Uploading Consciousness

In the Transhumanist Movement, Scientists Attempt to Create God in Our Own, Broken Human Image 

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things." 

- Romans 1:18-23

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West) 

Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and Mark Zuckerberg try to popularize a new vision of computer-based immortality, where a future rapture, called the “Singularity,” will save all believers in science and let them live for eternity in a heaven of their own making. This is the ecstatic vision behind the  “Meta-Universe” in which we can live, interact and do our business. It is also behind the “Simulation” view of reality, a theory based on the idea that future intelligence, equal in attributes to a theological God, run computer games and simulations to understand the lives of their ancestors. Multiple realities are pictured as being nested, one within another, like a Russian Matrioshka Doll, in which one universe runs a simulation of another, until that simulation runs another, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. These alternative philosophies have become popular in the tech and venture capital worlds, and are influencing contemporary theologians and scientists, science fiction, popular policies, and tax incentives. The world waits for a true Artificial Intelligence in a messianic and breathless anticipation, seeing in the coming "god" all the religious categories of final judge, arbiter, and apocalypse that threatens to end the reign of man upon earth. 

The problem with these transhumanist philosophies is that, even if we could "upload consciousness,” we can never gain artificial immortality - we will still die and whatever we create will only "think" it is you (or, appear to think based on programming that does not allow for a free will), and we will never truly experience it. The only apparent solution to many contemporary science philosophers and ethicists is "dualism,” the idea of a non-material component to our being, but secular materialism is propositionally set up against this conclusion, meaning, in effect, that there is absolutely no rational hope of immortality from this perspective. Transhumanists and Singulatarians are therefore exhibiting religious levels of hopeful irrationality when they state, as Kurzweil does, that we will become immortal via technological progress. Man's deep seated desire for continued existence is simply an impossibility without an immaterial God! 

Zuckerberg Manipulating His Virtual Avatar in the So-Called "Metaverse"

Kurzweil's Apocalyptic Transhumanist Eschatology in a Prophetic Diagram  

I think it is interesting to see how consciousness and the existence of God are wrapped together in an existential and ontological question about the nature of existence and the possibility of knowing truth - Are we lying to ourselves when we think that we exist, that we are conscious, that we can know the existence of others - the greatest of the "Others" would be the origin of all existence, consciousness, knowledge and truth - God? If we think consciousness is self-deceit, there is no hope of knowing the truth, and if there is no hope of truth, there is no reason for higher standards of factual accuracy, critical thinking, and angst-ridden atheism in the name of truth! 

C.S. Lewis’ Argument for Disbelieving Atheism if a Random Evolutionary Materialist Universe is True

I can understand why a non-revelatory theism would be necessary for any honest intellectual. If we think consciousness is self-deceit, there is no hope of knowing the truth, and if there is no hope of truth, there is no reason for higher standards of factual accuracy, critical thinking, and angst-ridden atheism in the name of truth! The whole academic premise is based upon the ability to know, and this is what gives them a sense of purpose, direction and fulfillment. It is also interesting to see how the Hellenistic "God of the Philosophers" caves so quickly to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob! If we can get back to a philosophical recognition of the need for God and our consciousness as evidence for His existence, we've already won the battle! Knowing this, those who oppose the personal and cultural implications of theism will not budge in their inability to recognize God, even if it negates the truth of their own existence and leads to ontological skepticism and cultural nihilism. Their ability to proclaim doubt-as-fact, loudly and harshly, is their greatest power! 

The Transhumanist Church, Officially Incorporated in Hollywood, Florida, Which Teaches Eternal Life through Technology and the Worship of an Artificially Intelligent God

I have been thinking about this a lot, in a close review of the anti-Palamite Orthodox writings of Akindynos and the "Political Dissenters" after St. Gregory Palamas rose to political power after the deposition of the rightful Emperor by his monastic political party. These Orthodox theologians are completely ignored by contemporary Orthodox polemics and the political nature of Palamism's victory is not generally known by the East itself. Deposed Patriarch Gregory Akindynos believed that the insistence on visions of light, the hysechastic experience, as the truest form of spiritual knowledge not only broke the prophetic and applicable "Word-based Revelation,” the model that is seen in Scripture and the Fathers, but that it also led to either a kind of panetheistic existentialism, or implied that there was an ontological duality of modes within the Godhead. Akindynos also believed that Palamism substituted an unknowable and uncommunicable vision of the individual for what had always previously been understood as a prophetic word given to the congregation, thus introducing another duality into the Christian experience - the extreme individualism of monasticism (where monks did not do the things actually commanded by Christ or lived the active, service-oriented lives of Christ or the Apostles) and the covenantal view of the Church as the priestly people of God. This was understood by the Greek dissenters to the Palamite takeover as a triumph of Massalianism, a saving personal experience that is set up and against the covenantal sacramental its of the Church as a Body, and the acceptance of a Hellenistic lifestyle associated with the ancient pagan philosophers absorbed in contemplation leading to Henosis ("at-one-ness") with the ineffable. While I believe St. Gregory's theology to be in line with the ancient intentions of Christianity, a personal and corporate life of Faith, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, the political situation then and since may have led to a "railroading effect" for all those with this caution. It is not pro-Roman to say that Palamism is an innovation with panetheistic implications, but Barlaam and his party's defection to the Roman Church has been used as a proof ever since (really the only place they could go after St. Gregory single-handedly rewrote the vows of ordination and the Synodikon to support his own views, with the support of the emperor, since all the other Churches were under the Turks). 

However, the issue of vision as a form of knowledge really goes to the heart of this issue - seeing God implies not only His existence, but also His communicability. These are good things. Origen thought that the end of all intelligent purpose was found in the contemplation/vision of the Divine Essence. Later Fathers found this theory unacceptable based on Biblical grounds. St. Maximos the Confessor's great legacy was that he was able to rehabilitate the general concepts of Origenism and Platonism, without destroying Biblical Cosmology or the imperatives of God's greatness, all the while defending Christ's uniqueness as an Incarnation of God, rather than the "Unfallen Logos of a Created Being." The idea behind the final Palamite development was to use the "Energies" to get around the problem that "No man has seen God and lived,” but also maintain God's transcendence in the midst of His knowability in the Incarnation. 

Old Testament Categories Focus on Hearing, Obeying and Conveying the "Dabar" ("Word") of the Lord. This Cultural Understanding Changed in the Hellenic World of the New Testament to Seeing and Understanding the "Phos" ("Light") of God. Both Categories are Important, and Must be Kept in Dynamic Tension, but the Theology of Christ as the "Word of God" through Whom We See the "Light of God" Must Not be Lost! 

While I agree with man's ability to directly experience God, I believe that the problem may rest in the cultural shift from the ear to the eye. St. Maximos may have done better to forget Origen completely and return to a textual understanding of Scripture as a communicated Word. The eye is intellectual, but the ear is emotional. The eye sees what the light illumines, but the interpretation is left up to the beholder. Words, however, and the process of conversation (feedback), create a different paradigm of knowledge. Knowledge of God comes from a process of change. We hear, we respond, we hear again. Much like the ongoing process of repentance itself. It contains none of the static, icon-like effect of a vision of light, but is a process of change from the get-go. The unchanging icon of Uncreated Light was a picture that did not explain itself, other than to claim that such spiritual heroism and blessedness could only be granted to the right-believing and God-loved, completely correct and politically validated Orthodox. It was not important for you to respond. You must be content to passively receive. Other Christian Traditions mystical experience, and the reality of common visions of light in Eastern Religion, become existential problems that can only be dealt with through vehement denial! We also have the problem of Postmodernism's discovery of the fact that even seemingly passive recipients bring meaning into every context through their subconscious and completely cultural lexical inheritance 

The assumption of immutability, rest, transcendence and ineffability of God are not Biblical categories. They are not Biblical Names for God. They are philosophical assumptions that are based on a cultural reading of Scripture, meaning that were brought, unquestioned, into the context of biblical hermeneutics. Throughout the Old Testament, God is angry, is changeable, is able to interact with man via fire, earthquake, voice, symbol, vision and always with words. He is not aloof or hidden in an apophatic haze of Ousia, Hypostasis, Energia, Theoria and Theosis. He is the visceral, living, quivering inner voice of the prophets. The later attempts of the Greek Church to deal with a Platonic conception of the "Philosophers God,” while initially justified for the purposes of apologia and conversion of the Hellenes, was not of the same authority or importance as what God had revealed about Himself. God never told us to contemplate our way into unknowing and unity with His Energies. He told us to obey His words and do the works He commands us to do! In the end, we often forget what was Scripture and what the Greeks culture read into Scripture - one of the Antiochian School's main concerns with the liberal use of allegory. Scripture was sometimes completely reinterpreted to fit a paradigm at odds with everything that it was saying for itself.

Evolutionary Progress from the Transhumanist Worldview, Showing the Atheistic Trajectory and Anti-Life Proclivity of the Theory of Evolution

What does this have to do with "uploading consciousness" and the impending age of an Anti-Christian "singularity"? Well, for one, we realize that Christianity was not originally concerned with the problem of consciousness as a thing, and not primarily concerned with sight metaphors for the spiritual life. These metaphors have won out in our contemporary age, and allow us to mistake high-quality computer graphics for reality itself. How different would our current technology be if we understood the world through metaphors of hearing and responding? In the Scripture, consciousness was a reflection of relationships and contexts, created, not for self-knowledge, but for the praise and worship of God. We are conscious because we were created for worship and reproduction, the creation of other sentient lives that also worship the Creator. As it states in the first chapters of Genesis, we were made to "walk with God in the cool of the day" and to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the whole earth." In later Christian philosophy, even with the centralization of the Beatific Vision or the Vision of Uncreated Light, this understanding is still central, but perhaps obscured by an overlay of political monasticism that turns this complementary Hebraic worldview of a holy married priesthood into an ecclesial dichotomy - the illuminated spiritual adept, the celibate monastic clergy, and their humble, unenlightened flock, the proletariat child-bearers who numbly stumble through life and are saved on the backs of their heroic and light-bearing priests. Our sentiency is a gift given by God as a reflection of His character an attributes, our reproductive nature is a direct reflection of the life-giving relationship found within the Holy Trinity. Our unification of both worship and reproduction are perfectly knit together in our physical bodies, which not only bear the image of God, a free will, and the capacity to selflessly love the other, but in a physical body that is now glorified and eternally sitting on the right hand of God Almighty, the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Thus, to disincarnate our personhood, to deny the Resurrection of the Dead at the End of Days, and to extract consciousness out of a reflective relationship with a loving and personal Creator God, deleting worship, deleting intimacy, deleting the life-giving and spirit-filled unity of bodies one with another for the creation of new spirito-physical bodies, is to create something other than life. It is to create a cheerful grave, decked out in bright and flashing lights, gaping wide for the destruction of both soul and body in a fake heaven of our own construction, where puppets who think that they are us may bob around for half of eternity, until the universe grows cold and folds into the material singularity, the inevitable end of this universe in entropy. Meanwhile, our deceived souls will stand in judgment before God in the real world, the world that stands outside of time and space, the base reality for our existence, cut free from the body at the moment our digital copies were uploaded into a plastic bliss we will never experience ourselves. We will be "reincarnated,” united again with flesh of God's own making, and will stand before the embodied God, Jesus Christ, in our own bodies. Fully alive, functioning and personal as individuals, we will be free to see the error of our ways. All those who took this "Mark of the Beast," this voluntary submission to a false and atheist gospel of men deceiving themselves that they could eternally reign as gods without God, will finally lament their waste, selfishness and the lost opportunity of this life, distracted and misdirected by  their false philosophy, the opposite of their hoped end. 

The New Faith of Scientism and Transhumanism Cannot Escape the Fear of Judgment Combined with the Hope of Eternal Life, Even with a God of Human Design, Because Both Express the Ultimate Reality of the Moral Purpose Designed into Every Human Being