Sometimes a story is shared by the people that contribute articles
to this website which vaults immediately and directly into the "finals"
folder, and today's story shared by W.G. (with our gratitude) is no
exception. And to me it is a kind of icon - pardon the usage of that
term here - of everything that is spiritually and morally wrong with the
modern west.
And here - again, not to coin any pun - is the crux of the story:
The small, unadorned church has long ranked
as the oldest in the Swiss city of Lucerne. But Peter’s chapel has
become synonymous with all that is new after it installed an artificial
intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different
languages.
“It was really an experiment,” said Marco Schmid, a theologian with the Peterskapelle church. “We
wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What
would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to
him? We’re probably pioneers in this.”
The installation, known as Deus in Machina,
was launched in August as the latest initiative in a years-long
collaboration with a local university research lab on immersive reality.
After projects that had experimented with
virtual and augmented reality, the church decided that the next step was
to install an avatar. Schmid said: “We had a discussion about what kind
of avatar it would be – a theologian, a person or a saint? But then we
realised the best figure would be Jesus himself.”
Short on space and seeking a place where
people could have private conversations with the avatar, the church
swapped out its priest to set up a computer and cables in the
confessional booth. After training the AI program in theological texts,
visitors were then invited to pose questions to a long-haired image of
Jesus beamed through a latticework screen. He responded in real time,
offering up answers generated through artificial intelligence.
Now I am so appalled by this I don't even know
where to begin. "It's not a confession," we're told. Ok, but if it
isn't, then why install this monstrous avatar in a confessional?
It took me some time to think about this whole article, trying to identify why I am so appalled. What is it about this that is really at the root of my difficulties?
I think there are two factors at the root of my
disgust. The first is the explicit nature of the assumptions being made
about the essence of Christian belief and piety, namely, that it is
something that can be normally experienced or formed apart from
the liturgical, and sacramental, context, or rather, that it is
reducible to a set of theological propositions than can be spit out by a
machine, like a fortune being told by one of those antique carnival
fortune-telling machines, and that mere mental or psychological assent
to said propositions constitutes Christian belief, faith, and practice.
In other words, it is bypassing the genuine humanity of the experience and replacing it with a similacrum - an avatar, an appearance -
of that experience and of the Person with Whom one is having that
experience. It's that "appearance-similacrum-avatar" aspect of things
that actually has a formal name, a name taken from the most ancient
heresy in the history of Christianity: Doketism, or to give it its more
familiar spelling, Docetism, from the Greek word dokein,
meaning "to appear." The early Docetists believed that because the
material world was perpetually entangled with evil, that matter itself
(and hence the physical part of human nature itself) was evil, and thus
that God the Son would hardly become incarnate in it. What one
encountered in Christ was the mere appearance of normal natural human existence, a hologram, a movie, a projection, an avatar.
Correspondingly, as St. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest
disciples of the disciples (in this case, of St. John the Apostle) noted
that the Doketists also abstained from the Eucharist (another
horribly material thing) and martyrdom. In other words, what the
Doketists believed about Christ - that He was a hologram - affected all
aspects of the piety deriving from that central core belief. And now
it's back with force majeur in Switzerland.
But there's something even deeper and much more
subtle and nuanced here that also disturbs me even more profoundly, and
that is the underlying assumption that the processes or operations
related to persona are equivalent to personhood itself, that the
entirety of that Second Divine Person of the Trinity is reducible to an
algorithm and a process, an assumption that, in some respects and for
the theologically-inclined out there, means also the confusion of
personhood with the processes of the natural soul, and with that
the confusion of personhood and nature, two categorically distinct
things that St. John of Damascus would state is the root assumption of all heresies, of all
false doctrinal formulations. For those really paying attention, this
phenomenon, this hideous icon in the barren Swiss church, is yet
another working out of that mentality that so captured the church in the
theological formulations of Augustine of Hippo.
I'm certain there are probably more unspeakable
horrors with the Artificial intelligence Avatar "Swiss Christ", not the
least of which is that the term "anti-Christ" can also, in the Greek,
mean "in the place of" as well as "opposed to", a fitting epithet for an
essentially Doketic avatar. But additionally, this AI anti-christ is
also being programmed by modern scholars, who in Europe's case, long ago
jettisoned any ties to traditional theology because their "assured
results of modern scholarship" issued in a biblical criticism having
little connection to anything but the German Enlightenment.
I could go on and on, but I hope that what I
have said is sufficient to make clear my reasons for being appalled, and
why I will continue to say my prayers from books in front of real
candles burning real incense in a real censor before real icons reading
biblical translations based upon the traditional text type and
ecclesiastical canon, and not the latest Baphotmet and severed head of
some computer-tech-savvy secret society of some techno-Temple.
See you on the flip side...
(If you enjoyed today's blog, please share it with your friends.)
Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in
patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in
physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book
The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published
in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative
history and science".
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