Artificial Transcendence (The Rise of AI Gods)
(The Threshold Series: Pt.6)
In a recent essay, the psychiatrist and philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist wrote: ‘I now think that there is no greater catastrophe awaiting us than that which will be brought about by advances in AI. Its effects on the human soul and on everything that makes life worth living are so great that they are beyond the ordinary human mind’s comprehension.’1 As part of this ‘catastrophe awaiting us,’ we are witnessing the breakdown or dissolution of the organic, carbon body as the digital-algorithmic landscape is forcing people to identify less and less as bodily beings. Human relationships with a ‘greater reality’ have also changed. Our human ancestors had a deeper understanding of the cosmic relationship to humanity; of how the body was not just a composite of substances from the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms but was animated by the influx of vital forces. The human being was an integral part of the cosmos, ensouled with its energies. Yet all this understanding was lost as humanity passed through the phase of deepening materialism and empirical scientism. Human societies and cultures are now in visible decline and decay through the dominance of physical processes that are placing artificial constructs and machinic infrastructure above the vital forces of spirit-consciousness.
This is the struggle that now blatantly confronts us. And yet, a great many people have bought into the belief system – or been programmed to believe – that the biological evolution of the human body has finished. And as there will be no more evolution of the physical human form then this has caused the materialists to move onto other bodies – technological bodies. This is the forthcoming ‘threshold’ that humanity will soon face head on. If humanity passes through this threshold in an unconscious manner, then afterwards we shall witness increased autonomous capacities of thinking, feeling, and will:
Humanity stands at a crossroads. One path leads through mechanization of the mind and spirit, which has become very mechanical in modern times … Mechanization of the spirit means a vegetating soul. Vegetables sleep, and the human soul also inclines to sleep – people are sleepwalking through the most important events.2
The choice that confronts us is whether to allow ourselves to be pulled or steered towards a mechanization of the human being – a state of not-being in mind and spirit – or compel ourselves to find the path towards an awakening of (and receptivity to) the spirit-consciousness. Transformative impulses will only be awakened if humanity concerns itself with the world of spirit-consciousness by cultivating thoughts, feelings, and beingness into which these forces can flow. Most people only wish to comprehend life in physical terms.
The deep materialism that has arisen within the last few centuries has only served to further alienate people from what is essential to the human being – its beingness. And this separation has given rise to an internal loneliness that often manifests through false pride, ignorance, and selfishness. Deep materialism detaches people from the essence of life rather than bringing them closer. As Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner said: ‘Most lonely of all are those who have become detached from life, torn from its living context, and are now related only to the arid machine … A wasteland now exists in human souls.’3 These signs of an inner wasteland portray the disembodiment that has arisen as part of a new technological theology, a false transcendentalism that masquerades under the mask of the new AI ‘gods.’
The Rise of the New AI gods
There is a sense of disembodiment that underlies the tech-theology of a discarnate future. A future where human bodies and beingness are replaced by a fusion or merger with a machinic, soulless vessel. And this will become the mediator for how a person interfaces with the environment around them. For through these artificial intruders, humans will no longer be concerned over the state of the human soul but of virtual vistas and tech-enabled conveniences that forge the new landscape. In the territory of techno-life there is no confusion over the soul for such a thing shall be regarded as a primitive religious superstition. The human being will gradually get replaced by a form of hybrid-self – a soulless construct. We may eventually become our own mythology; a human hybrid like the gods of old, fused creatures, gnostic mashups, photoshopped into existence. The slavishly praised ‘Technological Singularity is a neon sign that heralds the end of our essential human self. The pure human will become classed as the homo irrelevant. The hybrid has become the latest model to leap from the consumer assembly line.
The false transcendence evangelizes and preaches the Techno-Rapture – an uploaded merger of data fields from the biological carbon body to an algorithmic cloud vessel. The eclipse of the human era begins when the externalization of the mind and presence becomes a dominant trait. The silicon age is the epoch of the shadow human. There is everything on the outside whilst the inside remains hollow. It is the world of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’ come around again, revisiting the debris of desolation: ‘Shape without form, shade without colour/Paralysed force, gesture without motion…’ And how does such a world end? ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.’4 The externalization of the human mind, presence, and beingness represents something deeply alienating, as if abandoning one’s natural home residence and going out to wander the empty streets. There is the hollow promise of socialization and community, yet this ends up feeling like contact tracing in the void. This ongoing process of placing intellect into our devices and mechanical-digital assistants is nothing less than a strategy of estrangement, and such estrangement from the human self is one of the loneliest feelings the human soul can experience. For the soulful person, it represents a splintering of the self and a shutting down of one’s conversation with Source. Transhumanist transcendence wants your mind, but it doesn’t want it to stay where it should.
Perhaps now is a good time to remind ourselves that what we understand as human consciousness is not fixed, as consciousness is a merger between signal and receiver. So, why the attempt to blend the human mind within a machinic architecture? The tech-salvationists treat the mind as an object, as a solitary thing, separate and graspable. This is the limited cognition of scientific materialism. Scientific materialism in our current Age of the Machine is aiming for a synchronization of the social mind. It is codifying a data-driven life within the social-digital matrix. It will aim for a type of digital purity where nothing will ever need to be forgotten again. Human forgetfulness, lost phone numbers, addresses, etc, will be purged from society by a data-driven desire to override physical weaknesses. All too human, all too human – our carbon-bodied weaknesses and flaws will be remedied and remediated by a data-driven life that will quantify everything, from personal health, to feelings and thoughts. In a world where neural modification becomes the norm, human nervous systems are then the new programmable software. We become as ‘hackable animals,’ just like the pop-culture prophet Yuval Noah Harari predicted in his 2020 speech at the World Economic Forum. Historian Harari later announced in 2023 that AI has now hacked the operating system of human civilization:
At first, AI will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.5
The old-style programming tactics or propaganda once employed for the political mechanics of domination have been updated. Mind manipulation through frequency control and transferred by neural broadcasting has overtaken subliminal television advertising. Individual brains are to be fused into a collective, congealed mass of programmed thoughts, sensations, and beliefs. The plan is to transform biological bodies into mobile programmable units that receive and transmit codified data without the in-house personality (the ‘self’) being aware of the information. She/He/It only responds to the data but is incapable of deciphering it. The curvy flesh of carbon-based organic beings is getting reconfigured to connect with the geometric grid of the digital ecosystem. Well, this is the vision of biological decay that excites the tyrannical goals of certain tech-overlords.
Social tools are no longer hand-held instruments but are the untouchable and inviolable credit scores and stealth algorithms that creep inside your life as digital spies. Data is cold, and so its environment is inevitably chilling. And yet the tech-theology continues to preach to the beguiled masses and to tempt its congregation with its machine-friendly consciousness, its skin-laden robotics, and smiling prosthetics. Such a vivisection of the human self can only be realized in a dark age of human civilization where individual, sovereign identity is disregarded in favour of biometric subjectivity and the coded tentacles of algorithmic scrutiny. Yet this view through such a darkened lens is unable to see or perceive that there is something impenetrable about the human body-mind-consciousness that the digital regime cannot conquer or colonize.
The machinic approach appears sleek yet in comparison to the human spirit it is crude and lacks finesse. It is an affront to the human heart and soul. It is like the flea that sucks blood from the warm human body and claims equal rights. Such a technological realm, fronted by the oligarchs of economic control, is a soulless environment. Such a dark age of deep materialism acts not as an enabler of the human condition but as a parasite. It feeds off the human host. It needs to survive by enticing willing humans to step forward offering themselves as willing hosts for this mechanical parasite. It acts as a disease for it ultimately displaces the wholeness of human integrity and causes internal dis-ease.
The myopic arguments of transhumanism with its near-obsession with mind-consciousness uploading (false transcendence) target the perceived limitations of human biological evolution. They repeatedly focus upon what I have termed the ‘weak body’ hypothesis; that is, the human biological body is prone to disease, breakdown, infections, wear and tear, etc. 6 The human body, tech-theology preaches, has reached the end of its evolution and there is nowhere else for it to go. Two arms, two legs, and the current body physiology is now the best we are going to get, despite its biological weaknesses. The logical reasoning, say the transhumanists, is to transition to a tech-merger between carbon and silicon. And whilst this may sound ‘reasonable’ to some people, what it really shows is an attitude of deep materialism and, in terms of the human being, a sense of nihilism. It is a viewpoint that has given up on the development of the human being and replaced it with a false faith in external appendages and hybridisation. It is pure scientific materialism now entrenched in hyper-technology that worships at the altar of tech-theology. This materialistic perspective of the human being seeks to mould the human vessel into a new hybrid form of machinic body-vessel. It is a complete eradication of the metaphysical world – of the realm of spirit-consciousness – and an embrace of intellect as godlike. In fact, tech-theology is already on the verge of re-writing the story of humanity’s gods. According, once again, to historian Yuval Noah Harari:
In the future, we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence … Of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by unknown human intelligence. This was never true before. This could become true very, very quickly, with far-reaching consequences … For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society … Now AI is likely to be able to do it. And once it can… it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger.7
The machinic, ‘autonomous intellect’ of AI writing the next sequel of holy books would be manna from heaven for the tech-cultists – yet poison pills for those remaining authentic humanists. No doubt such a new god in the image of AI would create stories about the inevitable decay of the human body. These new fictions would portray the pock-marked human body as a ‘leprosy vulnerable vessel’ that was just waiting (albeit patiently) for its next evolutionary upgrade through the machinic impulse. Just as the aquatic creatures of the sea witnessed the arrival of the amphibians, so too will humans bear witness to the new hybrid human-tech fused humanoid with AI-assisted intellect. It is a new (his)story in the making. Another story being thrown at us. But it is just that – a story. And it’s incorrect.
The next revolution in human evolvement will be an inner one. It shall be a psychic revolution. The physiological human vessel may have reached its pinnacle of form (yet still it is highly underrated). The DNA inside our carbon bodies is amazingly adaptive to external pressures and environmental changes. The human nervous system, along with the neuronal-dense mind, is an incredibly intelligent vessel for the human soul-spirit. It has served human beings well, yet it also has its limitations (although not in the same way the transhumanists think). Our human limitations are psychic, and perception based. The way in which humans perceive their reality construct is limited to the physical-material state. Our five senses are limited and now need to be extended to add at least a couple more. These new faculties of sense-perception will allow the human being to comprehend to a greater degree the nature of existence within the cosmos. It shall also allow human beings to leave their existing perceptual isolation and to form communication with other intelligences beyond both our terrestrial planet and our dimensional reality. The psychic revolution will be the greatest revolution ever known or experienced so far within the whole evolutionary journey of the human species. It will be a decisive moment that will create a critical distinction between a ‘before’ time and an ‘after’ period. It will change everything. And it will certainly change everything on this planet, for humans will be able to perceive beyond the limitations of a matter-reality paradigm, and this will usher in a rapid revolution in our technologies as well as in our modes of civilization. We shall also learn to communicate upon a whole new level. However, such a threshold that the psychic revolution promises still has to be crossed.
Humanity is approaching this threshold – yet it is not there yet. And there is likely to be interventions, hindrances, and blockages upon the way. Before humanity experiences a psychic and perceptual revolution on a grand scale, it must first pass through the ‘pressure cooker’ or bottleneck phase of its evolutionary journey. We can only hope that such pressures are able to force new faculties into emergence rather than forcing an evolutionary extinction.
Taken from the newly published book ‘The Threshold: The Forces of Techno-Materialism and the Struggle for Humanity’s Soul.’ (released October 28)
The 20% discount has been extended for Substack readers who order direct from the publisher: Use the discount code ‘TH20’ that will give 20% off until 30th November 2025
(UK): https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/threshold/95365
Endnotes
1 https://iainmcgilchrist.substack.com/p/can-you-still-be-human (accessed 08/09/2025
2 Steiner, Rudolf (2015) Problems of Society: An Esoteric View: From Luciferic Past to Ahrimanic Future. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, p95
3 Steiner, Rudolf (2015) Problems of Society: An Esoteric View: From Luciferic Past to Ahrimanic Future. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, p59
4 The poem ‘Hollow Men’ by T. S. Eliot was first published on 23 November 1925, in Eliot’s Poems: 1909–1925.
5 Noah Harari, Yuval (2023) ‘AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation.’ The Economist - https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/04/28/yuval-noah-harari-argues-that-ai-has-hacked-the-operating-system-of-human-civilisation
6 See my earlier book Hijacking Reality: The Reprogramming & Reorganization of Human Life (2021)
7 ‘Yuval Noah Harari warns AI can create religious texts, may inspire new cults’ (3rd May 2023) https://www.timesofisrael.com/yuval-noah-harari-warns-ai-can-create-religious-texts-may-inspire-new-cults/
I have been observing the rapid acceleration of this digital infrastructure, or “internet-of-bodies”, with some level of interest for a while now. It occurred to me recently that a critical point has arrived, in which an inner choice must now be made in terms of how we face the tidal wave of technocracy looming overhead. Whereas up until this point, I could glean the stirrings of a difficult road ahead for humanity, it seems to me that the signs of it are now impossible to ignore with digital surveillance, “real IDs”, AI tech-theology, etc.
I reckon that most will be too distracted or care to notice the implications of the technological terraforming happening everywhere. Or too addicted to it…
I was sent this video essay the other day, which is a re-telling of Plato’s famous allegory, but told through the lens of how a technocratic world effectively hijacks the human bio-chemical system to make us addicted to it. It really helped me see the situation that confronts us now. I think it’s worth considering. https://youtu.be/uY2P_Kgi0w0?si=fr4y09DPo2C72AUb
Unfortunately I percieve based on previous history of technology is that an a.i war is inevitable to canonise it into a historical trope. Ergo outcome is some medical breakthrough as in various experimental treatments used in world war 2. So yeh... the hubris of mechanisation to the hubris of digitalisation. Entropy is the nature of all things in physical materium. So we must prepare and accept some post A.i apocalypse digital hospital of the future.