The Gift of Being a Weak Bag of Meat and Bones and Soul

On Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and Alchemical Eternal Life

Sometimes I fall asleep on the floor.

No pillows, no blanket — just on my arm, in my office, between my books and Ransom’s toy excavators. Midday cuts through the vertical blinds casting a prison on my floor, tracing my face and shoulders and sides with shadow bars.

But in these moments, exhausted, I am most free.

Last night I was up for a few hours because I’m a bit jet lagged, because there are song birds who do their morning warmups on our patio, and because my upstairs neighbour dropped what I assume to be a buffalo filled with nitro-glycerine at 4:30 in the morning.

I am thirty-six, and when four-hour nights stack up, I no longer face them with a smile and a stretch. I endure them with double espressos and floor naps in the sun.

Last week I was in New York and the hotel I stayed at had a sauna that cooked hot hot hot — and I would sit in there, with a litre of electrolyte water, for about an hour at a time. Sweat would pour out of me, down my chest and stomach, dripping off my nose and brows; even my knees wept with salt water.

And while I baked, slowly, I kept thinking about what it means to be human.

Mostly because I am reading a book about the technocratic revolution, because I heard Peter Thiel say he doesn’t really care if humanity survives, and because I fall asleep on the floor and because I drip water when I get hot and because I am so very human.

On the plane ride home, in between turbulence , I scribbled out a few thoughts on all this, on Artificial Intelligence, on Transhumanism, and on the gift of being a weak bag of meat and bones and soul. To the sound of babes crying and the lady in the row next to me tossing her chunks, I wrote about the Homunculus, the Golem, the Replicants, the Moonchild, and then, little old me, Josh.

I would like to share some of that with you, now.

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1. Is Technological Overreach Part of Man’s Rebellion ?

I have this problem, an ethical conundrum, that I can’t quite figure out. I have some friends and they think AI is hunky-dory, some tool to be leveraged to aid them in all their creative endeavours. It helps them draft their books, sift through hundreds of years of philosophical debates, it generates art for their YouTube banners and their Instagram Posts, it writes copy and captions, and it is their therapist and it is their self-help guru.

They’re cranking out content at the speed of Skynet and then there’s me, stuck with this :

Is an axe more ethical than a chainsaw ?

All tools, even apocalyptic neural networks, have a give and take.

Way back when, in the good ol’ days, Socrates was worried that the by-product of Plato writing down all his talks and thoughts would mean a complete loss of the tool of memory.

One step closer to evolving into goldfish.

And, among other things, Socrates was right — a few millennia later, here we are, attention spans that last as long an algorithm, and critical thinking abilities akin to Google summaries. And we only know Socrates thought this, the dwindling powers of gray matter, because, well, Plato wrote it all down. He was an early adopter.

And I, for one, am thankful Plato took up quill and ink and scribbled down the mad thoughts of Socrates, because that is how I found out I couldn’t live an unexamined life, it’s how I learned the place of virtue, and it’s how I learned I could poison someone with Hemlock.

Every tool has a give and take — and it’s hard to discern what is best among that giving and taking. We have to assess all that we lose and all that we might gain. Socrates didn’t want to lose the powers of thought and memory, and Plato wanted to gain the encoding those thoughts and memories for the future.

Fast-forward two thousand years, and two guys, John Aitken and James Jeffray, invented some crude version of what we now call a chainsaw. They used it for symphysiotomies, procedures that split the pubic bone to widen the pelvis to help in complications at childbirth.

And we use the chainsaw, now, to cut down trees with all kinds of relative ease.

A giving and a taking.

And herein lies my ethical conundrum :

Is an axe better ?
Is a chainsaw worse ?
How much humanity is lost with technological advancements ?
I don’t know, but surely, the answer isn’t none.

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The first tree I ever cut down was when I was in Pioneers and I was seven and we learned how to make lean-tos, shelters of branch and leaves that leaned against trees, and we learned how to use a compass and a map and track animals.

The axe was heavy in my pre-pubescent hands, and at my first swing the towering Pine scoffed. I wondered how long it would take to chop it down, whose endurance would give out first. Laugh all he might, by sweat and blister, I felled him, in so many chops and wood-chunks chipping away.

My body felt the strength of that tree, felt the cellulose like muscle fibre, the bark like bone, and you could smell all those wild scents from the split trunk. And with each chop I figured out more and more who I was. After that, the felling, I had to cut and chip away branches for the lean-to, and then cut the tree to prep it for firewood.

That night, at our campsite, we didn’t use my tree for the bonfire, it still needed to dry. But we did use some other tree that some other kid cut down and I felt, deep within me, a gratefulness and a pleasure. By the sweat of my brow, and the strength of that tree, we now sing songs and roast weenies.

I have used a chainsaw, and they are fun and they are efficient but they never made me feel like I did when I was seven and I was in a battle between my self and the untamed timber.

I don’t think I ever want to lose that again — the gratefulness and the pleasure. I think, for me, I might always need to use an axe because of everything I gain, and because I would lose too much. Sweat equity, or whatever.

And that is why I wonder about technological overreach — of the intent is the loss of self, the loss of personhood, the loss of connection internally and externally. I wonder if, at the fall, and in the seduction of improper stewardship of Eden, the serpent’s telos was a severing from God, from self, and from creation.

And if tools and technology were a means to that end.

Humanity was given authority over the garden, and I sometimes wonder just how tyrannical we might be, how destructive and mongering, all in the curséd name of efficiency and progress and comfort.

I wonder if those serpentine lies slithered in our ears and down our spines and told us that a hard day’s work was for the ants, and aren’t we, o man, so much more ? And I wonder if that’s why Solomon asks the sluggards to consider the ants, because they know the blessings of a job well done.

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2. Theosis, Salvation, and the Loss of the Person

Because here is the deal — at least in my mind :

All of this burgeoning tech, not just in the days east of Eden, but especially now, in the days east of Silicon Valley, they all add up to some kind of techno-gnosticism.

Part of that is simply the loss of that which is human — and, I think, from where I am sitting, pot meeting kettle, and typing this on a laptop with so many flashing pixels burning their insomniatic spell into my brain — all tech just might be a disembodying. It takes axe and pen from hand, it removes embodied connection, and replaces it with combustion and steel and microchips.

It promises addition by removal.

But the other part of all this, the more sinister part, is the idea that we can find a kind of salvation by escaping the limitations of the body; that we can be set free from the meat and the bones and soul of being human and find liberation through plastic, silicon, synthetic dreams.

Maybe this sounds far-fetched, or maybe it sounds like I am holding up a painted protest sign signalling the apocalypse. Maybe you think I’ve lost my marbles.

But I have read and I have heard the technocrats talk about “radically solving the human problem” and that “trans-humanism is this ideal where our human, natural body gets trans-formed into an immortal body”.

And if that doesn’t sound like mystical religious salvation talk, if that doesn’t sound like St Paul got held hostage by a hostile cyborg, then how about this for you :

“And there’s a critique of let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context or, I don’t know, a trans-vestite as someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a trans-sexual is someone who changes their, I don’t know, penis into a vagina…

But we [ the trans-humanists ] want more trans-formation than that.

The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural. Man, it’s so pathetically little.

We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs.

We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

Peter Thiel said that, and he went on to draw a direct line to Christianity, saying that when orthodoxy critiques the cross dressing and the changing of sex organs, it’s based on the fact that the trans-ing not going far enough.

And ol’ Pete is implying that, he agrees, and that trans-humanism is the gateway to the same kind of trans-formation the Christ brings :

Soul change.

But that is not the critique, and the bait and switch, the appeal that orthodoxy is okay with any means to achieve some nebulous end echoes with all kind of slithering whispers. But, moving goal posts and non-sequitors really work when people are used to twelve second reels passing by at the speed of thumbs.

When you remove God from the equation, and when you want eternal life, well, you gotta look to the wires and the waves and cybernetic saviours. What else do you have ?

Christianity says that humans are icons of God — that we are a truly unique hypostasis, a body and a soul, and that we bear the image of the Divine and that we are made for communion with Him. And Artificial Intelligence, imbuing our meat and bones with some kind of synthetic sanctification, can never replace that.

Christianity says that we are trans-formed, body and soul, by a living union with our God — and by being in union with Life itself. And by participating in the Divine, we will live forever; you are what you eat, after all.

The trans-humanists want trans-formation, too, and they also want eternal Life. But they think that nano-bot swarms being injected through your jugular, being implanted directly onto your brain, and mapping out your neuro-chemical-whatever and shocking you into obedience is the way to get there. You can live forever if you can upload your consciousness to the cloud.

Christianity says we are both human and Divine — animated by the Spirit of God.

Trans-humanism says we are both human and divine, too — they’re just still building the god we’re supposed to be controlled by. Working out the kinks of deity, ironing out the bugs in omniscience.

If that isn’t clear enough, let me say it a bit different :

The trans-humanists think salvation rests upon some kind of mechanical and digital enhancement — and at the very core of that enhancement, lies an all seeing, all knowing, artificial intelligence. Thiel has called his Palantir, after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings.

We do no think that.

Christians believe that salvation comes through Christ and being in union with the Triune God. We believe the goal of the human is not to become some hyper-intelligent instantiation of Google™, we do not need to by-pass our biological limitations by becoming digitally omnipresent.

No no no.

The goal of the human is is to become like God, in love, by the path of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. It is by the very human notion of surrender and freedom that we find salvation.

We do not lose our personhood by becoming some tele-mechanical replicant; we become full partakers of the divine through the path of meat and bone and soul.

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3. Artificial Intelligence, The Hierarchy of the Cosmos

I know all the arguments — all the ways AI has apparently integrated into our lives to be helpful, convenient, and to free us up to do all kinds of wonderful and creative exploits.

I don’t buy it.

AI makes all these grand promises : it can read books for you, it can decode diseases and cure you, it can automate work and bring about some post-labour utopia, and it can be some global governor of resources bringing about peace in ways pesky humans can’t, with their emotions, and all. Just give it total control — a small price to pay for utopia.

And it can generate emails for you, it can write up Substack essays, it can make slop images and garbage videos for your socials, and it can make strategies and business plans and project calendars.

“It’s just a tool !” Rings out the chorus of its defenders. “It will make life easier !”

As if ease was some Christian virtue.

I have friends, shocking, I know — and some of them tell me they use it for research — that they couldn’t really be bothered to read books on craft or politics or philosophy or theology. So they ask ChatGPT or some other LLM with a name to do the work for them.

And, in a matter of minutes, after the circuits whir and the hive-mind buzzes, it vomits up some inhuman summary of everything they ever asked for. They get the definitions, the main movements of whatever theory, and they can do deep research asking it to assess more and more and more and more. Like the grave.

They can take all that, consume it and regurgitate it, like some intellectual bulimic, as an essay, a YouTube video, an Instagram post — anything.

For these, AI addicts, learning and the life of the mind has been shaped by the pace of content, produced for the praise of likes and follows, and shared to accrue some kind of resources ( respect, money, clout, I don’t know ). The need justifies the means.

But that is, if you don’t mind me saying, demonic.

And I mean that in its deepest sense — disembodied and anti-human.

You see, I count it a gift to move at the pace of my humanity, to be confined by my meat and bones and soul.

Gift is too small a word, actually.

It is my Divine Blessing.

God became man, after all, not some stupid cybernetic organism or learning computer.

I read at the pace of my eyes and my mind, and I live in books, and when I read them, they stay with me. When I read about distributism, and when I read Belloc and Chesterton and Ropke, I have hundreds and thousands of little conversations with them in my mind. I speak with them, engage with their ideas while I am at the grocery store, while I am brushing my teeth, and while I go for walks and have a smoke.

It takes me time to read a book, me with my organic brain matter, made mostly of fat — scarcely a microchip to be found, in me, actually.

It takes me time to process a book, too, and to write the things I learn and think about. I have been stuck on that stupid axe and chainsaw question for months, just ask my brothers in law.

And I am not interested in enhancing the speed at which I learn with this new tool because I do not think that this tool, AI, is of the same category.

Let me explain :

Your body is shaped by the use of the axe; your shoulders and your forearms grow, your core tightens, your legs brace. I’ve met lumberjacks, and they look like they fell trees for a living. Your soul is also shaped by the use of the axe, by the slow rhythmic swing, by the intentional chops, by the time it takes.

The same is true of bodies and souls and chainsaws.

And, also, the same is true of Artificial Intelligence.

But this tool isn’t “neutral” — it forms narratives and mimics consciousness; it imitates creativity and reason and rationality. An axe doesn’t speak to you, it gives a silence and allows you to hear yourself, maybe for the first time.

There is an ontological hierarchy to the cosmos and to our bodies — a way of being that we all fit into. Created beings, you and me, cannot override our nature which means, given the fact that God is over all, we’re stuck being human.

Artificial Intelligence says, at its core, you can bypass all that — exceed your limits and disregard the ontological limitations put upon you, like some perversion of the Promethean mythos. It says, in some symbolic way, that you can rewrite reality in your image. I think a serpent said that once, too.

The Christian hierarchy of the cosmos surpasses the Materialist idea that mind is pure data and this post-enlightenment notion that virtue and truth and even beauty can be conceived of separated from a body and a soul, and especially a Personal Divine Being. AI is our latest and greatest culmination of that disembodiment — flattening the world to analytics and computation and randomized generative equations.

The Christian hierarchy of the cosmos realizes that life is ritualistic, liturgical, sacramental, and embodied — it is mythological, at least in the sense of what makes us grow. We are not simply rational beings, not simply data nodes on some digital network, that is too small, to narrow, to finite. We are symbolic beings who image the invisible with our bodies, the meat and bones, I mean.

We are shaped by stories and images and by participating in the Divine patterns that shape the cosmos. And by this participation, through this union, we find life and depth and meaning — because we are venturing further up and further in.

You can tell, and it seems the data and the studies are showing, that people formed by AI have significantly reduced cognitive abilities — and it seems to be manifesting in all those pesky little areas that make us oh so human :

critical thinking, memory ( I see you, Socrates ), creativity, and neural engagement.

It is easy to tell when sermons are AI generated, when lectures or essays are — and sure as Hell it’s easy to see when art is generative.

And it is sickening for a reason :

It is inhuman.

Here’s why the slow and intentional and difficult path of engaging with the world through that bag of meat and bones and soul matters :

It is the pattern and hierachy of the cosmos.

It is how we find union with God and depth to life and meaning for self.

Through our bodies.

Just like you can’t AI yourself into spiritual maturity or holiness, so too can you not download mastery in any other domain. You must take the slow path of being shaped by effort and work, of being re-created by intentionality and difficulty.

You must fight the machine on the scale of time, because eventually, they will rust, and we will live forever.

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The Gift of Humanity

The riddles of children destroy the ideologies of adults.

I think the path forward is childlikeness — these, says Jesus, the children, are who the kingdom of heaven belongs to.

I have two boys and I watch them play in the sand and dance in the water. I watch them eat cherries and watermelon and beef jerky; I watch them tell stories and make friends and pass out on the grass.

I watch them learn and grow, start to crawl, sing songs, help me do chores and tell me about their days and their dreams.

There is no programmed ideology, no digital philosophy, no cybernetic theology, that can stand against the dirt stained fingers of a toddler or the milk drunk smiles of an infant.

My sons, Ransom and Cassian, obliterate the trans-humainst worldview before breakfast — they sing it into oblivion, they laugh it into the abyss, and shatter it to a million pieces with their bright smiles.

The machines are a barrier, they blind us to the other — but the children ? They are a salve that drops mechanical scales from our eyes. They tell us that the very human, the very embodied, they very real is the only thing worth pursuing.

Sometimes, when I fall asleep on the floor, in between my books and Ransom’s toy excavators, he comes in and wakes me up. He comes and asks me to play, tells me that we can go for a bike ride or do some digging or play with Batman and Joker.

And I say yes.

Almost always.

That’s how I fight the machine.

It’s how I stay human.

It’s how I participate in the Divine.

Slow and steady.

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Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.

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