New essay: Soul Trader
It's Singularities all the way down
ARC Research invited me to contribute a paper for this year’s conference, on Identity in the Digital Age. The result is now live and may be of interest to some of you. It’s another metaphysical one: I started out exploring the idea of a technological Singularity, and ended up concluding that it’s Singularities all the way down - going all the way back to the Axial Age. That is: our contemporary Western concept of 'identity' emerged first out of 'the self', which in turn emerged from 'the soul', and this trajectory has tracked long, slow shifts in consciousness that are themselves inextricable from transformations in our information technologies. The first Singularity was literacy itself.
Now, the postwar cyborg turn has set about commodifying this interlocking matrix of self-concept and information technology, with the human soul itself (understood in Plato's tripartite terms) as the subject of technologisation and marketisation. This first claimed eros, the libidinal soul, via the sexual revolution. Subsequently it spread to thumos, the desire for recognition, via social media. Now, it’s turned its attention toward logos - our capacity for rational comprehension of the divine order - with AI as the medium.
Soul Trader argues that this is a category error, and will produce short-term profit but also negative sequelae whose shape can be inferred by assessing the trajectory of our digitisation of eros and thumos. But this is not a tech-negative essay. Rather, I argue that provided we can retrieve the concept of human ‘souls’ as of a fundamentally different order to digital technologies, and prior to these, we can escape the epistemological cul-de-sac of modernity without necessarily leaving behind all its fruits - but rather, harness these to our overall flourishing.
My favorite monthly illustration in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is from February. A lovely winter scene down on the farm, three women sitting more or less together in a little shed. Two of the women are sitting with their pudenda hanging out. They are the peasants. The third is a lady and is fully clothed.
This was in the days when we were more fully understanding ourselves as "souls". Some souls sat with their pussies out; some were granted modesty.
People who think going back to "souls" is a good and necessary idea must either imagine themselves as "lady/gentleman souls" or don't mind the thought of being a "peasant soul", genitalia exposed to the common view.
This is a absolute corker of an essay. Bernado Kashrup’s theories are very interesting about analytical idealism but he didn’t get there first, an earlier version of this was put forward by Bishop Berkley, (subjective idealism famously refuted by Dr Johnson).
If you want even more weird physics theories check out Superdeterminism and Bell’s Theorem, as I understand this (and I could be wrong), this means that the universe does not function without free will, that is our choices and agency are key to the outcome of the unfolding of reality, something in contradiction to the ‘inevitability of progress’ narrative. Who or what is driving this narrative? Is it an over reach of the left hemisphere as McGilchrist contends?