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Artificial Life & Pure Immanence
Published just five months before Deleuze committed suicide on November 4, Scientific American’s long time writer John Horgan helps us with the specifics of how to define what a restoration economy is not by citing theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist John Maynard Smith who pointed out that the predecessor of AI called Artificial Life or A-LIFE is “basically a fact-free science.”1 Rightly deeming the advocates of this newly emerging field of Complexity Theory to be more complexologist than physicist, Horgan then tells us that although the proselytizers of this fact free science “may disagree on what they are studying,” they do however “concur on how they should study it: with computers.”2 He continues:
Faith in computers is epitomized by artificial life, a subfield of complexity that has attracted much attention in its own right. Artificial life is the philosophical heir of artificial intelligence, which preceded it by several decades. Whereas artificial-intelligence researchers seek to understand the mind by mimicking it on a computer, proponents of artificial life hope to gain insights into a broad range of biological phenomena. And just as artificial intelligence has generated more portentous rhetoric than tangible results, so has artificial life.3
Rather than a mere gesture towards replicating human intelligence via AI, A-LIFE is an altogether different beast and should be strongly assessed by the Holy See’s Artificial Intelligence & Peace initiative given its tendency to bring the potency of AI in and of itself to bear its computational prowess upon the emerging trend towards artificial wombs. Not only will this merger between quantum gravity and mechanobiology give rise to some of the most advanced expressions of Gattaca, a 1997 film that explored the future of genetic engineering in a dystopian society, by and through a holey marriage between formation (via centrioles) and “functives” (via morphogenesis), it also signifies what the great sorcerer himself rightly deemed to be an expression of pure immanence.4
Deleuze sets the stage telling us that, “no more than the transcendental field” of AI “is defined by consciousness can the plane of immanence be defined by a subject or an object that is able to contain it.”5 In this way AI is best understood as simply a means to a nefarious end with A-LIFE being the final stomping ground for Deleuze’s order of the anti-Christ when he clearly states:
We will say of of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss. It is to the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and the object that John Fichte, in his last philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life, no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act - it is in an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly poised in a life.6
This potent understanding of A-LIFE is fundamentally the value of Deleuzian philosophy for theology in that it defines the absolute anisotropic/extrinsic parameters from which we can define noetology by way of outlining what God (i.e., our dependency upon Being and submission to Pure Act) is not via the pure immanence of the anti-Christ. For example, much like Deleuze’s beloved disjunctive syllogism, Horgan tells us that “Artificial life-and the entire field of complexity-seems to be based on a seductive syllogism: There are simple sets of mathematical rules that when followed by a computer give rise to extremely complicated patterns” all the way from singularities to the entirety of the cosmos.7 Following this logic of sense, the cosmos is understood as containing “many extremely complicated patterns. Conclusion: Simple rules underlie many extremely complicated phenomena in the world. With the help of powerful computers, scientists can root those rules out.”8
In doing so, Deleuze concludes, “there is no longer any originary reality.”9 In other words, the seductive syllogism of complexologist is rendered as a immanent space and place where the “ disjunction is always a disjunction; the ‘either-or’ is always an ‘eitheror.’”10 But “what is this other side” of the either/or of Being itself, “this Baphomet system of pure breaths or mortal spirits?” In answering this question, Deleuze pin points the relationship between a complexologist’s fact free science and his diabolical form/function schema suggesting that:
Rather than signifying that a certain number of predicates are excluded from a thing in virtue of the identity of the corresponding concept, the disjunction now signifies that each thing is opened up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, on the condition that it lose its identity as concept and as self. The disjunctive syllogism accedes to a diabolical principle and use, and simultaneously the disjunction is affirmed for itself without ceasing to be a disjunction; divergence or difference becomes objects of pure affirmation, and “eitheror” becomes the power of affirmation, outside the conceptual conditions of the identity of a God, a world, or a self.11
Thus, Deleuze describes precisely what God is not and thereby provides an invaluable insight into what noetology is and how theological realism can begin to define its katechonic disposition via the physics of isotropic gravitational waves and their relationship to the living-womb via, for example, regenerative agriculture through the production of Bionutrient food. In doing so we must honestly admit that Deleuze anisotropic philosophy exemplifies the absolute extreme of human “craftiness” or techne given, as Keith Ansell-Pearson notes in his review of Craig Lundy’s Deleuze's Bergsonism, he “is a notoriously difficult and dense thinker, and the difficulty and density are in evidence in his text on Bergson published in 1966.”12
Yet, in spite of these difficulties that can be attributed in many ways to both Deleuze’s neologistic craft as well as his occultic/esoteric undertones that are often linked through various analytic concepts such as ‘multiplicity’ and ‘singularity’ (to name a few), it comes as a true sense of irony that the rich philosophy of Henri Bergson and his theory of consciousness can in fact help us to illuminate the machinic worldview of new materialism’s principle architect and his ‘notoriously difficult’ schizo-speak. Indeed, as St. Paul tells us: “Let no man deceive himself.”13
If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”14
Renewing Bergsonism
Upon deciphering Deleuze’s ‘futile’ exotericism, the dissociative economy that his committed disciples seek to unleash onto the masses will become more and more clear as this memoir unfolds. However, I must note that this unveiling comes with its own technical (not esoteric) language as demonstrated thus far that may often times cause one to become cognitively exhausted – as it should given that philosophy isn’t easy. In noting this, I humbly ask that you stay the path as the illumination that comes with Renewing Bergsonism will assuredly payoff in the end, or so I hope!
STAY TUNED:
THE REST OF THIS SECTION WILL BE RELEASED ON JULY 26TH @11:00EST
John Horgan, “From Complexity to Perplexity: Can Science Achieve a Unified Theory of Complex Systems?,” Scientific American, June 1, 1995, https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/Hogan.ComplexPerplex.htm
Ibid.
Ibid.
Arkady Plotnitsky, “Chaosmologies: Quantum Field Theory, Chaos and Thought in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?,” Paragraph 29, no. 2 (2006): 51.
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Zone Books, 2005), 27.
Ibid.
Horgan, “From Complexity to Perplexity
Ibid.
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 295.
Ibid.
Ibid.
First quote is taken from 1 Corinthians 3:19 ESV; second quote taken from Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Review: Deleuze's Bergsonism,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 21, 2019, https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/deleuzes-bergsonism/
1 Corinthian 3:18 ESV.
1 Corinthians 3:18-20 ESV.