The Mania for Disembodiment

The Current Enthusiasm for Demoting Our Bodies

What follows is a transcript of a talk I gave a couple of years ago to a group of adults at my church. It reflects my own observations on the way several culturally contentious issues all seem to intersect around the idea that personhood and faith can be decoupled from embodiment. This notion, as it happens, is neither new to the world nor to Christianity. It is actually an ancient heresy.

I’m publishing this transcript now because, even if some of the culturally contentious issues are beginning (perhaps) to wane (e.g. transgenderism), others are waxing. Artificial intelligence is only just beginning to disorient people on the question of what it means to be human. I spent several days this week in meetings going over experimental results produced by my team on the capacity of AI for generating software source code, and in brainstorming ways of taking advantage of that capability. One cannot have such discussions without someone raising uncomfortable questions regarding agency and consciousness. Operating with clarity on these questions is vitally important as a matter of truth, but also as a matter of compassion for any of our friends whose understanding of what it means to be human may not enjoy the stable footing provided by Christianity.

I am prone to remark in private conversations, and have even publicly written about this here, that the cultural flashpoint, where Christians need most urgently to engage right now, is on this very question of anthropology: what does is mean to be human and what are human beings for?

This talk was a significantly expanded revision of some initial thoughts on this subject, which I had written as an earlier Substack post.

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Four years ago, I was hired by my current employer to play a role in helping to build the world’s fastest super computer. A little over a year ago we reached our goal of becoming the first exascale computer in world history – which means we built a machine that can do 1 quintillion arithmetic calculations per second. If the entire earth’s population started doing math calculations every second for 24 hours every day, it would take us all four sleepless years to do the same calculations this machine can do in a single second.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of people working on building that system, and my own role was in the building of software tools that can observe the interaction between applications and the system hardware to help ferret out ways that software can take more efficient advantage of the compute resources within the system. You can think of my work as building tools that are sort of technological peeping toms for math nerds.

Since that time, my own work has been redirected more into the realm of artificial intelligence. Some of the tools I built for supercomputing have been repurposed for AI and are being actively used in companies whose names you would recognize, to optimize the computational performance of their AI models.

I mention all of this as a preface because, doing this kind of work on complex systems for many years, one begins to form certain habits of mind. One of those habits is that of perceiving related patterns in seemingly unrelated phenomenon. By no means am I always right in identifying these patterns. But I have been mostly successful at this work by a stubborn determination to inform my observations by prying hard to acquire data out of these complex systems. As an aside, and I think I’ve said this before, one of my skepticisms about climate alarmism is rooted in my own experience with how hard it is to monitor systems that are far less complex than planetary climates. I don’t believe the quality of the climate alarmists’ data can possibly be adequate to reliably make the sweeping predictions they would have us accept. At best it can only excite hypotheses. The fact that climate alarmists don’t loudly characterize the projections of their models as mere speculative hypotheses probably tells us most of what we need to know about the ethics that prevail within climate science.

But I digress.

Today I want to suggest that an unexpected pattern (unexpected by me at least) has emerged that spans important social flash points – those flash points are homosexuality, transgenderism, artificial intelligence, and Covid.  That may seem like an odd assortment and what overarching pattern could there possibly be? I know what you mean. But I think there is something here that it might be good for us to consider. I think there is a common conceptual thread woven through all of these seemingly unrelated areas. That common thread, which I want to discuss today, and to which, I want to suggest, we Christians are not immune, is the ancient thread of “Gnosticism”.

Gnosticism was an ancient heresy which was roundly rejected by the church but which nevertheless has shown a surprising resilience and ability to reemerge in different ages. Central to the gnostic idea was the notion that pure knowledge is the basis for salvation (The Greek word “gnosis”, from which gnostic derives, means “knowledge”). Gnosticism suggested that the physical world was created by a lesser spiritual being and is thus inherently evil. It insisted that knowledge, unsullied by material existence, was the essence of faith. It went so far in its early Christianized forms of saying that Jesus was not truly embodied. This is probably why we find the apostle John writing in the first chapter of 2 John,

“As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.

7 I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.

Gnostics often reacted to their embodied existence by either embracing a hedonistic pursuit, on the premise that what we do with our physical bodies doesn’t matter, or by almost the opposite pursuit of a rigorous kind of self-imposed deprivation. This may have been behind Paul’s writing in Colossians where he warned against approaches to the Colossian’s faith involving “harsh treatment of the body”.

So why am I suggesting that Gnosticism is a unifying theme of homosexuality, transgenderism, artificial intelligence and Covid?

Let’s start with homosexuality.

The unstated assumption, perhaps not even always consciously recognized, that underlies homosexual activism is the premise that nothing about male or female human anatomy tells us anything that matters concerning the way sexual interests should be directed, or in what form, or toward what end. Those who insist on the affirmation of homosexual behavior are implicitly insisting that nothing about the physicality of the human body is instructive about anything having to do with sexual expression. One of the things I find most interesting about this implicit assumption is how markedly it departs from the assumptions of Darwinian evolution. Under Darwin, forms of beings supposedly evolved to confer to the advantage of the species. That means, on Darwinism’s own terms, observable forms tell us something about purpose, and what contributes to species survival. But homosexual advocates are implicitly insisting that the human form and function tell us nothing at all. It should perhaps not be entirely surprising that the anti-Christian world can’t get its story straight.

An affirming worldview in regard to homosexuality is one which makes a distinction between the inner life of desire, and the actual form of human anatomy. By doing this, it devalues the role of the human body for informing our lives. It insists upon a complete disconnect between our anatomy and our purpose. Thus, any instructive role played by the human body is thereby thoroughly deprecated.

The same kind of diminishment of the body holds true for the current craze of transgenderism. The underlying premise is that who and what we truly are is completely divorced from our actual embodied existence. More than that, our bodies may be actual impediments to who we actually are. For transgender activists, our bodies are inconveniences that can be carved up and rearranged in ghastly attempts to impose one’s inner life on his body, rather than conform one’s inner life to his actual embodied circumstance.

In the case of homosexuality, what someone wants overrides his embodied form, and in the case of transgenderism, what someone imagines himself to be overrides his entire embodied circumstance. The consistent theme of both of these aggressive worldviews is gnostic in the way they both elevate the content of their minds over actual embodiment and physical existence.

The deprecation – or to use a modern word – the cancellation of the human body is nowhere more evident than in the world of technology. Virtual reality is being promoted, not merely as entertainment, but as an actual substitute for our physical existence.  In 2021, Marc Andreesen, inventor of the web browser and board member of Facebook, was being interviewed about Facebook’s plans for the “metaverse” - an online virtual reality world they were building. During the interview, Andreesen was asked if he thought that technology perhaps made us all too connected and virtualized in ways that were unhelpful to human psychology. He responded by suggesting that such a notion might itself be an artifact of “reality privilege”.

Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. This is a paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin:

“Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges.”

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.  The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

Reality Privilege and Living Your Life Online

Don’t miss the essential point being made here: a disembodied, virtual existence is not only good, it is an actual matter of equality and justice.

Mary Harrington is a noteworthy and trenchant writer in the UK. Her most recent book is “Feminism Against Progress”. She is an exceedingly interesting thinker. One of an emerging class of erstwhile feminists who are giving reconsideration to the possibility that human flourishing might involve actually leaning into how one has been made. In a recent interview, she connects some of her own dots, linking what I’m calling the gnostic preference for disembodiment with technology and transgenderism.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the real uptick in trans identity coincides with smartphones becoming ubiquitous. I think…there's a very strong causal link and it's very clear that a lot especially young girls who embrace that and, you know, try and transcend the limits of their own embodied sex, are inspired to do so by influencers and really the experience of socializing in a disembodied way. You know, if you've been interacting with other people in Minecraft since you were five, then you know, is it any wonder that you believe you can edit your meat avatar the way the way you can edit your virtual one? I think it would self-evidently be a matter of basic social justice to people, you know, normalized into that paradigm, to imagine that this is something that you can and should be able to do. – Mary Harrington

A common premise shared by virtual reality and the emerging world of artificial intelligence is that computation is an adequate approximation, if not an actual substitute for, flesh-and-blood human beings.

Some foundational observations about technology are probably in order before proceeding with this line of thought.

Computers are calculators, they are not people or 'beings' of any kind.  They compute - they do not discern. They are machines that crunch numbers, they do not have insight. They can be programmed to convert numbers to text. We can use them to calculate the statistical associations between text fragments contained within vast accumulations of documents. This is what the language models behind all the current AI excitement do. They compute a vast sea of statistics regarding co-occurring letters and words and can regurgitate statistically probable sequences of text.

AI models do not have their own ideas. They reconstitute strings of text cobbled together from statistical probabilities. That means that the quality of their answers is entirely dependent on the quality of the documents they derived their statistics from. If the document corpus is full of errors or lies, an AI will regurgitate an approximation of those errors and lies. If the document corpus is full of political bias, it will generate answers with a corresponding political bias. AI models do not "know" what they are doing.  They only regurgitate calculated approximations of what they have been "told". In a sense, ChatGPT and all of its siblings can be thought of as massive juke boxes which can "replay" variations of the conventional wisdom on any particular subject they have been “trained” upon.

The mysticism currently in vogue for describing AI, especially in the popular press and on social media, is rooted in part (I suspect) in the widespread acceptance of the computational theory of mind.

In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation.

The underlying assumption here is that the human body is nothing more than a sort of baggy, wet, computer. It is the computations themselves, so the narrative goes, that comprise what we perceive as being a “person”. Once those kinds of “computations” can be performed by other kinds of computers, then those other computers will also constitute persons. If what it means to be human is reducible to mathematical computations, then nothing more significant than computations are what constitute human beings. The human body thus becomes irrelevant, except perhaps as an incredibly power-efficient instrument for doing math.

But since language is a central facet of our human existence, it can be deeply affecting for people to interact with a machine which can compute a coherent linguistic response to their questions. This video aptly illustrates the point I’m making here.

It is worth noting that there are some choices made by the original producer of the above video which are intentionally contrived to contribute to the viewer’s mystical sense regarding the AI behind the video. It is probably no accident that the maker of the video chose a persona for his AI character (a monk) which is perceived by many to have spiritual authority. Make no mistake, a kind of groundwork is being laid here. Also, the choice to use a British accent is worth remarking upon. There are many psychological studies suggesting that a British accent augments a listener’s perception of a speaker’s authority and expertise.

The widespread (among technologists) acceptance of the computational theory of mind - that humans are essentially computers – inevitably leads downstream to novel implications for what it even means to be human.

In this conversation between Lex Fridman and Andrej Karpathy, both leading thinkers in the field of AI, ethical questions are being raised about the morality of unplugging an AI that tells you it wants to live, suggesting that unplugging an AI will become a moral question akin to the kinds of questions that attend human abortion.

Fridman: But there's also this, perhaps just a narrative we tell ourselves, it feels like something to experience the world, the hard problem of consciousness.

Karpathy: Yeah.

Fridman: But that could be just a narrative that we tell ourselves.

Karpathy: I think it [consciousness] will emerge. I think it's going to be something very boring. We'll be talking to these digital AIs, they will claim they're conscious, they will appear conscious, they will do all the things that you would expect of other humans and it's going to just be a stalemate.

Fridman: I think there will be a lot of actual fascinating ethical questions, like supreme court level questions of whether you're allowed to turn off a conscious AI, if you're allowed to build a conscious AI, maybe there would have to be the same kind of debates that you have around, sorry to bring up a political topic, but abortion, which is the deeper question with abortion is what is life? And the deep question with AI is also, what is life and what is conscious?

Karpathy: Right.

Fridman: And I think that'll be very fascinating to bring up, it might become illegal to build systems that are capable of such level of intelligence

One way to understand the conflict roiling the West over these essential facets of human nature, humanity's place in the world, and our embodied existence, is to see it as modern resentment against the very fact of our "createdness". Moderns, especially in the West, are increasingly embittered by the possibility that the circumstances of our existence are prescribed by anyone other than ourselves. In such a context, adopting a belief, such as gender being anything we say it is, begins to seem like nothing so much as a collective desire to give God the finger. Moderns really do not like the fact that we are created and can thus never be entirely self-defining. For the modern, having the circumstances of our existence imposed upon us is, it turns out, enraging. Many are thus determined to believe that our humanity can be divorced from our embodied existence and reduced to something purely computational. Such gnostic pretensions offer a way out of the impositions of our physicality. You get a sense for this kind of modern intellectual petulance in this speech by Yuval Harari.

Organisms are algorithms. This is the big Insight of the modern life sciences, that organisms, whether viruses or bananas or humans, they are really just biochemical algorithms. And we are learning how to decipher these algorithms. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds but our intelligent design. – Yuval Harari

It was during Covid that I first began to perceive this kind of widespread cultural negativity toward embodiment. This manifested itself during Covid as an immediate - even enthusiastic - cultural receptivity to the idea that human bodies should primarily be conceived of as vectors for the transmission of disease. And it was especially the prevalence of similar assumptions, and novel new ethical arguments, within the larger Christian community, that left me scratching my head.

Here's why.

Beginning in the earliest chapters of the biblical text, a theology of the human body began to emerge: sexual distinctiveness, purpose-filled sexual expression, embodied existence. All of these were first principles set forth at the very outset. The very fate of the world itself even hung on the dietary choices Adam and Eve made concerning foods for the body to consume.

Later on, faith and human beings intersected in priestly garments, and in the consumption of sacrificial meat, and with anointing, and uncut hair, and circumcision, and ceremonial washings.

And then, to the great astonishment of every being, both in heaven and on earth, God went so far as to embody himself, and it was his bodily death, attested to by bodily fluids, preceded by bodily abuse, followed by bodily burial and ultimately bodily resurrection, that reconciled everything on earth and in heaven to himself.

Our Lord gave instructions that we should baptize the bodies of new disciples. On the night he was betrayed, our Lord told his disciples, “this is my body…” and did so in the very context of instructing them in the necessity of commemorating these events by bodily consuming bread and drinking wine. Everywhere we turn, the scriptures teach that human beings are embodied creatures - that our faith intersects with our embodied existence - making our faith itself something that is inescapably embodied.

The Christian faith is not less than informational – to be sure, the gospel does contain informational content. But it cannot be reduced to mere information. The church body (there’s that word again) cannot be reduced to being simply a vehicle for the exchange of information.

I’m very glad we have the technology to Zoom and livestream for everyone who is physically or geographically unable to gather with the Church in person. That is certainly a huge blessing for all who simply cannot gather bodily together. But the Christianity of the bible is both informational and embodied. It is an unsanitary and earthy amalgamation of dirty feet and baths, body and blood, death and resurrection.

The ancient Christian faith simply cannot be contained within the antiseptic flickering of a livestream video.

Christianity has long been plagued by a gnostic inclination. Gnosticism has always been characterized by its insistence, to greater and lesser degrees, on a dichotomy between the content of Christian faith and the embodiment of it. There has always been a gnostic tendency to diminish messy embodiment in favor of unsullied knowledge. Any understanding of Christianity which conceives of itself primarily as a form of disembodied information, reduced almost entirely to trafficking in right opinions, is a Christianity that emits more than a whiff of the gnostic past.  

Connecting the Dots

We are living through an eruption of transgender and homosexual mania - a moment characterized by a rejection of the relevance of the natural body as a guide to human sexual identity and sexual expression. A time when elite technology thinkers have adopted a reductionist conception of human beings as being merely algorithms. They are openly debating whether we should be allowed to turn off what are really just very fast calculators because they might warrant the very same moral standing as embodied human beings. After all, if a human being is only a machine, a machine can very well be a human being.

So, given all of this, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to wonder whether the gnostic undercurrent of our times is affecting the thinking of those Christians who have come to see their own bodily participation as an optional facet of their practice of faith.

One of the urgent tasks facing modern Christians, I believe, is the need to reinforce our understanding of the embodied nature of our faith. What life as a Christian involves is not confined to things informational or psychological. It is not limited to only the moral rehabilitation of our inner lives. There is far more to Christianity than thinking pure thoughts. Biblical Christianity is a comprehensive, redeemed way of being, one which reaches into every nook and cranny of our existence. Jesus did not redeem us merely to help us cope, or to enable us to have all of our informational ducks in a row.

Following Jesus involves bringing our whole self - body and soul - to take up arms in a very ancient conflict. One in which Gnosticism continues to be wielded in an attempt to seduce us with the idea that our faith exists only in the realm of ideas, and need not take up residence in our bodies.