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Annie Gottlieb's avatar

This post convinced me to subscribe. What a great way to end the year. Thank you.

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Ives Digory's avatar

Thank you for this (I too finally bought a subscription). The drive to remove friction from existence has become so intuitive; but a perfectly frictionless world is one of total artifice: it is delusive, meaningless, anti-human. Still, that's the spiral we're on: the more artificial our environment grows, the more we allow ourselves to believe reality imposes no constraints but is a canvas for our self-actualization. It's a disorder of the imagination.

Ironically, as David Bentley Hart pointed out in his recent substack series, the transhumanist fantasy of uploaded consciousness is the antithesis of the historical Gnosticism to which it is often compared. The Gnostics believed in an escape to the Real, not from it.

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