Zombies, Transhumanists and Our Meaning Crisis

What if I told you that the description of reality that we all share is a lie? I know this sounds like some sensationalist conspiratorial podcast shit, right? But the nature of reality proffered by science today is all based on a series of assumptions that were never empirically proven. Why is this relevant to our larger exploration of technology, artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley, and transhumanist ideologies? The assertions that AI companies and transhumanists are making are deeply metaphysical, and they double down on these unfounded metaphysical assumptions. So confronting them requires a discussion of philosophy and metaphysics. I promise you, this will be fun and interesting stuff, and it will lead us somewhere truly beautiful and inspiring. As a prelude to talking about transhumanism and what it means to be human in this new age of AI, I want to talk about our loss of meaning in the postmodern world and what to do about it. I think there are 2 main symptoms of our loss of meaning in today's world: zombies and transhumanists. We'll come back to the transhumanists another time, but for today I want to talk about zombies. There are far more zombie movies and TV shows in the 21st century than Alien and other monster movies combined. I saw a stat from 2017 that over 600 zombie movies have been made since 1920, and more than half of those were made in the 10 years leading up to 2017. As the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari put it, our only modern myth is the myth of zombies. Although zombies have historically been seen as an allegory for rampant consumerism or a thought experiment in service of debates between philosophers, The mythology and symbolism goes much, much deeper. As John Vervaeke points out, zombies represent our worldview crisis in the postmodern world, our deep unease about the loss of meaning and purpose in the world. Zombies, after all, lack culture, consciousness, and community. They, they mirror our growing alienation, disengagement, and existential angst. Not only that, but they gorge themselves on brains. Brains, brains, brains! In our postmodern world, the brain is the seat of intelligence and meaning-making. Verweijke suggests that zombies' insatiable appetite for brains represents culture devouring culture and mind devouring mind. I would add to that a suggestion that no matter how much We double down on reason and rationality in our society. What zombie tropes are telling us is that it will never get us where we want to go. A diet of intellect alone will not reanimate meaning for humanity. Not only that, but more brain matter doesn't lead to more consciousness, self-reflection, or wisdom. I would also add that there is some special significance to the fact that zombies come out of the ground. In our society today, we are alienated from nature. We have a tendency to eschew all things corporeal, earthy, and mucky. In this sense, zombies represent our view of nature and matter itself as devoid of intelligence or consciousness. It's even sort of reprehensible, right? This, this body, this like, ugh. So digging even more deeply, zombies are the living dead, right? Underscoring our collective fear of death and the mindless emptiness that awaits us within the depressing and distorted vision of death that arises from within our physicalist, scientific, materialist worldview. In short, the, the zombie mythology is doing a lot of work carrying the entire burden of our unmetabolized angst as a society. And from consciousness to intelligence to the corporeal and fear of death, the zombie myth touches on so many themes that I will be highlighting in this video series as well as in my forthcoming book. In fact, we will come back to the zombie metaphor when we talk about the transhumanists and mind uploading, because if we ever do manage to make a copy of our minds in the cloud, I and many others think that these copies will lack self-reflective consciousness making them zombie-like as well. By the way, Vervaeke also points to the popularity of superhero movies and comic books as another symptom of our intense yearning for myth and meaning, calling them pseudo-religions. As far as myths or sacred archetypes go, superhero movies are empty calories. They tantalize with the promise of archetypal meaning but always fail to provide any lasting After all, superhero stories are devoid of comprehensive spiritual frameworks and only really offer oversimplified black-and-white stories of good versus evil. There are no, like, spiritual texts or sacred practices to provide the superfan with wisdom, self-realization, or lasting transformation, not to mention the direct experience of something like unity consciousness.

What are you thinking?

How do you feel?

You.

You? The transhumanists and techno-optimists who want to merge with machines and upload their minds into the cloud and become immortal by effervescing into pure information, they proudly claim to be staunch physicalists while talking like Evangelical Christians. In order to show why transhumanist ideology is ultimately misguided and misaligned with reality, we have to understand the metaphysical water that we all swim in and why it is outdated and in need of replacement, in my opinion. In order for me to talk about transhumanism and what it means to be human in the age of AI, I first need to talk about our worldview. And so that's what we're going to explore in this video and the next one. But let me just briefly describe transhumanism for those of you who are new to my channel. I'll do a deep dive into transhumanism in another video. Transhumanism is an ideology and a movement that began in the late 20th century, and it seeks to make humans more than human, to transcend what it is to be human, essentially, including merging with machines in various ways in order to become immortal, Long-termism and cosmism are these related ideologies that emphasize the moral importance of becoming a new species as quickly as possible, colonizing space, and spreading consciousness throughout the universe. Many of these transhumanists think that we should prioritize the well-being of future humans over that of humans who are alive today, and we see this as a recurring theme with the techno-utopians as well. The technologies that will enable the creation of the transhuman include neural implants, mind uploading, nanotechnology, life extension, cryonics, cyborgization, artificial limbs, exoskeletons, 3D-printed body parts, genetic engineering, and of course, artificial general intelligence. Some transhumanists think that unfettered technological innovation will result in a techno-utopia Others worry that AGI in particular poses an existential threat to humanity. Transhumanists include Sam Altman from OpenAI, Ray Kurzweil at Google, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and occasional Trump backer. In short, they're holding on very tightly to physicalism while simultaneously claiming that it is possible to transcend matter and become pure information. Even techno-utopians can't escape the spiritual impulse. that we all share for deeper meaning. So first, we'll examine the water we all swim in, which is physicalism, and then we'll see why this worldview is outdated, including implications from quantum physics. In another video, I will then examine an alternative to physicalism called idealism, which is the view that consciousness or mind is fundamental rather than matter and energy. Imagine what it must have been like to, to live through the Copernican shift in the 16th century, from a geocentric model of the universe to a heliocentric model, to go from being the center of the universe to just another planet among the other heavenly bodies orbiting the sun, adrift in a great void. That must have been deeply disorienting. That level of destabilizing worldview shift is kind of hard to imagine today. Or imagine living through the Darwinian Revolution 2 centuries ago, from thinking that humans were God's chosen ones or the central focus of the cosmos to just a random endpoint in the long chain of mindless evolution of matter. That must have felt... Utterly disorienting and possibly quite depressing. To the extent that God was still relevant at that point, he was drifting further away. I think humanity went through a similar shift, a similar paradigm shift a century ago with quantum physics, but for whatever reason, the philosophical implications for our worldview were never fully absorbed by our culture, our media, or our institutions. And I think our failure to incorporate and integrate these discoveries is finally catching up with us. We are living through a paradigm shift every bit as disorienting as the Copernican or the Darwinian, but even though it's happening more quickly and globally, almost nobody is talking about it.

Hello!

The predominant worldview today in most of the developed world is known as scientific materialism or physicalism. It's the idea that the universe is entirely composed of matter/energy, and that all life simply arises out of random combinations of this matter/energy, purely by chance. It divides the world into subjects and objects and sees the cosmos as a spiritually empty vastness, impersonal, indifferent to human concerns, and governed by random processes devoid of purpose or meaning. Under physicalism, mankind and all of life is nothing more than a curious accident. Within this worldview, science holds all the answers to the big questions about the world, right? Questions like, what is nature? Where did it all come from? What does it all mean? Today, scientists alone are the arbiters of truth. Philosophy is considered essentially irrelevant. And it goes without saying that this is a depressing worldview to a lot of people, whether they acknowledge it consciously or not. I mean, it certainly was for me when I was an atheist. We humans seem to be naturally wired to seek meaning. Jacques Monod summed it up well when he said, the ancient covenant is in pieces. Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. Historically, the role of science was to explain how nature behaves. It was very utilitarian in that way. That's why it's great for building new technologies. In contrast, the role of philosophy has always been to explain what reality or nature is, to describe its essence. That aspect of philosophy that attempts to describe the nature of reality is also known as metaphysics. Bergson versus Einstein. Hello, Bergson versus Einstein. Next. In the early 20th century, science increasingly expanded into the realm of metaphysics. usurping philosophy in its role as provider of meaning. Some say this happened during a 1922 debate between French philosopher and global celebrity Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein. Of course, Bergson's name is hardly a household name the way Einstein's is today. We don't say, what are you, some kind of Bergson? But back then, he was huge. This was a time when philosophers were still taken seriously and looked to as a source of meaning or even wisdom. According to the popular press at the time, Bergson lost the debate, and after that, philosophy was deemed unnecessary, kind of a quaint thing of the past. After all, we have entered the age of progress. Who needs transcendent meaning? Onwards, upwards, into a bright techno-utopian future! So what's interesting and somewhat ironic about the fact that it was Einstein who was seen as rendering philosophy obsolete is that it was his theories, and quantum physics in particular, that were one of the scientific developments that have undermined the validity of physicalism. The other one is depth psychology, which we'll talk about some other time. To this day, physicalist metaphysics cannot explain a number of aspects of quantum mechanics, and I'll get to that in a moment. But we still carry on as if physicalism still accurately describes what reality is. I mean, how odd. Before I go on, I just, just, I just want to clarify that I'm not criticizing science. I'm a huge fan of science, the scientific method, and all the benefits to humanity that science has brought us. I am talking here about the scientific materialist or physicalist worldview, the metaphysics. So I hope that's clear. Okay, so what about these assumptions that I mentioned? Well, once the Copernican shift to a heliocentric model of the solar system allowed us to improve our mathematical predictions of planetary motion, and Galileo and Newton perfected the laws of motion and gravity, we became more confident in our ability to understand the world. Darwin's theory of evolution furthered this confidence. Suddenly, reason and empiricism ruled the day. And even though the individual architects of the Enlightenment were still quite religious, Science was on the rise. This was a period when fundamental science led consistently to technological marvels like electricity, steam trains, the combustion engine, radio, photography, television, computers, vaccines, etc., etc. As science allowed us to create new machines, this started to influence how we saw nature. The machine metaphor began to replace God. In an early example of Marshall McLuhan's famous feedback loop of technological innovation, where he said basically that we shape technology and then technology shapes us. It's not that nature is a machine, but we desperately want it to be. By the late 17th century, influential thinkers like René Descartes and Robert Boyle were promoting the idea that natural phenomena could be understood purely in terms of mechanical interactions of inert matter. In fact, Descartes thought that animals were complex machines and that the human body is like a machine. Newton's description of the planetary orbits in particular bolstered this image of a clockwork universe, set in motion by a clockmaker God, of course. Even Darwin's theories fit into this mechanical metaphor. As we can see, this mechanization of nature was a driving force behind the Scientific Revolution. But the underlying metaphysics of empty matter as fundamental was still just an assumption.

What?

So far it has not been proven empirically, right? As scientists furthered their understanding of nature and began viewing it as a mechanical clock, the Abrahamic gods started to fade into the background, briefly retaining their relevance as a distant clockmaker no longer involved in the world before being snuffed out entirely. And honestly, I think a lot of these guys were just depressed and projecting that onto the cosmos. Anyways, once Nietzsche pointed out that we had killed God in 1882, the secularization of modernity was complete. But again, the view that nature is governed by mechanical processes devoid of purpose or meaning was never proven empirically. Until the 20th century, it was a well-fitting framework for scientific discoveries. Science and physicalism were mutually reinforcing. But physicalism was, was, and still is merely an assumption.

Whoa!

What if the nature of reality is far more mysterious than that? Let's consider a helpful thought experiment, or hypothetical. Cosmologist and philosopher Richard Tarnas has argued that the cosmos is essentially what we make of it. In his parable of the 2 suitors, we imagine that the cosmos is a mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence. When she is approached by a hyper-rational materialist scientist as lacking in intelligence and purpose and interiority, she will happily oblige in affirming this view, revealing only those qualities. But when she is approached by a suitor who sees her as deeply intelligent and noble, permeated with mind and soul, imbued with purpose, and endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, she will open herself up more deeply, with greater beauty and rapturous bliss. In short, the cosmos responds to whatever we approach her with. The discoveries of quantum physics indicate that there is more to this parable than mere allegory. Some quantum physicists have acknowledged that. Werner Heisenberg said that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. The point I'm making here is that assuming that the human mind is the sole source and arbiter of meaning is an extraordinary act of hubris on our part. An act of cosmic proportions, literally. And I think it's worth Examining and questioning. So let's take a brief detour to understand why quantum weirdness, or quantum physics, undermines the physicalist worldview. Recall that one of the foundational assumptions of the physicalist worldview was that nature consists of an objective reality that is independent of human observation. There are subjects and objects, and never the twain shall meet. Science has long strived for this Archimedean point of complete objectivity. But because we are in the world, this is simply not possible, and quantum physics confirms this. At the quantum level, the act of measurement by an observer influences the system being observed. Up until the moment of observation, quantum particles exist in a fuzzy, indeterminate state full of probabilistic distributions until they are observed. Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until we open the box. Consciousness collapses the wave function, as they say. And nobody can explain what this means in terms of the physicalist worldview. Like, idealism, the view that everything is ultimately consciousness, does offer a satisfying and simple explanation for this phenomenon. But physicalism has, has to pretend that it doesn't happen, essentially. To avoid having to acknowledge that consciousness may play a role with subatomic particles, and to avoid having to revise our worldview, Physicists offer several unsatisfying interpretations of this so-called quantum weirdness. The first is simply to ignore the philosophical implications of this and stay focused on doing science, performing experiments, etc. This is known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Basically, there's nothing to see here. Carry on, do your experiments. It's sort of like a metaphysical shrug. We'll leave these questions to the philosophers, who we have also deemed to be Irrelevant. The second interpretation of this phenomena, the measurement problem, is called the Many Worlds Theory. Under this theory, consciousness doesn't actually affect reality. Instead, the universe continually branches into multiple parallel realities. All possible outcomes occur simultaneously in different non-interacting parallel universes. And I think this is a great example of the lengths that Physicists will go to, to avoid having to revise their worldview. I mean, do you see how rather than considering an alternative metaphysics, scientists would rather hypothesize increasingly extravagant explanations that sound kind of crazy? Many worlds, dark matter, dark energy, string theory. I mean, none of these has been empirically verified. Scientists would rather propose additional dimensions or multiple universes than consider An alternative metaphysics to reevaluate the longstanding assumption that matter is fundamental. And there are, like, other interpretations of this weirdness, but I won't talk about that here. If you're curious, you can Google hidden variables and pilot waves. Another quantum anomaly that has never been sufficiently explained by physicists is quantum entanglement. See, there's different ways to sort of bind 2 subatomic particles to each other. And then once they're entangled, the state of one can determine the state of the other. You could then separate these particles by miles or even light-years, and they would remain entangled. This has been verified experimentally ever since the early 1970s. So this creates problems for physicalism because it violates what's known in physics as local realism. In physicalism, it's essential that all forces acting on an object be local to that object. In other words, like, you know, I can push this plant. That's a local force. There's also gravity holding the plant down. That's a local force, that kind of thing. But you can't have sort of forces acting from across the cosmos. That violates physicalism. And also, according to Einstein, nothing in nature can travel faster than light. But entanglement over great distances seems to indicate instantaneous communication that travels faster than the speed limit of light. And that's why Einstein called this spooky action at a distance, because he was deeply troubled by this idea. A simpler explanation for all this is that everything is connected at a deeper level, a transcendent level of reality. And this is the view called idealism, which we'll talk about in the next video.

Waveicles.

Come on now. Just one more thing, uh, another strange feature of reality that's revealed by physics is that matter has both a wave nature and a particle nature, but it's not either one exclusively. It's more of a wavicle that can take a different form depending on how a particular experiment or observation is performed. So again, nature seems to respond to our inquiry. In short, quantum physics has shown us that nature responds to the kinds of questions that we ask and the experiments that we design, just like the parable of the 2 suitors. Finally, speaking of consciousness, One mystery that science has not explained is precisely how consciousness arises from matter in our brains. Nobody knows how this might work. This is known as the hard problem of consciousness. So much of transhumanism rests on the assumption that consciousness arises from matter. Our ability to upload our minds into machines and to make copies of ourselves requires treating consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain. Also, the simulation hypothesis that they rely on assumes that consciousness arises from matter. Otherwise, how could simulated humans have these rich conscious experiences inside of a machine? I think this hard problem of consciousness is related to quantum weirdness, but that explanation will have to wait for my next video.

What are you thinking?

How do you feel?

You! You?

In modern physics, the image of the universe as a machine has been replaced by that of an interconnected dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interdependent and and have to be understood as patterns of a cosmic process. Here's Fritjof Capra on this point: As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. This means that the classical ideal of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without at the same time speaking about ourselves. But it's weird, right? Because it's like nobody told us this when we were younger. Like, nobody talks about this. I mean, they don't teach this in schools, do they? You only hear about this stuff if you hang out with spiritual people, right? Thomas Kuhn, the great historian and philosopher of science, has described how scientific paradigms change through a crisis that results from an accumulation of anomalies in the current paradigm that can no longer be ignored. Quantum physics has given us several of these anomalies, yet somehow we have successfully ignored them for Physicalism does make a certain kind of intuitive sense. Like, things are roughly where we left them when we wake up in the morning, and we all seem to share the same reality made of solid objects. But we've all been living within the physicalist worldview for centuries, so we're kind of conditioned to see the world this way. In the 18th century, when Bishop George Berkeley suggested that reality is made of mind rather than matter, His friend was said to have kicked a stone and proclaimed, I refute it thus! So, we'll come back— again, we'll come back to the idea that everything is mind, not matter, in the next video when we talk about idealism. Physicalism is also deeply embedded in our institutions, universities, the mass media. It exists in the realm of dogma at this point. Anyone who challenges it is laughed at, ridiculed, and excluded from mainstream discussion. For example, when celebrity physicists like Brian Cox are dismissive of someone like Deepak Chopra, it's because Cox lives in a world of practical science and math, and Chopra is attempting to have a conversation about metaphysics. It's like they're talking past each other. But because celebrity scientists like Cox are able to dazzle us with fascinating factoids and mind-blowing conjectures about the cosmos, we don't question their authority on matters of philosophy or metaphysics.

That space and time are like a blob. So really, there's no sense in which the future unfolds. It's there, and we're traveling into it at the moment. Now, that might not be right, but it's the best theory we have of space and time at the moment.

What is the universe made of, to the extent of our knowledge?

Because there are— there's a very large proportion of it that we can't identify. Is this correct? We now think that something like 96% of it is made of something else other than this. And every star and Remember, there are 100 billion galaxies we can see in the universe, each with— in the observable universe— each with 100 billion stars in it like our sun.

Headache.

That appears to be about, what, 4% of the stuff in the universe, which we've discovered in the last 10 years. But the rest is not? It's a bit embarrassing for fundamental physics. So you don't know what the— 90% of the universe is something else. Is this because it's not matter in the way we understand it? Yeah, it's not this stuff. It's not stuff that shines in stars or galaxies. Something else. So we call it dark matter, and there's some other stuff around called dark energy. And that's what we know about it, basically. It's got a name, and that's about it.

I mean, these are, you know, weird, fascinating little factoids, but they're just theories. Like, they haven't been proven. They're just there. They're necessary to solve mathematical equations for the physicists, but they're not empirically verified things in the world. Yet. Not yet. Now, I'm not saying that dark matter or dark energy will never be verified. But I think scientists use these theories to sort of mesmerize us and keep us bewildered. And listen, I'm not defending Deepak Chopra necessarily, although I do respect the ways that he has tried over the years to get us to question physicalism. And I'm just pointing out the arrogant and dismissive methods and attitudes of our self-appointed spokespeople for physicalism.

Prod him a bit next time. Just give him a little— just say, just ask him about the Schrödinger equation. So you talk about quantum healing and these things. So solve the Schrödinger equation in a spherically symmetric potential first. Ask him to do that. Give him a blackboard.

Wow, that is a good slam. Whether or not a person can solve Schrödinger's equation is irrelevant to their qualifications to debate the metaphysical implications of quantum physics. Given the arrogant and condescending attitude of pop scientists like Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can understand why some philosophers and mystics are habitually and perpetually in kind of a defensive crouch. What did you do to get Deepak Chopra so angry?

I just, I just tweeted some facts. I just tweeted some facts.

Also, as I will discuss in a moment, our entire economic and political system is based on, or arose out of, the physicalist worldview. So this makes it much more challenging to shift away from it. But it may also point us to a way forward in our late-stage capitalist predicament. An argument often mentioned in defense of science or physicalism is the broad and impressive effectiveness of technology. I mean, we've got iPhones and Instagram and vaccines and electric cars and nuclear energy and ChatGPT. But remember that today's technology is only designed based on the forces and laws of nature that we are aware of, and understand. If scientists allowed themselves to explore the realms forbidden by physicalism, who knows what kinds of new technologies we could invent and create? Again, being critical of the metaphysics of physicalism is not a critique of science or the scientific method, nor is it some kind of like anti-technology Luddite ideology. It's merely pointing out the ways that physicalism fails to answer some of the big questions raised by quantum physics especially. And consequently, I think, limits our imagination and our potential as a humanity. In addition, Bernardo Kastrup has suggested that there are unconscious psychological factors driving physicalism. Physicalism is sustained in part because it functions so well as a neurotic ego defense mechanism. One way to say this is that if there is a separate world out there that's unconnected from us, then we don't need to feel responsible for it. And there's no need to find meaning because meaning doesn't exist. We're simply ghosts in the machine, and we are subject to forces beyond our control. There's a certain lightening of personal responsibility with physicalism. To hear materialists or behaviorists tell it, you and I are simply a series of deterministic responses to stimuli without any control over our actions.

Sam Harris talks about choices being illusions and It's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion.

Right.

Like, there is no illusion of free will. And that is a— unlike many other illusions, that's a more fundamental claim.

It's like, it's not that it's wrong.

It's not even wrong.

He explains that choices are part of a long chain of effects in our brains, and we are just along for the ride. In his book, he says, did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No, the choice was made for me by events in my brain that I could not inspect or influence. So science views the brain and the mind as essentially a machine, a machine that tricks us into thinking that we are conscious and have free will. Also, the idea that we will soon have total mastery over nature grants people a sense of control over their own lives and makes their challenges and our challenges collectively seem more manageable. It satisfies our need for order, stability, and control. This is why we put so much faith in science and technology to solve all of our problems. If we can just think harder and invent faster, then we'll be saved. This is what drives transhumanism as well. And I also think this explains the popularity of all the life optimizers out there, the Andrew Hubermans and the Tim Ferrisses This idea that we can engineer our way toward happiness and bliss, it's the neurosis of physicalism in podcast form, essentially. Anyways, these, these psychological factors are powerful sources of resistance to seeing the world outside of our physicalist conditioning. Having said all that, there are a lot of New Age celebrities who also throw around the word quantum and are criticized for it, like Deepak Chopra and Joe Dispenza and just about everyone on the Gaia Network. And I do think there's a way that a layman's misunderstanding of quantum physics can be distorted and used in a misleading way. At the same time, I think it shows there's a hunger on the part of a large number of people for a reconciliation of science with a more meaningful worldview. And it doesn't change the fact that there are at least 3 unexplained anomalies in quantum physics that seem to point to a more meaningful or spiritual metaphysics. We all grew up inside the physicalist worldview without anyone naming it for us. It has shaped our educational systems, and especially in the industrialized West, it has shaped our mass media and our governments. It's the water in which we swim. The standard narrative in school was that first there was the primitive indigenous with their animism, and then there were the archaic religious peoples of medieval Europe, and then there was science and reason, as if nothing was lost along the way. Another reason physicalism is so deeply ingrained in our society is how its emphasis on matter has given us the consumerist ethos and secular society. You could even go so far as to say that it is the underpinning of capitalism and democracy, not to mention communism. All of these ideologies arose within the physicalist epoch. So the cracks we are seeing in the facade are much bigger than it seems at first. Moving beyond physicalism may also mean moving beyond the economic and political structures of the past 2 centuries. As Bernardo Kastrup has said, Physicalism survives partly because of inertia, but mainly because of its symbiotic relationship with our economic system. By linking consciousness and personal identity to limited and temporary arrangements of matter, physicalism inculcates the following subjective values in our culture: Life is short, and you've only got one to live. The only source of meaning lies in matter. After all, nothing else exists. So the game is to accumulate as much material things as possible. We should consume as fast as possible, even at the expense of others or the planet, for we have nothing to lose since we're going to die soon anyway. So perhaps a shift in our collective worldview will allow us to imagine and create new forms of living together that haven't yet been imagined, structures and models that transcend capitalism, communism, and anarchism. Maybe. Anyway, my aim here is not to offer a comprehensive treatise on political and economic theory. I want to stay focused on transhumanism and the way that it's shaping the AI revolution And how that forces us to reexamine our worldview. It's worth mentioning that the scientific age elevated reason to special status above all other human faculties like intuition, imagination, emotional intelligence, and wisdom. The Copernican Revolution did spark the Age of Reason, after all, and we're— we've been living in its shadow ever since. I talked about how we overvalue intelligence in my video about artificial general intelligence, so you can check that out. But Bernardo Kastrup calls this overemphasis on rational intellect intellectual fundamentalism. And I think it's worth reminding ourselves that we live in this age where intellect is overemphasized. Speaking of intellect, Sam Altman, as you may have seen, just published this week a blog post titled The Intelligence Age, where he framed AI as a messiah once again. and suggested that we may have superintelligence within a few thousand days. Here's what Sam said in his, uh, his blog post. Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will. He goes on to say in the post that the AI of the future, this, this superintelligence, will not only fix the climate, but we'll discover all of physics. And I wonder if AI can discover all of physics when our physics has been written within the physicalist framework, like physicalism is baked in. I mean, maybe AI can help us to acknowledge the limits of physicalism. Maybe that's what it takes. Like, maybe that— maybe for us to shift away from physicalism, maybe— We have to be told by a machine that that's the solution. Wouldn't that be humbling? Anyway, in terms of elevating reason and seeing the world exclusively through the left brain, it's like we began to ignore the right hemisphere a century ago and never looked back. But it's still there, whispering its holistic, transcendent visions to the transhumanists and to the rest of us. In the Age of Reason, we bought human autonomy for the price of human alienation. Worldviews matter because they shape culture and they set the parameters for what is possible and acceptable in science, the humanities, art, and even politics. Worldviews determine our relationship with nature and our relationships with each other. In short, our worldview is the DNA of our culture. and its institutions. Our worldview isn't just how we see the world around us. It shapes who we are on the inside and how we experience the world outside. It reflects our inner thoughts and feelings, but it also strengthens and even creates those thoughts and feelings. Our worldview influences how we perceive and interact with the world. It's like a powerful lens that shapes our reality. Likewise, our beliefs, theories, stories, and assumptions about the world affect how we interact with it and can even subtly change it. In short, as Richard Tarnas likes to say, worldviews create worlds. To be clear, physicalism was an important improvement over the dogmatic, organized Abrahamic religions that preceded it, especially Christianity. It was also an improvement over undiscerning, superstitious views that saw elemental spirits everywhere or desired to escape reality into some heavenly realm. But physicalism is not the end of the road. It was just a necessary course correction from the Middle Ages in Europe. I'll be honest, when I think about questioning the physicalist worldview, I have this, like, knee-jerk conditioned internal response that I shouldn't allow myself to be seen as, like, soft-headed or harebrained or ignorant? I mean, what if I'm ridiculed or cast out of society? Like, what if they laugh at me, right? That's like, I think, how a lot of people feel when they start to try to question this stuff. They'll laugh at me! I'll be rejected! But it's actually the physicalists who are closed-minded and ossified. They forgot about philosophy. They forgot that physicalism was one Giant assumption. One downside to looking to science alone to set the parameters of what's possible is that this then artificially limits what's worthy of study by science. For example, we could be studying near-death experiences or parapsychology or homeopathy. I mean, these are just examples, but, you know, we could expand the, the scope of our scientific endeavors. And of course, the biggest downside to looking to science alone is that it strips the world of deeper meaning. And I think we're all feeling that. At the very least, I think physicists owe us an explanation for these quantum anomalies that I have listed above. I mean, we should demand this from our physicists. Like, explain this to us! Before modern times, we used to look to priests, rabbis, monks, and gurus for wisdom and guidance. Now we have scientists who are not only narrow specialists but have reached their station in life because they are good at math and science, not because they have cultivated wisdom. I mean, we have very few wise elders anymore. I feel like wisdom is out of fashion. Brian Cox says that the greatest threat to humanity is stupidity. I have to disagree. I think the greatest threat to humanity is ignorance, scientific dogma, and a lack of wisdom. Again, a lot of people are starting to feel suffocated and depressed living in this materialist emptiness. As Primo Levi described it, not only are we not at the center of the cosmos, but we are alien to it. We are a singularity. The universe is strange to us. We are strange in the universe. One encouraging trend that makes me feel better sometimes is that a lot of people increasingly identify as spiritual but not religious, and I think that's exciting. I think there's an opportunity there, and I think maybe those are the people that would be more open to an alternative to materialism. I just want to say a word about the relevance of worldview to technologies of the sacred. Spiritual practices like yoga and meditation are rising in popularity. So are sacred plant medicine ceremonies like ayahuasca. But for these things to be truly lasting and transformational, they must take place within a coherent and souled worldview that more accurately accords with science and the human spirit. When people meditate, microdose psychedelics, or drink ayahuasca in the context of physicalism and capitalism, they're stripped of their potency and become absorbed into the capitalist Borg. Instead of connecting us with a nurturing transcendental realm, yoga and meditation are simply used to manage the stress of work at a job that we don't enjoy, and sacred plants are microdosed to improve our focus and productivity. What's exciting about all the hype around artificial intelligence and AGI, and especially the transhumanist ideologies, is that it gives us this opportunity to talk about alternatives to physicalism. You might even say that it forces us to talk about it. In terms of transhumanism, Silicon Valley, and technology innovation, a shift from physicalism to something like idealism would mean that we would stop wasting our time on things that are unattainable, like mind uploading and Instead of worrying about living in a simulation, we would begin to find meaning in our lives for the first time in like 3 centuries. I think healing the divide between reason and our other valuable human faculties and finding a new worldview that ensouls the world once again is the key to healing ourselves as a humanity. I'll talk more about that in my upcoming videos. Next time, we will explore an alternative to physicalism Known as idealism, the idea that nature is fundamentally made of mind or consciousness instead of matter and energy. It might sound crazy, but I, I think you're gonna love it. So please leave your thoughts in the comments and subscribe for more of this stuff. I'll see you in the next video. Stay curious.