Orthodox Reflections

By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.

For the more visionary members of the scientistic elite, AI isn’t merely another tool for mankind to use but rather a means by which he will be transformed into a superior organism. An interview in the online magazine Noēma between Tobias Rees and Nathan Gardels provides many details of this ‘upgrade’ of humanity.

It begins with a redefinition of what it means to be alive and to have intelligence:

In her essay in Noema, the astrophysicist Sarah Walker said that “we need to get past our binary categorization of all things as either life or not.”

What interests me most is rethinking the concepts we have inherited from the modern period, from the perspective of the in-betweenness made visible to us by AI.

. . . Deep learning, in general, and generative AI in particular, have broken with this human-centric concept of intelligence and replaced it with something else: The idea that intelligence is pretty much two things: learning and reasoning.

. . . I am emphasizing this absence of the symbolic because it is a beautiful way to show that deep learning has led to a pretty powerful philosophical rupture: Implicit in the new concept of intelligence is a radically different ontological understanding of what it is to be human, indeed, of what reality is or of how it is structured and organized.

Understanding this rupture with the older concept of intelligence and ontology of the human/the world is key, I think, to understanding your actual question: Are we entering what you call a new AIxial age, where AI will amount to something similar to what writing amounted to roughly 3,000 to 2,000 years ago?

The Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church speak of man as the king and priest of creation, the one for whom it was all made and prepared by the All-Holy Trinity. By virtue of this, mankind has a special place in the created order. But the anti-Christian scientists, mimicking their predecessor Charles Darwin, are eager to demote man to a lower level, to make him simply one of the many myriads of lifeforms on the earth. In the context of AI, they are doing this by portraying AI as a new form of life with human-like intelligence.

The AI enthusiasts wear their evolutionist dogma on their sleeve:

Where does AI depart from, and where is it similar to the neural Darwinism described here by Gerald Edelman, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist? What Edelman refers to as “reentrant interaction” appears quite similar to “backpropagation.”

Because of this, they have no compunction nor hesitation about transforming mankind into a new kind of being via technology. They see the latter as a catalyst for accelerating the evolutionary process:

Let me summarize this simply by saying that the technology of writing had absolutely dramatic consequences for what it is to be human, for how we experience and understand ourselves as humans. Among the two, perhaps, most important of these consequences was the systematic emergence of self-reflection and abstract thought.

. . . We could take any theme and approach it from whole new perspectives. Imagine what this kind of co-cogitation between humans and AI would do to our current concept of interiority! Can you imagine what it would do to how we understand terms like mind, thought, having an idea or being creative?

. . . I am entirely aware that I am giving AI philosophical and poetic dignity. And I do so consciously because I think AI has the potential to be an extraordinary philosophical event. It is our task as philosophers, artists, poets, writers and humanists to render this potential visible and relevant.

All this certainly has the makings of a new pivotal age.

The stated goal is to create a new symbiotic creature by permanently combining men and women with AI:

I often think of AI as a kind of very early-stage experimental embryology. Indeed, I often think that AI is doing for intelligence what synthetic biology did for nature. Meaning, synthetic biology transformed nature into a vast field of possibility. The number of things that exist in nature is minuscule compared to the things that could exist in nature. In fact, many more things have existed in the course of evolution than there are now, and there is no reason why we can’t combine strands of DNA and make new things. Synthetic biology is the field of practice that can bring these possible things into existence.

The same is true for AI and intelligence. Today, intelligence is no longer defined by a single or a few instances of existing intelligences but by the very many intelligent things that could exist.

. . . Licklider goes on: “At present (…) there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

What does symbiosis mean? It means that one organism cannot survive without the other, which belongs to a different species. More specifically, it means that one organism is dependent on functions performed by the other organism. More philosophically put, symbiosis means that there is an indistinguishability in the middle. An impossibility to say where one organism ends and the other (or the others) begin.

. . . But here is the question: Is human-AI symbiosis possible from within this new, still emergent territory — this in-between territory — in the sense of the indistinguishability just described?

I think so. And I am excited about it. A bit like Licklider, I am looking forward to a “partnership” that will allow us to “think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

When we can think thoughts we cannot think without AI, and when AI can process data in ways it cannot on its own, then no one can say where humans end and AI begins. Then we have indistinguishability, a symbiosis.

. . . I am describing a situation of maximal human intellectual curiosity. A state where being human is being more than human. Where the cognitive boundary between humans and AI becomes meaningfully indistinct.

With this Borg-like dystopia right before our eyes, what did one of the highest officers of the most moral, non-imperial imperium (to use some of Jay Dyer’s words), i.e., the United States, say while in Europe recently? Vice-President J. D. Vance exalted AI’s ‘potential’, and condemned European countries for showing any ‘trepidation’ towards it:

In his speech on Tuesday, February 11th, the VP stressed that the true potential of AI technologies can only be unlocked inside an innovation-friendly regulatory environment, similar to the one in the U.S. He invited every country to follow this model.

With European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sitting next to him on the podium, Vance referred to the EU’s overly “risk-averse” AI Act, stating:

we need our European partners in particular to look to this new frontier [of AI development] with optimism, rather than trepidation.

European governments are full of a lot of dolts in many countries and at the level of the EU especially, but in this case their caution towards AI is more sensible than the US’s laissez-faire stance.

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In that regard, it is just a slender hair closer to the Orthodox approach towards the transformation of man, to knowledge, philosophy, and related subjects (though in most other ways the Eurocrats are just as implacable enemies of the Orthodox Church as the Deep State in DC and the various other State and local governments throughout the US). The scientistic elite, for instance, disregard the role of religion in philosophy. Hence, their naïve belief that an AI system can bring about a philosophical revolution in human history. With the Orthodox, this is not the case:

Religious faith, far from being considered as a necessary condition for sound philosophizing, has been regarded as something irrelevant or a positive hindrance to the attainment of truth. The philosopher’s moral character and inner being in general have been tacitly assumed to be quite irrelevant to the successful pursuit of knowledge.

The approach of the Byzantines [i.e., the Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire/New Rome/Constantinople; because the Orthodox Church is one, the Orthodox Byzantine approach is not any different from that of the Orthodox in Scotland or South Korea or etc.—W.G.], with very few exceptions, involves a negation of both these presuppositions. Religious faith is for them an indispensable condition of sound philosophizing. The philosopher must begin with religious faith, if he is to avoid error and attain truth. Also, one’s moral and spiritual state – whether one is courageous or cowardly, continent or incontinent, just or unjust, calm or irritable, humble or proud, disposed to love or to hate, and so on – is viewed by them as quite relevant to the pursuit of philosophical knowledge (Constantine Cavarnos, ‘The Way to Knowledge’, Byzantine Thought and Art, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, Mass., 2000, p. 30).

Furthermore, according to the Orthodox Church, mankind has already received the highest philosophy, quite apart from AI, writing, or any other technological advancement, for the Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ is the unsurpassable Wisdom:

For the Greek Fathers, Christianity is the truest and highest philosophy (philosophia), because it was revealed by Christ, Who is God’s Wisdom (Sophia). Perhaps the first who used the term philosophy in this sense was Justin Martyr the Philosopher (c. 100-164), the most important of the Apologists. Justin speaks of Christian teaching as the “divine philosophy,” which is “greater than all human teaching.” It is divine and surpasses all human wisdom because it is “inspired by the Divine Wisdom or Logos,” i.e. Christ. Consistently with his conception of Christianity as the divine philosophy, Justin continued to wear the philosopher’s cloak after he became a Christian. . . .

Similarly, St. Nilos the Ascetic (fl. 440), a pupil of St. John Chrysostom, says: “Many of the Greeks and not a few of the Jews undertook to philosophize; but only Christ’s disciples strove after the true wisdom, for they alone had Wisdom itself as their teacher, actually showing them the conduct proper for such a pursuit.”

Subsequent Greek Fathers, during the entire Byzantine period, continue to speak of Christianity in this manner, referring to it by such terms as “the true philosophy,” “philosophy according to Christ,” “heavenly philosophy,” “spiritual philosophy,” “divine philosophy,” “sacred philosophy,” “philosophy from Above,” and “wisdom from Above” (Cavarnos, ‘Philosophy’, Ibid., pgs. 16-17, 17-18).

The great advancement in human cognition and understanding promised by AI has already happened. For Christ the Eternal Logos, the Wisdom of God, has been united to human nature, and men and women, through union with Christ the God-man, thus have access to all the infinite riches of His knowledge, wisdom, etc. Nothing will ever surpass this wondrous event in human history. What is required to actualize those riches is not advancement in human tech either, but advancement in holiness:

. . . Maximos the Confessor remarks: “ . . . The Savior says: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ They shall see him and the treasures within Him when they have cleansed themselves through love and self-control; and the more so the more they intensify the purification.”

Inner purity results in the removal of the psychical barriers that make our innate knowledge inaccessible to us, that keep it buried in the unconscious. . . .

. . . Man is born with a vast treasure of knowledge pertaining to the whole created world and to God. This knowledge is termed “natural knowledge” . . . . Within God are contained the reasons, ideas, or archetypes of all things. Hence God is said to be perfect Wisdom. . . . Now since man has been created in the image of God, he must reflect within himself God, and hence all these ideas.

. . . In proportion as a man grows in passionlessness, his natural knowledge rises to consciousness, and his knowledge according to nature [i.e., the external knowledge gained through rational learning, the physical senses, etc.—W.G.] becomes sound, free of error. To the degree, on the other hand, that he remains chained to the “passions” . . . – to bad thoughts and feelings, to vice and sin – his natural knowledge remains buried in the unconscious, and the knowledge which he acquires through inquiry and search is not according to nature, but contrary to nature . . . , unsound, a mixture of truth and error (‘The Way to Knowledge’, pgs. 34, 35, 36).

But the highest form of knowledge comes directly from God, via our union with Him:

Natural knowledge and knowledge according to nature are distinguished from a higher kind of knowledge, which is “above nature” . . . , “supernal” . . . , “spiritual” . . . . This knowledge is a direct revelation of spiritual law, of the Divine will, of the hidden mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. It comes from the indwelling of Divine grace in those who have achieved purity. . . . Maximos the Confessor remarks: “He who has brought the body into harmony with the soul through virtue . . . becomes, through purity of mind, an abode of the Logos.” Such a person is said to have risen to a state of illumination . . . , of theosis or union with God, theosis being not only man’s highest state of being, involving the complete turning of the will and the emotions towards God, but also his highest state of knowledge (Ibid., p. 37).

When man enters into such a state of blessedness, it will necessarily profoundly change and improve how he interacts with the creation around him. The AI enthusiasts believe their union of man and AI will lead to a deeper and better understanding between man and the earth:

Gardels: Perhaps such a symbiosis of inorganic and organic intelligence will spawn what Benjamin Bratton calls “planetary sapience,” where AI helps us better understand natural systems and align with them?

Rees: What if we linked AI to this fungi-tree symbiosis? AI could read and translate chemical and electrical signals from fungi-tree-soil networks. These signals contain information about ecosystem health, nutrient flows, stress responses. That is, AI could make the communication between fungi-trees intelligible to humans in real-time.

We humans could then understand something — and possibly pose questions and thereby communicate — that we simply couldn’t otherwise, independent of AI. And simultaneously we can help AI ask the right questions and process information in ways it cannot on its own.

Now let’s expand the scope: What if AI could connect us to large-scale planetary systems that are impossible to know without AI? In fact, what if AI would become something like a self-monitoring planetary system into which we are directly looped. As Bratton has put it, “Only when intelligence becomes artificial and can be scaled into massive, distributed systems beyond the narrow confines of biological organisms, can we have a knowledge of the planetary systems in which we live.”

Perhaps in a way where — as DNA is the best storage for information we know — part of the information storage and the compute the AI relies on is actually done by mycorrhizal networks?

If anything, I can’t wait to have such a whole Earth symbiotic state — and to be a part of this form of reciprocal communication (Noēma).

Once again, however, the illumination experienced by the saints in the Orthodox Church, which gives them unparalleled insight into all the creation, makes this fever-dream of the technophiles irrelevant:

Those who ‘cleave to the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:25) and are totally committed to the spiritual life live in accordance with God’s will, dedicated to Him as were the Nazirites (cf. Num. 6:2-8; Judg. 13:5). At all times they labor to purify their soul and to keep the Lord’s commandments, expending their blood in their love for Him. They purify the flesh through fasts and vigils; they refine the heart’s dross with tears; they mortify their materialistic tendencies through ascetic hardship; they fill the intellect with light through prayer and meditation, making it translucid; and by renouncing their own wills they sunder themselves from passionate attachment to the body and adhere solely to the Spirit. As a result everyone recognizes them as spiritual, and rightly refers to them as such. As they approach the state of dispassion and love, they ascend to the contemplation of the inner essences of created things; and from this they acquire the knowledge of created being that is bestowed by the hidden wisdom of God (cf. 1 Cor. 2:7) and given only to those who have risen above the body’s low estate. Thus it is that when they have passed beyond all sensory experience of this world and have entered with an illumined mind into the realms that are above sense-perception, their intelligence is enlightened and they utter righteous words from a pure heart in the midst of the Church of God and the great congregation of the faithful (cf. Ps. 40:9-10). For other people they are salt and light, as the Lord says of them: ‘You are the light of the world and the salt of the earth’ (cf. Matt. 5:13-14) (Nikitas Stithatos, ‘On the Inner Nature of Things and on the Purification of the Intellect: One Hundred Texts’, ch. 7, The Philokalia, Vol. Four, Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware translators, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, p. 109; via the PDF available at this site).

Significantly, the Orthodox Church is adamant that each Christian, each striver for theosis, have a spiritual father to guide him on that difficult path. For the scientistic class, AI will fill that role:

Such an AI system can make me visible to myself in ways neither I nor any other human can. It literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me, and if so, then how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.

Philosophically put, AI can help me transform myself into an “object of thought” to which I can relate and on which I can work.

The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism (Noēma).

For the Orthodox, only an illumined spiritual father or mother, an actual human being who has had long experience with the spiritual life, not a demonically infested AI system, can guide a man or woman safely to union with God, to true knowledge and philosophy, to transformation into a new creature:

If you are not obedient to a spiritual father in imitation of the Son who was obedient to the Father even unto death and the cross (cf. Phil. 2:8), you cannot be spiritually born anew. If you do not become the beloved son of a holy father, and if you have not been born anew in the Logos and the Spirit, how will you yourself become a holy father and give birth to holy children who conform to the holiness of their father? And if this does not happen – well, ‘the tree is known by its fruit’ (cf. Matt. 12:33) (‘On the Inner Nature of Things’, ch. 54, p. 122).

Despite the States being heavily influenced by iconoclastic Protestantism, there is actually a painting by John Gast from 1872, American Progress, that is a very good icon of the reigning cult/religion of the union, i.e., material improvement. At the center of the painting is a voluptuous goddess, Columbia, who represents the union of the States. In one hand she carries a school book and in the other a telegraph wire. Following in the path she clears are pioneers, trains, sailboats, bridges, and other marks of Modern technological society; before her flee bears, buffalo, Native Americans, and everything irrational and pre-Modern. Technophilic civilization brings light itself into the world, as we see the sun shining in that part of the painting, while the pre-Modern world is full of darkness.

With this idolatrous worship of materialistic, technological Progress pervading the vast majority of the peoples of the States, and with VP Vance, other federal and State officials, and President Trump himself (via Project Stargate, for example) throwing their full support behind the unbridled development of AI, there is cause for deep concern that we will not escape the worst outcomes that will arise from it here in the US.

But for those who are looking for an ark to protect them from the coming deluge, the Orthodox Church is here in the States. Enter in, all who wish to be saved.