Demons, Identities, and Artificial Intelligence
In conversation with Jonathan Pageau
At ARC I shared a stage with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau to discuss identity in the digital age. After the video went live, a few people suggested we should find a way to extend the conversation.
With this in mind, I was pleased to reconnect with Jonathan Pageau for a further conversation, in which we developed some of those themes at greater length. It’s now live!
In it, Jonathan and I discussed
what postmodern philosophy gets wrong - and right
whether demons are real
how the internet is changing consciousness
the interconnected histories of identity and information technologies
what icon painting and Pepe the Frog have in common
and quite a lot else…!
It really was one of my favourite conversations in ages. Some of you may also enjoy.
Watch here:
Jonathan Pageau has had an enormous impact on me, far greater than I could ever have anticipated at my stage of life. Not just in how I see the world, but also in how I experience God, because of how he has enabled me to read the Bible. (And the world.)
His hermeneutic doesn't displace what I have known, but rather adds color to monochrome, or a third dimension to flat pictures.
Jonathan has said that he and his semi-reclusive brother Matthieu share the same brain. Matthieu has written a mend-bending book called "The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis."
He doesn't make reference to the four Aristotelian causes explicitly, but it's the same paradigm. The book is a magisterial effort to recapture what we lost when we stopped looking for final and formal causes.
The chapters are all 2-3 pages long. There's not a sentence in it that is in difficult English. But I've read it five times now in order to make the shift in paradigm.
Watching this I felt like I’d lassoed a comet and was just struggling to hang on. So many marvels.