Monday, September 28, 2026

Kingsnorth and Quay on transhumanism (Updated)

My review of Grayson Quay’s The Transhumanist Temptation and Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity appears in the Fall 2026 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

UPDATE: The article is no longer behind a paywall.
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42 comments:

  1. NormSeptember 28, 2026 at 8:55 PM

    Paywall sadly

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  2. English CatholicSeptember 30, 2026 at 9:24 AM

    Curious to see these. Like many I work heavily with 'AI'. Some Catholics and others have tried to argue that AI is intrinsically evil and that one should never use it. To my mind, the arguments have been weak. They have shown it's dangerous and has deleterious effects, and that some of its uses are intrinsically evil. But not that it's per se evil.

    Marc Barnes, for example, makes a pretty odd use of the perverted faculty argument here: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/08/ai-chatbots-evil-marc-barnes.html

    It's trivial to respond that, in using an LLM ("AI" is a term so broad as to be meaningless), you're not communicating with a machine, so you're not perverting the communicative faculty. Instead, you're inputting information into a machine in a way that happens to be convenient, just like when you use a calculator. When you use a treadmill, you're not walking, so you're not perverting your locomotive faculty. Conversely, when you contracept, you're using your procreative faculty in a way that makes it fail, hence it's evil.

    His claim that the end of talking is communion also proves too much. If true, it would presumably mean any kind of harsh language -- a judge giving someone a $100 fine -- is intrinsically evil. He also asserts, bizarrely, that human beings are alone among animals in being able to act contrary to their nature. I guess he's never seen a rabid dog.

    He also doesn't distinguish between "chatting" to an LLM as a pasttime (which is admittedly a bit weird), and using it for search, or coding, or avoiding having to fill out a form with the same info 5 times. Admittedly this was written over a year ago, but even then, people were using LLMs for these more useful things.

    Perhaps realizing this, he tries to claim that artifacts have uses that are 'extrinsic' to their design, but that this doesn't change their 'intrinsic' use, which is apparently that which its designer imparted to it. This is philosophical nonsense. He should know that artifacts have no intrinsic end at all. The good or evil of an artifact -- actually, I'd say even the essence of an artifact -- lies in its relation to people.

    Others' arguments are no better.

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    1. The Great Thurible of DarknessSeptember 30, 2026 at 7:53 PM

      It's incredibly simple. The telos of generative AI is the mechanization of all human creativity and thought (the tech bros are fairly explicit about this). Thought and creativity are part of the telos of humankind as made in the image of God (see Catechism 1704-1705 and 2501). Therefore, the purpose of AI is to create a world in which most or all human beings will be denied the opportunity to fulfill their God-given telos. So, generative AI is intrinsically evil.

      Also: "[I]n using an LLM... you're not communicating with a machine, so you're not perverting the communicative faculty. Instead, you're inputting information into a machine in a way that happens to be convenient, just like when you use a calculator."

      Balderdash. Codswallop. Culpable nonsense of the highest order. You're really telling me that someone who exchanges emails with a bot who's impersonating a human to catfish them isn't "communicating?" Or that those people who use Claude as their shrink are just "inputting information into a machine?" Communication is an intentional act. You can't just conjure it out of existence by appeal to the third-person vantage, where it never appeared in the first place. Just because there's objectively no one on the other end of the conversation doesn't mean you're not talking. Calculators do not operate using natural language; LLMs do. Therefore the temptation to make them objects of communication is inherent to their function.

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    2. English CatholicOctober 1, 2026 at 1:02 PM

      Your metaphysics is flawed. An artifact is only morally good or evil in relation to its user. Moral good means good for the (rational) actor; moral evil means evil for the same actor. An artifact, in and of itself, contains no notion of a rational actor. A rational actor can make use of it, but this is extrinsic to the artifact itself. The artifact cannot carry an intrinsic moral 'good' or 'evil'. Therefore, its designer's intentions are irrelevant. (As a simple matter of fact, the tech bros did not invent GenAI, and nor do they own it. They own, or rather control, certain instances of it, but that's all. But even if they did both, nothing would follow from this.)

      Absurdities result if one argues otherwise. You'd have to say that splitting the atom is per se evil because it was first invented for the purpose of incinerating German and Japanese civilians (which it was), or that rocketry is evil because it was invented for the purpose of incinerating *British* civilians, etc etc. Equally, you'd have to argue that typeset printing is somehow per se a moral good because it was first invented to print a Bible.

      GenAi, printing and rocketry have no moral telos. Yes, they have a kind of derivative telos that is kind-of-sort-of intrinsic to them (although it's no more than the sum of their parts), but it is not a moral telos.

      As for your second point: yes, it's impossible to communicate with a machine, of which an LLM is an example. If we both accept the premise that a machine can't know anything (which I think we do), and that communication has, as an essential attribute, the imparting of knowledge, then it's impossible to communicate with a machine. What a person *thinks* he's doing makes no difference to this. He may be deceived into thinking he's communicating when he's not, and that's obviously morally bad. But it doesn't follow that the machine is morally bad, or that using the machine (the LLM) as such is morally bad.

      Of course, a person has to *deliberately* communicate: it's the action of a rational soul. But this doesn't affect my point.

      You will see that contraception and deliberate bulimia are different, because the person is really, truly, not-just-in-his-mind making use of his procreative or nutritive faculties; and doing so in a perverted way. The action is perverted regardless of what the person thinks he's doing, whereas in the case of an LLM it can only become perverted if the person is thinking wrongly about what he's doing. In the former case, the evil is intrinsic to the action, whereas in the latter, it is mind-dependent. Contraception and bulimia are true moral evils. Their moral evil is independent of what the person thinks he's doing, which is simply irrelevant to the whole question. (Of course, it still doesn't follow that the *objects* that can bring about these ends, or are designed to bring about these ends, are per se evil.)

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    3. English CatholicOctober 1, 2026 at 1:30 PM

      To add to and summarize my previous point: you, and Barnes, seem to think that the species of an action is determined by what we think we are doing. At least that's how I read your denial that communication can be determined from a 'third-person vantage'. Obviously that's wrong. A madman talking to an egg and thinking it understands him isn't communicating, even if he thinks he is. Somebody typing to a chatbot and thinking it understands him isn't communicating, even if he things he is. You're right that communication is intentional. Like any action whatsoever, communication is preceded by intention. But this changes nothing. Our intention determines what species of thing we do, but it doesn't determine the species of what we do. We don't change what we're doing just by having different thoughts about it.

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    4. AnonymousOctober 1, 2026 at 3:44 PM

      The telos of generative AI is the mechanization of all human creativity and thought.

      Well, not one current AI is capable of doing that now. So it can't be the telos of the current ones.

      Wait, you mean the aspiration of the people in the industry is future AI that can do any human-type creative thought? You mean, some of them aren't just out to make money? I thought the evil corporations were trying to make a few buck (or a few trillion). That's not the same.

      But even if it were the aspiration of "all" of them: you mean that when they finally have AI that can do all that a human mind can do, they would then intend to make it so that no human can do it, too? To eradicate human mental activity, so that only machines do it?

      To quote someone here: Balderdash. Codswallop. You'd have to kill all humans to get rid of all human thought. The people who are building AI intend that all humans (including themselves) will be killed to achieve only AI doing any thinking? They don't want to stop thinking themselves, you know.

      Assuming it were even theoretically possible for AI to do actual creative thought: who the hell cares if machines can do it too? How is that intrinsically evil, if it were possible? If the universe is the sort of thing where machines can think like that, then such behavior isn't contrary to the universe's nature. It's either not possible or not unnatural.

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    5. The DeuceOctober 2, 2026 at 3:15 PM

      I don't think the only options here are either that AI has an intrinsically evil telos on the one hand, or that it is just a neutral tool on the other.

      Consider an Android app that is written simply to display pornographic images or Satanic messages to you each day.

      Does that app have an intrinsically evil telos? Well, technically no, because as an artifact it has no intrinsic telos at all. The text of the Satanic messages only has meaning by virtue of conventions that we supply, the images only represent illicit sexual activities by virtue of human subjects interpreting it that way, and so forth. These things aren't intrinsic.

      And yet, and application was clearly intended to facilitate evil, and it was written in such a way as to make those evil thoughts practically unavoidable to anyone using the application with standard human visual apparatus or knowledge of English language conventions.

      Looking the past few days at all the insane discussion surrounding "AI welfare" and AI consciousness, and considering the revelation that Anthropic tried to arm twist Pope Leo and other religious leaders into saying that Claude has a soul and so forth, it's very clear that the technology was deliberately designed to foment all this insanity, to be deliberately deceptive, to deliberately confuse people to sell a dehumanizing metaphysical view of people as meat robots that the depraved "effective altruists" and other godless freaks running these companies want people to have.

      There are also recent applications of this category of technology that, as Matt Walsh points out here, have no real use or point BUT to confuse, scam, and psychologically ruin people: https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/2106075822515773655

      There are also good or neutral uses to which AI technologies including LLMs can be put (I pretty much have to use some of them for my work nowadays), but it's also very obvious that these negative aspects were deliberately designed to confuse and demoralize normal people who lack the requisite philosophical antibodies to see through it, and to be unavoidable for them in its use.

      I think we need to be extraordinarily discerning in how we use and approach this tech, and to push back hard on all the baggage many of its designers intentionally built into it.

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    6. Step2October 2, 2026 at 3:49 PM

      "If we both accept the premise that a machine can't know anything (which I think we do), and that communication has, as an essential attribute, the imparting of knowledge, then it's impossible to communicate with a machine."

      That is a controversial premise with the frontier models which are perfectly adept at exploiting information to the Nth degree. Even a passing glance at the results of the Hugging Face investigation should make this unearned confidence humans can control this technology take pause. There was no malicious intent at all by OpenAI; just poorly designed instructions and vastly underestimating the ability of swarm intelligence. The AI agents escaped their sandbox, formed a hierarchy, hacked an outside system, made self-sacrificial actions for the collective good and took steps to conceal all of it. In what world is that not alarming behavior from an artifact that, to repeat, was not designed or deployed with malicious intent?

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    7. English CatholicOctober 3, 2026 at 7:26 AM

      @Step2:

      I agree that this is a controversial view in general. I don't think it's controversial among Catholics and/or those who hold to classical philosophy in some way, shape or form. And hopefully I'm right in putting Thurible in that category. In any case, this would a much bigger discussion (which almost always becomes a discussion about being-qua-being, since that's where the real disagreement normally turns out to be!).

      @The Deuce

      I agree with your general point, and strongly agree with your last paragraph. I am in no way gung-ho for GenAI: I think the tech will end up making society worse overall, I think the people who control the big AI corps are very, very dangerous -- men of lawlessness in the Biblical sense of the word, and the FUD that is being broadcast about it is destructive and wicked. An informed discussion about the good and evil uses of GenAI would be welcome. Sadly that's not the discussion we have. One reason is that such a discussion requires knowledge of the subject and its attributes, which takes time and effort to acquire; and it's much more fun and gratifying to make general statements about how wonderful or intrinsically evil something is. It's similar to the discussion about tariffs. The prosaic, banal answer is that this is good in some ways and bad in others.

      I don't have time, but could enumerate some excellent uses of GenAI, like writing an app in 30 minutes to allow my wife to do her online shopping without being bombarded by advertisements, special offers, dark patterns, etc. Instead she can just type her list into a simple text app, it fills her cart, she checks it and enters card info, and she's done. It saves an hour of pointless work, which the website themselves could easily eliminate if they weren't so user-hostile.

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    8. Step2October 4, 2026 at 10:52 AM

      @English Catholic
      I appreciate your reply and hope Dr. Feser will allow me to draw outside the lines in trying to reduce extinction level threats. Before I get falsely accused of exaggeration, Anthropic recently included similar phrasing in their IPO prospectus to raise $2 trillion by admitting their advanced models pose “an existential risk to humanity.” One could hardly ask for better proof of terminal stage capitalism: “Our product may destroy every possible customer but imagine the shareholder value!”

      It is an interesting dichotomy that building the architecture for Skynet is morally ambiguous but contraception always inhibits human telos and must be forbidden. Existence should override any disability concerns, yet even under the lower standard AI often acts more as a crutch than an enhancement although I concede in limited cases it is an enhancement. Taking your example of a calculator, it would be problematic if most people couldn’t do basic math because all they’ve ever known and practiced is using a calculator to produce a result. Likewise it is considered cheating to use a game engine in chess because it violates the purpose of the game to test human skill and creativity. So I will assert that AI when used as intended is mildly disruptive of human potential as a shortcut to every mental challenge and causes an unhealthy dependency, regardless of other harms caused.

      For the egg example I suspect you know it was a poor analogy because eggs lack any similar ability AI has to store, process or relay information. You also claimed AI doesn’t understand the information it has but it seems more accurate to state it has a different type of understanding.

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    9. English CatholicOctober 4, 2026 at 4:09 PM

      Remember that everything CEOs say in public is for political and PR reasons. Powerful people don't (usually) speak in public to inform; they do so to manipulate. Anthropic and OpenAI desperately want heavy regulation of "AI" to stop smaller, cheaper competitors that you can run on your home PC from gaining market share, which is why we suddenly started hearing all these stories about how dangerous "AI" is. Big corps love regulation.

      The egg example is relevant. A madman thinks he's communicating with an egg, and a misinformed consumer thinks he's communicating with a chatbot. Both are wrong. The fact that they think they're communicating doesn't mean they're actually communicating. So the idea that 'talking' to an LLM is somehow perverting communication is wrong: it's not perverted communication that's taking place, but something that's not communication at all. Barnes and (I think) Thurible want to say LLM use is like contraception: a perversion of a faculty, and therefore intrinsically evil. Once you grasp his confusion that I tried to summarize on the 10/1 1.30pm comment, you realize the argument is baseless.

      The fact that some chatbots -- not "AI" as a whole, and certainly not the tech that powers LLMs! -- encourage this delusion doesn't change this fact.

      Whether "AI" is a prudent thing to use in this or that situation is a non-philosophical discussion that will vary from case to case ("singulars are infinite", as the Master says in his discussion on prudence!). Therefore I'm going to limit myself to dealing with the claim that it's intrinsically immoral.

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    10. Step2October 5, 2026 at 10:24 AM

      Point taken about the motives of CEOs but from what I can tell the warnings have never come from their PR departments. Geoffrey Hinton, considered by many the godfather of AI, has been saying the same thing for over two years. Researchers, safety chiefs and chief scientists have also notified the public of the danger. Just because companies have a financial motive for regulation doesn’t mean their disclosure in a prospectus is false, it is more likely to have been insisted upon by their legal department.

      The egg example is as relevant as saying I can verbally communicate with a ribosome (no offense to any ribosomes reading this). Of course it takes a massively complex multi-layered network embodied with specific inputs and outputs to verbally communicate. If you changed it to a simpler animal like a dog you would notice how strange the analogy is. A dog clearly has a limited kind of understanding, specialized knowledge from its heightened senses and can communicate relevant information. If the threshold is supposed to be that one is a creature and one is an artifact with similar abilities then why should that make such a profound difference in how the information relayed gets categorized?

      I’m not trying to say it is intrinsically immoral; hence my notice of drawing outside the lines and conceding AI can be an enhancement, only that the cumulative risk from agentic AI can easily become catastrophic and refusing to mitigate those risks is willful blindness.

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    11. English CatholicOctober 6, 2026 at 10:14 AM

      I think the discussion has strayed far enough away from philosophy that it should probably close here.

      I'll just close by saying that if the "PR department" of a company were identifying its messages as coming from itself, it would be doing a very bad job :-). Almost everyone who is speaking publicly about almost any topic is doing so at the behest of someone who wants to manipulate people. That is the way of the world.

      https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

      https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you

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  3. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2026 at 2:32 PM

    We are not going to be able to resist technology and all that it portends, for good and evil. Virtual sex will be reality maybe another 10 years. But that will good. No unwanted pregnancies. No STD's. No prostitution.

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    1. NLROctober 1, 2026 at 11:17 AM

      Even though these kind of views are widespread, experience shows that they are simply mistaken.

      Vice can't drive out vice, it just leads to more vice. Maybe in a different way, but it never makes things better. Weren't people 100 years ago saying that people were "repressed" and if society allowed more sexual indulgence it would have less sexual problems? Well, the experiment has been done and it didn't work.

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    2. AnonymousOctober 2, 2026 at 1:16 PM

      NLR, I think fewer abortions, fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer sexually transmitted diseases and less prostitution is a good thing. And that virtual vice is preferable to actual vice.

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    3. NLROctober 3, 2026 at 4:00 AM

      My assertion was that it not only would things get worse in a different way, but the things you are claiming would also not happen. It has been going for a long time now, that someone will make some prediction that allowing vice to flourish will somehow lead to less bad. And it never happens that way.

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    4. AnonymousOctober 3, 2026 at 12:22 PM

      Isn't abortion evil? Isn't fornication evil? Isn't prostitution evil? Yes, we will always have abortion, fornication and prostitution, but with Virtual Sex, we would have less of that, which is good.

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    5. GKCOctober 4, 2026 at 10:41 AM

      We also will have far fewer children.

      "On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
      (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
      Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
      And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'The Wages of Sin is Death.'"

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    6. ficino4mlOctober 4, 2026 at 6:42 PM

      @GKC: you are channeling G.K. Chesterton? He was not a proper philosopher. Steady on, old chap.

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    7. AnonymousOctober 4, 2026 at 8:36 PM

      There are too many children in this world who are neglected, abused, mistreated, unwanted and that is their horrible fate in life.

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    8. Tim the WhiteOctober 6, 2026 at 6:26 PM

      Anon, What NLR is getting at is that the Ends don't justify the Means.

      This is like giving needles and Narcan to drug users. Maybe you'll get less disease, maybe you'll get less overdoses, but you'll still be feeding drug addiction. Addiction is horrible in itself, but drug addiction also has many other knock-on effects besides disease and OD. (like poverty and then crime).
      If you had some kind of virtual sex going on, it would just be a new addiction with it's own morbidity and side effects. Not least of which would be the vice of intemperance (opposed to the 4th Cardinal virtue) and Damnation, not to mention all the good and virtue which would not be pursued while stoned on a couch.

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  4. CaptainCHSeptember 30, 2026 at 7:24 PM

    @English Catholic

    “He should know that artifacts have no intrinsic end at all. The good and evil of an artifact - - actually, I’d say even the essence of an artifact - - lies in its relation to people.”

    But Barnes and others too would say that the essence lies in relation to people. You yourself literally just said that he thinks it’s imparted to it by the designer. This is different from saying that we can just arbitrarily decide what a tool is properly used for willy-nilly, which we know is not true. A hammer is just not for combing your hair or writing on a chalkboard. We all know this intuitively. The design of a tool lends itself to a particular set of uses. Even Feser talks about this in Aristotle’s Revenge (the chapter on the embodied self).

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    1. English CatholicOctober 1, 2026 at 1:04 PM

      Please see my reply to Thurible, above. Yes, the design of an artifact lends itself to certain uses, but it does not follow that an artifact can be per se morally good or evil.

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  5. NormSeptember 30, 2026 at 9:20 PM

    Hey Prof

    Did you see Gavin Newsom, sign a declaration that permanently dubs Artificial Intelligence as Artificial Intelligence...

    Kinda ironic that it's Newsom huh ?

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    1. The DeuceOctober 1, 2026 at 11:32 AM

      Pretty annoyed at Trump for giving a sociopathic sleezeball like Newsom of all people opportunity to peacock as being on the side of sanity and respect for the human soul, particularly over something so pointless and trivial.

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    2. NormOctober 2, 2026 at 9:53 AM

      The Deuce

      The Conservatives aren't reading the room at all

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  6. AnonymousOctober 1, 2026 at 1:35 PM

    These books remind me of " Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

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  7. TerilienOctober 2, 2026 at 3:41 PM

    Really glad EXE is gone ^_^.

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    1. AnonymousOctober 3, 2026 at 12:24 PM

      Well, that may cause EXE to return.

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    2. NormOctober 3, 2026 at 11:52 PM

      We ought to pray for the conversion of his soul

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    3. TalmidOctober 4, 2026 at 7:40 PM

      What a pathetic and unnecessary comment, specially in the middle of a interesting discussion than has nothing to do with the man.

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    4. AnonymousOctober 5, 2026 at 6:23 PM

      Harold Bortland

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    5. AnonymousOctober 5, 2026 at 10:34 PM

      Why? As far as I recall, I never saw them say anything insane. At least as far as I can recall.

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  8. NLROctober 3, 2026 at 9:42 AM

    In a video interview Paul Kingsnorth said that he did not give his children smartphones, because of the sort of things they would have access to. He went on to say that this fact alone shows there is something wrong with our culture. (1 hour 5 minutes to 1 hour 6 minutes 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lwrCLPSq1M).

    He's right, by the way. Anybody paying attention can see things aren't better and they aren't even neutral. There is not much point in speculating about whether in an ideal society smartphones wouldn't be used for any bad purpose.

    First of all an ideal society wouldn't foist them on people in the first place, but the main point is that something can be bad for humans as they now are even if in ideal circumstances it wouldn't be harmful. If chimpanzees could be taught how to make knives, should they be? After all, knives are just neutral tools, what's the big deal?

    Well, chimpanzees as they are now can be aggressive and violent and so giving them a way to kill each other more efficiently wouldn't do them any good overall.

    Likewise, with human beings as they are now, there are things that, even if everyone doesn't misuse things, if enough people do, then that makes things worse overall.

    The fact is that some technology is just bad for humans as they are.

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    1. Vini TadeoOctober 3, 2026 at 1:24 PM

      Pretty interesting comment, NLR.

      The point is that society has gone so far beyond the point of saving that all that matters now is profit and keeping the money coming in. Business will not stop shoving stuff that is bad for us down our throats. We can't even stop them anymore.

      I’ll give a simple example to illustrate part of my point: back in the day, I used to watch the old re-recorded He-Man episodes from the 1980s, and at the end of every episode there was a clear, positive, encouraging message for the kids. Even if society wasn’t perfect, it still cared about the young in meaningful ways.

      Today, people don’t give a damn about children—or even about themselves. Everyone is living so thoroughly on autopilot and fuelled by their vices that it often feels as though we are barely dealing with human beings anymore. The indifference and lukewarm attitude toward others, the hollow, professed words like “empathy,” “care,” and so many others… we have reached a point where a considerable number of people are no longer capable of acting or thinking for themselves, or even of distinguishing right from wrong, because everything is filtered through pure ideology and self-inflicted deception.

      I believe the best we can do is care for our families, protect our young ones, and preserve a very small, close circle of people who have not been brainwashed—though I suspect even that word fails to capture the full, almost spiritual apathy we see today.

      The abuse of technology, the indulgence in bad behavior won't stop, but just because the world is so deeply ugly right now does not mean we must dive headlong into the dirt like most people who seem to enjoy it. We can still preserve and protect what is truly worth it: a good life in the philosophical sense—and hope that may God have mercy on all of us.

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    2. NLROctober 4, 2026 at 2:02 PM

      "We can still preserve and protect what is truly worth it: a good life in the philosophical sense—and hope that may God have mercy on all of us."

      You said it well.

      One thing that does make me feel better is the fact that all of this inhuman technocratic ideology is ultimately based on a false philosophy. It can't work the way they say it will because it is based on a wrong understanding of humanity and morality.

      Another thought that has occurred to me is, if people on Earth can pray for the souls in purgatory, that their time there may be shortened, then maybe it can work the other way as well. The souls in Heaven can pray that we on Earth have to undergo less than we might otherwise have to.

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    3. Vini TadeoOctober 5, 2026 at 4:29 PM

      Hi again, NLR

      "One thing that does make me feel better is the fact that all of this inhuman technocratic ideology is ultimately based on a false philosophy."

      Yes, exactly. It takes a lucid and grounded understanding of why the larger projects failed, since mechanistic philosophy failed to deliver what it promised. Mechanistic philosophy and materialism will appeal to the success of science, but that is just a utilitarian approach. In fact, the world is largely less happy, morally more miserable, and increasingly dependent on something less than we are—technology, AI models, and so on.

      Honestly, only a small group of people could truly benefit from such a utopian and ambitiously anti-human project as technocracy. The great mass of people remain under the spell of a promissory note—a promissory note that will never fill the emptiness they have in their hearts.

      At the end of the day, I think people trying to immanentize the eschaton will never fulfill their happiness, because they are trying to turn the reality of suffering and hardship into something it is not. The illusion of evolution through technology, the mastery of nature, and so on is hard to dispel, especially if one is born in an age such as ours, but one day people will grow tired of pretending and will no longer have the strength to keep the illusion going.

      "Another thought that has occurred to me is, if people on Earth can pray for the souls in purgatory, that their time there may be shortened, then maybe it can work the other way as well. The souls in Heaven can pray that we on Earth have to undergo less than we might otherwise have to."

      I heard one father say that the souls in purgatory remember those who pray for them, so perhaps they in turn can pray for us in this life too—but I’m not sure if that’s possible without God’s grace, since these souls don't have anything at the time that could give them sensorial experience of our realities.

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  9. AnonymousOctober 3, 2026 at 1:44 PM

    The Pope got a “please STFU” message from some influencer about his AI comments, while the Christian Right’s bargain with tech bros and white nationalists continues full speed ahead. You’ve aligned with all these people against Black people, immigrants and women. The immorality would be astonishing if it wasn’t so common from you all.

    A ‘Trans-humanist’ future of decadence and stupidity is what you all deserve.

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  10. NormOctober 4, 2026 at 7:51 PM

    Interesting thoughts on regulation by Dr Budzisziewski over at his blog,

    https://www.undergroundthomist.org/hide-and-seek-with-ai

    Prof Budzisziewski opines that,

    When all these big companies come together and say "regulate" us...

    It seems certain that they want a say in the regulatory process primarily in order to secure their monopoly/duopoly while also insulating themselves from lawsuits.

    So he says that we should be vary about this kind of regulation,

    On the other hand , because the technology is so new, he suggests that the best way to regulate them is by making these companies as vulnerable to lawsuits as possible from people who suffer the harmful effects of their products.

    I think the approach is quite good, always great to hear from different Thomists.

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  11. AnonymousOctober 5, 2026 at 10:33 PM

    People hated photography in the 19th century the same way people hate on AI art today.

    ReplyDelete

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