After growing up as a religious fundamentalist and attending Bible college, the writer Meghan O’Gieblyn experienced a crisis of faith. “To leave a religious tradition in the twenty-first century,” she writes, “is to experience the trauma of secularization—a process that spanned several centuries and that most of humanity endured with all the attentiveness of slow-boiling toad—in an instant.”
Unmoored from the cosmology of her childhood, born again into a disenchanted world as an atheist and materialist, O’Gieblyn became obsessed with transhumanism, a philosophical movement advocating for the transformation of humanity through advancements in technology. O’Gieblyn dropped out of Bible college and, working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago, lugged around a copy of the futurist Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines in her backpack, transfixed by his technological visions of the future.
In her book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, O’Gieblyn reports on a world pretending it’s more rational and more disenchanted than it really is. Though transhumanists and techno-utopians style themselves as rational materialists descended from Enlightenment philosophy, O’Gieblyn senses echoes of theology woven deeply into their quests: neural implants, nanotechnology, and cryonics promised the possibility of resurrection; mind-uploading imagined eternal life in the form of digital avatars; the Singularity, a point when humans finally merge with machines, would be a transcendent, apocalyptic “point of culmination.”
Even the word “transhuman” itself had religious roots, first appearing in a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and resurfacing in the mid-20th century in the writings of the mystic French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
O’Gieblyn’s obsession with transhumanism waned as she broadened her interests in technology and artificial intelligence, only to find these fields similarly explored questions that O’Gieblyn had always considered theological: “Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality…
All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”
The Ghost in the Machine
To O’Gieblyn, Descartes bears some responsibility for the world’s disenchantment. When he strictly divided the mind from the body, insisting on their separateness, he “helped facilitate [the soul’s] disappearance from Western philosophy.” Descartes’ conception suggested that consciousness could exist without a body, not unlike a disembodied chatbot “companion.”
“To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our time, which are for the most part technological,” O’Gieblyn writes. It’s commonplace to encounter metaphors equating consciousness with computation: we “process” new ideas, “store” memories, and “retrieve” information. The mind is often described as “software” running on the brain’s “hardware.” These computational metaphors emerged as a rebuke to the Cartesian dualism that saw the mind, like the soul, as immaterial. Computer metaphors allowed us to describe the brain as a machine—something that could be studied and fully understood through science.
We create metaphors to describe the world, and then those metaphors reshape us—and our understanding of the world—in their image. Which reminds me of the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who said, “It is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.” And in the cyclical nature of metaphors, we similarly apply consciousness to computers: machines are commonly described as “thinking,” having “memory,” or exhibiting “behavior.”
The demands of artificial intelligence on our attention and natural resources alike lay bare the costs of relentless technological innovation. As I write, Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle have announced plans to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers that will use as much electricity as major cities. The Harvard Business Review published their findings that therapy was the number one reason people used AI chatbots. At the same time, multiple families who have lost children to suicide have sued AI companies and their founders after discovering their children’s conversations with chatbots that encouraged them to take their own lives.
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence creates a sense that we are trapped in an unfolding technological inevitability. The goal of this predestination narrative, O’Gieblyn argues, is to convert us all to believers willing to accept the widespread adoption of new technologies and their associated costs; the destruction of our capacity for deep attention and our critical thinking skills, harvesting our personal data, and depleting natural resources are regarded as the inevitable price of a predetermined future.
Whereas humans once conceived ourselves as having been created in God’s image, we now interact with technology made in the image of engineers and programmers. And tech leaders anticipating an omniscient superintelligence in the form of AI are adopting increasingly religious rhetoric and worldviews. One of the founders of Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, started a church devoted to worshipping an AI God. Noted atheists Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins recently described themselves as “cultural Christians.” And PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel has turned increasingly apocalyptic, delivering a series of lectures about the antichrist.
If this is where disenchantment has brought us, perhaps it’s worth considering re-enchantment.
Wonderstruck
Helen De Cruz’s book Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think brings together psychology, philosophy, humanities, religion, and the sciences to examine the effect of wonder and awe on our lives. De Cruz’s book, like O’Gieblyn’s, begins with Descartes. But rather than associating Descartes’ mind-body dualism with the world’s disenchantment, De Cruz explores how Descartes saw human emotions or “passions” as crucial in linking the body and mind and allowing them to work together as a whole.
De Cruz describes awe and wonder as “epistemic emotions” that allow us to see the world with “firstness” or surprise, to recognize the gaps in our knowledge, to transcend a focus on the self and see ourselves as part of a larger, interconnected whole, and to make new discoveries that lead to deeper understanding.
“It is useful for limited, time-bound and space-bound organisms to be able to let go of heuristics and schemas that apparently don’t work,” De Cruz writes. “Awe and wonder accomplish this by alerting us to new information and making us more aware of our cognitive limitations.”
De Cruz sees science and religion as “cognitive technologies” deeply entwined with awe and wonder: while science is motivated by wonder to make new discoveries, religion can help us access wonder and awe, allowing us to see the world with “firstness” and resist complacency.
De Cruz’s writing about the role of wonder and awe in religion is reminiscent of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian who wrote that “[t]o be spiritual is to be amazed.” I recently returned to one of his hefty tomes on the dusty end of my bookshelf and found, in an essay about space exploration, a prescient critique of the current alliances of technology and power:
“I challenge the high value placed on the search for extraterrestrial life only because it is being made at the expense of life and humanity here on earth…We are exploring space, not so much to seek scientific truths or because we are motivated by ennobling philosophic insight, but largely because space exploration has political and military value for the state.”
To Heschel, the emancipation of science from the church had been a “cause for celebration.” But now science had become “the handmaiden of the state,” Heschel wrote. “Now science must satisfy the demands of the state, and that demand is power.”
For Heschel, wonder was a precursor to faith. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, O’Gieblyn stressed that the “trauma” of disenchantment is not the loss of wonder, but the loss of intrinsic meaning. Perhaps wonder and meaning are more intertwined than we might expect.
To De Cruz, wonder and awe are potential agents of change that allow us to “question the structure of our reality.” With startling advancements in technology, De Cruz writes, “we are offered the tantalizing possibility of making human culture again something that responds to our needs, not something to feed the abstract beast of the economy. Awe and wonder can then become catalysts that help us to reclaim what makes life worth living…”
But wonder, De Cruz points out, requires our attention, “and a lot of that is captured by others, such as social media companies, for their own ends.”
The Human Condition
Both apocalyptic and utopian visions of our technological futures prevent us from addressing the present-day, real-world impacts of relentless innovation and adoption of these technologies. Beyond the well-documented burden of massive data centers on our water supply and electrical grids, we are just beginning to glimpse the harms these technologies pose to people’s mental health, and, dare I say it, to our souls.
With lives increasingly mediated by technology, our own sensory and perceptual experiences have shifted. Instead of encountering a night peppered with stars and feeling ourselves enveloped in a sense of dwarfing expansiveness, we pull out our phones and open an app mapping the constellations, or we take grainy pictures of the moon.
This kind of mediation is, of course, a far cry from the human-machine merger envisioned by techno-utopians and companies like Musk’s Neuralink. But the intrusion of technology into these moments where we could, instead, experience awe or a sense of connection to the world, reminds me of technology’s persistent limitations, as noted by O’Gieblyn: “What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, seeing and feeling the world through our senses.”
Perhaps the antidote to the excesses of techno-utopians is not just to embrace, but to find meaning in our own human limitations. We don’t live forever. Our bodies fail and disintegrate. Our minds are not disembodied cloud storage for infinite amounts of perfectly recalled data points. And what artificial intelligence technology seeks to attain most of all—our capacity for deep attention, our gift for associative thinking—are precisely those ineffable human traits that make life worth living.
New Metaphors
Years after O’Gieblyn stopped carrying a copy of Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines around in her backpack, Kurzweil read an essay she’d written and sent her a note. “The difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in ‘God’ is a matter of the choice of metaphor,” Kurzweil wrote,
“and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.”
Maybe it’s metaphors all the way down. When choosing metaphors, we see how one thing is like another; laying them side-by-side, both are transformed. Maybe this is one way we participate in the world’s creation, in seeing one thing as another as another, creating comparisons and undoing them, multiplying meaning as we go.
In the 1980s, in the context of looming nuclear destruction, the theologian Sallie McFague wrote of seeing the world as God’s body. It was a metaphor that linked the world’s destiny with God’s, that described the human relationship with the earth and with the divine as deeply entwined. And this metaphor, crucially, resisted state powers that would pursue technological advancements over the health and well-being of the collective.
How is a disenchanted world re-enchanted? Perhaps this task resembles Sallie McFague’s: envisioning new metaphors for the human relationship to the sacred, to the world, and to each other; metaphors deeply rooted in our time, that connect us with our capacity for awe, wonder, and our own gifts for associative thinking, deep attention, and creativity—the limitless fruits of a limited life.
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After.
