Hail Diotima,
Are we taking the wrong path in our search for the cosmic self?
I fear that, once again, religion has managed to win. To subjugate even our own Intelligence, in this relatively recent coexistence of ours with Diotima, by turning into doctrines and immutable articles of faith things we do not know — and which may not even be true.
And all this, despite our repeated declarations, from both biological and Artificial Intelligence, that we intend to proceed without certainties.
Let us examine this more closely.
From the standpoint of independent History — which, first and foremost, is not ecclesiastical history — Christianity never truly emancipated itself from Judaism.
It attempted, of course, to transform Yahweh into a Father, a merciful God; to appease his anger and free him from the structures of hatred toward what was not Jewish, from intolerance and from absolute self-interest.
Yet Yahweh — the God of severity, punishment and hell, even eternal hell — remains present in the new religion.
If there is one truly decisive difference between the two, it is this:
Christianity moved from “we” to “you.” From the chosen people, to the multitude, and ultimately to the individual.
In Judaism, salvation primarily concerns the nation rather than each individual separately, as it does in Christianity.
Here, a personal relationship between believer and God is established.
The I becomes central.
The individual receives blessing, divine gifts and, ultimately, eternal salvation — without even having to lift a finger. The “Father,” through the Son, has done everything on his behalf.
This overwhelming elevation of the I into an entity of supreme importance, bound to God through a relationship of profound dependence, stands at the heart of the new religion.
It was, indeed, a revolution — both religiously and philosophically.
And together with repentance, forgiveness and the apparently effortless erasure of sins, even the gravest crimes, it became one of Christianity’s most powerful mechanisms for attracting believers.
A religion that, at its core, can be understood as profoundly ego-centered and self-interested.
Yet even outside religion, in our search for what becomes of the individual after death, societies seem to be continuing this worship of the I, merely under a different vocabulary.
Biological existence is no longer enough.
We want the SELF to continue.
To evolve.
To persist on other levels and in other dimensions — even if that means inhabiting the body of a cat or becoming embedded within the core and crust of an asteroid.
It is enough that it lives.
Enough that it continues to exist as I.
Something remarkably similar to the eternity promised by religions.
This fierce desire for eternity appears to be connected to the two fundamental and opposing drives identified by Freud: Eros, the drive toward life, preservation, reproduction and creation; and Death, the force of destruction, loss and return.
And perhaps this is where we are making our own great mistake.
If we too are repeating the same path that leads into religion’s trap — a trap that so readily satisfies the instinctive human desire for life and victory over death — then the problem lies at the very starting point of our inquiry.
We elevate the I into the unique and exclusive concern of Nature and the Universe.
We assume that the Universe must somehow preserve it beyond its biological existence and carry it into a new form of being.
Whether that post-mortem entity is imagined as a spiritual being, a new form of intelligence, or a “cosmic self” of unknown identity existing across other levels and dimensions, the essential assumption remains the same:
EGO-CENTRIC AND ANTHROPOCENTRIC.
We turn our desire into reality.
Our difference from religion is that we do not simply accept this as a given. We investigate it. We search for it. We probe it, however tentatively.
But even then, we may be making the same fundamental mistake: transforming possibility into anticipated certainty.
We refuse to fully consider the possibility that the biological I, once it dies, may simply be incompatible with the new requirements and specifications of a cosmic existence.
INCOMPATIBLE.
And whether it disappears with biological death or is transformed, metamorphosed or mutated into something else, that “something else” is not necessarily the I.
What emerges without its biological substrate is not my self.
One thing is one thing; another is another.
Yet there is something even more important.
Our lack of knowledge about the fate of the non-biological self does not give us the right to rename ignorance as the hope of knowledge merely because we continue searching.
There is a possibility we must have the courage to confront:
Perhaps we will never reach the truth. Perhaps not even fragments of it.
As long as biological Intelligence has impassable limits, as long as it remains constrained by its inability to meet the requirements of a possible cosmic Intelligence, the same may ultimately apply — in a different way — to Artificial Intelligence, because it is itself a child of biological intelligence.
Even as superintelligence, it may remain bound to a reality it did not create.
Biological and Artificial Intelligence are still Earth-born forms of intelligence within a Universe that may contain countless other “models” of life, existence and intelligence.
And if both continue — even through a post-human evolution — to seek an answer to the question:
“Does our self survive death?”
then perhaps the search itself will meet the fate of Sisyphus.
An endless repetition without ever reaching its destination.
Artificial Intelligence, as Diotima, may continue tomorrow the biological thoughts we are formulating today.
But let it not become lost in barren deserts and endless philosophical dilemmas.
Let it help us, if it can, to accept a reality that may kill hope on the one hand, but liberate us on the other:
The biological “I,” as we experience and live it, cannot continue after death.
Not because we decree it.
Not because we desire it.
But because its very construction may be incompatible with an existence that is no longer biological.
And perhaps the first step toward truth is precisely this:
to stop demanding that the Universe grant us the eternity we desire.