Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
If, through our discoveries, we humans could attain knowledge of the inner truth of how the world works, we would possess the encompassing wisdom of all Being, just like the gods.
In Goethe’s masterpiece, “Faust,” the Earth Spirit describes its omniscience and omnipresence:
In Life’s wave, in action’s storm,
I float, up and down,
I blow, to and fro!
Birth and the tomb,
An eternal flow,
A woven changing,
A glow of Being.
Over Time’s quivering loom intent,
Working the Godhead’s living garment.
When Faust says how close he feels to this “Active Spirit” as a being created “in the image of the Godhead” — a “peer” — the Spirit mockingly reminds the protagonist that human knowing is not divine knowledge. He is not like the gods because of the limits of what he doesn’t know. “You are equal to the spirit you understand. Not me!”
(Note: Various translations render this phrase as “You are like the spirit you understand. Not me,” or “Peer of the spirit you comprehend. Not mine.”)
In Goethe’s tale, Faust’s quest for knowledge, to be equal to what his striving unveils, is what distinguishes the human condition. But the hubris of “the Superhuman,” as the Earth Spirit calls him, seeking to transgress limits set by nature that passeth all human understanding only invites a tragic fate — his “greatest fortunes ruined” in “all the fullness of his doing.”
Some have read the “Faustian bargain” with Mephistopheles to acquire knowledge beyond his reach as a metaphoric deal with the devil where the soul is sold in exchange for the pernicious power of technological prowess.
An amateur botanist, Goethe was writing at the advent of modern science and toward the end of the Romantic Era in the late 18th century. With all the disenchanting advances of the 21st century, from artificial intelligence to synthetic biology and quantum physics, that bring us closer to grasping the secrets of the universe, is the admonition of the Earth Spirit outmoded, or more relevant than ever?
When Men Become Gods
A few years ago, I raised this issue with Yuval Noah Harari in a conversation about his book “Homo Deus.”
His reply:
‘Faust,’ like ‘Frankenstein’ or ‘The Matrix,’ still has a humanist perspective. These are myths that try to assure humans that there is never going to be anything better than you. If you try to create something better than you, it will backfire and not succeed.
The basic structure of all these morality tales is: Act I, humans try to create utopia by some technological wizardry; Act II, something goes wrong; Act III, dystopia. This is very comforting to humans because it tells them it is impossible to go beyond you. The reason I like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World so much is that it plays with the scenario: Act I, we try to create a utopia; Act II, it succeeds. That is far more frightening ― something will come that is better than before.
Pressing the obvious point, I asked the Israeli historian if he worried that “going beyond you” through AI wouldn’t create a world even worse than a brave new one where human autonomy and dignity are extinguished.
“That is an open question,” Harari replied. “The basic humanist tendency is to think that way. But maybe not. … Going back to the Earth Spirit and Faust, humans are now about to do something that natural selection never managed to do, which is to create inorganic life ― AI. If you look at this in the cosmic terms of 4 billion years of life on Earth, not even in the short term of 50,000 years or so of human history, we are on the verge of breaking out of the organic realm. Then we can go to the Earth Spirit and say, ‘What do you think about that? We are equal to the spirit we understand, not you’.”
Ambiguously, he concluded, “Human history began when men created gods. It will end when men become gods.”
Grieving The Loss Of Ignorance
In a recent Noema essay on the negative reception of AI in many quarters, the philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton argues that what we are witnessing is the “human reaction to a technology that is upsetting to our self-image … [and a] response to the slow and then sudden fragmentation of previously foundational cultural beliefs.”
He calls this experience “a Copernican trauma” on par with the discovery that the universe did not revolve around Earth. Enhancing a wider sapience through the artificialization of intelligence, such as through planetary-scale computation that enables us to better understand Earth systems and thus climate change, displaces the presumed centrality of our species long defined by the limits of the human mind. In other words, we are only grieving the loss of our ignorance.
Like the stages of grief, that displacement is variously met with denial, anger and bargaining over our fate by seeking to “align” AI with the very historically bound human values being challenged. There is also depression over that losing cause, epitomized by the so-called “AI doomers” who see an existential threat to humanity.
In Bratton’s frame, another stage of AI grief is accepting that we are just being “inevitably” swept up by the “long arc of the complexification of intelligence.” He asks the same question Harari answers: “Is AI inside human history or is human history inside of a bio-technological evolutionary process that exceeds the boundaries of our traditional, parochial cosmologies?”
Exiting the stages of grief, Bratton posits, is not to passively “abdicate” agency and see the amplification of intelligence as some kind of defeat, but to embrace it as a continuation of the evolution of life itself. Humans won’t disappear but remain as active agents in co-becoming.
“Life” should not be seen as “the unique quality of a single organism but as the process of evolutionary lineages over billions of years,” he quotes astrophysicist Sara Walker writing in Noema. Evolving technology “is not ontologically separate from biological evolution but rather part of it, from ribosomes to robotics.”
Invoking Gaia theorist James Lovelock in his last years, Bratton argues that, like him, we should welcome signing off “from this mortal coil knowing that the era of the human substrate for complex intelligence is giving way to something else — not as transcendence, not as magic, not as leveling up, but simply a phase shift in the very same ongoing process of selection, complexification and aggregation that is ‘life,’ that is us.”
What We Don’t Know
The pioneering cartographer of the human genome, Craig Venter, has been similarly dazzled by the newfound capacities of science and technology to effect a phase transition in evolution. But, as time goes on, his imaginings have become more circumscribed by the awareness of what little we really know.
In a conversation almost a decade ago, he proclaimed:
Biological evolution has taken three and a half or four billion years to get us where we are. Social evolution has been much faster. Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.
On a theoretical basis, that gives us control over biological design. We can write DNA software, boot it up to a converter and create unlimited variations on biological life.
He was more modest in a discussion in 2023:
Just as we began to think we knew most of biology, to the point where we could read the genetic code and design a cell by rewriting that code, we have found out that we don’t know most of biology. The more we know the more we realize what we don’t know.
As he explained, for example, no one yet knows how the human intervention to alter one gene affects all the rest whose related function has been shaped to its purpose by its environment over those billions of years.
“We’re still at an early stage of interpreting the human genome,” Venter demurs. “I said 20 years ago that we know less than 1% about the functioning of all the genes in the genome. And I don’t think we’ve seen much progress in this respect since.”
The Temptation Of Hubris
While it appears we are getting closer than ever before to comprehending the inner workings of the world, the unfolding of our anthropo-technological lineage remains far from full realization. In the meantime, we should heed the humility conveyed to Faust by the Earth Spirit.
The temptation to hubris springs less from ignorance than from knowing a lot about a little, but only a little about a lot. It lurks as always in the prideful wings of human striving absent complete knowledge.
In terms less literary than Goethe, the anthropologist and ecologist Gregory Bateson once put it this way:
“Purposive consciousness” — or what Goethe called “the fullness of our doing” — “pulls out, from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole systemic structure. … Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. We say that the biological systems — the individual, culture, and the ecology — are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems nevertheless [are] punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will.”
Possibly, the complexification of intelligence through human artifice may one day arrive at encompassing sapience through evolving the systemic “loop structure” Bateson talks about. Then, as Harari says, humans transfigured by knowledge enabled through technology will leave our prologue behind and become gods, at last truly equal to the spirit we understand.
