The Reality of Politics…
Given the historical ebb/flow of transhumanism’s neo-eugenics is simultaneously increasing its oscillatory resonance between right/left political orientations in direct proportion to the speed at which it is accelerating towards fusing artificial life (A-Life) with AI, the true enemy isn’t found in leftist or right wingers as some would believe the case. This of course includes Schindler’s along with other conservative forms of post-liberalism that signifies a ‘post’ maneuver that conveniently forgets Milton Friedman’s ‘radical liberalism’ that tends towards rather than away from realism.1 If you can accept the necessity of transcending left/right politics as I have, then the reality of political liberalism trumps the Politics of the Real’s post-liberalism by leaps and bounds given that the true enemy becomes much clearer if we collapse the arbitrary distinction between the right’s fascist tendencies and the left’s communist ideals into a singular ‘anti’ system of belief formed by what we Christian's call the “spirit of the antichrist which,” for St. John, “you heard was coming and now is in the world already.”2
Overshadowing Schindler's ‘Politics of the Real' via the absolute authority of public revelation (i.e., St. John’s Gospel), its this ‘anti’ reality of politics that subtly perpetuates the us/them Schmittian logics by collapsing the possibility of a state/church hybrid in favor of a ‘soft’ integralism rather than embracing the it via a ‘strong’ liberalism. In recognizing the existential nature of the emerging AI-revolution, the strong route accepts the reality of liberal democracies and thus builds upon a state/church hybrid where the two find ‘unity in diversity’ (i.e., being united while being different) by establishing a generative balance between ontological Being and moral becoming. Simply put, liberal democracies must embrace that which Schmitt despised the most: the ‘deep listening’ required for open-dialogue to occur between two seemingly unreconcilable political points of view where our becoming proceeds from Being an and of itself . Keenly put, its ‘the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances’ that holds the unique fluidity to restrain the ‘spirit of the antichrist’ as it specifically relates to the emerging AI-revolution and its trans/post-humanist ideal.
Basically, if executed properly, a hybrid relationship between the Holy Church (Being) and liberal democracies (becoming) holds the capacity to totally bypass Agamben’s so-called paradox of sovereignty which reside totally within the latter (moral realm) while conveniently ignoring the former (ontic dimension). In doing so, Ultimate Reality is then revealed as the absolute reality of God's immanent love for human dignity that is expressed in all things from pure potentiality - to - prime matter - to - pure form - to - the New Creation where we are invited to either reclaim our intrinsic identity as daughters and sons of the Living God or not. Unveiling the absolute truth that we are all engaged in a process-design of Agapic Love that is so mysteriously real and overflowing with Grace, I will argue throughout the corpus of my work that we must come to understand that God’s adherence to our free will (the source and summit of human dignity) extends itself to the absolute Dantean threshold of the Inferno > absolute zero itself < where God is willing to let us go if this is ‘our choice.’ This is a lot to take in so lets unpack this a bit to reveal the intuitions that informs my rational.
To begin with, we must first supplement Agamben’s theory of the sovereign with the absolute sovereignty of the Godhead by trading his un-real paradox for the real ‘paradox of liberalism’ where its not the sovereign (‘he who holds back’) who resides both inside and outside of the ‘state’ but us (‘that which holds back’) who resides either inside or outside of God’s unconditional love. What this translates to is that if we accept the absolute authority and reality of free-will, our open/closed, trustful/distrustful relationship with Pope Francis’ recent call for a binding global treaty to regulate AI will serve as the proverbial ‘canary in the coalmine’ so to speak for determining our collective ‘State’ of dignity and its capacity to restrain one of the most potent expressions of “the mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:7) that the world has ever seen. How can I say this with a fairly high degree of confidence you may ask?
First, this works prologue testifies to my own gifts and experience in combating real-world nefarious forces. Secondly and most importantly, the answer is found in ontology which is concerned with the nature of Being in and of itself. What’s important to understand here is that the conservative role of the sovereign cannot be filled in its absolute sense of Pure Act within the ‘state’ alone (Schmitt’s preference) but can and is fulfilled by the absolute sovereignty of the Vicar of Christ on earth in conjunction (not disjunction) with world governments. Simply put, either we chose the disjunctive spirit of the anti-Christ to fill St. Peter’s seat by proxy (via collapsing the hybrid church/state into the state alone) or we don't. If the choice for some of you is to affirm the disjunctive synthesis, this ontic direction of pure-chaos will become a reality if and only if we remain within Agamben’s paradox rather than concede to the absolute paradox of God, who is ‘Being in and of itself,’ being both intrinsically conservative (Pure Act) and extrinsically liberal (Pure Potentiality) with the latter (i.e., Extension) being eternally begotten by the former (i.e., Thought) in real-time.
Indeed, as Jesus showed us through his incarnation in real-time that “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” (Jn 5:19) In other words, the infinite parallelism between Pure Act and Pure Potentiality is sustained by and through Pure Form as opposed to the spirit of the anti-christ that seeks to break with the formers conservative dimension (in Being) by favoring the latter’s liberal becoming ad infinitum. Figure 1 helps illustrate this point of distinction between two radically different expressions of ‘prime matter’ with the left exemplifying the new materialist position and the right conveying this works theological realism.
This will be explained in detail throughout the corpus of my work but for now what’s important is that the nexus between Pure Act (Godhead) and Pure Potentiality (Extension) signifies the unique distinction between Schindler’s Thomism and my Franciscan leanings towards the Blessed Duns Scotus ‘subtle’ reconfiguration of the hylomorphic schema. Taken from Aristotelian physics, this helpful yet limited schema of Ultimate Reality affords one to see only a sphere and negates the parallel interactions that creates/sustains said sphere in Figure 1 above (i.e., it negates the reflective and relational qualities of the Trinity found in Pure Matter and Pure Form). Obscuring the distinctions between pure form (Idea) and pure matter (Extension) by only affirming the former in lieu of the latter, this schema ostensibly limits one’s metaphysics of providing a complete picture of Pure Act’s immanence (Thought) within the seemingly unshakable, impenetrable essence/existence binary of Thomistic hylomorphism (Substance/Accidents). Is this not what Jesus the Christ testified to, that is, an absolute fusion between his divine/human natures? Given the fact of the hypostatic union, something else seems to be going here but what?
Here (right here), Catholic Answers own Douglas Beaumont helps us clarify what we are dealing with when he asks: '“If matter and form do not exist as substances apart from one another, are they even real?”3 His answer is both obvious and counterintuitive to many who ascribe to the orthodox position of creatio ex nihilo. Especially if we take 2 Maccabees 7:28 to heart which states:
“I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, an recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.”
The key question here is that if prime matter and pure form did not exist apart from one another in creation (immanently) did they exist at all in the Godhead (transcendentally)? Drawing from his rich understanding of the orthodox view of the Holy Church, Beaumont gives us a partial (Thomistic) answer that “forms have been equated with ideas (with regard to creation, in God’s mind) and something called 'prime matter' is referred to when speaking of form and matter as distinct principles 'prior' to their conjoining.”4 He continues by gently treading outside of the Thomistic schema stating that:
What is interesting about prime matter is that while it is in a sense “real” – it doesn’t exist. It is only the potential for existence that becomes real existence when it is informed. “Pure potential,” then, on an Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding is literally nothing!5
Therefore, by “combining all these classic Greek philosophical terms and ideas” he provides an “account for the meaning of Wisdom 11:17 that neither capitulates to the pagan idea of creation from eternal preexisting matter nor simply relegates it to a gloss on Genesis 1:2 (the Church’s more popular understanding from what I have seen).”6 In sum, his speculation regarding the nature of prime matter aligns perfectly with this works theological realism that explores the following:
On a classic Greek Aristotelian/Thomistic understanding, God “creating the world from formless matter” could mean that God conjoined forms (His ideas) to prime matter [His extension] in the very act of creating all the natural substances of the universe. Since the classic Greek understanding, “formless matter” is – literally – nothing, then to say that God created the universe out of formless matter is the same as saying he created the world out of nothing (= creatio ex nihilo).7
With Beaumont’s speculative theology in mind, we can now re-envision St. Thomas’ essence/existence binary from an inside-out rather than a outside-in perspective. Defining the latter point of view, on the essence end we have the absolute oneness of the Godhead as Pure Act (Substance) and on the other end we have the absolute existence of Prime Matter (Accidents) where the only active principle is found in Pure Form with little to no appreciation of Pure Potentiality (ex nihilo) as playing generative role in the morphogenetic properties that gave rise to the universe (creatio). By negating prime matter’s active properties, this negation is essentially carried over into ignoring how it plays an ontological role in sustaining a moral sense of our social/existential reality within which 'we live and move and have our being.’
Essentially, these ontological codings of one (act) and zeros (potency) percolate all the way up from the foundation of Thomistic physics (essence/existence distinction) to form and sustain various us/them dualisms such as those expressed by modernity’s left/right politics as well as the pre-Vatican II Catholic/Protestant binary.8 All the while forgetting it is the absolute sovereignty and love of the Godhead (not man’s dualisms) who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45). Indeed, we must keep in mind that these outside-in dualisms are already anticipated by those who seek to extort the metaphysical shortcomings of the Holy Church’s as they “invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another.”9 More still, these self-professed enemies of the Holy Church “employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models” that testify to the formative Being of Pure Form.10 They continue to explain their anarcho-sentiment towards the Holy Spirit:
Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arriv[ing] at the magic formula we all seek - PLURALISM = MONISM - via all dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.11
In taking this binary shadowboxing seriously, this memoir’s “Preludial Tone of a Street Philosopher” proposes that we expand upon the hylomorphic shortcomings that negate (from the outside-in) ‘prime matter’ by setting the stage for the Catholic Church to update its Thomistic physics so that it can properly engage in the necessary inside-out work (God with us) in connecting ‘Artificial Intelligence and Peace’ with the Holy See’s recent document entitled Dignitas Infinita (released August 2024). A connective maneuver that would regulate the computational architecture (0/1) that they are at present ‘forever rearranging’ as they see fit (i.e., lacking any formative regulatory framework). Specifically, some of the exhaustive notes (i.e., i, iii and vi) concerning pure potentiality in the prologue that follows allude to the much more extensive treatise that will be presented in part II of this work regarding the role that prime matter plays in the emerging new physics related to both anisotropic (outside-in) and isotropic (inside-out) gravitational waves.12
In brief, anisotropy is essentially the structural property of non-uniformity in different directions and expresses the absolute extreme of pure potentiality (ex nihilo) that some many equate with quantum computation, as opposed to isotropy which expresses a uniformity in all orientations which strikes an essential anthropic balance or ‘attunement’ between pure form and prime matter (creatio).13 In providing a prefatory snapshot of how we are beginning to succinctly measure this anthropic balance via the new physics, pure form is best understood as being expressed by the “pulsar timing array” whereas prime mater and its absolute extension into nothingness (i.e., pure potentiality) is found in the collapse of two supermassive blackholes. The gravitational wave itself is the medium through which we can peer into both the isotropic beginning (creatio) as well as the anisotropic end (nihilo) of the observable universe. Here (right here), Jesus’ hypostatic union begin to unveil the unfathomable mystery that “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together[…] for by him all things were created.” (Col. 1:16-17)
To help us conceptualize the new physics/metaphysics, the former (creatio) is isotropically spherical or curved in nature and thus form driven from the inside-out whereas the latter (nihilo) consist of an anisotropic assemblage of intersecting planes where the form is never complete but always differentiating from the outside-in. This begins to match up nicely with Thomistic physics especially when we begin to understand that form and matter are not ‘parts’ of things. Beaumont tells us that “you don’t have ‘stuff’ called matter just hanging out waiting for form to come along shape it into something! Instead, they are principles which explain how things change” in real-time.14 As such, this gives us another way to look at not only the Greek concept of form and matter but also their similarities with isotropic and anisotropic gravitational waves where the prime matter’s non-uniformity provides the possibility of a substance to come into existence (potency) and pure form’s uniformity is what makes that possibility a reality (act). Beaumont sums it up nicely as follows:
Morphe: “Form” does not (despite many explanatory examples) refer to “shape.” Rather, it is that which informs matter resulting in the existence of a individual substance.
Hyle: “Matter” in the Greek philosophical tradition does not (again, despite many explanatory examples) refer to “stuff.” Rather, it is that which takes on form resulting in the existence of a individual substance.15
In other words, liberalism, or ‘Formless Matter’ as Wisdom 11:17 calls it, is not simply a human enterprise as Schindler and others suggest by defining its essence as ‘anti-Catholic.’ To the contrary, it is an ontological condition of reality in and of itself (i.e., ‘creatio’ + ‘ex nihilo’) that either restrains (Figure 2 - right image) or unleashes (Figure 2 - left image) the spirit of the anti-Christ via the people’s will (‘that which holds back’). The Holy See’s recent Declaration “Dignitas Infinita” on Human Dignity that “Draws ‘Clear Line’ on Gender Theory” illustrates this point by defining a “ fourfold distinction of the concept of dignity: ontological dignity, moral dignity, social dignity, and existential dignity.”16 It’s the relationship between ontological and moral dignity that most interests me as it seems to provide further illumination regarding the parallelism (an “undivided continuity” as Henri Bergson calls it) between Pure Act (essence) and Pure Potentiality (existence). It continues:
The most important among these is the ontological dignity that belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God. Ontological dignity is indelible and remains valid beyond any circumstances in which the person may find themselves. When we speak of moral dignity, we refer to how people exercise their freedom. While people are endowed with conscience, they can always act against it. However, were they to do so, they would behave in a way that is “not dignified” with respect to their nature as creatures who are loved by God and called to love others. Yet, this possibility always exists for human freedom, and history illustrates how individuals—when exercising their freedom against the law of love revealed by the Gospel—can commit inestimably profound acts of evil against others. Those who act this way seem to have lost any trace of humanity and dignity. This is where the present distinction can help us discern between the moral dignity that de facto can be “lost” and the ontological dignity that can never be annulled. And it is precisely because of this latter point that we must work with all our might so that all those who have done evil may repent and convert.17
For the purposes of this argument concerning liberalism’s ontic nature, ontological dignity is best understood as the conservative element (truth of Pure Act) while moral dignity is the liberal element (freedom of Pure Potentiality) that can be lost through what Bishop Barron calls “the divorce between freedom and truth.”18 The 'whole' truth of Pure Act always precedes the potency of the ‘parts’ that are expressive of freedom if and only if we begin to think about the relationship between the two in terms of the formers isotropic nature being the Pure Form (that which informs matter) within which the anisotropic nature of the latter takes shape (that which takes on form). Its this essential hylomorphism that new materialism seeks to overturn/flip/invert by way of liberating AI from its anthropocentric constraints via taking the non-human turn towards... perhaps, just maybe disembodied machinic-entities?
I will certainly explore to the best of my ability (absent taking drugs) if this is in fact the case given I have to assess all possibilities. However, what I can say for now is that in direct opposition to the essence of this work’s ‘paradox of liberalism’ where freedom and truth remain married to the ontic reality of Pure Act rather than divorced from it, new materialism seeks to privilege individual freedom over and above universal truth in the most radical way possible by “Re-thinking ‘Human-centric’ AI.” In other words, “liberal concepts of human moral agency” must be overturned even if “they go beyond possessive individualism” given this tendency “to assess the worth of nonhumans” always operates within “terms of human-centric standards.”19
Within this paradigm, the human must be done away with altogether in favor of the absolute zero in order to liberate AI from “the values that have sanctioned social, political, and economic hierarchy, exclusion, and subjugation to date.”20 As if we can transcend ourselves (formed in prime matter) in order to find our post-human self (formless pure potentiality) by ignoring the universal truth of human exceptionalism, that is, the fact that we express consciousness far beyond what other sentient entities are able to physically muster - all the way from paramecium - to - elephants - to dolphins - to - the chimpanzee. Indeed, “more critical and speculative posthumanistic conceptions may decenter strong anthropocentrism by upholding relationality, solidarity, and care as primary aspects of human/nonhuman associations (rather than atomism, hierarchy, and mastery)” if and only if human exceptionalism (i.e., our infinite dignity), understood in terms of living (not machinic) consciousness, remains intact.
Performed in a manner that restrains this exceptionalism from being undermined by shallow exhortations of proclaiming isomorphic symmetries between living systems and computational architectures as DeLanda posits, the absolute essence of consciousness in and of itself serves as the universal truth par excellence for defining the present katechon of our age. Restraining various adversaries all the way from the highly speculative ‘machine elves’ of Terrance McKenna - that seem to utilize what Deleuze calls “molecular perception” - to the undeniably concrete trans/post-humanism espoused by new materialism.21 Figure 3 and 4 below preface the physics of this katechonic disposition found in Orchestrated Objective Reduction or OrchOR.22
Basically, the universal truth of what some have come to call quantum consciousness (a name that I’m honestly uncomfortable with due to its tendency of being confused with new age woo-woo) and its power to restrain is tantamount to the isotropic and/or inviolable nature of human dignity and vice-versa where human nature (as a whole) supersedes what post-humanist scholar Nandita Mellamphy calls ‘strong anthropocentrism’ or atomized expressions of liberty “by upholding relationality, solidarity, and care” by and through embracing the very essence of Christendom, that is, Catholic social teaching.23 This universal/Catholic framework allows for us to boil new materialism down to a full-on attack upon the absolute truth of human dignity by and through its anisotropic segmentation of our identity (via ‘molecular perception’) as children of God; an “inalienable value of the ontological dignity that is rooted in the very being of the human person in all circumstances.”24 Dignitas Infinita clarifies:
Biblical Revelation teaches that all human beings possess inherent dignity because they are created in the image and likeness of God: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ […] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:26-27). With this, humanity has a specific quality that means it is not reducible to purely material elements. Moreover, the “image” does not define the soul or its intellectual abilities but the dignity of man and woman. In their relationship of equality and mutual love, both the man and the woman represent God in the world and are also called to cherish and nurture the world. Because of this, to be created in the image of God means to possess a sacred value that transcends every distinction of a sexual, social, political, cultural, and religious nature. Our dignity is bestowed upon us by God; it is neither claimed nor deserved. Every human being is loved and willed by God and, thus, has an inviolable dignity.25
Choosing to either conform to this world (i.e., Pure Potentiality isolated from or negating Pure Act = AI Singularity) or “to be conformed to the image of” (Rm. 8:29) Christ “who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,” (Col. 2:9) the modern liberal democracy presents an absolute and undeniable existential choice to either socially accept or restrain our impending War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. This ontic-choice between sustaining or eroding our socio-existential dignity in light of the ontological reality of both the inalienable dignity of human exceptionalism (Thought) and the relative morality of accepting or denying this identity (Extension) leaves us with the crucial decision of either linking Artificial Intelligence and Peace with Dignitas Infinita (Idea) or not. Dignitas Infinita helps us frame-up this fundamental decision that’s woven into the socio-existential fabric of our present age of intelligent machines.
When we speak of social dignity, we refer to the quality of a person’s living conditions. For example, in cases of extreme poverty, where individuals do not even have what is minimally necessary to live according to their ontological dignity, it is said that those poor people are living in an “undignified” manner. This expression does not imply a judgment on those individuals but highlights how the situation in which they are forced to live contradicts their inalienable dignity. The last meaning is that of existential dignity, which is the type of dignity implied in the ever-increasing discussion about a “dignified” life and one that is “not dignified.” For instance, while some people may appear to lack nothing essential for life, for various reasons, they may still struggle to live with peace, joy, and hope. In other situations, the presence of serious illnesses, violent family environments, pathological addictions, and other hardships may drive people to experience their life conditions as “undignified” vis-à-vis their perception of that ontological dignity that can never be obscured. These distinctions remind us of the inalienable value of the ontological dignity that is rooted in the very being of the human person in all circumstances.26
What’s at stake when we consider the potential intersections between Artificial Intelligence and Peace is that when this machine/human tension is situated within the magisterial authority of Dignitas Infinitum, the inalienable value of our ontological dignity becomes the ‘unmoved mover’ in how we morally navigate our social and existential reality of accepting or restraining our impending War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. If the choice is to restrain, then the Holy Pontiff and we who are obedient to the Holy Roman Catholic Church are here to assist! If not, may God help us all... Assuming the choice will be the former, Pope Francis sets the statge by beginning with the heart stating:
Before all else, we need to set aside catastrophic predictions and their numbing effects. A century ago, Romano Guardini reflected on technology and humanity. Guardini urged us not to reject “the new” in an attempt to “preserve a beautiful world condemned to disappear”. At the same time, he prophetically warned that “we are constantly in the process of becoming. We must enter into this process, each in his or her own way, with openness but also with sensitivity to everything that is destructive and inhumane therein”. And he concluded: “These are technical, scientific and political problems, but they cannot be resolved except by starting from our humanity. A new kind of human being must take shape, endowed with a deeper spirituality and new freedom and interiority.”27
The Vatican explains this katechonic path towards Part II of this memoir’s proposed “Peace in the Age of Intelligent Machines” in the the following video. Its this potential path towards taming the binary Us/Them logics of Schmittian fascism that the present memoir seeks to discern, that is, to assess whether or not I am called to commit to the vocation of linking Artificial Intelligence and Peace by and through Franciscan spirituality…
While we begin to make our moral decisions from within the absolute truth of free will’s pure potentiality, we can also consider how the social teaching of the Holy Church expressed by Dignitas Infinita leaves many asking “is this left, is it Center, is it right?”28 For Bishop Barron as well as myself the answer is simple: “none of it” because “Catholic Social teaching beautifully transcends this split” along with the anthropocentric bogeyman of post-humanism.29 Its in this way that this work rides the line between left/right politics in hopes of collapsing the growing us/them logics that’s quickly coming to invade the ontological soils from which our modern liberal democracies derive its subsistence. It does this by wholly and emphatically embracing the metaphysical realism espoused by the Catholic Church that, according to philosopher Nicholas Capaldi, “can only be a product of a transcendental argument. It is from the transcendental that we arrive at the transcendent, but the transcendent does not consist of physical things, rather it consists of beings or persons” as Dignitas Infinita unquestionably affirms.30
If we begin to embrace the metaphysical realism of Dignitas Infinita, existential questions like “who amongst us has not learnt and constantly rediscovered that worldly success is always an illusion?” then come to the forefront of the ‘Reality of Politics’ in such a way that we can, by and through Catholic social teaching, socially confront the fact that “if there is no conceptualization of the whole, then there cannot be a comprehensive conceptualization of the relationship between practice and theory.”31 Meaning that “if one had such a conceptualization” such as those proposed by Dignitas Infinita, “one could dictate future practices” that emerge from understanding the evolving relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Peace.32 In this light, “it is important to see that the purpose of metaphysics is not to lead to an ideology” but to quail it.33 This is especially true for the ideologies espoused by both the trans and post-humanism of the left as well as post-liberalism on the right.
While positing a post-enlightenment move away from ‘scientism’ per se rather than a post-liberal sanctification of the state as Schindler suggests or a post-human sterilization of AI as suggested by Mellamphy, we can begin to accept Capaldi’s prescriptive approach. By doing so, we must first accept the unquestionable fact that “the final logic of the Enlightenment Project is post-modern nihilism; post-modernism thinks of itself as a critic of the Enlightenment Project, but is in fact its last gasp.”34 In doing so, this last gasp cannot be followed by embracing Nietzsche’s anti-nihilist as new materialist implicitly suggests but must “stress that the practical domain is not the only or even the most important domain of human existence” as Schindler suggests.35 Capaldi argues that if we stress “the extent to which the transcendent is also apprehended in a poetic act of contemplation, we” can successfully “escape the illusory domination of our practical concerns” regarding AI in favor of bringing about ‘Peace in the Age of Intelligent Machines’ by and through accepting the central premise of Dignitas Infinita’s ontology. Capaldi sums it up nicely stating:
Retrieving our tradition is not a simple matter of an uncritical return to the past. Instead, it is the re-identifying of something that is a permanent part of the human condition even though it is always expressed in specific historical contexts. The fact that these universal truths are always contextualized means that the act of retrieval through explication inevitably involves a reformulation. To encompass the past is to make it our own in some fashion. It would be a singular example of the lack of Christian faith to adhere to the belief in a set of conditions that relieved us of the responsibility of reappropriation. A tradition is not a rigid structure but a fertile source of adaptation that not only evolves but expands to incorporate things that might from an earlier perspective even seem alien. Christians are intellectually and morally obligated to engage in a perpetual retrieval of their tradition. Since the universal truths are moral truths and since their apprehension is not solely an intellectual act, we should now not be surprised that there is (a) no definitive articulation of the divine order, (b) inevitable controversy over its articulation, and (c) a necessary act of faith in its continuing apprehension. Controversy is not a problem to be solved but an inevitable condition that requires a moral response.36
In sum, what’s at stake is not directly confronting the us/them logics head-on, but to come together and co-create a path towards embracing the exceptionalism of human dignity in a manner that transcends right/left politics all the while keeping liberalism’s desire to move “beyond good and evil” restrained.37 What’s more shocking if and when the us/them scales fall from our eyes is that we will come to see that this present age of Nietzsche’s anti(Christ)ic spirit of moving beyond good and evil is lingering in the most inconspicuous 'blind spots' of both conservative critiques of wokeism (they haven't dug deep enough) and liberalism's anti-fascist desires for so-called trans-rights (they dug too deep). One has to look no further than the leftist riots of 2020 and the right-wing insurrection event of 2021 to see where the oscillatory intersections (ebb/flow) between a ‘Foucauldian’ wokeism that denies objectivity (radical-liberalism) and a ‘Schmittian’ transhumanism that embraces absolute technocratic control (radical-conservatism) is taking us. And it’s the explicit purpose of this memoir to tease out what this posthuman future is envisioned to be and specifically who or what it is resonating with.
Beyond Us vs. Them
In all honesty, what was odd to witness in 2020-21 was that the communist and fascist tendencies of the left/right binary passed each other ‘at lightening speeds’ as they reactively marched towards and through the absolute center of Dante's Inferno during the COVID-19 pandemic, all the while missing the true intellectual culprit…
STAY TUNED:
THE REST OF THIS SECTION WILL BE RELEASED ON MAY 10TH @11:00EST
J. Eric Mathis, “A Case for Applied Sustainability: Why I Am Not a Marxist or a Capitalist (Part 2),” Seven Storey Garden Memory Lane Series, April 10, 2024,
1 John 4:3 ESV.
Douglas Beaumont, “‘Formless Matter’ in Wisdom 11:17,” Douglas Beaumont website, October 23, 2020, https://douglasbeaumont.com/2020/10/23/formless-matter-in-wisdom-1117/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20beseech%20you%2C%20my%20child,out%20of%20things%20that%20existed.%E2%80%9D
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid; brackets are mine.
For more regarding the origins of St. Thomas’ essence/existence distinction see: Kevin Corrigan, “A Philosophical Precursor to the Theory of Essence and Existence in St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 48, no. 2 (1984): 219-240.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.
Ibid.
Ibid.
J. Eric Mathis, “Prologue: Part 1 ‘Introduction,’” Seven Storey Garden Prologue, April 5, 2024,
For an excellent overview of the anthropic principle see George Gale, "The Anthropic Principle," Scientific American 245, no. 6 (1981): 154-171; additionally, the following provides a reasonably objective overview of the fine-tuning argument: Luke A. Barnes, "The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life," Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia 29, no. 4 (2012): 529-564.
Beaumont, “‘Formless Matter’ in Wisdom 11:17.”
Ibid.
Holy See, “Declaration ‘Dignitas Infinita’ on Human Dignity,” Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, April 2, 2024, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20240402_dignitas-infinita_en.html
Ibid.
Bishop Robert Barron, “Dignitas Infinita,” Word on Fire YouTube Channel, April 9, 2024,
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Re-thinking ‘Human-centric’ AI: An Introduction to Posthumanist Critique,” EuropeNow, November 9, 2021, https://www.europenowjournal.org/2021/11/07/re-thinking-human-centric-ai-an-introduction-to-posthumanist-critique/
Ibid.
Gilles Deleuze, “Cinema: The Movement-Image / 8,” The Deleuze Seminars, January 26, 1982, https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-08-4/#_ednref8; in this fairly revealing seminar Deleuze examines a similar machinic characteristic to those found in Terrance McKenna’s so-called ‘self transforming machine elves.’ It’s nonother than Carlos Castaneda himself (the schizophrenic “trickster”) who influences Deleuze’s development of his time-image by way of achieving what seems to be the goal of his flavor of sorcery, that is, “to have stopped the world.” This of course requires an anisotropic approach that is set in direct opposing to the isotropic nature of reality in such a way that the holes or gaps that are exploited by the artisans of metallurgy are univocally/perceptively mapped onto one’s consciousness via what seems to be an experience that is similar if not synonymous with McKenna’s DMT explorations. Deleuze writes: “if you have arrived in your perception at stopping the world a little, it is indeed a kind of effort to transcend the movement-image. But why do it? Or rather, why not-do it? Well, the first phenomenon that is given to you already as a splendid compensation is magnification, the insane magnification of things. Things literally become close-ups, things enlarge themselves. You see a face, not under the experience of drugs, which is always miserable, but in a Zen illumination, and apprehend it in colossal dimensions. Why is that interesting? If that doesn’t happen to you, it’s because you haven’t taken enough, by why is it interesting?
It’s prodigiously interesting because at this moment the thing becomes holed [trouée]. The larger it is, the more holed it is. You will not accede to molecular perception unless you attain to the ‘holes’ in each thing. Take the video image, which is easy to make holes in. All that makes for a certain kind of whole [ensemble]. It is necessary that you grasp the thing as Castaneda says: “to grasp things in their pattern [trame]”, each thing’s pattern; the thing is holed. When you have stopped the world, the thing becomes enlarged, reveals its holes. Castaneda’s analyses are beautiful even when taken in a literary sense: it is the perception of water, the molecular perception of water, the molecular perception of air, the molecular perception of movement, and each time molecular perception means: to have stopped the world, to obtain this magnification of the image and to grasp the holes in the image.”
This is in a nutshell the origins of machinic-consciousness, or at least I will let Deleuze himself (via his various works) make this case throughout the corpus of my work that examines his nefarious system of logics. Deleuze is in fact exploiting Henri Bergson’s insights regarding the distinction between a living unity (isotropic uniformity) and a empty diagram (anisotropic non-uniformity) to develop his hacker methodology of ‘stopping the world.’ Essentially the holes (empty diagrams) affords Deleuze to ‘grasp the holes in the image’ in order to mold and shape it in the image of a machine (anti-Christ) rather than a living-unity (the Christ). Bergson writes in Matter and Memory: “That which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an undivided continuity” build upon, as I will argue, the new physics that will emerge from our understandings of isotropic gravitational waves and their relationship to OrchOR.
In opposition to the isotropic uniformity (i.e., undivided continuity) that is sensed by our intuitions, human perception for the most part breaks “up this continuity into elements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct words, in the other to independent objects.” This is precisely what Deleuze seeks to exploit given that a human beings normal procedure, given his/her lack of meditative or contemplative discipline, is to break “the unity of our original intuition” up into component parts and then establishing “between the severed terms” or holes “a bond which can only then be external and superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts which it holds together.” It’s this holey diagram that Deleuze and his disciples seek to exploit in the emerging AI-revolution. One example is DeLanda’s “Multi-Homuncular Model” presented in his most recent work Materialism Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception that privileges relations of exteriority (empty diagram) over the relations of interiority found in Bergson’s living unity. Above quote taken from Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (Dover Publications, 2004), 239. .
For more regarding OrchOR see Amanda L. Collins, "Orchestrated Objective Reduction: Quantum Physics and its Implications in Human Consciousness," College of William and Mary—Degree Program Thesis (2015); in this brilliant introduction to OrchOR, Collins tells us that “Orch OR seems to challenge quantum theory, to the point that proving Orch OR may actually result in the development of new physical laws. While some may dismiss the radical models proposed by Penrose and his colleagues, physics was never meant to be a stagnant field. New observations frequently disprove long-held conventions, and so there is no reason to dismiss this theory unless and until direct observation proves it to be incorrect.” (18).
Mellamphy, “Re-thinking ‘Human-centric’ AI.”
Ibid.
Holy See, “Declaration ‘Dignitas Infinita’ on Human Dignity;” one very clear example of this anisotropic approach is found in DeLanda’s Materialist Phenomenology where his “argument proceeds via proof by construction. Such a proof, in this case, means simulating the origins of perception, and using this simulation to draw real lessons about the historical origins of consciousness. DeLanda calls his simulation the “Multi-Homuncular Model.” The name of this model follows from the method of construction on which DeLanda relies. This book pursues the possibility of modelling the origins of perception using “artificial neural nets.” Neural nets are artificial intelligences which, unlike other intelligences that are programmed by a human designer to possess certain capacities, can simply be fed information from which they develop associations autonomously. It may be objected that reliance on software developed by already-conscious beings cannot accurately simulate the origins of consciousness unless the existence of a designer, like the human software designer, is assumed. However, DeLanda does not consider this objection, and instead relies on a theory of natural signs, according to which the basic components of perception always-already exist in the external world.” In opposition to the OrchOR model that opens up very fruitful doorways to isotopic relations, DeLanda favors the outside-in (anisotropic) approach provided by the classical model of consciousness that privileges neural networks over the substructures of centrioles. Above quote taken from Kenneth Novis, “Manuel DeLanda: Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception,” Phenomenological Reviews, February 1st, 2023, https://reviews.ophen.org/2023/02/01/manuel-delanda-materialist-phenomenology-philosophy-perception-review/
Ibid.
Pope Francis, “Artificial Intelligence and the Wisdom of the Heart: Towards a Fully Human Communication,” Holy See, January 1, 2024, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/communications/documents/20240124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.pdf
Holy See, “Declaration ‘Dignitas Infinita’ on Human Dignity.”
Barron, “Dignitas Infinita.”
Ibid.
Nicholas Capaldi, “Catholic Metaphysics in the Wake of the Collapse of the Enlightenment,” Metanexus, September 1, 2011, https://metanexus.net/catholic-metaphysics-wake-collapse-enlightenment/
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.