The Machine Version of Infinite Love

What’s the difference between trying to live “my truth” and allowing our image in the mind of God to come alive?

Photo by eduard on Unsplash

Today, financial success is measured by the degree to which their wealth insulates its owners from reality. As an example, consider the AI-based utopia envisaged by tech billionaire Marc Andreessen. In Marc’s vision every “… child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.”¹ Marc’s dream suggests that we are on the cusp of a golden age in which everyone will be accompanied throughout their lives by an omniscient guardian angel designed to protect them from their natural idiocy.

What’s incredible is that Andreessen seems to actually believe that the “machine version of infinite love” will bring about a digital paradise. He apparently doesn’t foresee that the inmates of his AI-powered wonderland might become the tools of their overseers. The emergence of such mind factories reflects Pope Benedict XVI’s premonition in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate that technology is becoming an ideological power that might one day mediate all encounters with our fellow creatures, both human and nonhuman. In it, the Pope suggested that we might become so dominated by technology that we would find ourselves cut off from any meaning that was not of our own making.

Ever since the cognitive fissure known as the internet opened up, it seems as if the boundaries of reality have been steadily dissolving. All the struggles that once gave substance to human character - the long, hard focus demanded in order to gain genuine skill, the endless effort to identify the nuggets of truth hidden within a thousand ideological shapes, and the capacity to see through the debased forms of beauty that trap us in their lair and suck our spirit dry: all these have been usurped by virtual virtues won in simulated battles calibrated to the user’s skill level. Maintaining our humanity will require that we puncture these unrealities so that our hearts and minds can once more become obedient to creation. Our souls flourish only when we create order in the world around us by first establishing integrity within.

One way to avoid becoming lost in identity games is to go outside and look up into the sky. It is the same sky our medieval ancestors pondered as they ventured out at dawn to begin their daily struggles. Useful as technology might be, it never occurred to them to look to it as the source of their salvation because they believed in a heaven that did not require technical support. Today, the worship of technology has led to a world in which most people are no longer able to distinguish between performing online simulations of life and actually living.

Digital culture has become an ideology of absolute freedom that pretends to liberate us from the limitations of our bodies and minds. Yet for most of human history these limits have acted as moral and spiritual safeguards that granted those who accepted them membership in a harmonious and meaningful cosmos. For Christians, happiness is considered a gift of God that can only be realized by living within the boundaries of one’s essential personhood, meaning the image in the mind of God that assigns each creature its unique task in creation’s sacred order.

In the medieval world, metaphysical sanity still endured. The cosmos was experienced as “… a highly structured, complexly ordered universe in which everything has its proper place …”² under the rule of one supremely rational and gracious power. There were as yet no liberated zones in which “my truth” could be pursued in splendid isolation. Every creature shared the same universe and most obeyed the God who ruled it because of the rich spiritual rewards that awaited those who obeyed the laws of love. A single divine order embraced all of reality and nothing lay beyond its lawful integrity.

The spiritual cohesion of medieval civilization radiated a serenity that reflected its subjects’ inner peace. They knew that they thrived only when they lived in obedience to the meanings they did not make. Within the world ruled by such purposes, every creature had an assigned nature, known as its form or essence, that governed the role it had been made to carry out. Instead of each person having to chase after an elusive “true inner self”, the rules that led to human flourishing in those days were as clear as sunlight. Dionysius the Areopagite described each creature’s relationship to the Good this way, “Everything with a mind and reason seeks to know it, everything sentient yearns to perceive it, everything lacking perception has a living and instinctive longing for it, and everything lifeless and merely existent turns, in its own fashion, for a share of it.”³ By nurturing the words of God that had been implanted in their hearts, his people were able to rejoice in the light of his undivided goodness.

The Unworlding of the Inner Self

In advanced societies today most people no longer seem inspired by the divine image that is the symbol of their true humanity. Instead of striving toward the person God intended them to become, the majority have been seduced by the identity game. Duncan Reyburn has given us a suggestive analogy of the relationship between identity and personhood: “… identities gather like flies around the recently murdered corpse of essential personhood.”⁴ What I think this means is that the swarm of our branded identities feed off the corpse of the essential personhood that God has entrusted us to bring to fruition. Identity, in contrast, is best understood by the phrase “my truth”, which is a notion with no necessary relationship to anything at all. It is a fashion statement that can change faster than the images that flash across an Instagram feed.

Once we have become fixated on our identity, our essential personhood is usually forgotten because it is likely to clash with the personality we wish to adopt. Our packaged identity corresponds to what Pope Benedict XVI described as “… the Un-person, the disintegration and collapse of personhood”⁵ Though the Pope intended this phrase to characterize the corrupt nature of demonic personalities, it applies equally well to online personas that betray the image in the mind of God that we were born to realize. Both the demon and the seeker after “my truth” have debased their souls by rejecting their God-given nature. Whatever encourages us to abandon our essential personhood feeds the identity swarms that live off its decay.

When we learn to respect the authentic nature of our souls we enter into the harmony of the created order. But if we try to replace our personhood with a manufactured identity we disconnect from the wisdom that allows our true personality to thrive. To help us understand how online identities operate, we will look at an article by Luciano Floridi, an Oxford professor who is one of the world’s leading authorities in the philosophy of information. In a paper titled “The Informational Structure of Personal Identity” he attempts to demonstrate that “… selves are the final stage in the development of informational structures, for they are the semantically structuring structures conscious of themselves.”⁶ His paper shows how information precedes, guides, and underpins personal identity.

Floridi sees information as the control system that manages the basic functions of the self. Here he describes what he believes that the self consists of: “… individuation – the characterization or constitution of the self – is achieved through forms of information processing: consciousness and memory are dynamic states of information ...”⁷ If the self is constituted through information, then control over information is the key to managing human identity. By detaching the self as information from its embodiment, Floridi is able to conceive of the self as a cross-platform entity no longer bound to a specific body, but capable, like any other form of information, of being transferred to non-organic substrates such as digital devices.

He believes that the self is able to continue operating even after it has become detached from its current embodiment. He says that “… the life of the self may be entirely internal and independent of the specific body and faculties that made it possible.”⁸ What constitutes identity in the mediated world is the internal data that structures the self. Therefore, gaining control over human identity is a matter of managing the narratives that organize that data. When we live our lives online, the information-based self becomes a godling in charge of its own self-constructed reality.

By defining human identity as an information-generated entity detached from the reality of its body and soul, Floridi implicitly denies the deeper sources of human selfhood. At the root of our personhood is God’s image of who we are, an indelible aspect of our being that we are quite capable of disfiguring, but not erasing. If we convince ourselves that the constraints of physical and spiritual reality no longer apply, it is easy to fabricate an identity that pretends to shelter us from life’s inescapable demands. However, as conflicts with external reality inevitably erupt, our self-image must be constantly revised to compensate for the discomfort that the real world inflicts on our illusory identity. Eventually the increasingly elaborate deceptions required to maintain a contrived selfhood become unsustainable and it begins to unravel. In the end, we discover that it is only through our essential personhood that we can experience a world that is more than a mirror of our sterile ego.

The Face in the Online Mirror

There is a fundamental difference between natural realities such as the starry skies that mirror the wisdom of God and information products such as branded identities. The reason that natural creatures strike us with such unmistakable force while online spectacles don’t, is that living creatures have been creatively fashioned by the source of being itself while virtual realities can only mimic its creative power. As Josef Pieper put it, “Their brightness and radiance is infused into things from the creative mind of God, together with their essential being (or rather, as the very essence of that being!). It is this radiance, and this alone, that makes existing things perceptible to human knowledge.”⁹ It is the fact that natural creatures have been made by the same mind that created us that makes them intelligible.

Floridi’s paper describes a technology of the self capable of unfolding an unlimited selection of identity options to support a user’s quest for “my truth.” The ideology of “my truth” treats reality as a jumble of things to be manipulated so that we can be amused, rather than a band of fellow creatures who belong to a divinely ordered whole of which we and they are both members. What if the cosmos is not simply a pile of raw materials waiting to be exploited, but a living being with its own built-in order and meaning that we must align with if we are to discover the purpose we were made to carry out within it?

Duncan Reyburn lists some of the consequences when the purposes embedded in our essential personhood are overridden by the desires aroused by “my truth”: “… ideas negate reality; gender usurps sex; culture supplants nature; and creatures displace God.”¹⁰ Fortunately, the power to create reality belongs to God alone. No matter how smart the light of the internet becomes we can’t actually fabricate new selves directly out of online data. Our essence reflects God’s vision of who we are whereas “my truth” is merely a transcript of our ever-changing passions. No matter how virtual my self-image becomes, an essential core of personal reality will always be necessary to legitimate a disembodied self.

The ideology of “my truth” is perhaps best understood as a diabolical inversion of our essential personhood. In his book Freedom from Reality, D. C. Schindler wrote, “This is the heart of the diabolical: an image that is not an image, but presents itself as the real thing …”¹¹ No matter how much their victims might wish to be seduced, such images are diabolical because they disconnect their identity from its divine essence. Online personalities train us to become experts in the art of voluntary self-deception. In contrast, our essential personhood is anchored in God and he will do everything in his power to help us realize it. Only our obstinate refusal to embody the image in the heart of our being can frustrate his plans.

Hell is the final destination of those who demand to be their own God. Instead of heeding his voice, its minions prefer to listen to those like the priests of the ancient fertility cults who enticed their worshippers to plunge “… into the current of life, into its delirium and its ecstasy, and thus you will be able to partake of the reality of life and of its immortality.”¹² They wish to experience the overwhelming life force they believe they will find once they unleash the power of “my truth” like the mythical serpent Ouroboros who devoured its own tail in order to regenerate its indestructible ego.

The Meanings We Did Not Make

Paul Kingsnorth defines the Machine this way: “The ultimate project of modernity, I have come believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.”¹³

Escape from the Machine requires that we develop an insatiable hunger for reality. Technocratic ideology captures us through our often unnoticed surrenders to unreality. For instance, a few years back, some of us thought we had become digital minimalists, but our online addictions quickly reasserted themselves and before we knew it, social media was once more devouring the time that could have been used for those face-to-face conversations that are alone capable of fostering genuine human connections. The relationships that once poured life into our souls are now directed by algorithms designed to exploit our corrupted “needs.” True human fulfillment can’t be achieved through machines that project illusory identities because the parts of us that have become mechanical are those that have lost their humanity. We must find a way of regenerating our souls by loving that which remains most alive in us.

Our recovery can only take place in unmediated reality because, as John Senior wrote, “… there is a reality outside ourselves and inside ourselves in the psychological and spiritual order, by which we are measured: outside, it is called nature; inside, human nature, a reality to which we ourselves are not exceptions and by which we are measured; and happiness consists–exactly opposite to what the technologists say–in conformity with nature, not against it or reconstructing it according to our desires.”¹⁴ Abandoning the spiritual truths inherent to human nature leads directly to psychological and social disintegration, as the history of the past 150 years makes abundantly clear. Our happiness depends on whether our life has been successfully built on the meanings we did not make or wasted because we became deaf to the voice of our own being. If we learn to listen to this voice, we may once more experience the world in the fullness of its beauty. We may even  be granted a vision of the angels whose presence St. John Henry Newman sensed within the natural world: “Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God.”¹⁵

1. Andreessen, Marc. "Why AI Will Save The World." 6 6 2023. Marc Andreessen Substack. <https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-will-save-the-world>.

2. DeYoung, Rebecca, et. al. Aquinas’ Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations, . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. p. 15.

3. Pseudo-Dionysius. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. p.72.

4. Reyburn, Duncan. "The Psychopolitics of Mimicry." Eucatastrophologist 16 5 2023. <https://duncanreyburn.substack.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-mimicry>.

5. Benedict XVI, Pope. Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. p. 204.

6. Floridi, Luciano. "The Informational Nature of Personal Identity." Minds and Machines 11 2011. <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-011-9259-6>.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Pieper, Josef. The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957. p. 56.

10. Reyburn, op. cit.

11. Schindler, D. C. Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. p. 158.

12. Ratzinger, Joseph. In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of the Creation and Fall. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995. p. 70.

13. Kingsnorth, Paul. "The Tale of the Machine." The Abbey of Misrule 29 6 2023. <https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-the-machine>.

14. Senior, John. The Restoration of Christian Culture. Norfolk, VA: IHS Press, 2008. p. 40.

15. Newman, John Henry. The Complete Works of John Henry Newman. Shrine of Knowledge, 2020. p. 348.