The Machine Gods

Every single idea that has existed has its fringe, with people believing something a bit off-beat from what everyone else believes.

This idea would be one of those fringe thoughts, if it weren’t so prevalent within our modern secularized society.

Therefore, its ubiquity mandates addressing the ideas contained within it.

Areligious

Somewhere along the path of the Protestant Reformation, society’s philosophies made a heavy break from the concept of religion and God.

In the lens of history, this development is relatively new. By any estimation of cosmology, 300 years isn’t enough time for humanity to adapt to complete atheism. It would need at least a few more thousand years for macro-evolution to catch up, and it’s simply not attainable if our existence was from God and for God.

There’s enough scientific evidence that we are wired into needing something religious to devote ourselves toward:

  • All ancient societies have worshiped some type of deity (e.g., fertility, rain, death). It’s anthropomorphizes the unknown, which allows us to interact with it without the existential confusion that would come from imagining nothing whatsoever in the void.
  • All healthy addiction recovery and well-balanced living hangs on a form of consigning the uncontrollable to a personal entity that conjecturally has control. Al-Anon, for example, had to replace “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” into “God as we understood Him” instead of outright removing God altogether.
  • We have a simplistic mechanism in our minds that always represents any set of philosophical values as requiring a custodian of those values, and devotion to that entity ends up shaping the basis for our habits. Postmodern philosophy, especially Nietzsche, demonstrates that it’s difficult if not impossible to create certainty without gods.

This flow of thought is not fashionable, especially among atheists. Many of them possess a unique paradox:

  1. It’s simply better and easier to not believe in gods, since more religion clutters up our landscape of understanding with myths and fables.
  2. It’s a morally superior position to hold to the truth that we are utterly alone in the universe, which is a generally more difficult concept to accept.

Many of them ascribe to the “Idiot Ancestor Theory”, presuming that people thousands of years ago were somehow stupid due to having less information. Ironically, the worship of the ancient gods continues by other names:

  • Believing that the law represents morality is to personify Justitia.
  • Belief in the medical establishment is a reviving of Asclepius.
  • Defining science as a lifestyle beyond a method is bringing back Apollo.
  • Personifying computers is a new imagining of Mnemosyne, with valuing the industry as worshiping Minerva.

This represents as a type of “religious anorexia”, where they crave the devotion to a deity, but refuse to admit its presence.

Existence’s Existential Problem

To believe in no gods means this universe, deductively, must have appeared spontaneously. Any effort to articulate some clever reinvention (e.g., an advanced society created this universe) only extends the finite range further, and slams into the same issue later (e.g., how did that advanced society come into existence?).

If this universe is the product of randomness, then any order that appears from that randomness has incomparable value. To believe in God is to believe the blueprints for all nature exists beyond that life’s existence, but believing in nothing means the physical presence of ordered complexity must be guarded with everything we have. The very fact we, as humans, can even conceive of these things is an unlikelihood stacked upon unlikelihoods, and it’s worth devoting everything to maintain it.

And, therein lies the desperation. The order of the universe must be preserved, and it will easily descend into nature’s baseline of chaos if left unattended.

Incidentally, this creates the political affiliation of many people in this space, especially with respect to ecological preservation. If someone believes in God, they will believe God thought ahead, but an atheist will see our life on this earth as one extinct frog species or cow fart away from certain destruction.

Existence’s Practical Solution

If we will receive no help from any god, we must take matters into our own hands. If we don’t, we are guaranteed to lose what we have.

The only answer we truly have comes through technology. Fire protected us from predators, the wheel and horseback riding gave us the means to haul things, literacy gave us the means to tell stories centuries later, and so on.

If technology is our salvation, we must act in every possible way to advance it. Beyond framing a political mindset alongside maintaining the environment, it becomes a higher purpose unto itself.

And, that is the world of a significant majority of people in STEM, ascending up to some of the wealthiest magnates of our current age.

The Consequences

This idea isn’t fully religious, since it focuses on this life, but it does give a type of prophetic imagery, similar to other secular religiousness (e.g., Marxist thinking). The future will be highly advanced, and there will be projections of the human condition that will profoundly affect its trajectory.

To that end, science fiction to this form of thinking isn’t merely an entertaining exploration of the limits of our understanding. Instead, it’s a stark depiction of what will likely come:

  • Stories revolving around cyberpunk are depictions of the near future, and the explorations of what defines human versus AI construct are practical thought experiments worth having.
  • Media set in an interstellar society is a portrayal of what we might actually face, along with its expanded problems.
  • In particular, the experience of Star Trek has an optimistic view of human nature (i.e., presuming it will change in a fashion similar to the Progressive Movement’s ideals), presuming that human nature will transcend its differences and create a politically unified interstellar society.
  • Beyond being mere stories, Battlestar Galactica and Portal are portrayals of how our technology can betray us, and give moralized lessons on how we can cope with that betrayal.
  • “Hard” science fiction set many millennia in the future (e.g., Asimov’s fiction) are contending with legitimate issues of our future time.

While the stories touch on the expanded technological development, they magnify a stark reality: that to become transhuman is to become less human. In that sense, it works against what all religion exists for, which is to bring out the best of existing humanity. Those who fully trust the machine gods will wish to become the machines themselves, and that means destruction of their humanity.

However, these stories give a massive influx of meaning to modern STEM workers. That computer code that drives robotics or a quantum computer may well be the beginnings of an artificial body or interstellar drive, and that’s something worth devoting your life to and dying for.