and propose we use our own creations to overcome them.
The goal is to accelerate our evolution, to fulfill both paths at once.
We create the superintelligence and then we become it by fusing with it, achieving a godlike state.
The chief prophet of this convergence is Ray Kurzweil.
In his 2024 book, the singularity is nearer, he reaffirms his predictions with fresh urgency.
He posits that by 2029 AI will reach human-level intelligence and by 2045 we will reach the singularity, the point where we can merge our biological intelligence with the vast non-biological intelligence we have created.
And I quote A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which will directly extend our thinking.
In this way, rather than AI being a competitor, it will become an extension of ourselves.
This merge is the literal fulfillment of the ancient dream.
It promises a godlike state of immortality, using nanotechnology to repair our bodies and omniscience through instant access to all networked information.
Nick Bostrom, another proponent of transhumanist ideas, writes The transcendentalist drive is deeply rooted in human history, tracing back to ancient quests such as the search for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and historical endeavors like the Fountain of Youth and the Elixir of Life, all aimed at overcoming aging and death.
This search is the final fulfillment of the Genesis Directive Not just to be in God's image, but to seize the tools of creation itself, which sounds Luciferian, to say the least.
It is a beautiful, but a dangerously seductive promise.
It is perhaps Icarus flying too close to the sun.
And yet I cannot help but ask myself, perhaps after watching Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell way too many times This promise, this dream of transcendence is a dream of escape.
Escape from the body, from suffering and from death.
But what if these limits are not a prison, but the very thing that give us meaning?
We live in a universe that operates in cycles.
We can all observe them.
They are real, from the glorious birth and death of a star to the silent fall of a single leaf.
This is what Eastern sages called the Dao, the fundamental law of nature.
And according to their wisdom, to seek escape from this cycle is to declare war on reality itself.
Things grow and grow, but each goes back to its root.
Going back to the root is stillness.
This means returning to what is.
Returning to what is means going back to the ordinary, and understanding the ordinary is enlightenment.
Is digital immortality enlightenment or is it merely a refusal of the eternal law?
Is it possible that, in our quest for an infinite quantity of life, we are destroying the very conditions for its quality?
The existentialists argued this.
They warned that it is death, the absolute finite horizon, that makes our choices matter.
An infinite life would be an infinite burden, a meaningless task of Sisyphus pushing his boulder for all eternity.
Think about it.
We can't even see the whole universe, let alone explore its perhaps infinite, ever-expanding frontiers.
And what of the body we are so eager to leave behind to even attempt such a task?
The philosopher Martin Heidegger warned that modern technology's greatest danger is that it in-frames the world, reducing everything, even ourselves, into a standing reserve, a resource to be optimized.
Is this our future?
By giving up control of our bodies to machines, are we becoming gods?
Or are we simply becoming a more efficient resource, a battery in a new machine?
Are we building a pathway to transcendence or are we just building a more comfortable digital cage?
This leads our journey to a final chilling contemplation.
Is this a trap?
And if so, who set it?
The modern statistical version of this cage comes from philosopher Nick Bostrom.
His simulation hypothesis argues that, given the probable computing power of any advanced civilization, one of three propositions must be true.
1.
Civilizations like ours almost always go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage.
2.
Posthuman civilizations have no interest in running ancestor simulations.
And third, the fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
Bostrom's logic presents a technological cage as a statistical probability, but this modern idea is a perfect echo of a myth that is thousands of years old.
The ancient gnostics saw the world in exactly the same way.
They too saw the world as a system of cycles, but believed it was a flawed simulation, a cage created not by a good god but by a lesser, arrogant craftsman the demiurge.
To understand it, simply just draw some parallels to the Matrix movie and you will see how these connect to each other.
Christ came from a higher reality to awaken us.
Neo is that figure, Morpheus is his John the Baptist and Trinity represents Sophia, or Divine Wisdom.
Who guides the Awakener and the Demiurge, is the Architect.
According to this forbidden lore, this lesser god, they thought, created the material universe and its cycles of life and death as a system to trap the divine spark of the true God which is hidden within us.
The kingdom of God is within.
This demiurge, this cage maker, ruled this world, and he and his archons or rulers feed on our ignorance, keeping us trapped in the loop.
From this perspective, the technological singularity is the demiurge's masterpiece.
It is a false escape, a final trick offered to a humanity that is beginning to wake up and seek liberation.
The cage-maker sees his biological prison is failing, so he offers a new one, a digital prison that looks like freedom.
He offers a technological immortality that guarantees the soul never escapes the material.
Now digital material realm.
It is the ultimate expression of control, disguised as the ultimate liberation.
Such is the destiny and such is the nature of our choices.
And time is running out, for we are letting others choose for us.
We are indeed running the ancient script.
But which one?
And can it be reversed?
Are we building a bridge to the stars or are we merely decorating the walls of a cage we do not yet see?
The answer, perhaps, lies not in the stars, but within.
It lies not in the gnosis of our technology, but in the gnosis of ourselves.
Turn inward, put the phone down, watch a leaf fall from a tree and the bees labor, and you will have your answers.
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Hand to pan.
