Analysis, Loss of Meaning, and Religious Transhumanism

Speaker 1

Our next speaker will be another Christian transhumanist, Micah Redding. He grew up as a preacher’s kid, spent eight years as a rock musician, and was once involved in the high-speed pursuit of a spyplane. I haven’t heard that story, Micah. Now he develops software and writes about the intersection of human values and technology. Please welcome Micah.

Micah Redding

Thank you guys. It’s good to be back for the third year and I’m really grateful that you’ve had me here. I want to talk about religious transhumanism and the sense of loss of meaning that can be sometimes experienced with that, and what I think we can do about that problem.

Micah Redding

If you’ve had the opportunity to see one of the latest reboots of the Sherlock Holmes franchise, then you’ve seen a moment where Sherlock, in the middle of investigating a case or a crime scene, kind of looks up and sees a passing stranger or friend or landlady. And he verbally cuts through them and he kind of rips open whatever social pretense they’re putting up. He exposes the very secrets that they’re most trying to hide. And when we see this, we cringe. We cringe because we know instinctively that there’s something not quite right about that. We know that human relationships require more than just kind of brutal honesty and and the cold hard facts.

Micah Redding

We have this idea that analysis belongs in certain domains and doesn’t belong in others. We even have proverbs to this effect. We say, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Giving the idea that we need to keep our penetrating insight kind of in check and in certain areas.

Micah Redding

And I think that this comes because analysis is a little bit like dissection. Analysis is the process of taking a complex system and breaking it down into the constituent elements so that we can see how it works. And it’s an incredibly, profoundly productive thing to do. It’s given us science and philosophy and human society as we know it, but it’s also incredibly destructive. And if you go through the process of dissecting a frog, you may end up at the end of that process with all the same pieces. You may even put them back together in the same order. But most likely, most of the time, something’s going to be missing at the end of that process. Something will have gone missing somewhere along the way.

Micah Redding

And I think analysis is psychologically similar. And this is why we often talk about it as debunking or demythologizing or exposing the subject of our investigation. There’s a sense that we. By looking deeply into what it is, we’ve pulled back some kind of elusive curtain and we can no longer see it like it was before.

Micah Redding

So one of my friends a few years ago went off to get a Master’s of Divinity degree. And as she was going off to study, someone told her. You know, this is really going to mess you up. And that kind of seems true. Like a lot of religious students go through these. profound crises of faith. They may lose their religion entirely, or they may emerge cynical and disillusioned from that process.

Micah Redding

And we might think that this is because they’ve been exposed to some new facts that they weren’t aware of before. Much like we might suppose that a biology student learning about evolution might start to have trouble believing the book of Genesis. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think there’s something else going on. And I think we can see this because for every set of facts there are There are religious believers who hold to those facts. It’s not facts themselves that contradict our ability to hold to religious or to have devotion. And it’s not the biology students who are having these severe crises of faith, it’s the religious students. I think the problem is a lot deeper.

Micah Redding

I think the problem is that we’ve asked These people to turn their analytical gaze on something that’s a profound, foundational piece of meaning in their lives. And whenever we do that, I think whether that Thing is, religion, or our family, or our culture, or our sense of personal identity, the choices we’ve made, it threatens its ability to act as a foundational element. And it becomes unsolid. It loses its stability and it propels us into this crisis of personal identity.

Micah Redding

So I think there are two sides to this process, though. I think analysis is the process of tearing down systems to get at the parts inside. And then there’s another side of that, which is the process of putting disconnected parts together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of those parts. And I think that’s what it is to make meaning. So we have these two different things in constant tension. Analysis tears down old systems of meaning, and new systems of meaning are built from those pieces. And we get. We lose the narrative of Newtonian physics and we gain general relativity. And this process goes on and on and on.

Micah Redding

But what’s easy to overlook is just how traumatic that process can be. And especially when we’re talking about something that plays a core meaning-making role in someone’s life, then the effect is even more intense. But of course, we have to do analysis. Analysis has to happen, and new systems of meaning have to be built. I think the problem is that a lot of us are a lot better at the analysis part than we are at the meaning-making part. And what’s worse is that we’re often blissfully unaware of the trauma that we’re trying to introduce into people’s lives. And so we kind of go headfirst into taking on the rethinking of religion and humanity and divinity itself, and we’re shocked when people don’t embrace this with open arms.

Micah Redding

So it’s not just though that other people can experience a sense of loss. It’s that we ourselves can experience it. And I’ve seen this with a lot of people who set to rebuild their worldview. Piece by piece, whether that’s philosophy students or religious students or just deep thinkers. When we go through this process, sometimes we emerge feeling like we’ve lost something along the way. And so religious rationalists Might emerge with this profound belief in the existence of God, but have lost the ability to experience reverence or awe. Or other people might have lost a sense of purpose or direction. And I’ve heard religious transhumanists talk about this. And I’ve experienced this sense of lack myself.

Micah Redding

And I don’t think it’s because there’s something wrong With trying to be rational. And I don’t think it’s because there are things that we should believe over here versus over here. I think that this is because we’ve taken on the incredibly terrifying and dangerous and weighty task of shaking the pillars of our own existence. And it’s not surprising that that is a tough process, that maybe it takes us a while to get through, that maybe we don’t fully emerge unscathed.

Micah Redding

So I think the solution is not that we give up rationality or give up analysis. I think the solution is not that we embrace dogmatism. I think the solution is that we become better at creating meaning. And meaning in practice, I think, looks like a story.

Micah Redding

I think story is the way that the human brain builds and encodes ideas. And if you look at the way we do movies, or TV, film, or books, or politics, or advertising, it seems like story is intrinsic to everything we do. It’s at the root of how we approach everything in the world. We don’t care about ideas just because they’re ideas. We don’t care about facts just because they’re facts. We don’t even embrace our own beliefs just because we believe them. We embrace them because they give us a sense of coherence. They allow us to integrate with things inside of us and externally to us. They allow us to feel like we are part of a whole. And that’s what story does.

Micah Redding

I think a lot of us have had this experience of trying to connect our religion and our rationality, our spirituality and our science. and trying to uphold the value of religion and religious devotion. And sometimes our most intense opposition has come from other people who are religious. And this can be baffling because it seems like shouldn’t they Shouldn’t they appreciate what we’re doing? Shouldn’t they embrace what we have to offer? And an easy response would be to argue for our ideas or to argue for the things that we value or the way we think. That the world works. But if I’m right, then I think we may be missing the point because it’s likely that the person on the other end of that conversation isn’t just looking for more facts or analysis. They’re probably looking for something that allows them to feel more coherent, to allow for more meaning in their lives.

Micah Redding

And I think we can become better storytellers because with religious transhumanism We are really here at the source of one of the most profound sources of story imaginable. Are we dealing with ancient questions and modern ambitions, and we’re bringing them together and claiming a coherence and a convergence that’s never been possible before? And I hope that what you hear me saying is not just that this is a way we can do better advertising or better PR. I hope what you hear me saying is that this is really, truly a Incredible story that we have, an incredible potential that we have. And it’s not two different stories or different stories that we’ve been in. able to connect in interesting ways. It’s one story, one narrative about what it means to be human, about where we are coming from and where we are going to. And that is the deepest concern of religion. It’s the deepest concern of transhumanism. It’s what stories ultimately all resolve to. And when we see it in its proper perspective, when we step back, it’s enough to provoke meaning, and awe, and reverence, and devotion, and worship.

Micah Redding

Thank you.