“Sweet Days of Discipline” by Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Tim Parks)

In this novella, Jaeggy writes about her boarding school days and her first great love, Frederique, “She spoke to no one. Her looks were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that is why I wanted to conquer her. She had no humanity.” Even while living in Appenzell, Frederique lived in a world apart. “She was more interested in ideas than in human beings. Though one can hardly speak of human beings in boarding school. At table sometimes I would hear her laugh her gratuitous laugh that haunted me in my sleep. I turned, and everybody’s face was serious.” For Jaeggy, boarding school was the formative experience. “I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lowered eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.”

“God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning” by Meghan O’Gieblyn

O’Gieblyn is an evangelical Christian turned atheist, who writes essays on philosophy, religion, technology, and science. This book is part memoir of her conversion, written as intellectual odyssey, as well as digressive philosophical musings on the nature of the self, modernity, subjectivity, the history of religion, and general artificial intelligence.

O’Gieblyn begins with the state of modernity. “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” The possible rise of AGI has forced humanity to re-question what it is that exactly makes us human. The hard problem, as coined by philosopher David Chalmers, is to be able to objectively explain just what the nature of consciousness exactly is. “Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”

The mind-body dualism espoused by Descartes strikes the modern mind as quaint. Perhaps, we are all materialists now? O’Gieblyn suggests, “Materialism is the only viable metaphysics in modernity.” Consciousness resides in the realm of the subjective. Modernity is objective, if it is anything, right? “Science put a bracket around consciousness because it was too difficult to study objectively, but this methodological avoidance eventually led to metaphysical denial, to the conclusion that because consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, it does not exist. Within the parameters of modern science, subjective experience has come to seem entirely unreal.”

Ray Kurzweil is, perhaps more than any other academic, responsible for popularizing the ideas of transhumanism and the Singularity. “Kurzweil calls himself a “patternist.” He believes consciousness is a pattern of information, a biological configuration of energy and matter that persists over time. It does not reside in the hardware of our brains—the cells and atoms and neurons, which are always changing—but in the computational patterns that make up our sensory systems, our attention system, and our memories, which together form the distinctive algorithm that we think of as our identity.” Norbert Wiener had already suggested, “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Transhumanism is materialism all the way down, just with a software and hardware distinction. “A pattern, after all, is essentially computational, which means it can, at least in theory, be transferred onto a computer…. Most transhumanists insist that this understanding of personal identity is fully compatible with physicalism…. Its fundamental ideology is actually nudging us down to a lower ontological level.” Individuality, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, sensation: these all just become patterns in the data. “The promise of a coming Singularity served to justify a technological culture that privileges information over human beings.” This is what computer scientist Jaron Lanier decries as an “antihuman approach to computation [where] bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” There are more than faint echoes of religion. “What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.” Kurzweil, himself, claims, “The major religions emerged in pre-scientific times so the metaphors are pre-scientific. That the answers to existential questions are necessarily metaphoric is necessitated by the fact that we have to transcend mere matter and energy to find answers…. The difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in “God” is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.”

O’Gieblyn states that, contrary to popular notions, many of these transhumanists are actually de-anthropomorphizing the world. They are attempting to remove the human subjectivity from objective reality. “Proponents of decentralized intelligence are less interested in projecting human qualities onto nonhuman objects than they are in reconfiguring human intelligence through the lens of these inanimate systems.” Philosopher Philip Goff cautions, “The fact that physical science has been extremely successful when it ignores the sensory qualities gives no reason to think that it will be similarly successful if and when it turns its attention to the sensory qualities themselves.” AGI researchers have chosen to pursue practical results over any understanding of theory. “It turns out that much of life can be “gamified,” reduced to a series of simple rules that enable these machines to build their own models of the world…. Many forms of machine learning are considered “black box” technologies. They are composed of many hidden layers of neural networks, and there’s no way to ascertain what kind of model they are building from their experience…. This metadata—this shell of human experience—becomes part of a feedback loop that then actively modifies real behavior.” O’Gieblyn compares the inscrutable certainty of these neural networks to the Calvinist theology of predestination— able to be taken only on faith alone. And taken only with a measure of doubt too, for the thoughtful, at least, perhaps. “The doctrine [of predestination] eradicated not only free will but any coherent sense of self. To concede that one’s mind is controlled by God is to become a machine. It is to grant that the heart is also a black box, full of hidden desires and shadowy motivations whose true causes remain hidden from the conscious mind.”

Perhaps the most intriguing part of O’Gieblyn’s book is her section on idealism, the belief that consciousness is all that exists. According to O’Gieblyn, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup contends that “the world is just one universal consciousness and that the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of this cosmic mind…. The universal mind—whether it goes by God, Brahman, or some other name—is a common feature of idealism…. All living, conscious creatures were the “disassociated alters” of the cosmic mind.” However, O’Gieblyn makes clear, Kastrup “doesn’t believe the cosmic mind is omniscient, omnipotent, or benevolent; most likely it is not even self-reflective, or self-aware…. Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system.” Anti-materialism is, therefore, not anti-science. “One can speak of the behavior of atoms, their properties, their relationships, regardless of whether one believes they are composed of matter or information or emanations of the cosmic mind.” Kastrup posits, “The meanings we think to discern in the world may not, after all, be mere personal projections, but actual properties of the world…. Each of us, as individuals, can now give ourselves permission to dedicate our lives to finding meaning in the world reassured by the knowledge that this meaning is really there.”

Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests that when we reach the point where we, as humanity, allow blackbox algorithms to not only choose our movies and restaurants, but also our spouses and occupations, then we will have annihilated the modern project of individualism. “Harari argues that this would officially mark the end of liberal humanism, which depends on the assumption that an individual knows what is best for herself and can make rational decisions about her best interests.” But can we really remove the human perspective from our human reality? O’Gieblyn continues, “A vantage so far removed from human nature cannot account for human agency. The view of earth from the Archimedean point compels us to regard our inventions not as historical choices but as part of an inexorable evolutionary process that is entirely deterministic and teleological…. We ourselves inevitably become mere cogs in this machine, unable to account for our actions in any meaningful way, as the only valid language is the language of quantification, which machines understand far better than we do…. What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations—to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life—a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification.”

O’Gieblyn concludes by pointing out that a culture built upon the reliance on digital technology and quantification is an ideology in itself. It has normative implications for the direction of humanity’s future. “The central pillar of this ideology is its conception of being, which might be described as an ontology of vacancy—a great emptying-out of qualities, content, and meaning. This ontology feeds into its epistemology, which holds that knowledge lies not in concepts themselves but in the relationships that constitute them, which can be discovered by artificial networks that lack any true knowledge of what they are uncovering.” This is the brave new world in which AGI suggests and humanity obeys, without question. Hannah Arendt had agreed that consciousness is truly humanity’s hard problem, “It is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that whenever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”

“Philosophical Fragments” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

In this essay, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, comparing Socratic and Christian notions of truth, faith, the historical, and the eternal. He asks, “Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin. It was a Socratic question or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight.” Kierkegaard continues by stating Socrates’ notion of the individual and how its subjectivity relates to the objective world. “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge. Moreover, this is how Socrates understood himself, and in his view this is how every human being must understand himself, and by virtue of that understanding he must understand his relation to the single individual, always with equal humility and with equal pride.” Socrates was opposed to notions of individuality espoused by the Skeptics and by arch-subjectivists, “If the Socratic theory of recollection and of every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in “to learn” not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, with everything as the measure of man, in the sense that he is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that the single individual is for himself the measure, no more and no less.”

Kierkegaard next compares the Socratic method to the teachings of Christ. “Between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest…. The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching.” Where Christianity steps beyond the Socratic is in the leap of faith. “Faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical…. The follower, however, is in faith related to that teacher in such a way that he is eternally occupied with his historical existence…. Then the object of faith becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has the condition, can thrust the teacher away…. Faith, then, must cling firmly to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment…. The contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and, since it is a condition for the understanding of eternal truth, it is eo ipso the eternal condition…. Faith is not an act of will…. But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so…. Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith…. The wonder that the eternal condition is given in time.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (for it is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which in this connection one can say with multiple meanings that it did not arise from any human heart…. If in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy we begin by narrating what was said earlier, how shall we ever, not finish, but ever manage to begin, for history just keeps on growing.”

“Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher” by Gregory Vlastos

Vlastos was a classics professor at Princeton and Berkeley. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990 and was considered, along with Leo Strauss, the foremost American expert on Socrates in the twentieth century. First, Vlastos tackles the unique double meaning behind some of Socrates’ irony. “We can see how Socrates could have deceived without intending to deceive…. The concept of moral autonomy never surface’s in Plato’s Socratic dialogues—which does not keep it from being the deepest thing in their Socrates, the strongest of his moral concerns…. Socratic irony is not unique in accepting the burden of freedom which is inherent in all significant communication. It is unique in playing that game for bigger stakes than anyone else ever has in the philosophy of the West.”

At the heart of Vlastos’ argument is that while the Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues was the historical Socrates, the Socrates from the middle dialogues onward was a “Socrates” of Plato’s invention, whose espoused metaphysics was actually Plato’s. Vlastos argues, “This is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics: the postulation of an eternal self-existent world, transcending everything in ours, exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes which afflict all creatures in the world of time, containing the Form of everything valuable or knowable, purged of all sensory content…. Plato’s Form-mysticism is profoundly other-worldly. The ontology of non-sensible, eternal, incorporeal, self-existent, contemplable Forms, and of their anthropological correlate, the invisible, immortal, incorporeal, transmigrating soul, has far-reaching implications for the mind and for the heart…. One could hardly imagine a world-outlook more foreign to that of Socrates…. He is not other-worldly: the eternal world with which Plato seeks mystical union is unknown to him. For Socrates reality—real knowledge, real virtue, real happiness—is in the world in which he lives.”

Vlastos argues that the early Socrates relied on elenctic arguments that consisted strictly of peirastic statements. In the Gorgias, Socrates implores, “By the god of friendship, Callicles, you mustn’t think that you may play with me and say whatever comes into your head, contrary to your real opinion, nor, conversely, must you think of me as jesting. For you see what our discussions are all about—and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?” Vlastos explains, “When engaged in elenctic argument, searching for the right way to live, he is in dead earnest…. This is my claim: when Socrates is searching for the right way to live, in circumstances in which it is reasonable for him to think of the search as obedience to divine command, his argument cannot involve willful untruth. For elenctic argument is the very process on which he depends to test the truth of his own convictions about the right way to live, no less than those of his interlocutor.” As Socrates, himself, says, “I examine the argument chiefly for my own sake, though no doubt also for the sake of my friends.”

In the rest of this book, Vlastos describes what made Socrates’ morality so original. Vlastos begins, again, with the Gorgias, “The thesis Socrates undertakes to prove to Polus in this section of the Gorgias (474B-475C) is at the heart of his vision of the good life. It is that he who commits injustice inflicts upon himself a greater injury than on the one who he wrongs…. Has any stronger claim been ever made by a moral philosopher? I know of none.” For Socrates, piety is intimately tied with reason. In the Crito, he claimed, “I am the sort of man who is persuaded by nothing in me except the proposition which appears to me to be the best when I reason about it.” The original leap first proposed by Socrates was that even the gods were bound by reason. Vlastos explains, “For [Socrates] the highest form of wisdom is not theoretical, but practical. And it is of the essence of his rationalist program, in theology to assume that the entailment of virtue by wisdom binds gods no less than men. He could not have tolerated a double-standard morality, one for men, another for the gods: this would have perpetuated the old irrationalism…. Piety, and by the same token, every other virtue, has an essence of its own which is as normative for the gods as it is for us.” In the Euthyphro, Socrates asks, “Is piety loved by the gods because it is piety? Or is it piety because the gods love it?”

Socrates’ own conception of his own pious life engaged him in being a gadfly to the community of Athens. Vlastos suggests, “Socrates saw his own work in summoning all and sundry to perfect their soul as work he did at god’s command, as his own service to the god.” Socrates reveals, “I believe that no greater good has ever come to you in the city [of Athens] than this service of mine to the god.” Another of Socrates’ contentions was his refusal to countenance the justice of an eye for an eye. Vlastos “argued for the ground-breaking originality of Socrates’ interdict on retaliation…. If, when we see that an option is unjust, we should reject it instantly without giving any consideration at all to countervailing benefits, then, naturally, we should never commit injustice.” In the Crito, Socrates states, “Therefore, we should not return wrong for wrong nor do evil to a single man, no matter what he may have done to us.” Socrates realizes just how revolutionary this morality is. He continues, “And between those who do believe and those who don’t there can be no common counsel: of necessity they must despise each other when they view each other’s deliberations.”

Vlastos concludes by returning to how Socrates see his own hierarchy of ultimate ends: “The final unconditional good is happiness. It is the only we “pursue” or desire only for its own sake and thus the “end” of all our actions…. The supreme non-final unconditional good, both necessary and sufficient for our happiness, hence the sovereign constituent of our good is virtue…. Regardless of whatever other good we may gain or forfeit, if we achieve this constituent of the good we shall possess the final good: we shall be happy…. The subordinate, non-final and conditional goods: health, wealth, etc. the difference to our happiness these can make is miniscule. But goods they are; we shall be happier with than without them, but only if we use them aright, for they are not “good just by themselves”: if separated from wisdom they will go sour on us and we shall be worse off with them than we would have been without them…. The “intermediaries”, which are reckoned “neither good nor evil” because they are not constituents of the good: their value is purely instrumental; they are never desired for their own sake, but only for the sake of goods.”