Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence (2024)
Reading Group session at S.I.S.U., Shanghai, March 2026Transcription
Aeris:
So actually I first bought and read Giorgi’s book at an avant-garde book store. It's called Post-Post Space in Beijing. And, so inviting him to join our reading group feels like such a huge coincidence, and stroke of luck. So here I would like to say a sincere thank you to Giorgi, all the way in Tbilisi. Let me quickly walk you through how today's reading group will flow. So, first of all I will share some thoughts on the title of this book, and give it a little bit of context, because this book draws from a huge range of academic resources, I won't be able to cover every single detail. Instead, what I want to do is focus on three key philosophers that the book really builds on: Foucault, Wittgenstein and Deleuze.
So, in my view, with Foucault, we can examine the mechanisms or power dynamics of the technologies of self, from the Christian era to today's cybernetic capitalism. With Wittgenstein we can question the ontological status of A.I. and Turing machines. Through Deleuze, we can explore ways to find lines of flight within today's computational regime. And after my introduction, I want to invite Giorgi Vachnadze to share some thoughts upon your book and towards your Chinese audience right in the office. And finally, after Giorgi's conversation, my supervisor, Professor Qian Jin [钱进], will have a conversation and a Q&A session with Giorgi. All right. Now let's dive into the title of this book.
What is Christian Eschatology? Basically, it's a branch of theology that deals with the end times; the final events of history. You can think about doomsday, the apocalypse, Last Judgment, as we can see in the book of Revelation. Now, in this book, I mean, in Giorgi's book, eschatology isn't just about the narratives surrounding “the end,” but it is also about the means to get to that end. And, the former could refer to the kind of redemptive narratives centered on A.G.I., which is artificial general intelligence. While the latter deals with the technologies of the self in today's era of cybernetic capitalism, which Giorgi analyzes in detail. Now, let's start with the former part. I would say, at a deep structural level, A.G.I. is kind of a secularized form of eschatology, and it inherits and transforms core concepts from Christian theology, and the temporal structure of A.G.I. narratives are very different because history in A.G.I. is split into two fundamentally distinct eras which are pre-AG.I. and post-A.G.I. So this binary division is a classic feature of eschatological time because it's very similar to the Christian distinction between the world and the afterlife.
So in Christianity, the decisive moment of the Last Judgment actually corresponds with singularity in A.G.I. discourse, and at this juncture, super intelligence emerges and history enters a completely new phase. For example, Ray Kurzweil, an innovator, a futurist and an author, wrote a book called ‘The Singularity Is Near.’ So this book is a classic text for this A.I. driven eschatology. It predicts that the singularity will arrive around 2045, where humans will merge with machines and death will be overcome, consciousness will be uploaded, and intelligence will expand exponentially across the universe. So I think this kind of narrative can be seen as a secularized eschatology promising the same things as the Christian. And I think that's, you know, some kind of overcoming of death, transcending finitude, and dealing with the divine.
So in this sense, I think we can use Christian metaphors to understand the workings of power dynamics in cybernetic capitalism. For instance, where you can consider the A.I. labs as temples, or we can consider code as scripture, product launches as rituals, and online communities as churches. So, as Foucault pointed out, A.I. eschatology is dispersed across technological discussions, media coverage and everyday conversations, and it's precisely this dispersion that embodies Foucault’s concepts of power. So, now that we have a general sense of what is going on in A.I. eschatology, it's time to actually dive into the actual text of the book. First off is the preface, which has a great title ‘How not to read this book,’ and in this section, the author, I mean Giorgi, lays out his main goal. He wants to juxtapose two things that seem totally different. One is the Christian pastoral technology of the self, and the other one is the technocratic and neoliberal technology of the self.
The technologies of the Self, or as it's called in French, se-gouverner, is a kind of governing or managing of oneself. Well at first glance, these two technologies of the self might seem incompatible because Christian asceticism and abstinence might appear at odds with a secularized market economy and technological progress. But what Giorgi argues here, is that both technologies of self-formation actually adopt similar forms of conquest and subjectification, which produces similarly docile subjects. And to really understand these power dynamics, we need to visit our first philosopher Foucault, which I am mostly interested in. Specifically, I think the chapters that really resonate with Foucault’s ideas are the introduction ‘Biopolitics of A.I.,’ and a chapter one ‘Bionic Christ and the Diagram of the Flesh.’ Let's move on to the introduction. As the title suggests, Giorgi frames the book as a kind of genealogy of A.I. systems, or as part of the biopolitics of A.I. Right from the start, Giorgi poses the Foucauldian question of ‘what types of truth hailing practices of self formation are constitutive of an artificial regime?’ As I mentioned earlier, we might take a look at the technologies of the Self from the Christian era to better understand the ones of the present.
So to explore this ‘archeology of Christian Hermeneutics of the self,’ here we can focus on a crucial resource found throughout this book, which is the fourth volume of ‘The History of Sexuality,’ ‘Confessions of the Flesh.’ So, ‘Confessions of the Flesh’ is essentially what Giorgi has made a detailed research about. ‘Confessions of the Flesh’ delves into how Christianity reshaped subjectivity, and traces the formation of medieval concepts of sexuality, along with institutional forms and ethics concerning sexual relations and marriage. In ‘Confessions of the Flesh,’ Foucault also outlines the historical periods of sexuality, which is analyzed in detail under the subsection of the introduction. So, there is a subsection of the introduction entitled as ‘Three regimes: Aphrodisia, the Flesh and Liberated Sexuality.’ So what is ‘aphrodisia?’ Aphrodisia is the ancient Greek concept of sexuality. It encompasses desire, pleasure and sexual acts as inseparable elements. It corresponds to the ancient Greek period, as the Flesh corresponds to the Christian era and the Liberated Sexuality corresponds to modernity.
And this section focuses on how self-management transitioned from the Greco-Roman period to the Christian era. So in the Greco-Roman period, the self was actually the center of care, where proper conduct was a matter of personal lifestyle, and aesthetics, about how one conducted oneself. In contrast, during the Christian era, individuals were required to surrender the self to God and consider themselves as something which needs to be negated. To further explore the transitional period, a key focus which lies in Giorgi's book is the concept of ‘the Logos.’ So ‘the Logos’ carries the meaning of both internal laws and essence, as well as external verbal expressions of these laws and essence. Of course, what I am talking about now is the concept of ‘the Logos’ in the Greco-Roman period. But in Christianity ‘the Logos’ is understood as ‘the Word of God,’ so it is Christ who taught ‘the Logos’ to his followers and made it a mediating medium between believers and God, the Father.
Thus, unlike the Greco-Roman emphasis on reason and proper conduct, ‘the Logos’ in Christianity aimed to cultivate a morality in believers, that prepared them for the afterlife. So the logos promised eternal life after death and guided followers toward the path of salvation. I would say it is such a narrative, which is a step towards a strong teleology. So to achieve this redemption, Christianity leads to managing the physical body, employing techniques such as asceticism, confession and the institution of marriage. So these Christian practices can be termed as ‘Encratism’—or self renunciation—which is a very important part in Giorgi’s book. So this kind of self-denial, self-renunciation, requires believers to scrutinize every corner of their souls and acknowledge the part within them that is actually not their own. I mean, this part actually belongs to God.
In contrast, in ancient Greece, people reflected and understood themselves to better live their lives the next day, while Christian self-management aims to transcend oneself and surrender themselves to sacred technology. So, from the late transitional period, onward the Christian technology of the self essentially became punitive. For example, Christianity includes various rituals of self-humiliation, along with a complete set of dramatic acts of self confession. So Foucault actually referred to these techniques collectively as ‘exomologesis,’ in Chinese, we can say 表现真相. He also introduced a related concept ‘exagoreusis,’ which in Chinese, we could say 述说自己. So ‘exomologesis’ involves the confessor publicly and dramatically expressing their state of sin. While ‘exagoreusis’ entails the continuous and analytical expression of one's thoughts through speech. And both methods of technologies of the self actually embody the aforementioned self-realization where one must disclose their thoughts and actions without reserve.
And if you think about it – I think this bears a striking resemblance to what we do when we talk to ChatGPT, other A.I. therapists so we can compare these Christian self-formation techniques with our algorithmic age. So Foucault’s ideas will give us a powerful lens that helps us to see that self-realization and these old Christian technologies haven't gone away. We can still find them in how we relate to how we relate ourselves to A.I. For example, Giorgi mentions one reference text here: Diane Stypinska’s article. So the article's title is ‘Pastorate Digitalized: Social Media and Desubjectification.’ So Stypinska argues that the pastoral power and the discursive formation discussed by Foucault in the Christian era, actually permeates social media and operates invisibly and effectively.
So as for what pastoral power is, I have some words to say. Pastoral power is actually originating from Hebrew culture, but the benevolent pastoral power of Hebrew culture was adopted, absorbed and transformed by Christianity. It evolved into a technology aimed at salvation, implemented through practices of scrutiny, confession, guidance and obedience. So in this pastoral view, people cannot manage themselves, or cannot govern themselves. The self is rendered as a source of dissent and evil, which is inherently sinful. Thus, to exorcize the self, Christianity requires people to voluntarily surrender themselves to religious powers and willingly confess. So, in Stypinska’s view, social media today functions as a neoliberal, scientific confessional apparatus.
So, in my view, the digital confessional in the A.I. era goes like this: First of all, the bloggers or influencers of social media actively immerse themselves in self-exposure and self-datafication, which produces a brand new digital subject. And then they use social media as a kind of digital confessional and they document their desires, senses and dreams. So this gives bloggers and influencers the ideological illusion of free expression. But all of this is built up on authenticity, in other words, it's about how to shape themselves into unique, marketable entrepreneurial personalities. So, in my view, in this context, everyone on social media relaunches themselves and hands over their identity to the tyranny of the market and A.I. in a strikingly religious manner. So it's no wonder that Giorgi, in his book, said that here, A.I. plays the role of God, the final solution to all human problems, and unfulfilled desires and the self-renunciation (or the encratic system) discussed here will also be revisited when the book explores the debate between Wittgenstein and Turing. Additionally, Giorgi will provide an overview and commentary on Foucault’s ‘Confessions of the Flesh.’ In chapter one ‘Bionic Christ and Diagram of the Flesh.’ Actually, for now we will skip the content of chapter one, and turn our attention to Wittgenstein.
So Wittgenstein is addressed in chapter two ‘Music and the Poetics of Time,’ and chapter three ‘The Incomputability of Computation.’ So, let's begin with Wittgenstein's example of piano playing at the end of chapter three. I think this excellent example illustrates how human thought is filled with heterogeneity and interaction, which is irreducible to mere computational numbers and repetitive mechanical actions. So Wittgenstein says the only possibility for getting to know a piece of music is indeed this: you play it, and thereby notice distinctly that you played the passages still without understanding, you can choose to continue playing the piece with no understanding, or you can choose to listen to the inner voice that emerges as you play. And the more you listen, and the more you will hear, voices that would have been hardly audible at first will then speak more and more distinctly, and new ones will turn out.
For Wittgenstein, understanding a piece of music is not about mechanically executing the notes, reading from the paper, nor is it functionally mapping each note to a piano key, because that is precisely what machines do, right? So instead we should interact with the music, listen to our inner voices and be moved by it. Therefore, Giorgi argues that the complexity of knowing and thinking is fundamentally irreducible to mechanical rule-following, but here we actually encounter the topic of the next chapter: the philosophical, and even theological foundations, of mathematics, which is talked about in chapter three ‘The Incomputability of Computation.’ So Wittgenstein, at the starting point of chapter three, raises a question.
The question is, is it possible for a machine to think? So Wittgenstein raises this question in his Blue Book, which is written in 1958. But he said it wasn't about whether we have enough computer power or if the technologies have advanced enough, he said that we can start to believe that the problem lies in how the question is framed. Actually, in the language used to pose it, Wittgenstein said the trouble is rather that the sentence “a machine thinks, perceives, or wishes” seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we have asked “has the number three got a color?” So can a machine think, it's not really a technical issue, It's more about the limits of a language and the limits of our grammar. Which is very similar to Wittgenstein’s language games.
Of course, this question easily brings us to mind the Turing test and Turing machines. Well, actually, here is a funny historical fact, because Turing was Wittgenstein’s student, and the two had intense discussions, but the ideas later diverged. And also regarding the debate between Turing and Wittgenstein, I would like to recommend our Chinese scholar Lydia Hua Liu. So, Liu, who actually wrote a book, it's called ‘The Freudian Robots,’ meaning dealing with the philosophical foundation of mathematics and the debate between Turing and Wittgenstein. Let's come back to the topic. Turing actually might have partly agreed with Wittgenstein. Turing would like to say, ‘okay, we don't need to start from the definitions of machine and thinking, but we can bypass it by looking at human and machine behavior.’ So, actually, Turing's wager was that thought can be approached through outward behavior and formalized procedures. Turing’s idea took over and became the way to think about the brain. So in a kind of Turing sense, Turing's way to think about the brain is that the brain is actually like a computer. It takes in data, runs computations, and spits out an answer. But Wittgenstein’s response to this is that Turing tried to cross the boundaries of mathematical logic into the realm of philosophy, but the result was that neither side could be fully achieved. And Turing actually blurred the line between thinking and calculating. And this leads to Wittgenstein's other response. So Wittgenstein says, ‘Turing machines are really just humans who calculate.’ So, we can think about that. A machine is a human who only calculates. It's kind of a reversal of Turing’s thesis. Right? So this kind of machine only follows steps, only follows the rules; it doesn't think. So, with this, Wittgenstein dismantles the whole idea, the mechanical thesis.
But we can also continue to focus on Wittgenstein’s analysis of the nature of calculation. In his remarks on the foundations of mathematics, Wittgenstein actually raises another question. The question is: does a calculating machine calculate? So for Wittgenstein, calculation is not entirely confined to the realm of mathematics. It is there, but it is also connected to our everyday life. For example, if we detach the equation ‘2+2=4’ from the life scenarios it can be applied to, then this equation becomes something meaningless. Therefore Wittgenstein will say that calculation is a normative social practice – In other words, human calculation is never merely a kind of sequence of symbols, manipulations isolated from the normative practices in which those manipulations have sense, thus our human calculation cannot simply be reduced to the regularities of outcome. And because when we calculate, we are simultaneously instructing, explaining, correcting or justifying our actions.
So I think that's why even if a Turing machine can provide a quick answer to the computational problem. It still cannot explain its own behavior. So, through these two questions, Wittgenstein demonstrates to us that the key to machine intelligence lies not in the results, not in outcomes, but in whether it can participate in non-formalizeable, embodied and spontaneous human practices that constitute the fundamental state of our life. So, the answer is certainly no, because we can say that a machine conforms to and applies the rule, but we cannot say that the machine masters the rule. Similarly, we also cannot say that the machines don’t have an algorithm, however, for Turing, human calculation, which is a rich, normative and cultural process, was equated with mechanical calculation.
So, Giorgi argues that Turing's ideas about mechanical rule-following binding states and machines are actually theological concepts without any real empirical or analytical backing. So I think this is a very profound contribution. And, Turing’s machines in this sense is considered as the biblical canon of A.I. research. And I think the worst part of this quasi-theological discourse is how it views humans because we as humans cannot follow causality as perfectly as machines do.
So, in Turing’s sense, we humans are rendered as flawed, inefficient, and ‘obstacles to a clean order,’ it's very similar to the self-renunciation we have talked about earlier and the power relationship between ourselves and the machines has fundamentally flipped. So, what's the way out? What's the solution? Some would say, it's just what the eschatology of A.I. tells us, which is just, “Let the system decide.” Surrender to an algorithm and submit to a higher super intelligence. But, to resist this kind of dehumanizing idea, as Giorgi has suggested in his book, that we actually can do two things.
Firstly, we can conduct a kind of a genealogical examination of A.I., and we can uncover, you know, “the savoir” of the discourse around A.I., and uncover the cultural and political, sort of hidden beliefs, in the discourse of A.I. Secondly, we can also follow Deleuze and take a line of flight and think about the possibilities for change within the computational system.
Now, let's move to the third part, Deleuze. So in Giorgi's book, Deleuze is mainly around in chapter seven, ‘The Heroic Tale of a Minority Machine.’ So when we talk about minority machines, it's very easy for us to think about the concept of minor literature proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. So this idea comes from Kafka's work. Deleuze says that a minor literature doesn't come from a minor language. It is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. And one of the key features of minor literature is a strong, deterritorialization of language, which, breaking away from existing literary systems, and Deleuze & Guattari even argue that all great writers become strangers within their own native language system because of the deep familiarity with the language, and so use their first language as if it was a foreign language. So we actually can mimic this kind of statement, we can say all great machines become stranger machines within their own technical systems, and this will bring us to the minority machine.
So, a minority machine – the author uses this term to look at the scientific fiction series called ‘The Murder Bot Diaries,’ which is written by Martha Wells. So, first of all, why scientific fiction? Why sci-fi? Because, sci-fi can serve as thought experiments. It can let us imagine what happens when technology is pushed to its limits. So this can help us to reflect on how to resist current technological and political control. For example, discussions around A.I. often frame A.I. either as a super intelligence or as a purely obedient machine that follows orders. Considering the A.I. in Martha Well's scientific fiction series, it's totally different because the main character—the Murderbot—in Well's book is a kind of self-questioning A.I. system, and the Murderbot is self-protective. It gets bored, it's anxious, hesitant, and even overthinks. And I think that's exactly the kind of A.I. that can create cracks within the technological system.
Now, please allow me to briefly introduce the plot of this sci-fi novel and the possibilities of minority machines. So the first volume of Martha Wells book series opens with first person narrative from the A.I.; our A.I. protagonist a socially awkward and gentle Murderbot, and it actually hacked its own security system and decided to stay under cover, and continue his assigned murder tasks without letting its human colleagues know, it has gained a new level of autonomy. So the A.I. in this story survives by performing its own machinic stupidity. So here we can see actually a reversal of Wittgenstein's questioning concerning machine thinking.
Now some people might say that robots with feelings are nothing new because there's tons of writing about that. But here I think, what makes Well’s work so unique is that, in Well’s book, she actually posed the question, what happens when this sort of conscious machine has to deal with the real world? I mean, the A.I. versus the political and economic system. So, in Martha Well's book, the humans are not surprised that robots have feelings. They actually know. The humans, in this sci-fi, still treat A.I. like these exploitable commodities. And I think that's the real kicker. So how does the murderbot, our A.I. protagonist, resist? It’s not by fighting, actually, I think it resists with a kind of self-questioning of the A.I. systems. For example, the company’s sec-unit, which the murder bot belongs to, is bought by a non-corporate organization called the Preservation Alliance, which claims that bots are considered fully citizens. So, the murderbot is actually thrown from the machine world into a totally new, human society.
But here there is another problem because in this Preservation Alliance, the murderbot is still required to have assigned a legal guardian and it has to comply with regulations under its new status. So here we can see, it's just a shift from one dominant structure to another. And our A.I. protagonist actually grapples with an existential crisis in the Preservation Alliance and, secondly, beyond the protagonist’s nihilism and self-questioning, another form of resistance, lies in A.I.-to-A.I. interactions, and I think that's a topic that current academia hasn't yet explored, for example, the protagonist, the murderbot, shares emotional support, cooperation and even conflict with a sex robot and a transport A.I., et cetera. And we can see, in the original text. So the original text states that the sec-unit conspires with other robots and artifices forming alternative local alliances against humans and already docile robots. So I would say we could, in a way, see these machines as the actual minority machines in the age of cybernetic A.I. So these machines understood how to bypass protocols and resist control. They are the ones who truly grasp how to create lines of flight. And more importantly, I want to say that the language of code we faced today. Just like the bureaucratic language that Kafka encountered or the Christian language which believers face. But, breaking away from existing power structures and seeking change doesn't mean surrendering to reality. The minority machines in Martha Wells sci-fi series, show us that machines might escape the control of code. They can override protocols or hack systems to find possibilities of change. And we cannot call them humans, we cannot call them machines, and we cannot even call them... half-human and half-machines because they are kind of hybrid, they are a sort of fusion that has never existed before. So I think the minority machines in Giorgi's book are capable of loosening greatly defined boundaries. And here we can repeat this phrase once more. All great machines must have become foreign machines within their own technological systems.
So, from Foucault to Wittgenstein to Deleuze, we have travelled such a long intellectual journey on A.I., so honestly, this book uncovers way more than just that. Now I want to end my introduction and I want to invite Giorgi Vachnadze to share your insights, your thoughts on your work and your words to your Chinese audience in the office.
Giorgi:
Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for getting in touch with me, for reading my book and for inviting me. So it's a great honor for me as well. That was a great introduction. And that was a great overview and analysis of the book. I really enjoyed listening to it. So I'm just going to add small comments here and there to your introduction and to your reading of the book, because I think it was quite good and exhaustive. Right.
So, how did the book get started? Well, I got my training in Wittgenstein. I got my training in Foucault; I read all these books. I got the gist of what they were doing in their project, and so I thought, well, how can I use this in my situation? And I thought, well, okay, A.I., let's try to take a Foucauldian and Wittgensteinian perspective and apply it to A.I., it's something new. It's something that concerns me. And it's definitely something that troubles me as well because with time I have learned to become a little skeptical of modern technology and the discourse that surrounds modern technology with all the wonderful things it has brought, but also all of the things that are hidden. The stuff that I also talk about in my last chapter on colonialism and resource extraction and all that. Right.
So now clearly there's an element of what is called political theology in this text. Right. So I try to uncover that there's a political theology to A.I. and it is hidden, and it pretends to be secular. Right? It has to be non-religious. And so I try to expose this and then show that, no, there's a lot of mythology that is built into legitimating A.I. technology and making it acceptable.
So and as you pointed out, I use Foucault’s ‘Confessions of the Flesh,’ But also Foucault’s ‘Hermeneutics of the Subject’ was very useful in writing this text because, in the hermeneutics, he talks about the Greek Aphrodisia as well. And he really shows how these techniques or technologies of the self have evolved throughout antiquity and Christianity. And then he makes some comments here and there about the 16th and 17th century, and the 19th century as well. But he doesn't really dedicate a whole book to those eras. But the point is that there is a direct linear continuity, even though I don't trace that continuity in my book. But there is a historical continuity of the techniques of the self, that can be traced from antiquity to modern sort of, digital or spectral subjects, as Stypinska mentions them.
Then, now, you mentioned the transformation of ‘the Logos.’ That's also very important because ‘the Logos’ is the ancient interface, right? Metaphorically, we can say the ancient interface or the ancient apparatus is ‘the Logos,’ and ‘the Logos’ operates as a power structure, I argue more so in Christianity. So in Christianity, power becomes more dominant than resistant. At least that is Foucault's idea, and I kind of bought into this idea, I believe this, I like this approach that Foucault has, which is the golden age of what he calls ‘parrhesia,’ or the golden age of the courage towards truth or speaking the truth was this ancient period of aphrodisia, the ancient period of stoicism, and then the early Roman period. So the period between Plato and Christianity is what Foucault thinks was the best period to study if we are to think of resistance today—so yes.
And so then, with Christianity, ‘the Logos’ becomes Christ and Christ becomes an interface. And the problem of Christianity is the problem of the Flesh. The title does say Pastoral Technologies of Flesh, of Cybernetic Flesh. So Flesh is the target of the apparatus? So today, what A.I. wants to make invisible, or disappear, or sometimes even destroy quite violently, is precisely the Flesh. Flesh creates a problem even today. And so Flesh is the domain of resistance. How can we constitute our Flesh differently, in a way that is not computable, in a way that doesn't fall into this neoliberal cybernetic paradigm of ‘be your own entrepreneur’ and ‘sell yourself’ and ‘be predictable?’ It's all about predictive analytics, of being predictive, of posting regularly on social media, taking selfies regularly on social media. So we see that entire culture, which is now not just capitalistic but also cybernetic, right? So you have to be profitable and you have to be computable. We have to be predictable. So a Turing machine is supposed to be able to know what you're going to do.
All of this is a confession right? These are histories of confessions which you presented very well. One thing I would add to this is that, today, confession has become passive; you don't need to talk to someone to confess, you can talk to a chatbot, right? The chatbot is the new priest. You can always consult the chatbot. But even if you don't talk to the chatbot and you're just browsing media, clicking things online, everything is recorded, right? So these are also kinds of confessional writings. In some way they trace your activity. So the confessional becomes automated. So, we were saying, automated confessional. We have seen robot priests, like A.I., and so now the question is… so we are led through this to the foundations of A.I.
Now, there's one thing I have to confess, which is that I don't know if, today, A.I. epistemology is still relying on Turing's model. It's very possible that they've moved beyond that. And I have to now research and find out what the new model is, because I think Wittgenstein did an excellent job of deconstructing the Turing thesis. And so maybe I'll talk a little bit more here, because I think what Wittgenstein does is very ingenious. And it's not very visible in his writing style because he had a very conservative writing style. He would just write in short sentences and sometimes he would refuse to explain. He was a very eccentric figure.
So, the first thing [Wittgestein] says is profound but not as profound as what he does later. So the first thing he says is, ‘Turing machines are just people who calculate.’ He says they are just people who calculate, you know, that is profound because what he's showing here, and what the musical composition example shows, is that there are domains of human activity that you just cannot reduce to calculation. Now that's something that, I am further investigating with another book that I'm writing, which is a book on Deleuze & Painting, and there Deleuze talks about painting in a very original way. He offers an ontology of painting, which I think is also incomputible. Also relevant today because there's these conversations about A.I. painting, and doing all these amazing things while we have to do all the difficult labor. The A.I. does the interesting stuff. We have to do the boring stuff. And so I'm really interested in these sort of analog forms of human activity that are irreducible to computation. And so Wittgenstein’s musical example is one of these.
So the danger or what I think is the biopolitical danger of thinking humans in terms of machines who calculate is, what happens is that first it legitimates or it justifies the building of an infrastructure around humans that forces them to calculate. So in a way, if you want to work today, it's like if I want to work today, say as a freelance writer on online, to make some money on the side, I have to look at SEOs, search engine optimization, I have to see what words are used very often. So I have to forgo, or I have to give up, my creative writing, to a certain extent, and I have to make my writing computable. Otherwise they're not going to pay me. So there's an infrastructure that is built around me. No one is forcing me to do it, but I sort of need the money. So it looks like I'm doing it out of my own free will. So this element of freedom or artificial freedom, and that I'm forced to enter this infrastructure where I write like a machine. But then I finish my work, and in my free time I don't do things like a machine. I do things spontaneously or randomly in a way that's not very predictable.
But if I'm forced to calculate all the time, if I'm in a precarious position where I have to write this way all the time, then it might look like this is what I am. Because if I have to work all the time and this is all I do, then it really looks like I am a Turing machine, right? So the biopolitical danger of the epistemic power. The epistemic regime here is that, if I can force you to do something repeatedly and then I say, this is your nature, then I have a very compelling argument for human nature. Then I say, look, they're all calculating, right? But what I don't say is that I force them to calculate. So there's the danger of the human being becoming a Turing machine. So if you think of the human being as a machine, there's a danger that he will, in fact, become the Turing machine, and he will be forced into an interface against his will.
Now, that's just the first part of what I think is brilliant with Wittgenstein, but then the second, more complicated question is calculation. Is calculation itself a form of calculation? So, and that's a powerful question because Wittgenstein has his own ontology of calculation. He has his own ontology of mathematics, and Turing has his own ontology of mathematics. So the first battle is within the domain of philosophy of mind. So Turing says I have this mathematical model of the human mind. And therefore I will introduce this model and then Wittgestein says, well, no, you can't introduce this model because the human mind has or the human experience has aspects of it that are irreducible to your model. But then Wittgenstein starts to attack the mathematical domain. Then he says not only is the human mind not structured like a computational model, but even mathematics isn't quite computational. So, to Wittgenstein, mathematics is, to a certain extent, not computational in the Turing sense, because calculation is a social practice, right? So his argument is not only that the human mind is not a Turing machine, but even calculation isn't always Turing computable. So he thinks of calculation as a cultural practice, as a socially accepted cultural practice. So that was the second move and that summarizes my take on Wittgenstein and Turing.
Right. So Turing sees the mind and the act of calculation as abstract, as an isolated discrete system of units. And then he attempts to reduce all of human activity, or his followers attempt to reduce all of human activity to that kind of system and Wittgenstein counters, first by liberating the mind, and then calculation itself. And one of the fundamental arguments is that there's no such thing as a simple rule, right? This is his core thesis. There's no such thing as a mechanical rule, because a rule is a complex concept. So the rule is a complex that requires interpretation. So a machine is only able to follow a rule. And it seems like it's a simple rule because it is embedded in a society. So within a society a machine knows what to do. But it's because there's all these other humans and their lives that are regulating the activities of the machine. So the fact that inside the machine there is a system of perfect rules, that is a mythology. Right? So that's the central argument. That is a theological concept. So there's an element of Turing's thesis that is theological, in many ways.
And yes, your final comments on Deleuze—because here already with Wittgenstein, we see an aspect of resistance against computationalism. And Wittgenstein offers the most sophisticated path of resistance because he challenges the formal system and its core. And then we have the Deleuzian element, which is this idea of a minority machine. Right. So when I was reading Deleuze's minority machine, he conceptualized, well, he and Guattari, had a notion of resistance that is more active and more empowering than Kafka alone, because with Kafka we have this pessimism, this nihilism. And so for Deleuze, we have a more active kind of ‘we can fight back,’ we can perform lines of flight.
So literature, I think, is an important domain of resistance, and in general art. Throughout the book we have poetry, we have music, and we have literature and painting. Now I mentioned painting as well. Right. So I think these are important because I don't think we can compute a metaphor, for instance, I don't think we can compute how metaphors work. I don't think we can isolate some element and say this is always how metaphors work, because the whole idea of a metaphor is to break down meaning in a very interesting [way]. Yeah. Okay.
So and the Murderbot: I thought the Murderbot was a very interesting character, and a very relatable character for several reasons. First of all because it's fragmented, right? There's a lack inside this robot. There is a very human lack of a psychoanalytic type of fragmentation of the subject. I also thought there was a double metaphor here because it's not only fragmented emotionally as a subject, but also physically fragmented as half human flesh and robot. So a literal metaphor. This was something that I really like, too, and it's very relatable because we are hybrids too, right? We are already hybrids between machine interface and human cognition, right? We are already joint cognitive systems. And so the transition so the political maneuver here, the ideological maneuver is that while we are being distracted about apocalypse and A.I. utopia, meanwhile we are already inside the apocalypse and we are already undergoing these changes as hybrid subjects. So we're talking about whether the singularity will happen, or we will become robots, but we are actually already becoming robots just by this interface. Right now, we are already in the process of becoming robots. And that process is being hidden by these grand eschatological narratives.
So then, and finally, I like Martha Wells because she, because the problem in her book is not the big evil A.I. or the big good AI that's going to help us. For us, it's us, all right? The A.I. is almost innocent. The A.I. is a positive character. But we humans, we are the problem. We have created a situation where both A.I. subjects and human subjects are suffering. Right? So that's why I like this book so much. Okay. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you again so much. This was wonderful. Okay. Thank you.
Aeris:
So, I want to say sincerely thank you. Thank you so much. So, now I want to say sincerely thank you to Giorgi's contribution to the conversation. Now, I want to give the stage to Professor Qian, as I sense that he has a lot of things to talk about with you.
Professor Qian:
Okay. Thank you Giorgi, for sparing time to join our reading. Actually, we have several other students actually inside the room. I can show you around here, and they're very thrilled to be here. And, thank you for your book because it brought up something that I have been considering for quite a long time about the religions of theology and technology, which is a big part discussed recently, given the circumstances, the global circumstances or zeitgeist. We have a lot of talk about the alignment between Silicon Valley and religious groups, with theology, and with Christianity. But your book actually dives into the historical text by rereading Foucault and tries to connect it with A.I. technology, and also the relationship between A.I. and Christianity, and also, the theology is actually making the connection between these political climates and also the architects and also the agenda itself. So it's, at least for me, a bridging sort of approach where I can connect the political theology and technology.
And also, by reading your book, it actually gave me a sense of a synthesis of different traditions, you can easily identify the French school, starting with Foucault and Deleuze, And then we witness something from the material studies from, Kitler, or from the German school. And also we can identify a theoretical lineage from Italian theory, like the political theology, because recently we are reading Roberto Esposito's book. So it's a very comprehensive approach, tackling the relationship between technology and theology. So that's very, actually, that's very illustrative, at least for me.
And another thing—of course, there's a lot of stuff you are talking about in this book, as you mentioned about and also as the presenter mentioned about, but something actually, as you mentioned about is your separation of clear demarcation between the definition of body and flesh, because in Chinese translation of these words, we sometimes tend to conflate the concepts of the body and flesh is all being translated to 身体, the body, and especially you give the example through analyzing or synthesizing the literature in data quantification. Because a couple of years ago, I wrote a bunch of papers, on datafication, I used a lot of the literature you actually cited—marvelous work—and by using the cases of the quantification, you actually illuminate the differences between body and flesh. The body is something reasonable which can be quantified and can be penetrated by data and actually is saturated with data. But the flesh is something that cannot be reduced to mere data. It's uncontrollable, irreducible and random, and it cannot be compressed. And actually this kind of separation is interesting because, considering all the body research from Judith Butler and bunch of other kinds of literature which have actually tried to deviate from the idea that the physiology of the body or the flesh is important because all this dialog about body is diverted into the social construction of the body but it is missing out the starting point of the flesh, being the flesh yourself, the natural physiology. A nature of this type is crucial and especially important in this A.I. era, because that's something probably still makes human beings human, because you still bear the heaviness of the flesh.
So your separation, or your identification, of these two different concepts is very crucial for our understanding of A.I.’s current development. That's something I want to point out, which is very interesting. And also, another thing is that I wonder—and you probably can elaborate on this—even though your main focus is tracing the development of the Christian theology and how the A.I. the codes and things that's embedded into the whole history of the Christian. And it's theology. But there's another very heated debate about A.I., about its current political theology, which is about the danger of enlightenment, because, as we said, the development of A.I., as you mentioned about, is destabilizing the idea of a reading subject, or destabilizing the idea of people can grasp their own fate, or grasp their surrounding environments, and that's coincided with the arguments that the enlightenment actually pushing people, I mean, moving people from the theological era to this kind of reasoning era by reestablishing the individual or reestablish the self, and the people can actually being a reasoning subject and how this development, if you put into the lineage of the development of the theology of Christianity, now this is a relationship with the A.I. how the enlightenment stands in these kinds of entanglements between technology and theology, and how are we going to be sort of, in dialog with the idea of enlightenment? How will that be affected by that part?
For the last year, I spent my time in Berlin, visiting Humboldt University in Berlin; they have a large exhibition about the enlightenment. What is enlightenment? And at the beginning of the exhibition they show different paintings during that period of time, the most common motive in these kinds of paintings is light—enlightenment—the lights. You have the sunrise, you have the candle lights of different types. It gives a metaphor of a sort of brightness. Okay.
But when we arrive at A.I. and arrive at the Large Language Model, the metaphor we are prone to citing is the metaphor of black, darkness, as in ‘black-box.’ Or there other people are saying this a black/dark enlightenment or whatever. The black/dark Deleuze, whatever, the basic metaphor they're using is so contrasting. So I am just very curious, how do you place this enlightenment in your arguments even though you're not talking about it directly. But it's something I'm very curious about. How are you going to place the enlightenment into your long lineage of the kinds of investigation between the relationship between theology and technology?
Giorgi:
Thank you so much. So that was an excellent commentary. That was really good. I'll make a small comment about Flesh first. So you mentioned that, in Chinese, the body and flesh are used interchangeably, and I think that's also the case in English, and that's why I think I had to emphasize the separation so much, because I think in English too, it is conflated. People say “the body of Christ”, “the flesh of Christ”. They use both terms. So yeah, that separation was very important and I owe most of that, I think, to Merleau-Ponty. Because Merleau-Ponty I guess takes the Christian idea of Flesh. I don't know how it is in French, but he makes flesh into this positive force of resistance. And Merleau-Ponty has written a lot about the biological body versus the phenomenological body, so for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is all about deconstructing the biological body and showing that the biological body, the empirical body, as useful as it is, is a complex construct. So there are certain experiential intensities underneath the organic body that are neglected, right? By modern empiricism. So that's where Flesh comes from. And Foucault was a student of Merleau-Ponty. So there's probably some influence there as well.
Now, questions of enlightenment. Now, I haven't done my critical research on enlightenment yet. But there is an excellent book. And you asking the question just reminded me about the book called Enlightenment Biopolitics by William Nelson. The subtitle is “A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens”. Right. So, in a way, this already answers a lot of what we're trying to pose here and the question of enlightenment and the question of light. Right. I think this question of light is very important. Foucault himself famously said that the light is a danger, right? Stay out of the light. It's a danger. He said, and I think that's the Gaze. The Lacanian Gaze is also relevant here. The masculine Gaze, the racist Gaze, all of these various forms of enlightening or of shedding or putting a light on the subject. Which also reminds me of all these concepts that are now flooding in. There's also the Deleuzian idea in his reading of Foucault in his lectures. He has this idea of visibility. So he says with Foucault, we have epistemic regimes, and with every epistemic regime, there's a kind of panopticon that deploys visibility of how things are to be seen, how they're supposed to be interpreted and understood. So indeed, this counter movement of blackness or of darkness, of dark Deleuze, and the dark enlightenment. This is very important. I think these are very effective tools of countering this pseudo-secular “making of citizens” that has emerged from the enlightenment. So, absolutely. Yeah, definitely.
Professor Qian:
Also another thing I wanted to pick up on, in your previous presentation about the man-machine combination or assemblage or whatever. And there's, there's a connotation that this invasion of a pure human body or human or being human, by the invasion of the technology of A.I., or of the mechanical/mechanism or whatever, is an erosion of the self. I don't know. My impression is, in Donna Haraway’s cyborg it seems that Donna Haraway is embracing these hybrid entities. Of course, they embrace it under a different, sort of a theoretical, underpinning because the Donna Haraway is using the cyborg to try to advance feminist theory, and has this optimistic view of these kinds of men-machine or cyborg hybridity. But, by reading your book, it gives me a sense that the erosion of the self by the A.I. is something that's also problematic. And my thinking is, is there the possibility that if we are following Darwin's evolution, there is a possibility that the human beings keep evolving, as mentioned in the Katherine Hayles books, that we are evolving into something that combines with algorithms, for example, or combined with robotics. And is this the possibility that the man and the machine, this kind of assemblage, all these kinds of hybridities, is the arrow of evolution. That's it's a part of the evolution as a human being, as Darwin, imagined in his theory. So it's just something I just came up with when you mention the sort of evolution and also the cyborg in that part, especially you mentioned the part in the All Systems Red book, the novel. Yeah, that's another thing I want just to point out.
Giorgi:
No, the idea that our merging with technological artifacts is the next stage of human evolution is perfectly fine and acceptable. I don't see a particular problem with that. Also, I don't really believe in this pure body as well, this self that is untainted by technological artifacts. I don't believe in that at all. In fact, the line of resistance that I'm offering is actually more like a stoic or a Greek aphrodisia style of assimilation of technology as opposed to a Christian kind of assimilation of technology, where we are completely obedient, right? So the idea is to choose and be aware of what relations of power you enter into with interfaces, and not just some sort of A.I. asceticism, where you just say no to all technology. That's just not possible today, I think. So my conception of Flesh is not that of a pure self untainted by technological artifacts. But it's more of a rhizome, a Deleuzian rhizome that enters into certain relationships with technology. It's just not the relationships that maybe mainstream culture, or that the technological or the political trends want us to enter into.
And I think one additional comment I can make about this, just to make the point clear, is that I want to think of Colin Koopman, also a scholar of Michel Foucault, who has written a book called Informational Persons. And in that book he has done very interesting things. I mean, he does a similar thing. He traces the genealogy of how we became informational persons. He doesn't have a focus on A.I. specifically, but he does something very similar. He takes the idea of Foucault's political technologies, the technologies of the self, and he shows how they have merged with digital apparatuses. Now, an interesting thing that he says is that we were informational persons even before computers. So we didn't really need computers to become informational cybernetic subjects, that it's just that the computers are the most powerful artifact within this paradigm, but it's just one artifact within the present paradigm. And then he says, if you take the idea of identification or an analog birth certificate, right. If you take your passport, birth certificate, these are also artifacts that make you into a computable person, right? So there is no... I don't advocate for any kind of nostalgia where we go back to a pre technological age or some utopian ideas like that. Yeah. Thank you.
Professor Qian:
Yeah. Thank you. I think that your clarification of the flesh is something, yeah, that's very illuminating, and is something that is, the flesh you're conceptualizing keeps... deterritorialization, and rhizome, as you mentioned with Deleuze, the rhizome is something against sort of categorization, against sort of, pinning down, and against territorialization. I think that, actually, you helped clarify – it made me more, sort of, understanding about the concepts. Thank you. Yeah. Any other questions that you want to add? Yeah. You can use the mic, I can unmute it.
Here I have only one question. So, Georgi, some people say that Foucault is more of a historian than a philosopher and in a way, your work reads like a genealogy of A.I. which uncovers the hidden savoir, the knowledge behind the discourse surrounding A.I., so, my question is, for a student like me in communications, I want to do some empirical research, especially meso-empirical research about the pastoral technologies of the flesh, as you mentioned. So, I would like to ask, where would you suggest we start, for example, like, some interesting research subjects, or research methods, empirical research, meso-empirical research on pastoral technologies.
Giorgi:
To make sure I understand the question, you're saying, where would you suggest one would begin doing empirical research, on how people are made into computable subjects? because the genealogy of A.I., this kind of historical writing is quite different from what we communication majors do, one is empirical research. So my question is, how to connect these two things together.
Yeah. Okay. Excellent. So first, let's talk about Foucault being a historian. You said some people say Foucault is more of a historian than a philosopher. Maybe philosophers say that, but my advice would be, go talk to a historian and see what he says, and he will say, “no, no, no, he's not a historian.” “He's more of a philosopher”, you know? So it's like nobody wants Foucault. He's in a liminal space between philosophy and history because he's just that subversive, you know, he's just that critical, because he has undermined historiographical research by offering a kind of methodology that is at least as good. And he has also compromised classical enlightenment philosophy in many ways, because he showed how ideas emerge out of a kind of, embedded, situated sort of cultural context. Okay.
So, now, I don't know what the formal methodology of communications is; I would love to know. But I think Foucault's advice would be to start from your immediate surroundings. So Foucault would say, start from a kind of phenomenology, almost of where you are. Right. So think of, say, how does computation affect me personally? So I, as a writer, would maybe begin by studying those little built in A.I. systems in PDF readers. Have you encountered one of those? You open the PDF, and then it's like, nobody asked you whether you wanted it, whether you like it, whether you... there was no question.
Right? It was probably somewhere in the terms and agreements. But at some point I had a regular PDF, and now I have a little A.I. assistant underneath, and I haven't really tried it, I'm not very interested. But it would be interesting to do a research on that, you know, like, how does that affect your research? Or how does that work as a medium between you and your colleagues when you do research? Right. Is that useful in your research? Or do you use AI to write emails? Right. And then how does that impact our relationships with each other? Because my guess is that it reduces the element of honesty and it increases the element of predictability in human interactions. Right. Which is beneficial for maybe administrative apparatuses in universities. It might be beneficial for companies that make money off of data. But it may not be very conducive to human autonomy. Right.
So these are several ideas or pathways that one could explore.
Aeris:
Yes. I got you. Because, yeah, in China, we have so many counterparts of ChatGPT. Yes, we have DeepSeek. We have, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something, which is similar to ChatGPT, even A.I. therapist or doctor. So the A.I. Doctor is researched and launched by a company called Alibaba. Yeah. So, yeah, this company, announced this A.I. product. And there is a lot of discourse around this A.I. product. For example, I have seen a report on the A.I. product. So the CEO was saying that the product can act as a kind of A.I. doctor, you can say something about your disease, and upload your images concerning your bodies to the chat bot of the A.I. product. So I think that's quite available, as a research resource for me in China. Okay. So I think your response is very illuminating for me.
Professor Qian:
I just want to add one thing, I think you talked about the doctor A.I., or whatever, it is something that you can connect to the body or Flesh, and the sort of investigation of the whole neoliberal idea of how to manage your body. So probably this kind of work, medical A.I., is something that, as you mentioned, can be an empirical study, to investigate the relationship between the body/flesh and also the invention of the self. So probably that's one way to actually look into... I just wanted to add that one thing.
Giorgi:
That’s an excellent note because that also ties in with the idea of visibility and the Gaze, because Foucault also has a notion of the medical Gaze in his book “The Birth of the Clinic.” So I think if you take the birth of the clinic and then you trace the epistemology of how the body is spread upon a geometric or mathematical plane in the attempt to understand it, well, you already have a ready-made genealogy, you just have to add on top of that the computational paradigm, and how the computational paradigm wants to do the similar flattening out of the body, or the body’s features, onto an understandable comprehensive plane. And, yeah, you could do that as well.
Aeris:
Really, thank you. So, it's about one hour and 30 minutes for the reading group. So how about, anyone from the reading group, now? And here, to sum up, I, I want to, express my sincere gratitude to Giorgi Vachnadze for his attendance because it was very influential for me to have bought your book and read your book, during my winter break. And, it was actually Professor Qian who encouraged me to, you know, to make acquaintance with you, to contact you. So, yeah, I want to express my sincere gratitude to Giorgi. To Professor Qian and to, you know, make the silent classmates right in the office. So, I hope to, you know, to, explore the academic question, you know, concerning my own communication studies and, yeah, I hope you have a good day in Tbilisi.
Giorgi:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, one more time, and you have a great day as well.
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