Recently, the American poet, author, and Sufi Charles Upton uploaded a video to YouTube, under the title “The Psychic and Spiritual Dangers of AI,” garnering not very many views and, at the time of my writing, receiving less than ten “likes.”
And yet, this video provides the most thorough understanding of AI and contemporary “big data” crunching technology from a spiritual perspective I have encountered; a delineation of relevant concepts so penetrating as to deserve canonical status in the analysis of, and resistance to, the denaturing developments of post-modern global civilization.
Upton is the author of several books, including Dugin Against Dugin, whose thesis I adopt in my “Against Eurasia and Atlantis” essay, published in the winter edition of The European Conservative. But he is also a poet, who was part of the “beat” poetry scene of the 60s, drawing important insight therefrom.
Art and Despair
In terms of AI and the endless array of possible software-generated poetry, visual art, essays, answers to questions and solutions to problems it offers us, Upton begins by distinguishing between necessity (that which must be) and possibility (that which might be).
To be in despair of necessity is to be in a situation that never changes, and to be in despair of possibility is to be immersed in endless change, where all is “becoming,” and nothing is allowed to simply “be.”
These are the twin monsters, the horns of the beast, Blake’s “cloven reason” of “alienated necessity” and “alienated possibility,” whose definitions, following Kierkegaard, Upton provides: “When the necessary being that is God is seen through the darkening filter of the ego it becomes the hard necessity of fate” and “When possible being is seen likewise it becomes a deceptive liberation from the bonds of that alienated necessity, failing us in the end.”
Today, the prevailing hegemonic cultural discourse under which we live is particularly frightened by “necessary being:” it does not want to be stuck, and it lashes out against stable definitions, solidity, anything implying immutability or even endurance. From borders to genders, all must be made fluid and ultimately abolished.
And this cultural moment we are living through has roots in a reaction to previous stultification:
Victorian poetry tended to be involved in forms that had become conventional, constricted and lifeless. This was paralleled by a general bourgeois conventionality that led the middle-class to speak in stock phrases and shop-worn clichés.
Modernist poets worked to free their discipline from this lifelessness, a work that reached its zenith with the beatnik generation: “to the stone of necessity” they administered “the solvent of possibility.”
But, whereas a recalibration of art away from a calcified understanding of necessity through an opening up of possibility was justified, it also went too far, embracing relativism and rejecting any canonical or central criterion for producing art. The notion that AI can replace the artist is the extreme consequence of this.
Of course, with sufficient “self discipline and clarity of purpose,” one may use AI to positive ends, but given that society is characterized more by self-indulgence than self-discipline, most of us will likely find in it a “wilderness of endless possibility,” and find ourselves experiencing the “despair of possibility:”
Only those with the one-pointedness and self-discipline to retain their grasp on their own intent and purposes while swimming in the sea of infinite possibility will be able to escape this trap … [Because] AI uses all our inherent curiosity to lead us into an indefinite proliferation of chaos, chaos of the many, away from the integrity of the one.
Echoing Plato’s warning against the mental flaccidity that might come from relying on writing over memory, Upton warns that technologies like AI can be used as a replacement for thinking, rather than an aid to it, contributing to the apparent trend of declining IQs.
As a replacement for thinking, the use of AI becomes lethally addictive, “the fentanyl of cyberspace,” just as internet addiction, or addiction to novelty through online content, is already a diagnosable malady.
Here we come to a crucial point: Upton does not exclude intention and specific aims on the part of those who program AI (indeed, we know ChatGPT is thoroughly ideologically biased in its responses to user questions), however, this encoded manipulation is almost beside the point. Even if we realize the idea of an utterly ‘neutral’ processing of human and technologically generated data, this would be no more benign than the submission of human deliberation to a supposedly ‘neutral’ (Marxist conception of) historical materialism, or (liberal) free market.
The real danger AI poses to a weak generation—lacking discipline and a grounding in traditional aesthetic and moral criteria—is the seductive draw of open-ended possibility.
From Mystery to Tyranny
As Nietzsche said of the abyss, which gazes back at us as we gaze into it, we might say that AI prompts us as we prompt it:
AI is prompting us too, because it has no intent, but its responses to our prompts, which act as prompts to us, are without specific goal and intent, open-ended, infinite possibility. What might be done, what might be created.
Inanimate technology can thereby replace personal reflection and interaction with trusted persons, as we sooner pose our questions to AI than to ourselves, our teachers, and to God. The latter leads us towards understanding, transparency, and lucidity. Indeed, even spiritual transcendence is lucid, it cannot be expressed because it is beyond language, not because it is “murky” or “oneiric.” In contrast, the new outsourcing of understanding to external technologies leaves us ignorant and in the realm of mystification (Heidegger warned against this in The Question Concerning Technology). It is for this reason that Blake understood “mystery” and “tyranny” as allies: tyranny justifies itself on the basis of mystery, and accepting mystery leads to the rise of tyranny.
Ordinarily, the spiritual misapprehension with which all of us contend is that the body is sovereign over the soul, that our minds are somehow caused by the physical reality we perceive. This misapprehension receives a new, tighter turn of the screw when external technology becomes the center of our self-image, and our minds and bodies feel like mere appendages obsessively responding to its prompts and compulsively pursuing its possibilities.
As Upton argues, from this fixation on what technology can offer comes a “despair of possibility so extreme that it is about to flip over into despair of necessity.” I’ve described this dynamic as the parodic celebration of an inverted carnival and its incessantly-changing costumes leading to the parodic discipline of a diabolical Lent characterized by extreme social control (from puritanical political correctness to the compulsive cataloging of daily activities through Smart City grids).
Whereas the inverted carnival and Lenten fast lead into each other, they also structure political and cultural dialectics as though they were genuine alternatives. Upton asks whether today’s culture wars are not “an open conflict between alienated necessity masquerading as integral form and alienated possibility masquerading as universal freedom.” These are Blake’s Tyranny and Mystery, which he describes as tyrannical father-god and chaotic mother-goddess (the so-called “Nobodaddy” and the “Female-Will,”which I explore in my essay “The Great God Pan is Dead”).
AI’s promise of realizing every possibility is that primeval-seeming chaotic mystery—producing new forms from itself, and the dystopian systems of control it threatens us with—is the calcified order of tyranny.
The “Black Box,” or Saturn the Devourer
It generates a “black box” of inner workings consisting of ever-changing learning paths which programmers cannot track. If Pythagoreanism posited a fiery cube at the center of the universe, equivalent to the cuboid throne of Osiris in Egyptian myth, which we may interpret as the foundation of human subjectivity, this new “black box” usurps that center—like a virtual, counterfeit kaaba around which the post-modern devotees of technology congregate.
In approaching the spiritual quest to overcome this misapprehension, tradition furnishes us with the symbol of the blind or immobile father who we must rescue (Isaac to Jacob in the Bible, Jacob to Joseph in the Qur’an, Anchises to Aeneas in the Aeneid, the injured fisher-king of the Holy Grail stories, Adam rescued from Hades by Jesus in Christian tradition, etc.).
In the case of addictive technology, it is not only the father we must rescue and restore, like the merely mineral, physical body whose dead-weight we must enliven and make transparent to transcendent realities. Rather, we face a more thoroughly false image of the father, a demonic Saturn actively devouring his children. Technology, our creation, pretends to have primacy over us; pretends to be the legitimate center for problem-solving and even moral calculus, a position it usurps from the human heart.
The challenge is ever the same:
1) reject Satanic seniority (the devil’s tempting of Jesus in the wilderness, wherein he acts as though he were sovereign over the world, offering all its kingdoms);
2) face our ego-twin, what Blake calls his “specter,” who would take our spiritual inheritance from us (the illegitimate religious authorities and their ally, the idol Caesar, which are the whore and beast of John’s Apocalypse, also analogous to Jacob’s persecution by his brother Esau, and toil under the trickery of his uncle Laban);
3) realize our true origin (devotion to God as actual and only sovereign), and
4) rescue the past and physicality (Christ raising Adam from Hades, revealing himself as the “new Adam” in the resurrection).
This reminds us of the fourfold of spiritual development in different traditions.
Technology as Spiritual Combat
It just so happens that the temptation in the wilderness is now reified by technology-addiction and AI’s vast and terrible all-encompassing potential, presenting us with a chaotic multiplicity rather than ordered harmony.
There, in this new wilderness, we face a devil tempting us with every possible output, all the kingdoms of a virtual earth, and there, we find our own digital self, “the sum of our manifestations online [our online outputs]” serving as a pretty good “approximation of our ego:” a fact-simile lending itself to deep fakes and out-of-context quote-mining, a desecration of the human likeness in an irony-poisoned cyberspace public-sphere.
“True spirituality,” in contrast:
Is based upon the correct union of necessity and possibility in which necessity appears as form—integrity, authenticity—and possibility as freedom—spontaneity, liberation from attachment.
This “correct union” dispels the illusion of there being a conflict between “possible being” and “necessary being,” between Divine freedom and Divine goodness, or Divine power and Divine order (for example, when we pose meaningless questions such as “could God create a square circle or rock so heavy He cannot lift it”).
What this means, in practical terms, is that we should approach technology (the Internet in general, A.I. in particular) with a purpose in mind, and not allow it to derail us; that we use instruments as instruments, and that we regain a sense for appropriate technology, rather than using high-tech means for low-tech ends—all of this in order to keep the locus of creative work, the sense of intention and guiding vision, where it belongs, in the human subject itself and, therefore, in order to cultivate skill, understanding, and virtue, rather than continuing to diminish our attention-spans, memories, and cognitive abilities in favor of machines.
