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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149 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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    12. Step2October 7, 2026 at 11:58 AM

      From your own link: "PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest."
      It follows it must contain some truth; therefore agentic AI does pose a serious risk.

      Since we are submitting links I'll start with an interview with somebody who investigated the Hugging Face attack.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI

      Then a thorough breakdown of the many problems with monitoring current and future models.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zNRoQmzaME

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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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    9. AnonymousOctober 7, 2026 at 11:34 AM

      Wrong, Tim. It has nothing to do with ends justifying means.. It's going to happen eventually and it will have salutary effects. And since you mentioned overdoses, I work in the E.R. ( I was philosophy major but couldn't get a job with that) of an inner city hospital. Narcan reverses a drug overdose so a person doesn't die. Clean needles are preferable to infection, which can lead to sepsis and death.

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    10. NLROctober 7, 2026 at 2:33 PM

      Anonymous, are you the same person that talked about the dream playing pool with Hume? I forget which post that was.

      That was an interesting comment. I have not had any dreams about famous philosophers. Maybe that's a comment for the next open thread, whether people have had dreams related to philosophy.

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    11. Tim the WhiteOctober 7, 2026 at 6:10 PM

      If you were a philosophy major, you should be aware that you didn't really make any counter argument; you just said I was wrong and gave the same opinions again with a new set of details.

      Let's try this again.

      Do you agree that any form of addiction is harmful and should be cured rather than accommodated?

      Should this always be the case regardless of what kind of addiction is involved; chemical, sexual, or especially BEHAVIORAL.

      People can get addicted to almost anything. They get addicted to video games; even video games that are not meant to be so, like solitaire.

      I also want to point out that inevitability is not a good argument where morals are concerned. You could justify any kind of crime that way.
      You could justify euthanasia like that.
      "His quality of life is about gone anyway. He's never going to be productive again. He's certainly going to die anyway. Give him a retirement party and then apply the pillow."

      You could justify lynching like that.
      "If he goes to trial, they're just going to condemn him anyway. Let the mob have him. Better him than us."

      Why should we facilitate maladaptive or immoral behavior? Enabling drunkenness, sex addiction and other vices and addictions instead of preventing them and curing them is wrong in itself.
      Good ends do not justify bad means.
      Preventing death is not the ultimate criterion for what is moral. If a soldier does not kill an invader, and then runs away to save himself from death; he would be a coward and a traitor, and both men would still be alive but neither would be justified.

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    12. AnonymousOctober 8, 2026 at 12:36 PM

      NLR, good memory! Yes, I was dreaming about playing billiards with Hume and running the table.
      White Tim,
      You are confused and your examples are non-sensical. Drug addiction is not like the desire to have sexual relations. That is a natural human desire; drug addiction is not.
      Virtual Sex is masturbation and that is preferable to having unwanted babies, STDs and prostitution. If you think you can tell men that can't have sexual relations unless they are married you are delusional. During WW2, the U.S. Army issued to condoms to soldiers because they knew that soldiers would engage in immoral behavior but that was preferable to contracting venereal disease.
      Now, do you understand?


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    13. Tim the WhiteOctober 13, 2026 at 8:02 PM

      Can yall not see, or will yall not acknowledge, that lesser evils cannot be directly encouraged to prevent greater evils that may or may not have to happen?

      Do you see that this is encouraging the MEANS of a lesser evil under the justification that some, or some kinds of, greater evils may/will not happen (good END by negation)?

      Encouraging lesser evils leads to a more entrenched habit of vice that will then develop into those very same greater evils later, instead of preventing both greater and lesser in the first place by encouraging virtue instead!

      Regarding any given vice, people will fall into three categories:
      1. Those who will never fall into it.
      2. Those who will definitely fall into it.
      3. Those who may, or may not fall, depending on the circumstances.

      Just because some people will definitely go into the pit, does not mean you should push all the fence-sitters toward it when you can push them away instead.

      Are you familiar with the definition of Moral Hazard?

      A Moral Hazard is a situation where an actor has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it will not bear the full costs associated with that risk.

      In the example you gave about the Army, they were creating a moral hazard by handing out condoms.

      You know what else they were handing out? GUNS! When they handed out those guns, they make it possible to play Russian Roulette. They don't take any measures to try and stop the troops from doing that because it has very obvious consequences. They also don't really need anybody who wants to do that in their ranks, so the situation would take care of it self.
      BUT, what if somebody got the bright idea that it should be announced that anyone who wanted to play Russian Roulette was allowed to do so, as long as they didn't point the gun at their head, and a medic was present. Now obviously some of the troops would definitely play it anyway, and some would never do so; but it makes no sense to put out "safe play" announcements that sound crazy at best and give the troops encouragement to try at worst.

      I must also point out that both the lesser and greater evils are all sins and vices. They will send people to Hell even if they don't directly cause death or suffering in the present for those committing them.

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    14. AnonymousOctober 17, 2026 at 2:45 PM

      I just saw your post. The Army was trying to prevent a disease that would have impaired out troops from killing the enemy. Thank God they did not ponder about moral hazard. BTW, my dad fought in WW2 and he was issued condoms. The next day the chaplain came by to hand out pocket New Testaments and give a talk about morality. And your blather about Russian roulette is just that.

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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.

      Delete
    6. EXEOctober 7, 2026 at 5:07 AM

      Well, this was an interesting thing to see on my morning websurf! Glad to see it proven that Terilien was always just mad about having his worldview challenged and is happy to have his safe space back. Honestly, I'm conflicted - there are some people here who are genuinely interesting to talk to, but also a substantial number of theo-bros who just stick their fingers in their ears and go "nuh-uh". The amount of strawmanning I received was disheartening. I genuinely expected better from this community. 'Twas disappointing.

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    7. TerilienOctober 7, 2026 at 11:25 AM

      No I’m not mad about being challenged. I actually stopped finding people like you challenging well over a decade ago. The people I find intellectually threatening tend to be certain non Christian elements on the right.

      I find you boring and cringe.

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    8. EXEOctober 8, 2026 at 6:38 AM

      Yep, you're so mellow and unbothered by me that you felt the need to rejoice at my absence, completely unprompted, even though it had nothing to do with the topic at hand. You can try to put the Cool Guy mask back on if you like (and I expect you'll reply to this with some catty retort aimed at restoring your social status), but being honest with yourself is a strength. If you truly live in a culture where you feel like you can't admit to weakness, then I pity you.

      Delete
  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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    Replies
    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.

      Delete
    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.

      Delete
    4. EXEOctober 7, 2026 at 5:16 AM

      Vini

      "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."

      Really? What's your definition of "caring" for children? I presume it's something like "imbuing them correct (read: my) morality", because it seems like concern for children's *rights*, for treating them like actual people who deserve to be informed about how the world actually works and allowed to make choices for themselves (within what's reasonable for their development and capability), has only increased in the modern era. A lot of traditionalists seem to regard children as their father's property; indeed even you are doing this by framing your family as something passive, incapable of acting for or defending itself.

      People being on autopilot? Gee, wonder why that might be. Maybe because people increasingly have to work second or even third jobs, and thus are more likely to be exhausted? That's not something rigorously studied either, but it seems more plausible than Moral Degeneration Theory, which is a prediction literally every generation has been making since ancient Greece at least.

      Delete
    5. Vini TadeoOctober 7, 2026 at 11:49 AM

      EXE

      "Really? What's your definition of "caring" for children? I presume it's something like "imbuing them correct (read: my) morality", because it seems like concern for children's *rights*, for treating them like actual people who deserve to be informed about how the world actually works and allowed to make choices for themselves (within what's reasonable for their development and capability), has only increased in the modern era. A lot of traditionalists seem to regard children as their father's property; indeed even you are doing this by framing your family as something passive, incapable of acting for or defending itself."

      You returned to this discussion visibly irritated. With all due respect, you are projecting intentions onto what was said and interpreting meanings that simply aren’t there.

      If you had actually paid attention to the He-Man example, you would have noticed I deliberately used the words “clear,” “positive,” and “encouraging.” Reading any moral judgment into that is a complete stretch.

      What I was actually pointing to is something far more concrete and simpler than that: the overwhelming majority of fathers show little real investment in their children. They hand them phones hoping for them to shut up. They barely cook, instead loading them with junk food. They rarely ask even the most basic question—“How was your day at school?”—and the list goes on.

      Morality may play a role in shaping those choices—and I think it does—but that was never the central point, and the behavior described can be reprovable even apart from a particular morality.

      "People being on autopilot? Gee, wonder why that might be. Maybe because people increasingly have to work second or even third jobs, and thus are more likely to be exhausted? That's not something rigorously studied either, but it seems more plausible than Moral Degeneration Theory, which is a prediction literally every generation has been making since ancient Greece at least."

      I know plenty of wealthy, unemployed, and careerless people who live exactly the way I described—on autopilot, shallow, and disengaged. These are people who never have to lift a finger to get by. Your analysis, therefore, doesn’t hold up—or at the very least, it’s incomplete. The problem may run deeper than you think.

      I think that the real problem is that you become deeply irrational the moment someone says—or even hints at—something you disagree with. You then assign intentions that were never there and come charging in with both feet. I’ve never had an issue like that with you before, and I’d hope to keep it that way.

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    6. EXEOctober 8, 2026 at 6:33 AM

      Well, the He-Man example doesn't help me, because I don't know what you mean by "positive" or "encouraging". Since you left me in the lurch, I had to look them up myself to check. Sure, most of the things promoted seem good or at least harmless; protecting the environment, valuing hard work, and so on. But I'm baffled that you seem to think kids aren't being taught these very basic moral concepts anymore. They are. The only sources you have given for your belief to the contrary are personal anecdotes and vibes (in other words, your feelings). You say fathers are increasingly derelict in duty? OK, that's a hypothesis. Let's check it. Do you have any data to back that up, or is it merely a feeling you get from social media? Before forming an opinion about something, one ought to investigate it rigorously. I get the feeling that you haven't done that here. Can you prove me wrong?

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    7. Vini TadeoOctober 8, 2026 at 12:40 PM

      EXE, you said:

      "But I'm baffled that you seem to think kids aren't being taught these very basic moral concepts anymore. They are. The only sources you have given for your belief to the contrary are personal anecdotes and vibes (in other words, your feelings)."

      I never claimed that children aren’t being taught “basic moral concepts.” That is your assertion, not mine.

      My data—since that is the term you internet dwellers seem to prefer—comes from experience.

      I worked at a law firm for a long time. Before that, while still in law school, I interned at a police station and later moved to the Department of Legal Affairs in my municipality—until OCD abruptly forced my career into a prolonged hiatus.

      Across all of it—handling legal matters involving drug addicts, career criminals (traficantes, ladrões e toda a corja possível), people charged with what you call guys in the US call misdemeanors (crimes de menor potencial ofensivo), parents who refuse to pay child support, and every kind of civil or penal dispute—the reality has been exactly the same: the children are overwhelmingly neglected. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw a father or mother who genuinely put the child’s life first.

      So your assertion that this is “just feelings” carries none of the weight you intended. It amounts to little more than an unsubstantiated projection—particularly striking given that you have offered not a single piece of evidence in support of your own position. A little more experience with the struggles of people outside the internet chambers might yet broaden your perspective on the issue.

      Also, for the record: I maintain no social media presence beyond occasional participation on this blog. All of my “data” comes from that rather ugly term you guys seem to have coined—“lived experience.”

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    8. EXEOctober 10, 2026 at 3:00 AM

      "My data—since that is the term you internet dwellers seem to prefer—comes from experience."

      So, you admit that you are basing your opinions on personal anecdote. I don't deny that you've seen some shit. That's valid. But my problem is that this is wholly inadequate for making an opinion on something as broad as society. You have access to exactly one viewpoint, your own. How can you possibly hope to understand society as a whole? Have you met everyone? Even everyone in your town, let alone everyone in your country? Do you understand their motivations and circumstances? Have you understood the reasons behind those circumstances? If not, then how can you state with such confidence that you know what is causing society's ills? No matter how extensive, one person's lived experience is never going to be adequate to capture such a big thing as society.

      You say that you spent a long time working with the law - OK, fair. But have you considered that, by virtue of your work, you were therefore much more likely to encounter criminals? People who had committed no crimes would not come before you, because they would not be in legal trouble. You therefore encountered an unusually high amount of criminals, so your experience cannot be generalized to society as a whole. Someone in your position would probably think that society was bad *even if* crime was rapidly decreasing, because they would encounter lots of criminals.

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    9. Vini TadeoOctober 10, 2026 at 8:50 PM

      EXE, you said:

      "So, you admit that you are basing your opinions on personal anecdote. I don't deny that you've seen some shit. That's valid. But my problem is that this is wholly inadequate for making an opinion on something as broad as society. You have access to exactly one viewpoint, your own. How can you possibly hope to understand society as a whole? Have you met everyone? Even everyone in your town, let alone everyone in your country? Do you understand their motivations and circumstances? Have you understood the reasons behind those circumstances? If not, then how can you state with such confidence that you know what is causing society's ills? No matter how extensive, one person's lived experience is never going to be adequate to capture such a big thing as society."

      I understand your point, EXE, but unfortunately it does not help you diminish my conclusions to a particular perspective. The experience was too broad and spanned several social fields to be merely falsified by an appeal to feeling. If you go to a market, if you go to a school, if you go to a restaurant, you may find the same problem I’ve been describing all along in these comments. When the same pattern shows up repeatedly in different contexts, it stops being “just my perspective” and becomes an observable fact. Dismissing that as insufficient simply because I haven’t interviewed every single person in the country is a rhetorical dodge, not a serious rebuttal. Frankly, I don’t understand why you are quibbling over something so basic and factual.

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    10. Vini TadeoOctober 10, 2026 at 9:18 PM

      EXE, you also said:

      "You say that you spent a long time working with the law - OK, fair. But have you considered that, by virtue of your work, you were therefore much more likely to encounter criminals? People who had committed no crimes would not come before you, because they would not be in legal trouble. You therefore encountered an unusually high amount of criminals, so your experience cannot be generalized to society as a whole. Someone in your position would probably think that society was bad *even if* crime was rapidly decreasing, because they would encounter lots of criminals."

      I don’t know the reality of the US, but again, my experience wasn’t isolated — it was widespread. When I interned at the police station, there was a 15-year-old named Maikon (he must be a fully grown adult by now; it wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up dead on the streets). Maikon was a "weekly client" at the station. He was a small-time drug dealer. His mother was serving time, his father had been murdered, and his grandmother was raising him. The problem is that there were far too many Maikons: constantly arrested, constantly released. One had a father but no mother; another had a mother but no father, and so on. The abandonment was both material and emotional.

      Later, when I moved to the municipality — after the internship ended and I couldn’t stomach much more of it — the cases became more “tolerable”: civil matters, municipal debts, occasional child custody disputes. The problem didn’t disappear; it just changed clothes. I saw kids handed cell phones larger than their own hands, kids who were neglected, sometimes had psychological issues… the list went on. On this side, the problem wasn’t purely material. Fathers were throwing technology at their children in a failed attempt to fill the gap left by their own emotional absence.

      You’re right that much of my experience was on the rougher side of society. But the same patterns repeated themselves at the law firm — even among the lawyers, some of whom were quite wealthy. How many clients did I work with in civil and family cases who presented the exact same issues: negligence, indifference, emotional absence? You can argue that because I worked in an area with constant demand for such cases, I saw a lot of it and that this doesn’t represent “the majority.” Fine. But that still doesn’t help your argument. My claim was never that every single person is like this. My claim was that today, far too many people simply don’t give a damn about children — or even about themselves. And that reality is visible wherever you look.

      One last thing, unrelated to the main point but worth reflecting on: you’ve repeatedly labeled people on this blog as racists, bigots, and so on. By your own logic, that should be impossible. You haven’t interviewed every single person here, the "majority," yet you still labeled us as a whole. You don’t know their full backgrounds, motivations, or circumstances. According to the exact standard you just imposed on me, your sweeping accusations are therefore invalid — because one person’s (or one commenter’s) impressions can never capture the whole group.

      You’re demanding that I meet a standard of evidence that you yourself completely ignore. That’s a double standard, and it’s a textbook fallacy: special pleading. You get to make broad, confident claims about entire groups of people based on limited observation, but the moment I do the same based on years of direct experience, suddenly it’s “inadequate” and “anecdotal.” You can’t have it both ways. Either limited personal observation is never enough to support general claims — in which case your own accusations collapse — or it can be valid when the pattern is clear and repeated, in which case your objection to me fails. Pick one.

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    11. NLROctober 12, 2026 at 7:10 PM

      I will expand on my earlier comment a little, there is a further point I want to touch on.

      The primary issue is moral, not intellectual. Discussions about the properties of the stuff that makes up the physical universe and what else exists are important. However, the main reason why people think that the world is arbitrarily manipulable is because they *want* to manipulate it. Technocratic totalitarianism doesn't come about because its proponents skipped too many philosophy classes; it comes about because they want to control others. Greed and pride are endless, they can never be satisfied; the only way to stop them is if the individual turns away from these vices.

      I think there is a tendency in some circles to over-intellectualize the problems of our era and to put the blame too much on intellectuals. They deserve plenty of criticism as do their theories, no doubt about that. But seriously, how much real power does some professor somewhere have? I don't remember being told we have to go to war or make killer drones because some scientist said so. I don't remember being told some scientist is too big to fail so we need to indirectly extract money from everyone else to pay for his pension or whatever.

      A good representation is in the book That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. Some of the villains are scheming academics, immersed in their petty squabbles for prestige or money or being a big fish in a small pond. But they themselves are being duped by people with much more sinister intent.

      Yes, people believe mistaken things and bad theories are harmful. But more than that, there are people in this world who simply want bad things.

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    12. TalmidOctober 13, 2026 at 8:54 PM

      @NLR

      Good point, actually. Now excuse me for your view gave me a idea than i did not have the time to organize or test:

      The average naturalist is living alright and there are a lot of criminals, the violent or more political type, who do believe in God existence on a theoretical level(at least were i live most by far probably are believers).

      But there is a thing lacking in this analysis: technocratic totalitarism is quite a new ideology. I do not see it in this exact form on the average conquerors from the past. We could say than our socio-economical system is part of this particular form.

      Back on, say, Alexander the Great time most people produced for themselves or for their masters and so commerce was limited, it was a time were the market existed but you hardly needed to participate in it to survive, unlike us.
      Also, knowledge and social orientation was way more guided by tradition and religion(which were mostly inseparable), so there was no need or space for a science than dictated what was to be believed or how people and leaders should act*. Back them, just looting ome cities and conquering others was the way to be the strongest empire.

      So libido dominandi is a thing on every human being, and being moved a lot by it will result today on a technocratic impulse, but this is only a thing today. A man can be very powerful and certainly change how the world works, but how he will do it depend on the world as well.

      *scientists do not force we to do things, of course, but scientific and academic truth do play a very inportant role on what we believe and do, specially on social organization, even negationists on certain fields can't escape on the rest

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    13. EXEOctober 14, 2026 at 11:09 AM

      Vini,

      OK, sure, you don't need to interview every single person. I exaggerated there. I apologize for being unfair there, and I hope I didn't come across as trying to invalidate your experience - that wasn't my intention. But the point I'm trying to get at is that there are a *lot* of reasons why social science isn't just based on anecdotes alone. Even the most well-read, well-travelled, honest man is inherently limited by the conditions he lives in. A poor woman cannot have the same experience of the country as a rich man does, someone who's lived his entire life in Monterrey can't know what it's like to be a Zapatista, and so on. On top of that, we know for a fact that the human brain is wired to manipulate and misrepresent reality in ways that are useful for our survival. For instance, negativity bias - we pay far more attention to bad information than to good. A week where we get insulted at work three separate times is probably gonna go down as a bad week, even if hundreds of good or neutral things happened too. To some extent this is useful; in that bad things are more likely to be things you can't afford to ignore. But it is a barrier to finding the truth. To try and arrive at the truth about stuff like this, it's important to try and remove those barriers.

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    14. EXEOctober 14, 2026 at 12:20 PM

      Talmid, NLR

      You've hit on a few things I'd agree with, but it seems like there's some other stuff mixed up in it. You've both hit on the fact that the creation of, say, killer drones, or the decision to start a war, are not really made by professors or scientists or even the people who make drones. You're right; they're made by the people who hold the reins of society. And as of right now, that's the Capital class. Factory owners, big businessmen, oligarchs, and so on. They're the ones who exercise the most control over the government (super PACs dominate the electoral system, and senators/congressmen can easily be bought and bribed). Endless forever wars in the Middle East are bad for basically everyone - unless, of course, you're Lockheed Martin or ExxonMobil. Then they're a money-making opportunity. Sabotaging nuclear energy for decades makes no sense - unless you realize that it's in the interests of the Oil Industry. Look at the American government's track record, especially since 1980, and you will consistently see that the government's actions align far more readily with "what is good for the rich" than "what is good for the working-man".

      The kicker about this is that it doesn't even require the oligarchs in question to be particularly immoral on a personal level. The problem is that the system, the way it's currently set up, consistently incentivizes immoral and antisocial behavior from them. When profit and growth are the only incentives, anyone who chooses to do the right thing is inevitably going to leave some money on the table. Maybe you can find a couple of big businessmen who won't succumb to that lure. But you won't find many, and every single generation will be tested the same way, because it's a structural force, like gravity. Inevitably they will be drawn down the endless spiral towards exploitation, because there's always profit to be made by being unscrupulous (cutting wages, cutting safety standards, etc). And in an infinite competition to maximize profit, eventually *someone* is going to refuse to leave the money on the table.

      Honestly, this is one area where the two sides should be able to find more agreement. Who has more of an interest in destroying the "traditional way of life" than capitalists? They want to turn everyone into fodder for their factories, seperate us from the fruit of our hands, at least until they can replace us all with AI (their ultimate dream, and the real reason why it gets infinite funding despite its lack of tangible results). What's one of the primary drivers for illegal immigration? Because capitalists want a source of cheap, exploitable labor with no rights (they can always be reported to DHS if they dare to complain about their shabby working conditions, after all). In fact, businessmen are incentivized to ensure that there's always a significant group of permanently unemployed people, because this makes workers more expendable, thus more vulnerable to exploitation. If there are 100 men lining up to take your job, you're never going to risk stepping out of line! So you'll keep your mouth shut even if he demands another day of unpaid overtime. Why has America de-industrialized, devastating the Steel Belt? Because the Bosses wanted cheaper labor and no unions to deal with. They're simply following the incentives. So should we, by getting rid of them.

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    15. TalmidOctober 15, 2026 at 9:43 PM

      @EXE

      We probably disagree on what to do exactly, but yea, that makes sense.

      One can say that there is a kinda of selection where to be on "top" of most places you need to be okay with doing bad things, being as a individual, as a company, as a country etc.
      The guy on top is as constrained as act as expected as the guy on the bottom, i'am afraid.

      Delete
    16. NLROctober 18, 2026 at 2:15 PM

      Talmid and EXE, you make some good points. I agree that the surrounding circumstances have an impact. Nobody makes moral decisions in a vacuum.

      EXE, we have had our disagreements, but I completely agree with you that this decades long trend of transferring wealth from ordinary workers to managers and executives is not good. For that matter also the financialization of the economy and the shift from focusing on real resources (including the labor it takes to make something). Many traditionally-minded people would feel similarly. I remember someone on this blog a while back saying how the previous pope Leo in an encyclical said that a job should pay enough for a prudent working man to support a family.

      I agree with both of you that the systems of incentives and the surrounding circumstances are significant. Though what I would say is that the moral dimension, the individual choice is more fundamental. A society comes about because of the beliefs and values of its members and the choices they make.

      It's hard as an individual to change a whole society, but as a last resort, you can say no. The scene in Crime and Punishment about Mameladov and how his daughter turned to prostitution to support the family made me think when I read it. I don't have a daughter, but if I was in a situation where the only way to make money was for her to go into pornography or prostitution, well, it's not easy to do, but I believe it would be better to all starve together and get ready for what's next.

      Or suppose if someone says you need to get a chip in your hand to get a job. Hey, it's not in your head and it's just a matter of security and technological advancement, what's the big deal? (or so some would say). Well, should people do it or not? One of the main reasons people give for going along with techno-totalitarian stuff is for the next generation. I completely sympathize with that, everyone has to make a judgment about how far is too far, but at the same time, if things go too far, then going along doesn't really benefit the next generation. If you get a chip in your hand so you can make enough money to send your children to Harvard and their jobs say they need a chip in their head to be "smart enough", what did you really do for them?

      That's one of the reasons I'm against the so-called AI stuff. It is so much harder now to get a job than it was 25 years ago that people back then wouldn't believe it. In fact, people who haven't had to get a job for 25 years don't believe it. But how is the mass adoption of a technology whose main purpose is to replace humans going to help the next generation? Well, it's not going to make anything better for them, that's for sure.

      I don't know what the future is going to hold, but I don't think anyone really does. But I do believe that trying to work for the good is what we need to make a good future. I'm sure you both think that as well. Anyway, I'm not really arguing with what you both said, just putting my thoughts out there, because I think it's an important topic.

      Delete
  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
  12. EXEOctober 7, 2026 at 6:00 AM

    OK, actually read through the article about Quay. Some interesting points, but only effective as a way of preaching to the choir. My fundamental issue with all of this is that you give no reason why anyone should prefer the "traditional" worldview over the "mechanistic" one - perhaps that's simply presumed by virtue of appearing in a conservative journal? But either way, the "mechanistic" worldview is generally preferred because it does a far better job of explaining reality than Thomism does, despite its flaws - something this review simply ignores. What is Thomism's advantage? You don't seem to say, and I suspect it is simply "because it supports the beliefs and outcomes that I want". Pine as you may for the days when things were simpler, you can't just ignore the discoveries and developments of the last 400+ years. To do so is to prefer ignorance to truth. To appeal to allegedly bad moral consequences as reason for doing so is to commit a fallacy; truth is not false just because it would be more fortunate for us if it were false.

    Secondly, why ought one to simply accept "their nature"? This is again simply asserted. But this only makes sense if one presumes that Nature is the product of Divine Design, expressive of the will of an all-good and all-wise creator. This is not at all obvious. If, instead, "our nature" is simply the result of blind natural forces, then there can be no moral fact derived from them. Even if it's true that we are naturally inclined to certain behaviors, there is no reason why we are morally obliged to go along with them. Indeed we already accept this; few people would say that xenophobia against anyone beyond your immediate group is a moral good, despite that being natural to most people. You may as well say that the Wright Brothers were Satanic for trying to convince humans to fly, which is against their nature. This entire ideology seems designed to keep people tame and docile, meekly accepting their lot in life instead of rebelling against it. Very convenient for those in power, hm?

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    Replies
    1. NormOctober 7, 2026 at 7:44 AM

      EXE

      Having read the article once it was released from the paywall,

      It is clear that the point of this particular article is first of all to point out that the problems are at baseline philosophical because the purveyors of such transhumanist views often think that they aren't making any such philosophical assumptions.

      And secondly it's a review.

      So the point was not to provide an out an out defence but to merely hint at it

      And Prof does refer to his books for a defence of why the A-T world view is preferable.

      So if you are genuinely interested, you should purchase a copy of e copy of Scholastic Metaphysics or Aristotle's Revenge.

      And as you are reading it, you can note down certain objections you may have and sure many people here at the blog will be willing to help you parse through them.

      This would a much more better , academic and structured approach, then just launching into tyrades which don't even make any sense.

      Your understanding of Natural Law is also extremely imporverished.

      For example many Thomists should say that because of original sin certain defective behaviours became almost second nature to us.

      Your constant stawmanning and attempts at caricature is what makes you unpleasant as an interlocutor

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    2. AnonymousOctober 7, 2026 at 11:26 AM

      You're back!

      Delete
    3. EXEOctober 8, 2026 at 6:56 AM

      Norm

      I'll be honest, I don't feel like buying and reading an entire book that I'm not particularly interested in just so that my points will be considered worthy of response. My brain is structured such that any attempt to read through something uninteresting would likely be futile. But OK, sure, Ed probably didn't intend to give a thorough explanation. Hence why I called it "preaching to the choir", in that it was never intended to have any persuasive power; and assumed that its audience would already be sympathetic to its position.

      I will also object that if you actually understand AT to any degree, you ought to be able to give at least a Cliff's Notes basic version of a defense. It doesn't need to be flawless or technical. The fact that any question I pose immediately gets punted to "read the book" is annoying, and comes across to me as a cheap attempt to raise the barrier to entry for discussion by making the reading of multiple technical philosophy books a prerequisite for the right to ask questions. If someone here asks me about, say, Marxism, I will answer to the best of my ability, and if I don't know something I'll say so. I would never say "Screw you, read Das Kapital!" instead.

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    4. EXEOctober 8, 2026 at 7:06 AM

      I wanted to just point this out in a seperate comment, but:

      "For example many Thomists should say that because of original sin certain defective behaviours became almost second nature to us."

      But this is a highly controversial move. Original Sin is *not* part of natural theology, it is explicitly a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, with no basis in either reason or historical fact. You can't just introduce it into the question as if it were uncontroversial. Imagine if *I* tried to respond to your arguments about Human Nature by saying "well, we know that's false. Nothing has a unique nature because all things are simply different expressions of teotl, the divine energy that makes up all things and which all else reduces to, including the gods"! You would rightly take umbrage at my taking Nahuatl/Aztec theology and cosmology for granted!

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    5. NormOctober 8, 2026 at 11:51 AM

      Hi Exe

      Thanks for your comment,

      My answers was basically a response to this

      "Even if it's true that we are naturally inclined to certain behaviors, there is no reason why we are morally obliged to go along with them. Indeed we already accept this; few people would say that xenophobia against anyone beyond your immediate group is a moral good, despite that being natural to most people. "

      So first of all we would deny that, one is naturally inclined to xenophobia (assuming that we agree that xenophobia is irrational hostility to one who is not of the tribe, because one can confuse an approach of caution to be xenophobic as well).

      We would say that given our nature as rational animals, with an intellect and a will, our flourishing or goodness consists in having stewardship over our own lives in general, and given that we are naturally social animals dependent on others, our goodness or flourishing also consists in respect and cooperation immediate family, our community,our nation and at a very general level the human race as a whole.

      This is just what is natural to us given the kind of beings we are.

      As such it just logically follows that we ought to act accordance with our nature so that we may flourish and fulfill our nature, to be a flourishing instance of our kind just as all things in nature tend towards their good or flourishing.

      Non-Rational Animals also behave in accordance to with their nature or in other words tend towards their flourishing.

      The only difference is that given that by nature we also have free will, or the ability to do otherwise unlike non rational animals, we don't always act towards what is really our good (we no doubt perceive it is good or focus on some limited good) or in other words what we refer to as sin. As such in us there is the possibility of self defection so to speak.

      (In non rational animals, they can also act in defective ways, ways that are not conducive to their flourishing, but it is always external to them, maybe a parasite causing defective behaviour or brain damage.)

      These unnatural behaviours or sin or xenophobia, once committed and reinforced, tend to take hold just like how other vices tend to take control of us such that we can say , drinking is second nature to an alcoholic or excessive/compulsive sexual behaviours are second nature to a sex addict. Second nature because it has become so ingrained, "second" because of our understanding of what our nature truly is, we know that it is not good for us.

      My reference to original sin was just an example, to illustrate how Thomists explain the manner in which unnatural behavious came to be ingrained us and there is also the fact that we gradually came to understand our nature and how the natural law comes to be promulgated is a seperate topic. There is a book by Fr Stephen Brock called the "The Light that Binds."

      Very academic, but informative and Fr Brock writes well.

      Regardless, belief in original sin is not required in order to know what is naturally good for us and what isn't, we can know it by reflecting on human nature and that people often act in a manner contrary to what is good for them (xenophobia or what have you) does not negate that, since our nature also entails the possibility of self defection.

      Why do people act in ways that are not good for them is a seperate question but it does not change the fact that are acting in a way that is not good for them and as such unnatural.

      When you said people naturally act in a xenophobic, the term natural can only be applied in terms of "second nature", not in the strict sense of the term natural since we know that it is not conducive to our flourishing as a rational animal or you can say it's not conducive to our flourishing as the kind of thing we are or in other words not conducive to our flourishing .........given our nature.

      Comprehende ?


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    6. AnonymousOctober 9, 2026 at 1:41 PM

      Exe, I’m the anon that travels with you in these waters a few times. Only thing I ever disagree with you on is the import of Reductionism and mechanism: both false as total philosophies. I would agree with you that mechanistic explanations explain the world better if I felt this was in conflict with a non-physical aspect to reality. Which I simply don’t. Mechanism does not refute teleology and has no necessary conflict with it - we’ve allowed one mode of knowing -because of its technological success -to completely dominate how we think of ourselves and knowledge. It will ultimately be our doom. Right now, we have AI charlatans claiming essentially that via software and word predictive algorithms, they’ve created a new life form. It is nonsense.

      Part of my conflict and disappointment with Christianity is that they, unfortunately, are the guardians of a compelling metaphysics ( at the ground level) but because they are an immoral sect yoked to Power ( see: America) , it cannot get a proper accounting. The Scholastics philosophical discussions on Minds/Concepts/ Semiotics in general are worthy pf a non-doctrinal, none Christian accounting.

      I don’t consider myself a Christian and certainly do not believe that if any being created the universe, it matches what these people say it is ( A homicidal racist bigot that will reward self-same in some heaven above) BUT I cannot also lie to myself and say I don’t find materialism/mechanism abhorrent as ultimate takes on life. We have no reason to assume that a non-physical aspect to reality entails the morally outrageous universe many of these Christians believe in so I will take what I can from these traditions and I hope other do the same. We need not theorize ourselves as aimless beasts because the ostensible people that purport to show we’re not are morally bankrupt.

      There’s worthy ideas there to strip out from the overriding context.

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    7. EXEOctober 10, 2026 at 2:35 AM

      Norm,

      Thank you for your response. Yes, that more or less makes sense, and more or less tracks with the understanding of AT that I had myself. Something like:

      1. Things have inherent, immutable natures which define the sort of things they are
      2. To act in accordance with one's nature is good and to act in defiance of it is bad

      My core problem with this view also comes in two parts:

      1. We can only know natures via observation, but how do we demarcate perfection? What metrics are we using? How do we know that our designation of something as being part of something's natural perfection represents an objective reality rather than merely being a projection of our human preferences onto nature? For example, what is the best color and shape for a flower? (pick any species you like).

      2. Darwin throws a massive wrench into this picture of the world. Thomism conceives of species as having fixed natures, but now we know this isn't true. Pigs, camels, deer, hippopotami, and whales all share a common ancestor (as far as we know, a small herbivorous ungulate named Diacodexis). How can one nature give rise to many? How can Diacodexis-nature change to camel-nature or whale-nature? By Thomas' standards, it can't. Yet it clearly did, so what's up? Furthermore, this complicates any attempt to assign behaviors as "good" or "bad" according to their nature. If a member of a terrestrial mammal species shows an unusually-strong desire to swim, is that an aberration from its nature, or the earliest signs of mutation that will eventually give rise to a new, aquatic variety of that animal? How could you tell the difference?

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    8. ficino4mlOctober 10, 2026 at 12:34 PM

      @Norm: you wrote "This is just what is natural to us given the kind of beings we are.
      As such it just logically follows that we ought"

      Your sentence, which I interrupted after "ought," seems to require many contentious premises in order to get the "logically follows" part. I'm sure you're aware of this. I think EXE and others are arguing that to make claims about nature's presenting "oughts" for us is to attach a normativity to things and processes that don't seem to be governed by conscious intention.

      I

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    9. NormOctober 10, 2026 at 3:36 PM

      Hi EXE

      Well I would say couple of things in response first, We can distinguish between the existence of a thing and the kind of thing it is for , the famous example is that if I explain two you the essences of a human, a dinosaur and a unicorn, just from knowing the kinds of things they are you wouldn't be able to tell which one actually exists , which one is extinct and which one is imaginary.

      So it is a valid distinction , there are good reasons further more to think it is a real distinction and not just a logical one because of the way in which scientific experimentation is carried out, the usual naive assumption is that is carried out through trial and error, but in most cases, a single experiment under extremely controlled conditions is enough, extremely controlled conditions is a key term because we usually want to find out how the object of experimentation would behave in the absence of interfering factors which is precisely what one would do if they were hunting for objective natures of things, it's the best explanation of why we do it under such controlled circumstances, that the thing really does have an objective nature that can be discovered and understood.

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    10. NormOctober 10, 2026 at 3:36 PM

      Now to answer the first part of your questions,

      "How do we know that our designation of something as being part of something's natural perfection represents an objective reality rather than merely being a projection of our human preferences onto nature? "

      I don't know if you are pressuppusing some kind of Kantian Epistemology but in general I don't think it flies because it would ultimately be subversive of itself and reason itself including empirical observation given PSR.

      Now assuming you aren't pressuppusing such an epistemology,

      I don't see why we can't logically say that a plant which is alive, growing and functioning properly is a good instance of it's kind.

      And that a plant which is withering and dying is a bad instance of it's kind. The various parts of the plant are not functioning in the way they are supposed to.

      Infact the whole field of biology including your example cannot do without making use of such intentional notions, that is why if a particular plant is withering you call the botonist to see if anything can be done to "improve it" which presupposes there is a way certain organs are supposed to be acting but they aren't.

      Certain features that you mentioned like color and shape are particular features of plants but it is possible to have features that are not essential for the ordinary function of the plant.

      That Biology is impossible to do with the use of such teleological notions is even acknowledged by atheists like Alex Rosenberg, who try to save the field of biology and resist the teleological notions by trying to adopt a middle ground, but even that attempt couldn't avoid making use of the concept of "program" which is kind of like sneaking in the teleological features from the back or rather quite openly from there front.

      Maybe you may be willing to bite the bullet and do away with the field of biology out of a commitment to radical eliminativism, but radical eliminativism as a theory is just incoherent given that we can't escape the notions of truth , validity.

      As such there is no reason to doubt that these biological phenomena like plants do have ends towards which they are oriented and the degree to which they fulfill those ends can be objectively measured as good or bad unless you have other motivated reasons.

      2

      To your second points

      [A]n atom smasher can transform (samples of) lead into (samples of) gold. However, this does not undermine the idea that the chemical elements have immutable essences.

      A dead plant eventually becoming soil

      That another essence can arise from a particular essence is just not controversial.

      Infact in your example, it would be that given the kind of thing it currently is, that behaviour is not ideal, indeed the only way you would even be able to detect and aberation is if you presupposes that there is a certain way it is supposed to act given the kind of thing it is (nature).And in that example you shared the animal is still that kind of thing, hence we can even say "aberation". And the fact that it is manifesting signs of losing it's nature and becoming another thing is not really counteractive to the point I am making, because things can lose their natures,

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    11. EXEOctober 11, 2026 at 10:14 AM

      Hey Anon, cool to finally talk to you.

      As for philosophy, well, I don't know exactly where I land. Most modern-day naturalists would call themselves Physicalists rather than Materialists per se - that means they believe that only natural, physical things exist, but this includes more than ordinary matter. Energy, quantum fields, spacetime, physical laws, etc, are thus "physical" but not "material". Of course, we are nowhere near a complete understanding of the Universe, and there's also the fact that there might just be a ceiling on how much of the Universe we're capable of understanding, even if we were as smart as we possibly could be. So perhaps some sort of cosmic creator does exist somewhere, though if they do, they seem pretty apathetic towards our existence. There are so many ways in which the Universe could be both better and worse that it's hard to believe any creator god would be either good or evil.

      However, I don't agree with you as regards the horror of being "aimless beasts". I've felt that fear before, but I don't anymore. So what if there turns out to be no ultimate purpose to life? No meaning engraved in the fabric of spacetime? It might seem a bit trite to say "make your own meaning", but we actually do that all the time already. Every single day there are things that you care about, and you act on those desires accordingly. This is true even if you know the thing "ultimately doesn't matter". Does it matter if your favorite football team wins the Super Bowl? Probably not, in the grand scheme of things. Yet who would call you stupid for being happy about that? A similar point applies to the fact that pleasure must be temporary - your children grow up, and thus the joy you feel in, say, their early years (the first words, steps, going to school for the first time, etc) is transitory. It happens once and then never again, and this is true even if you believe in eternal life (I've never met anyone who thought kids would remain kids in the afterlife). Yet it would be ridiculous to claim that you shouldn't care about or enjoy those moments as a parent, that they "don't matter". If indeed I die and am dead forever, well, that kind of sucks, but that doesn't mean that I should spend the time I have here moping about it. The joys of life remain even if they must inevitably end someday. Living a good life is a matter of how you choose to spend the time you have. I want to help others and leave the world a better place than I left it, and that help, the goodness and joy that it creates in myself and others, is real. It doesn't matter if everyone I ever help will eventually die and become nothing, that good still existed, and that was a good thing to experience.

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    12. AnonymousOctober 12, 2026 at 2:24 AM

      Hey Exe, when I say “aimless beasts” I’m talking about our constitutive ability to choose, to think, to decide not about the universe having a meaning as such.

      I agree wth you. However, the logical end of materialism /physicalism *as currently theorized* is that we cannot sensibly do what you suggested.

      Physicalism (current), as it relates to us, and life in general, makes our actual experience an impossibility so I reject it, as do I reject the morally outrageous world of your everyday conservative. It is what it is.

      It is not a logical impossibility that there is nothing after AND we are capable of making choices. So, I don’t fall to narcissism in this ( that is not to say I have not dreaded the void; I have and have written about it). So, ultimately, I’m not in disagreement you. I just have the position that our experience of choice and the actuality of it is a real occurrence in Nature and any ontology that makes it ephemeral, fake, or whatever should be rejected. This rejection, for me, does not entail an affirmation of any religion. We’d have to have a proper philosophical conversation about this when not warring with Christian conservatives. Just imagine a lively debate about the philosophy of mind w/o the baggage of religion - I like to philosophize in that space

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    13. Step2October 12, 2026 at 11:07 AM

      Hi Anon,
      It seems like you are saying if the inner subjective experience is a unique (analog) program grasped from the inside then it should be rejected as an illusion. I believe the phrase goes “use your illusion”. Of course navigational choices will affect the objective world in various ways, even when the goal is purely imaginary, and if that makes it illogical then it only means there is yet another instance where logic breaks down. If you reject reductionism, which in my opinion is absolutely justified, you’ve already accepted there are logical gaps in how disparate elements and forces combine into a holistic picture.

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    14. AnonymousOctober 12, 2026 at 5:27 PM

      I don’t understand, Step2. I’m absolutely not saying the first sentence. It is not an illusion and in so far as any ontology *concludes* or leads to this conclusion, that ontology or theory must be rejected. My *personal* view on this does not lead me to a religious route.

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    15. EXEOctober 13, 2026 at 1:28 PM

      Norm

      I'll separate my response into two posts, for clarity's sake:

      First, I'm not presupposing any kind of epistemology, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at by bringing up Kant.

      "I don't see why we can't logically say that a plant which is alive, growing and functioning properly is a good instance of it's kind.

      And that a plant which is withering and dying is a bad instance of it's kind. The various parts of the plant are not functioning in the way they are supposed to. "

      This may be intuitive, but it's not actually very helpful. You can't determine whether a plant is "functioning properly" unless you can tell that it's fulfilling its nature - which means you'd need to already know what its nature was. That'd be circular. I suggest that the intuitive "healthy plant good, withered plant bad" feeling that you're referring to is actually just an evolutionary trait, a projection of our own interests onto reality. We, as animals, are interested in healthy plants because they are useful or pleasant to us (for food, for scent, for aesthetic pleasure, etc), and we find withered plants useless, ugly, etc.

      The closest you've come to providing a definition for an organism's purpose/nature seems to boil down to "survival", since your main example of an organism "failing" to adhere to its nature is a plant withering. But not only does this seem rather Darwinian, it's also kind of...uninformative? "What behavior is Natural for a sunflower?" "Whatever helps it survive."
      "What behavior is Natural for a Venus Flytrap?"
      "Whatever helps it survive"
      "What behavior is Natural for a lion?"
      "Whatever helps it survive"

      Am I misunderstanding something? I just don't see anything informative in your description.

      Furthermore, it gets really complicated by things like monocarpic or semelparous plants, which die immediately after reproduction (or even in the process of doing so). The Agave plant spends up to a century gathering energy and growing only to spend it all shooting up a central "death bloom", scattering seeds, and then dying. Bamboo does something similar, except co-ordinated with other neighboring plants. Is the proper Nature of these plants to die, even though they could keep going for centuries?

      Sure, it's difficult to divorce biology from teleological language, but that's a thin reed to hold onto. It's just much easier to say "the lungs are for breathing" than to say "the lungs exchange oxygen between the body and environment, animals whose lungs exchange oxygen with little loss survive much better than those whose lungs do so with much loss or not at all, and thus outcompete them over time".

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    16. EXEOctober 13, 2026 at 1:57 PM

      Norm 2

      You're ignoring a key aspect of your own philosophy. For Aquinas, for one substance to become another requires substantial change, not merely accidental. In your examples, he might allow for the possibility that the substantial form of lead in a sample of prime matter could be changed into the substantial form of gold, via the substantial change of alchemy or whatever. He conceived of decomposition as the loss of one substantial form and its replacement by others (those of a corpse and all its byproducts), once again brought about by the substantial change of death. He believed that individual members of species could undergo substantial change. But he did NOT believe that an entire species could undergo substantial change (unless it were entirely wiped out, I guess). It's a general principle of Thomism that an effect cannot be greater than its cause, and gradual mutation and differentiation is very clearly an example of an accidental change. One bird, by chance, happens to be born with a beak that's a little thicker and better at cracking nuts. This is clearly an accidental change, it's the same species of bird just with a minor variation in beak shape and size. Surely you wouldn't say that a human born with an atypically long nose was a new species? But Darwin's great discovery was that yes, with enough time, and enough alterations, these small accidental changes *can* add up to a brand new species. An accumulation of changes in accidental form eventually gives rise to a new substance - but on Aquinas' metaphysics, this should be impossible.

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    17. NormOctober 15, 2026 at 2:48 AM



      On your remarks on substantial change , I don't think you are reading it quite right and I am going to draw verbatim from Prof Feser here,

      Aquinas is his understanding of human embryonic development. He supposed that the process begins with a vegetative form of life, which gives way to a sensory or animal form of life, which in turn gives way to a rational or human form of life. (Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles II.89.11.) Here too he was simply mistaken scientifically. (Cf. Haldane and Lee 2003.)

      But it does imply that the kind of change you are talking about is not ruled out on an Aristotelian view

      The Aristotelian could argue that even transformations between philosophical species are naturally possible and therefore would not require special divine action. On this view, even the most complex kinds of sensory or animal life are contained at least virtually in the simplest kind of vegetative life – and indeed, contained virtually even in the simplest inanimate substances.

      The idea here would be that the nature of the elementary kinds of inanimate matter is such that, when they exercise their causal powers in concert in the right sort of way, the eventual result will be simple kinds of vegetative organic substances; and that the nature of these simplest vegetative substances is such that, when they together with the inorganic substances that make up their environment all exercise their causal powers in concert in the right sort of way, the eventual result will be simple kinds of sensory or animal substances. The properties and causal powers of the simplest inorganic substances are on this view naturally sufficient to generate this outcome, just as purely natural processes can produce water out of hydrogen and oxygen and lead out of uranium.

      So whatever accidental processes that lead to the change you are describing could just be the excercise of such causal powers just as mentioned above purely natural processes can produce water out of hydrogen and oxygen and lead out of uranium.

      In any case, telelologu seems to be the only for the. process of evolution and natural selection to overcome the indeterminacy problem.

      As secular philosophers like Fodor have pointed out natural selection as it is usually conceived tends to suffer from the "Select For" problem that is, for example why do we say that the frog evolved to catch flies, instead of small moving things.

      You can't account for it in terms of counterfactuals because natural selection being a mindless process doesn't know those counterfactual conditions.

      Natural selection cannot distinguish the trait that causes reproductive success from the trait that is merely correlated with what causes it.

      And moreover.Darwin himself often used language which was close to a teleological description if not teleological.

      As James Lennox notes,

      "Selection explanations are inherently teleological, in the sense that a value consequence (Darwin most often uses the term ‘advantage’) of a trait explains its increase, or presence, in a population… Darwin essentially re-invented teleology… The concept of selection permits the extension of the teleology of domestic breeding into the natural domain, without the need of conscious design. As in domestic selection, the good served by a variation continues to be causally relevant to its increasing frequency, or continued presence, in a population – but the causal mechanism, and the locus of goodness, shifts. (1993, pp. 410 and 4)"

      So the claim you made with regards to the kind of changes doesn't hold as there is nothing per se anti Aristotelian about the accumulation of per se changes giving rise to such substances and more fundamentally evolution itself has to make use of teleological notions in order to remain coherent.

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    18. EXEOctober 15, 2026 at 11:51 AM

      Norm,

      Hmm. OK, as far as I can tell, what you're putting forward is some kind of Revised Aristotelian view that attempts to harmonize Evolution with its metaphysics. I'll be honest, I don't know if this would work or not, but I'm willing to allow that it might be logically coherent. I know most Thomists do try this (if only because they really want to avoid Creationism), though some, like Fr. Michael Chaberek, vehemently oppose such fusions. Ultimately, though, I don't know why you would be motivated to adopt such a belief system, unless you were committed to preserving Thomism. It certainly doesn't seem to be a theory with good explanatory power of its own, it seems more like a desperate attempt to rescue Thomism, to patch leaks in the proverbial hull. I should say, though, that Aquinas' thoughts about embryonic development (right or wrong) don't seem like a good example here. He clearly thinks of each stage of development as a new substantial change, rather than merely an accidental one. An entirely new kind of soul is given to the child at each step. Unless you're willing to accept that each and every single mutation, however slight, produces a new species, that doesn't seem to be what's happening at the level of Adaptation.

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    19. NormOctober 16, 2026 at 11:47 PM

      Hello EXE

      Thanks for your kind reply, Well I wouldn't call it motivated , because as pointed out Natural Selection as a theory purports to explain how the traits were selected for, but given the indeterminacy problem laid out above, on the standard understanding there couldn't be any fact of the matter.

      In this regard, a teleological explanation gives more bearing to the theory.

      So it would actually be the Aristotelian notions that would be patching the leak in the naturalist theory by helping to explain why is it this particular thing rather then this correlated thing (To explain why is it the frogs ancestors evolved to catch flies and not small moving things)

      "Unless you're willing to accept that each and every single mutation, however slight, produces a new species"

      If the change is so slight that it amounts to a change between subspecies (let's say between one variety of cockroach and another), that's not really a problem for the aristotelian.

      What is often considered more difficult to account for is the jump from inanimate matter to vegetative matter (plants) to animate matter (sensory animals).

      And my point was that, it is not impossible given the Aristotelian concept of virtual powers, (The way in which it is said that hydrogen and water is said to exist virtually in Water).

      Now I will admit that pointing outwhat exactly are the virtual constituents in inanimate matter that allow for it to become vegetative matter is a bit of a task but suffices to say for now that evolving from inanimate matter is not at odds with Aristotelianism per se.

      And given that as mentioned above it helps to ground the explainability of natural selection mentioned above it is not motivated.

      Although you might find some different way to try and solve the inderterminancy problem, I don't think there is but you seem like one who is genuinely in pursuit of the good and true, so I wish you well in your investigations.


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  13. AnonymousOctober 7, 2026 at 11:48 AM

    Dr. Feser,

    Thanks for the review! I had just started Kingsworth's book, so this is good timing for me. I'm keen now on picking up Quay's.

    Have you read Lewis' The Abolition of Man or his Space Trilogy? The final book of that trilogy is basically his Abolition of Man in novel form, and he speaks to a lot of these same issues. I always thought Abolition was brilliant and have re-read it a few times.

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  14. AnonymousOctober 7, 2026 at 12:19 PM

    I read the article. Ed Feser thinks birth control is transhumanist and a threat to humanity! Even in deep red Alabama where I live, which is Southern Baptist conservative, you won't find anyone who believes that.

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    1. AnonymousOctober 7, 2026 at 4:32 PM

      Because they’re Baptists.

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    2. MichaelOctober 8, 2026 at 11:47 AM

      He is right regardless of what anyone thinks. If a woman can take a bc pill not to fix something that is broken, but to reshape her body in accordance with her desires, it's hard to argue that a man also can't take a HRT pill to reshape his body in accordance with desire. The pill is a transhumanist technology because it shifts the focus of medicine from healing something wrong to altering a normal body in accordance with personal desire.

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    3. AnonymousOctober 8, 2026 at 12:03 PM

      That makes no sense.

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    4. ficino4mlOctober 9, 2026 at 8:20 AM

      @Michael: um, isn't the person altering a normal body in accordance with personal desire a human? I want to convert to Islam or Judaism so I get circumcised-- I'm not human now? We alter "normal" bodies all the time. So what? Musonius Rufus said natural law dictates men shouldn't shave their beards. I guess the Popes going back centuries were using transhumanist technologies and therefore breaking natural law.

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    5. AnonymousOctober 9, 2026 at 10:49 AM

      A lot of firefighters and cops are on HRT. And of course, Pete Hegseth wants our troops on it too.

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    6. EXEOctober 10, 2026 at 3:08 AM

      The entire idea that there are "normative" bodies is the problem to begin with. Why should anyone have to simply settle for the body that blind Nature provided them with? It might be difficult to understand for someone who's never felt uncomfortable with their body on a fundamental level, but for some people, asking them to just go with that is placing an immeasurable burden on their backs. Gender dysphoria, for instance, is a very real phenomenon, and it RUINS lives. HRT improves the lives and wellbeing of those with gender dysphoria so much that, if there were an antidepressant that were equally effective, it would be a miracle drug.

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    7. AnymouseOctober 14, 2026 at 11:36 AM

      The entire idea that there are "normative" bodies is the problem to begin with.

      The entire idea that there's "bodies" is the problem to begin with. Science has told us that in reality there's only fields and waves. subject to probabilities. There's no body, no bodily beings, no self, no free will, no meaning to any so-called categories like "human" or "just" or "good". No meaning to laws, to philosophy, to science, to "making decisions". It's all been eliminated by science.

      Or: not.

      Delete
    8. EXEOctober 15, 2026 at 10:49 AM

      Anymouse,

      I don't see how your comment is saying anything meaningful. If it's some attempt at a reductio of my position, then it doesn't work. If it's just an attempt at cheap mockery, then at least learn to be funny.

      Delete
  15. Vini TadeoOctober 7, 2026 at 4:00 PM

    While the terms like “The Machine” or “the new Tower of Babel” are very useful, the phenomena also deserves being called for what it also is: the modern roman Pantheon. Here, in a single temple of communion—the internet itself—the modern gods are gathered and adored: envy, pornography, opulence, hedonism, wrath (manifest in the endless, futile quarrels of online discourse), and countless others who populate this vast pantheon. The faithful assemble in one place to worship them all—while, tragically, turning their backs on the God of all gods.

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  16. TonyOctober 7, 2026 at 7:29 PM

    I have no doubt that AI - however "intelligent" they might become - need to be restrained to types and tasks that advance human good, and prevented from unrestrained kinds and behaviors that nobody controls or that gravely damage societies. In a sense, this aspiration should be uncontroversial.

    What I am concerned with is this: the people who are pushing for there to be rules and constraints on AI seem to either be unaware, or uncaring, that no matter how much they invoke social benefit to justify such constraints, there is (almost certainly) some large number of persons or country or non-state actors who don't give a sh*t about rules, and is perfectly willing to ignore them for whatever goals they have in mind (and will employ AI to hide / escape detection). And even within the realm of those who can be convinced to accept that AI needs constraints, it is far from clear that there is even a remote chance that there will come to be a generally accepted paradigm for what goals or what methods are out-of-bounds. And for what methods to shut down: how can you foreclose on a "bad" model when the next input to their favorite AI is "how to avoid that rule and still get the desired goal". And it is (at least for now) far less than obvious what authority would be employed to enforce any agreed-upon constraints. (I hate the idea of Big Corp being in charge. But I fail to see how Big Government is likely to be any better - especially because it's so incestuous with Big Corp anyway. Who will police the policemen, hmmm? And how will any government larger than town hall be convinced to NOT use AI to further its own (good?) agenda (i.e. to bend the rules in their favor)?)

    It's not whether restraints are a good idea, it's whether there's even a remote chance that wholesome restraints would be successfully designed / emplaced / enforced. I see no plausible prospect of it.

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    Replies
    1. Step2October 8, 2026 at 8:27 AM

      Tony,
      These companies keep rushing at breakneck speed for ASI which is not a tool and is functionally an adversary to humanity even if it provides a temporary advantage to one tribe (i.e. divide and conquer). Everyone already understands the need for regulation of dangerous and potentially dangerous items for public safety. The notion that another nation or group creating a "better" WMD means we can't have government restrictions and safeguards on our own is nonsensical.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousOctober 8, 2026 at 11:44 PM

      Tony, the “other country” is the United States. The boogieman is you, not China, not Russia, nor Iran or whatever ‘enemy’ you conjure up to justify the evil you do elsewhere and coming full steam here. A people so thoroughly propagandized they look at their mirror reflection and call it something else. Ridiculous.

      Delete
    3. TonyOctober 9, 2026 at 2:20 PM

      Tony, the “other country” is the United States. The boogieman is you, not China, not Russia, nor Iran or whatever ‘enemy’ you conjure up

      Whatever the heck made you imagine I was excluding the US from my critique? I said nothing of the sort.

      Delete
    4. TonyOctober 14, 2026 at 11:28 AM

      The notion that another nation or group creating a "better" WMD means we can't have government restrictions and safeguards on our own is nonsensical.

      Step2, I agree that lots of people agree on the need for boundaries - and I'm one of them. What I am suggesting is that getting useful boundaries that are actually doing the job is so difficult as to be (highly) doubtful there's much point. Unlike nuclear weaponry, it's not at all difficult to envision an independent country or company (or even rich individual) to gin up a "rogue" AI for whatever purposes he has in mind, without being easily found. And unlike chemical WMD, it's not hard to imagine a highly lucrative benefit from keeping a tame AI that isn't subject to some official set of boundaries. In addition, while seeking and blocking rogue AI by human effort might need to be at least tried, it seems likely that the best ways to both find and "disarm" rogue AIs probably would be to use other AI trained to the task, that itself constitutes risks to the paradigm of constrained AI.

      It would be beneficial to have boundaries that are recognized by all civilized parties, and only the rogues like North Korea, Al Qaeda, etc violating them. But given the (probable) ease of quietly keeping a rogue AI from prying eyes, how likely is it that "all civilized parties" will follow the rules? And if half of all large corps have secret AIs "on staff" helping them out, is there really much point to the rest of us keeping the rules? (Indeed, there is likely to be both steep difficulty in defining what's out-of-bounds, and in preventing the use of AI to help mask the AI from looking like it violates the definition.)

      Delete
  17. TonyOctober 7, 2026 at 8:06 PM

    As Quay, a former editor of The Week and The Daily Caller, argues in The Transhumanist Temptation, the transgender phenomenon reflects an essentially transhumanist mindset, but so too does the prevalence of birth control pills, in vitro fertilization, and dramatic body modification through cosmetic surgery. If the latter practices seem to many today to be less extreme than the former, that is because the basic presupposition of transhumanism—that there are no ends or purposes to which we are directed by nature, so that the only ends we need conform ourselves to are those we choose ourselves—has thoroughly permeated the modern Western mind. Transgenderism simply follows out its radical implications more consistently.

    I don't find this all that convincing. Sure, there's SOME commonality between transhumanist ideology and the choice to contracept, but frankly, there SOME commonality between EVERY disordered human behavior and every other - they all deny human nature in some sense.

    So what!

    To deny that X particular good is an essential aspect of the workings out of "rational animal" is not to deny that there IS an essential nature of men. People didn't buy into contraception by literally thinking "I don't have any nature so anything I want is "good for me". BS. That was far too far out for the housewife of the 1960s and 70s - they just were convinced to put blinders on for ONE aspect of human nature, not to deny it altogether. And it doesn't suffice to point to demons as being behind it all: I believe they are indeed working back behind the scenes, but they do it varyingly in various epochs, they don't have to have a SINGLE end goal in mind, since wreckovation is the point, not building something. Anything that wrecks humans works for their purposes.

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  18. TalmidOctober 7, 2026 at 10:15 PM

    Interesting review. It is interesting how a lot of assumptions are not perceived at all by most people, even ones in power.

    It makes me wonder how AI would be treated in a society were a non-physicalist view were common in the elite. Most people i see tend to treat it as just a tool.

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  19. NormOctober 8, 2026 at 10:07 AM

    Hey Prof

    Apparently the White House considers you to be "The Enemy" , lol.

    https://x.com/disclosetv/status/2108232712469561827

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    1. Edward FeserOctober 8, 2026 at 10:21 AM

      Wow, he's insane.

      Delete
    2. NormOctober 8, 2026 at 8:28 PM

      Prof

      Don't you think that the this AI pact you signed is a bit excessive ?

      Atleast I don't see anything intrinsically evil with using AI in that way.

      It's a potent and dangerous tool for sure.

      But can be used responsibly.

      I am not advocating catholic AI slop.

      If it's just a tool though, for example Do you think it's necessary, if a scientist conducts an experiment, and then prompts AI to see what inferences can be drawn from the results, and AI gives some interesting inference that turns out to be true after being better by the scientist himself, does the scientist have to report "I used AI to draw this particular inference" in your opinion ? Given that AI and LLMs specifically just predict the next word, it doesn't seem necessary to mention that, it would be assumed that you verified the inference. Similarly even if AI was used to create the literature reviewcof the paper and other parts, as long as you are at the helm of it and ensuring that it is working according to how you would write it. Is it sinful if one omits to mention that AI was used any more then any other tool ? In reality isn't it us just thinking with the help of AI S you would put it

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    3. English CatholicOctober 9, 2026 at 7:18 AM

      > Don't you think that the this AI pact you signed is a bit excessive ?

      If anyone's interested in the content of the pledge:

      https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/pledge-against-ai-catholic-content-and-text-paacct/

      I think it's pretty sound. As the saying (now) goes: if you didn't write it, I'm not going to read it. And using AI to generate holy images is horrible (although if I were feeling provocative, I'd say it's only slightly worse than The Chosen).

      Delete
    4. TonyOctober 11, 2026 at 8:53 PM

      Regarding AI for Catholic content: I don't like the idea of AI produced image of Christ or the saints, but I don't mind the use of AI to produce aspects of backgrounds to movie scenes: CGI was around quite a while ago, and while it got a bad rap initially, it's a lot better now and it's use is generally accepted for things like stunts and otherwise impossible shots. And now AI is baked into CGI frameworks. So, if someone is making a movie of a saint who pulling some weird miracle, (say, Moses parting the Red Sea) and they use AI enhanced CGI, that doesn't seem totally unacceptable.

      And that sets the sorites problem: it seems there's a continuum running from "just a tiny bit" to "mostly by machine" and it's hard to state a principle that tells where the line must be drawn. But equally, it's hard to state a principle that establishes definitively that not even a little bit of assistance is OK.

      I think that the essence of the issue is who is doing the actual thinking, and whose mind is the creator of the content. Suppose you were to give an AI a detailed outline of an essay and 200 of your prior essays, and told it to follow the outline and your style. And then you edited its output heavily, changing words, re-writing whole sentences, re-arranging some of the sentence orders, etc, and in general you review and either change or approve every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph on the page. I have a hard time calling foul on this as something other than "your work." (Mind you, I have not tried this myself, and my limited dealings don't suggest they would do a GOOD job of it, but my contact has been with the presumably low-budget AIs available for free: I assume the ones costing money would be better.)

      Delete
  20. EXEOctober 10, 2026 at 2:08 AM

    Say what you want about Biden (and I have much to criticize), but he was never anywhere near this bad.

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  21. EXEOctober 10, 2026 at 3:41 AM

    I'd also like to take a shot at Feser's comment about transgenderism being connected to transhumanism. First, I'm pretty sure most people would reject this connection - usually transhumanism is considered the artificial improvement of the human body *beyond* any natural ability.

    Secondly, even if we do go with your definition, what's the problem, exactly? Why shouldn't people be free to modify their bodies in any way that makes them happy? Why is settling and being content with one's lot in life virtuous? Is not striving for better, for control over one's circumstances, not the most quintessentially human thing there is? If it weren't for that hunger for more, we would still be living in caves, or in the treetops. I know Catholics love their "Carrying the Cross" rhetoric, but I find this nothing more than a strange obsession with suffering and death. That whole shtick is far more "Death Cult"-coded than anything in Modernity ever could be.

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    1. AnonymousOctober 10, 2026 at 1:10 PM

      EXE, Are you trans?

      Delete
    2. EXEOctober 13, 2026 at 12:40 PM

      Anon, are you gay? Since it's apparently "ask strangers inappropriate questions" Day.

      Delete
    3. ficino4mlOctober 14, 2026 at 9:05 AM

      Anon and EXE: are you guys Los Angeles Dodgers fans? If not, sod off, you blighters! /s (:

      Delete
  22. a.morphousOctober 10, 2026 at 10:52 AM

    Thanks for making your review available.

    I am confused by your position on transgenderism, however. I am an anti-essentialist, I think it's great that we have managed to discard such an obsolete idea. But transgenderism is essentialist at its core! The transgender person simply believes that their gender essence doesn't match the physical body they have. It's usually expressed in those explicit terms.

    This has always made me feel that transgenderism is kind of reactionary; it reinforces traditional gender roles rather than smashing them.

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    Replies
    1. EXEOctober 12, 2026 at 3:28 PM

      This is only true of some, and I would argue the minority position. Very few trans folk believe in a strict gender binary. It's far more common to regard the entire idea as nonsense, at least among those who accept nonbinary and agender folk.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousOctober 13, 2026 at 2:22 PM

      No, a.morphous's point is that most still claim that there IS such a thing as "gender" and that it resides in them, most also saying it resides "innately" in the sense that they didn't pick it and they can't change it at will, they discover it within them (though for some they may say the discovery evolves over time, yet their choice is not driving it.)

      All you gain by suggesting that there's nonbinary and agender folk is more categories of given natures, not "there's no such thing as natures to begin with."

      Delete
    3. grodriguesOctober 13, 2026 at 3:53 PM

      @a.morphous:

      "But transgenderism is essentialist at its core! The transgender person simply believes that their gender essence doesn't match the physical body they have. It's usually expressed in those explicit terms."

      My guess is, and this is just a guess, they intuit, quite rightly in my opinion, that their claims will deflate to an absolute nothing if taking a non-essentialist view of sex.

      Of course on the flip side, and to use your formulation, they have to decouple "gender essence" from "physical body", with the former being prior in an ontological, if not temporal, sense to the latter. Which raises all sorts of problems, especially intractable if you are also a physicalist. Transgenderism as a recapitulation of Origen's heresy on the pre-existence of souls is an apt commentary on it. "This has occured once and will occur again, said Euphorbius" ...

      Delete
    4. TalmidOctober 13, 2026 at 9:00 PM

      @EXE

      I don't think morphous is arguing than the average trans people believe in than, but that it is what they would need to be the case to the concept to work.

      He seems to not be a essencialist and i did see non-essencialists arguing against the trans concept by using this idea, so it makes sense.

      Feminists they were, i believe. To be fair this was a popular discussion several years ago, so i have no idea if it tracks out what any group of feminists think, but it could explain the comment here.

      Delete
    5. EXEOctober 14, 2026 at 10:47 AM

      Talmid,

      I believe you're referring to Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, better known as TERFs. Basically, transphobic feminists. JK Rowling is probably the most infamous example of such. And no, I really don't see your interpretation of morphous' comment making any sense. Why is it the case that trans folk would "need" essentialism for their beliefs to make sense? The standard trans view on gender is that it's a social construct. Or, to be more specific, we have certain arbitrary groupings of traits, behaviors, appearances, clothes, etc, which we classify as "manlike" and others which we classify as "womanlike". These classifications are arbitrary; they are different across time and cultures; and there is no reason why they should be one way rather than the other. "Male" and "Female" are biological categories, "Man" and "Woman" are social constructs (a lot of Conservatives seem to think that pro-trans folk deny the reality of biology - we don't, we simply acknowledge that it shouldn't matter to one's identity. Nobody, but nobody, claims that trans women have wombs, for instance. We just don't think that matters to being a woman or not). Given the fact that they are in fact socially constructed, there is no reason why they ought to be any particular way rather than another. Thus, everyone should be free to decide their own gender and their own expression of that gender. Being biologically male should not mean that you can't wear dresses, paint your nails, wear your hair long, identify as a man, woman, neither, both, or what-have-you. Being biologically female shouldn't mean that you can't wear pants, swear, work steel, have a hairy chest, etc, identify as a man, woman, neither, both, or what-have-you. It goes beyond clothing and dress, too - with hormones, one can alter their body to have an appearance they find more satisfying.

      Delete
    6. AnonymousOctober 14, 2026 at 4:58 PM

      TO Rodrigues: Trans people, like most people throughout history, (Including Catholics) rarely if ever think about "pre existence of souls", know or have ever encountered such a word as "ontological", or "essence" in the philosophical sense, and have never heard words like "essentialist", "Nominalism" "Cartesian Dualism" "Hylomorphism" etc. since these terms are not of importance in most Catholics or anyone else's day to day life. People who are trans are not rejecting any philosophical views, they've never even heard of them. They simply have an irremovable, unalterable innate need to be referred to by a pronoun that is traditionally not grammatically suited to their sex, and possibly may need sex reassignment surgery in order to avoid suicide or suicidal thoughts/make life worthwhile.

      Delete
    7. grodriguesOctober 15, 2026 at 3:52 AM

      @Anonymous:

      "They simply have an irremovable, unalterable innate need to be referred to by a pronoun that is traditionally not grammatically suited to their sex, and possibly may need sex reassignment surgery in order to avoid suicide or suicidal thoughts/make life worthwhile."

      What they think they are doing, or what they present themselves as doing, is completely irrelevant to my point, which is an analysis of the underlying ideas.

      And I should add that you are presuming a lot, i. e. they lack the self-awareness of understanding the logical implications of their position. Even if it is true (and maybe it is, I don't know), it is incumbent on me to extend them the grace of taking what they say seriously.

      Delete
    8. TalmidOctober 15, 2026 at 10:06 PM

      @EXE

      Yea! I heard of these feminists before, they are probably what i saw. As you explained, the average feminist point of view can account pretty well for the acceptance of trans people, so the TERFs are impopular.

      What i see on most discussions and what morphos' seems to be trying to get at is that the average person tends to have a very rigid view of what is a man and what is a woman, confusing these with our current western notions. When this person sees someone who is biologically male and who demands recognition as a woman because they want to appear like and act like what is understood as a woman them this person notion than a woman is what society says can be strenghtened.

      Notice that my comments are mostly descriptive, i try to describe what i take to be morphous' position and also what i do see with the average person understanding of transexuality. The inference the person does on my example is mistaken, but it seems to happen.

      Sadly, people on my home state and on closer states elected extreme-right politicians* than do openly focus on attacking trans people, so i see sometimes these "debates" or talking points using similar logic to reforce rigid gender binaries.


      *know your country extreme-right? These losers are a copy, they love you guys decadent republican elite

      Delete
    9. EXEOctober 16, 2026 at 7:58 AM

      Talmid,

      OK, actually, you have a point. Yes, there is some risk that trans activism *could* lead to a reinforcement of the gender binary, if it's done in specific ways. My own position is that it would be nice to abolish the gender binary entirely, but that is unfeasible in the short or medium term. Social constructs can be changed by human will, but not by an individual will. If the majority of people in your society say "woman is when XYZ", then that becomes the social reality. And no matter what, the traditional concepts of gender are likely to still "work" for a lot of people, so it's not like those need to be *destroyed*. What needs to be destroyed is the idea that these concepts are the *only valid ways of being*. This is starting already, actually - most of the trans folk I know tend to prefer "masc<->femme" as terms rather than "man<->woman" or "male<->female". The "traditional" ideal is masc males and femme females, but the world I'd like to see is one where neither males in dresses and makeup nor females with muscles and broad shoulders are seen as "wrong".

      Delete
    10. TalmidOctober 16, 2026 at 7:19 PM

      @EXE

      I admit that it is interesting how well the idea of abolishing the gender binary could work. Biological sex do tend to set people apart, giving especific conditions and limitations on most people etc. As you mentioned, if it works for most people them the binary will continue to be.

      The mas/femme duality perhaps could be a way to change things, but until we can do what transhumanists aim to do i guess that our biology will be a guide to most people. Even the average progressist tends to "obey" it personally.

      I do defend a more traditional view on biological sex, but any historical concept of male or female is mostly tied to material and social realities, so what exactly they say is a bit trick. What we take as a man or as a woman is mostly social, i admit.

      Of course, people who do not feel like part of the binary need to be able to do so. Several older societies seemed able to acomodate these persons, so we should be capable too.

      Today i saw a diocese here repudiating the death of a trans person than happened a few days ago and i was quite happy for seeing it, especially because i could saw no hate speech on the comments. We can do it.

      Delete
    11. EXEOctober 17, 2026 at 5:08 PM

      Talmid,

      Thank you. This is a genuinely inspiring comment and it's good to hear. A lot of the evils in our society are caused by people insisting on putting others into rigid boxes and denying the reality of, or pathologising, any deviance from that standard. My personal belief is that the reality of human experience is so much wider than our traditional framings allow for. There are probably ways of being that are unknown to the vast majority of people, including many of the people who actually are that way. See the example of how many people don't know they're autistic for years, and who just assume that they're "broken" or "stupid" or "lazy" instead. There may well be entire new modes of existence that people either keep to themselves, or rationalize away without fully realizing they experience them, or simply never realize that their experience isn't normal (see the people with aphantasia who spend years thinking that "picturing something in your head" is just a metaphor, because they physically cannot do it).

      As regards biological sex, I think I'd say that it's more like a bimodal distribution than a binary. Or in other words, it's a spectrum that clusters around two specific poles, what are traditionally called male and female. The vast majority of people fit into one of these two categories, but not all of them. Intersex people are one kind of exception. Another is things like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome - as far as I understand it, all fetuses begin with a body plan that we would refer to as "female", regardless of whether they have XX or XY chromosomes. What transforms them into what we would call a "male" body plan is exposure to androgens, such as testosterone, in the womb. However, occasionally, the fetus will simply be insensitive to the testosterone, and the signal won't get send. In this case, the person born will have XY chromosomes and be "biologically male", but will look exactly like a woman on the outside, with the only difference being that they do not possess a uterus or fallopian tubes, and have undescended testes.

      Delete
    12. TalmidOctober 17, 2026 at 9:22 PM

      @EXE

      I'am not very knowledgeable on biology, but it fascinates me how much things can go wrong on bodies. As someone who is probably neurodivergent i know well what you are describing. By making society very rigid we create a lot of suffering for these who just are not capable of being in line.

      Sure, rules are necessary and good, and some i think we should not nor could ignore, but the world is what it is, so we should be careful, for any exception to the rules is a person.

      We have very diferent views, but it is nice to have a good conversation, man.

      Delete
  23. a.morphousOctober 10, 2026 at 11:04 AM

    On another note, this opposition to transhumanism seems misguided. If human beings have an essence, its that they are capable of transcending themselves – of aspiring to be more than they are. This drive underlies all of human culture. The problem with today's transhumanists is not this impulse but that they tend to realize it in kind of stupid science-fictional materialist ways.

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    1. TonyOctober 13, 2026 at 2:26 PM

      Nothing can transcend itself by its own efforts - that would imply an effect without a cause. And if there's no nature, there's no transcending it either. All you can logically suggest is that "people can transcend past achievements." And even that's only a maybe: you can't KNOW whether there's levels of achievement that can be superseded until they HAVE been superseded.

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    2. TalmidOctober 13, 2026 at 9:14 PM

      "The problem with today's transhumanists is not this impulse but that they tend to realize it in kind of stupid science-fictional materialist ways."

      Exactly the criticism than the christian will make. Classical Christianity will argue than the human person is capable to be more than our current condition and than striving for it is our duty and the way to real happiness. Our goal should be theosis, being divinized by Christ in grace and slowly becoming like Him, like the old example of the piece of metal droped in the fire and also becoming hot and bright. Some other religion traditions would have similar ideas.

      Here i think the christian is in a bit of a dilema:

      Either he can defend this view, but it comes with a complete religion, so it is too much baggage to be used in public discourse. Worse, a baggage than many would not take serious intellectualy on the public square.

      Or he can use a more aristotelian view, who will appeal way more to common sense, even naturalists see the use of something like it in science fiction scenarious, for instance, but will give only a way more impoverished view of the human person than the christian one. It seems a bit lame nowdays.

      What to do? That is a interesting question.

      Delete
  24. Geert ter HorstOctober 11, 2026 at 4:08 AM

    The following thoughts came to me while reading this review.

    Modern science is not mainly about a deeper knowledge of the world, but about a different relation to it. What is this new relation? I think it is a relation of instrumentality, according to which everything is viewed from the perspective of what one can do with it, or how it can be used or manipulated.

    The systematic exploration of the instrumental possibilities of reality is the essence of what makes modern science modern and different from an earlier conception of science and knowledge, which was directed at knowing the essences or natures of things.
    The modern conception of reality has nothing to do with essences or natures. Reality is simply reduced to or viewed identical to what one can do with it or how it can be used. All the rest is set aside or filtered out by the basic method of modern science which is experimentation, or perhaps better: limitless experimentation. Reality is only recognized insofar as it lends itself to experimentation.

    The essence of this method of experimentation is very simple. It is trial and error. Every time that this method hits upon a hard limit, i.e. something which resists further manipulation, this amounts to the discovery of some law or principle of nature, at least for the time being, i.e. until the progress of the experimental method succeeds in breaking down this supposedly hard limit. When this happens, a deeper layer of reality becomes available for the experimental method.

    This process of successive discovery thus reveals that the experimental method is limitless. Its tendency is to subject everything to manipulation, and this tendency is thus identical to the will to power. Once introduced, it is very difficult to subject the experimental method to any principal restrictions. For every restriction seems arbitrary in light of the fact that the will to power is simply the will to ever more power.

    Modern science thus reveals a totalitarian character. Its inherent goal is to instrumentalize everything in function of the will to power. Therefore any conception of it as something neutral, which can be used for good as well as for bad purposes, seems to miss the mark. It is exactly this neutrality which is the problem. For this neutrality is nothing else but imposing the absence of natural essences and natural ends.

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    1. ficino4mlOctober 11, 2026 at 11:58 AM

      @Geert ter Horst: I assume that you consider something having a totalitarian character bad. So modern science is bad. Might you prefer to be back in the 13th century?

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    2. Geert ter HorstOctober 11, 2026 at 8:29 PM

      @ficino4ml: What are you trying to say?

      Delete
  25. The DeuceOctober 11, 2026 at 11:34 AM

    Hi Ed, bit late to this, but I think that you and most other modern philosophers in the Scholastic tradition underestimate the degree to which materialist human origin theory is driving transhumanism. Most of the arguments I've seen for machine consciousness and intelligence are implicit or explicit extrapolations from Darwinism via the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

    After all, the basic premise of the Darwinian narrative is that mindless, mechanistic processes, envisioned as a sort of pseudo-designer and dubbed "natural selection," conferred all of the biological function that exists in living organisms in a way parallel to how human designers confer function to our artifacts. Given that premise, the type of function that exists in artifacts, including computer algorithms, must exist independently of any external mind for it to exist in. And indeed, given the Darwinian premise, our own minds have to be examples of artifact-like algorithms existing in meat computers without any mind to ground them. Either that, or the existence of human minds needs to be denied altogether as per eliminativism.

    Nearly all the arguments for machine intelligence I've seen on Twitter argue that because we "know" based on "established science" that this is how all human faculties came about, our minds must be algorithms that were accidentally cobbled together by mindless, mechanistic causes over millions of years, and therefore it must be possible to replicate intelligence in machines, and even create a "super" variety, using the right algorithm and hardware. And since this also entails that there is no innate human telos or essence, it also follows that we could be modified the same way, driving transhumanism.

    While you and other neo-Scholastics often attack the mechanistic world picture for its incoherence and the spiritual damage it has wrought in society, you seem to be oddly sanguine about Darwinism for the most part. I find that odd, because Darwinism is observably the remaining intellectual linchpin holding the whole thing together. As you have pointed out, the original justifications for the mechanistic world picture have collapsed in physics, chemistry, and other "hard" sciences, forcing it to be repeatedly revised in monumental ways, but these developments don't make any headway into how human beings see themselves so long as they believe that there is a fully mindless and mechanistic reductive explanation for their own existence that is "settled science."

    How you addressed this in Aristotle's Revenge illustrates the problem, I think. It was an excellent book overall, and in the sections on biology you did an excellent job of demonstrating why the concept of essences and natural ends remains indispensable in biology, why organisms must be substances, and why innate and ontologically irreducible biological function is rationally undeniable and vital to any coherent understanding of biology. You had two sections explaining very well why biological function cannot possibly be reduced to mechanistic terms due to the indeterminacy problem, and why (heavily citing Fodor) there cannot be any fact of the matter about what function blind and mechanistic causes "select for."

    Based on that, the expected conclusion would've been that the Darwinian concept of "natural selection" is incoherent and that Darwinism is false, and that while some form of evolution may have happened, neither the Darwinian picture nor any other attempt to reduce our origins to blind mechanistic causes can possibly be correct.

    (comment continued here)

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    1. EXEOctober 13, 2026 at 12:40 PM

      Deuce,

      It's because Ed isn't stupid. Evolution is as proved as a scientific theory can be. It has quite literally been observed, in the case of bacteria. Ed doesn't suggest that evolution is false, because it isn't. Arguing against evolution instantly eviscerates all of your credibility and puts you on the intellectual level of a Ken Ham. Nobody sane wants that.

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    2. TalmidOctober 13, 2026 at 9:29 PM

      Interesting opinion, perhaps above my pay grade but lets see what i can do.

      I suppose than Dr. Feser does not challenge Darwinism because:

      1. This is the consensus in Academia for quite some time and being against it is a very good way to be dismissed as a american Bible Basher in almost any intellectual area besides the american evangelical one,

      2. The Professor just agrees with it. St. Augustine and others did point out how knowledge of the sciences of their time did serve as a intelectual barrier to convertion and for mocking biblical accounts and some heresies like Arianism were defended by a appeal to greek philosophy, but since these two sources of knowledge were, well, real sources of knowledge, they could not just be dismissed.

      In the end, i suppose than Dr. Feser seems Darwinism as the best explanation of life forms we see and so he tries to harmonize it with the truths of philosophy. Not that intuitive, but what one can do.

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    3. AnonymousOctober 14, 2026 at 4:52 PM

      I seriously question the brain of anyone over age 24 who still doesn't believe in Evolution/Old Earth/Big Bang, even more since this article exists :https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/

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    4. Dane ParkerOctober 15, 2026 at 11:21 AM

      Deuce,

      Your remarks strike me as a tad baffling. I'm aware Prof. Feser generally accepts an evolutionary history of life, and that he seems, as far as I have seen, to take that history to follow the broad contours of what the respective fields of study have theorized under the Darwinian paradigm. But I'm not aware he's ever accepted the moniker of Darwinian or Darwinist. He's argued against the absolute adequacy of natural selection, which in itself puts him outside any such designation (cf. Feser, Edward. "Life, Reproduction, and the Paradox of Evolution." BioCosmos, vol. 5, no. 1, The Israel Biocomplexity Center, 2025, pp. 7-11). Therefore, any sustained objection seems to be targeted either at his acceptance of evolution as a contiguous process at the level of efficient causality, even though you just conceded evolution of "some form" could have happened; or else, at his appeal to final causation. But if you're disagreeing with him about the former, your disagreement isn't really over Darwinism at all. And if your disagreement is over the latter, you're the one holding on to a paradigm that permits only mechanistic (and thus blind) causes being that they're (per you, apparently?) the only ones on offer anyway.

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  26. AnonymousOctober 14, 2026 at 3:29 PM

    Question for the traditionally religious people here:

    Would you want the enterprise of medicine, bolstered by accelerating technological power, to eventually cure all physical diseases? If you say "yes," then you are effectively some version of a transhumanist, because the "natural" physical death of a human being is caused by physical disease. Removing all physical diseases will immediately lead to a world where there is no death. Because whether we are talking about cancer or dementias or heart diseases or strokes (diseases that are the leading causes of "natural" death at the moment), they are all ultimately caused by the physical parts of the body losing functionality with age (like rust and wear-and-tear on an old car), hence why they are overwhelmingly prevalent among the elderly than the young (when the young suffer them, it's usually due to some horrific genetic abnormality). Treating those diseases *FULLY* will ultimately mean putting a stop to the process of physical deterioration at the level of cells and tissues. But "the process of physical deterioration at the level of cells and tissues" just is what scientists call *biological aging,* distinct from the *chronological aging* that would happen, say, in a Heaven where physical decay was nonexistent.

    Defeating biological aging would lead to indefinite lifespans with good physical health, which is the core desire of transhumanism.


    On the other hand, if you say "no," that's fine. But then you are saying that *some* physical diseases are morally and spiritually desirable and as such owe an explanation of why that is the case.

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    1. EXEOctober 16, 2026 at 2:42 PM

      Well said. "Transhumanism" means many things to many people, but at the foundation it boils down to the desire to put people in charge of their own lives, rather than being at the whims of cruel fortune. Just as democratic revolutions overthrew the tyranny of feudalism, I want transhumanism to free people from the tyranny of reality, or at least of biology (physics might not be possible). I want every human being to be a beautiful, self-made sculpture that takes joy and satisfaction in their own form, whatever that might take. If someone wants to be a floating metal sphere, so be it. If someone wants to have wings and scales like a dragon, so be it. If someone wants to just be really tall and buff, so be it. The only limitations on humanity ought to be the well-being and freedom of others. Our history is one long tapestry of defiance against the cruel reality that we live in. We have already broken through many barriers that were thought unbreakable. This is also why, if I may wax poetic for a minute, I've always regarded Prometheus as the only god that I'd be willing to worship, were I religious. Only he seemed genuinely interested in the well-being of humanity for its own sake, rather than in simply controlling them.

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  27. AnonymousOctober 14, 2026 at 8:05 PM

    Evolution is as proved as a scientific theory can be. It has quite literally been observed, in the case of bacteria.

    To be more careful: micro-evolution has been observed directly and widely. Nothing in this is difficult for A-T theory of natures. In animals that reproduce sexually, there have been a few cases of what is termed speciation observed in which new lines are not capable of reproduction with the old lines, and where the new lines have features or functions that are quite unlike those of the old lines. If this reached the point of fundamental development, ie. of new kinds of faculties, that might be something difficult or perhaps even impossible* for A-T theory to address, but so far it hasn't done so.

    *Probably not technically impossible: Some modern A-T philosophers have commented that nothing about the development of new beings with truly new faculties not found in their ancestors could always be explained by direct intervention by God (or angels): it might be, for some, an unpalatable account running uncomfortably close to a God of the gaps account, but it cannot be discounted as clearly wrong. It would be a non-scientific account, but so is that of creation.

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    1. EXEOctober 15, 2026 at 10:46 AM

      Anon,

      You're dancing with Creationism here. Biologists generally do not use the terms "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution", they usually prefer "Adaptation" and "Speciation". The main point is that there is no fundamental difference between the two, Speciation is just Adaptation stretched out over a very long period of time. "Macro-Evolution" is just lots and lots and lots of "micro-evolution".

      Question: what is a "fundamental" development in this context? Because it sure *seems* like we've seen that happen in the fossil record. For one example, dinosaurs developed the first feathers, which we believe were used primarily for thermal insulation. But eventually, Adaptations permitted these to allow certain small, light, dinosaurs to fly. Fast forward a few more tens of millions of years, and these creatures' descendants now fly around your garden every morning. Is that not a "fundamental" development? If not, why not?

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  28. bmillerOctober 15, 2026 at 7:55 AM

    Dr Feser has written before that evolution as it has been proposed poses no fundamental problem to Catholic teaching nor to AT philosophy. It is theoretically possible that the human body was evolved but not the human soul and since evolution does not make any claims regarding souls it does not contradict the teaching of the Church. As we know, each human soul is created directly by God an infused at the moment of conception so by definition is not "evolved" from previous souls.

    Here is a previous post regarding this:

    https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/12/knowing-ape-from-adam.html

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    1. AnonymousOctober 17, 2026 at 2:36 PM

      369 comments. That was back in the day.

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    2. bmillerOctober 17, 2026 at 7:28 PM

      Wonder what happened to Santi and Don Jindra. Hope they are doing well.

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  29. ALEXANDER VIOctober 16, 2026 at 9:11 AM

    "As we know, each human soul is created directly by God an infused at the moment of conception" Exactly how do we "know" this?

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    1. bmillerOctober 16, 2026 at 11:21 AM

      ALEXANDER VI,

      Dr Feser explains it at the provided link better than I can.

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  30. NormOctober 17, 2026 at 2:59 AM

    Also Prof you should check out the new vision quest series on marvel...

    Seems like a way of talking about or explorinh the memory identity problem.

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  31. NLROctober 18, 2026 at 7:57 PM

    The thing about all this techno-totalitarianism and transhumanism is that its proponents try to say it's inevitable.

    But is that really so? Medicine works best when it tries to help the body do what it already does. The more disruptive a drug or surgery is, the higher the risks and the most disruptive such treatments are used only as a last resort. Medicine is just one example, but overall, the evidence points in the other direction. Things cannot be arbitrarily manipulated.

    Nobody really knows what the future holds, but all of us reading here might at some point face the question of how far is too far? Everyone has to make a judgment, but there may come a time when it is better to go into the unknown and strike out on a new path than continuing down a path that we know leads somewhere bad.

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