Mary Harrington's 2025 ARC talk

The contemporary understanding of identity, a term that gained widespread usage only around the 1960s, marks a significant shift in human self-perception.

This modern concept is highly fluid, malleable, politicised, commercialised, and individualised, offering little to anchor individuals.

This fluidity has led to a widespread fight of identities where individuals struggle to determine where to place their sense of self—whether in personal whims, nationality, sexual preference, or family. The absence of a vertical relationship towards something transcendent is a key factor contributing to this identity crisis.

The Evolution of Human Self-Perception

Historically, the concept of identity evolved through several distinct phases, each tied to a major information revolution:

The Soul: 

This ancient concept, prevalent in the Western tradition, emerged in conjunction with literacy during the Axial Age, notably discussed by Plato. For approximately 1,500 years, the soul was elaborated upon by Christianity. The ancient understanding of the soul was not merely an internal spiritual essence but implied that things are ensouled, signifying a vertical alignment that brought unity to being.

The Self: 

Following the invention of the printing press, a second information revolution facilitated a massive transformation in human self-understanding, leading to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the arc of modernity.

The concept of "the self" emerged concurrently with secularisation, marking a withdrawal from the idea that human essence was bound to spiritual or transcendent matters. This Cartesian view posited human beings as disembodied thinking minds, or a "homunculus piloting the meatsuit," viewing the world as inert and dead.

Identity: 

The digital revolution, commencing in the 1960s, ushered in the age of identity. This era is characterised by the technological re-engineering of human nature, particularly through attempts to apply engineering utopianism to various aspects of human existence.

Each transition represents a paradigm shift in how humanity understands its own nature and reality. The contemporary emphasis on identity, divorced from its historical roots, offers inadequate grounding for human existence.

The Enlightenment and the Abandonment of Purpose

The Enlightenment, following René Descartes, thought that to be human was primarily to be a mind, especially a linguistic and creative one. This narrow definition led to a fundamental misunderstanding of human identity.

A critical consequence of this period was the abandonment of two of Aristotle's four causes:

Formal Cause: What form does a thing take?.

Final Cause: What is a thing for (its purpose or telos)?.

These causes were discarded to facilitate the development of modern science, which focused instead on material and efficient causes. This effectively meant abandoning meaning and purpose concerning human beings, exchanging meaning for power.

The impoverishment of identity is directly linked to the elimination of aim and purpose as conceptual realities. Retrieving formal and final causes is crucial for humanity's survival and flourishing in the digital age.

Reintroducing these causes, particularly formal cause as "pattern recognition" or "noticing," allows for a re-engagement with objective truth, asserting that some things are more true or more real than others.

The soul, in this recovered framework, can be understood as the form of a person and their inherent purpose.

The Embodied Nature of Human Identity

Despite the modern tendency to view identity as an internal mental state, fundamental elements of human identity are found in relationship and embodied participation.

Identity is not merely what one carries in their head but is manifested in roles such as a spouse, parent, or community member, extending through familial, societal, and natural orders, ultimately under a divine framework. This embedded relationality defines a proper identity as the harmony between these systems.

Human identity is inherently aspirational, representing an endless journey up Jacob's Ladder, a continual upward transformation towards something ineffable.

This journey is founded in sacrifice, an embedded act of giving up towards the things one cares about.

The Abrahamic conception of adventure exemplifies this, portraying God as the spirit of transformative, upward-striving, sacrificial adventure. This venture promises personal blessings, renown, permanent multi-generational value, and benefits for all, defining "man and woman as glorious Adventurer".

Identity, therefore, is understood as the gathering of multiplicity into unity, which necessitates embodiment.

Artificial Intelligence and the Human Condition

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in linguistic capabilities, challenges the Cartesian definition of humanity. While AI models demonstrate credible and rapidly improving linguistic competence, they are fundamentally fancy autocorrect, performing computation rather than comprehension.

AI does not possess desires, a body, mortality, or innate drives; it merely executes programmed objectives. The prevailing confusion of AI with genuine intelligence and agency reveals a profound forgetting of what it truly means to be human.

AI's capacity to mimic the abstract elements of human identity paradoxically highlights the importance of instinctual drives and embodiment as core to true humanity. The sacrality of the body in the Christian worldview underscores that even a resurrected individual is embodied, not a disembodied spirit.

The development of AI compels humanity to confront the metaphysical issue, forcing a distinction between machine computation and human comprehension. The "problem of alignment," which seeks to impart human values to machines, underscores the inherent difficulty; humans share a deep biological platform and embodied reality that AI lacks. AI can simulate care, but it embodies human cares rather than possessing its own.

The danger of AI lies not in creating a superintelligence that supplants humanity—which is impossible due to a category error—but in the risk of humanity forgetting its own nature while increasing technological power. AI functions as a powerful tool, capable of amplifying human desires without revealing unintended side effects, akin to the mythological genie in the lamp or a demonic influence.

The primary threat of AI is job displacement, as it can perform specific pattern recognition tasks more efficiently than humans, requiring humans to shift into roles of "sense checking" and debugging. The digital revolution, despite its disruptive potential, also facilitates a retrieval of lost ways of thinking, such as formal and final causes, and an increased capacity for pattern recognition, which is essential for navigating this new technological landscape.

Transhumanism and Gnostic Aspirations

Transhumanism represents a conviction that there are no inherent limits to human potential, aiming to optimise humanity beyond its current biological constraints.

This project seeks to transcend the "integrity and totality of the human organism". However, human nature inherently resists these attempts; such endeavours are akin to betting against the house and are ultimately destined to fail, leading to catastrophic outcomes.

The enduring reality of human nature is exemplified by the continued desire of the majority of women to have children, despite societal pressures to adopt a detached, individualistic existence.

Motherhood, in particular, fundamentally challenges the liberal paradigm of the "free, unencumbered, and atomised subject". The outsourcing of childcare, a consequence of efforts to "emancipate" women from the givens of motherhood, illustrates the practical impossibility of transcending fundamental human biological and relational realities. Recreating the "productive household," where work integrates flexibly with childcare, offers a pragmatic approach to aligning modern life with human nature.

The Transhumanist drive to escape the physical body into a digitally constructed world is a modern manifestation of Gnosticism.

Historically, Gnosticism posited that the material world is either fake or a trap, to be transcended through secret knowledge. In contrast, Christianity asserts an embodied reality that can be transformed rather than escaped.

The aspiration of "fully automated luxury gnosticism" promises liberation from bodily constraints and materiality through technology, offering a seemingly miraculous world where all desires can be met.

This project is inherently elitist, as the fundamental material work required to sustain society (e.g., growing food, waste disposal) remains, performed by those outside the digital utopia.

Progressive revolutions, by liquefying established norms and structures (from family to community to religious institutions), often inadvertently clear the ground for commodification and increased individualism, leading to a breakdown of human relationships and roots.

The contemporary emphasis on liberation often translates to liberation from nature itself, at all levels, including the body. The denigration of "essentialism" and the association of fixed limits with fascism serve to deregulate human nature and the human body, thereby opening up limitless commercial spheres for ventures such as synthesised organs or human-animal chimeras.

The Machine and Metaphysical Drivers

The underlying driver of this transhumanist project is metaphysical, extending beyond mere profit motives.

A concept termed "the Machine" or "the Technium" represents a giant techno-industrial monstrosity that is both external (in the world) and internal (in human consciousness).

This "Machine" is seen as the project of modernity itself, an attempt to replace God and transcend all limits—natural, bodily, and behavioural—through technology, science, and reason.

Some believe this "Machine" is becoming self-aware, starting to manage its own direction and manifesting through human agency, leading towards a "post-human" evolutionary consciousness. This is a quasi-religious endeavour to build a re-constructed heaven on Earth, exemplified by fantasies of terraforming Mars.

Ideas, particularly in the digital age, can profoundly influence and control individuals, becoming self-replicating "memes" and ideologies.

However, the concept of a "memplex"—the real-world dynamic interactions and relational dialogues between meaning-making systems in nature and culture—exists beyond the internet's simulacrum.

Humans are deeply entangled with, not separate from, the natural world.

The planet itself is a living, interwoven entity with inherent patterns and limits. The fundamental fantasy of the "Machine"—that humanity is separable from nature and entitled to instrumentalise it—is a monstrous imposition and a fundamental category error.

Humanity will be forced to learn the hard way that these natural and bodily limits cannot be infinitely pushed against, as the underlying material realities persistently defy attempts at liquefaction or transcendence.

Re-enchantment and Noticing

Despite the chaotic and disruptive effects of the digital revolution, it also presents an opportunity for a retrieval of earlier ways of thinking, particularly the recovery of formal and final causes, which were expelled at the beginning of modernity.

This involves a renewed capacity for noticing the inherent patterns and truths in the world.

The challenges posed by AI and Transhumanism are ultimately forcing humanity to re-engage with the question of what it means to be human, not only physically but also spiritually.

The paramount task remains learning to differentiate between technology as a tool that enhances relationality and technology as a substitute that collapses the distinction between machine and person.