Ancient Ecstasies
Creativity | Aesthetics | Relationships | Embodiment
One of the features of the AI age is that it raises important questions about us as human beings.
And, as a philosopher and one-time theologian, this means that it is really great to be alive right now. The questions that I have been asking for forty years, and people in my field have been asking for thousands of years, are suddenly the questions everyone is asking.
I thought it would be interesting to write a few articles about how modern questions about technology reflect ancient ideas about humanity. It might be that we can find answers, or at least, some clues about what answers might look like, from ancient sources.
So what are the questions that the AI age raises for us? In my professional life as a university executive I spend a great deal of time working with people who are for and against AI.
Out of all of those conversations, four themes keep coming up for me. I have reflected a lot on these four things. I think they are really important for our future in the light of this technology, and they all have profound foundations in philosophical and spiritual traditions. They are four themes that provide a bridge between the ancient world of thinking and feeling and the modern world of technology and advancement.
So what are they?
Creativity. The technosophical question, if I can coin a term, is about what it means to create something from nothing, whether that is a work of art, a piece of music, or a vibe-coded web app.
Aesthetics. Here we ask, in the context of technological advancement and a rich philosophical background: what makes something beautiful? What makes something ugly? Why does it matter?
Relationships. The question here is about why human relationships are so important for individual and collective flourishing. Is it incidental or fundamental?
Embodiment. Finally, we might ask, not superficially but in terms of humanity’s most profound spiritual yearnings, about what it means to be “in” a human body.
To make it easy to remember, these four things can be arranged into a nice acronym: CARE. Which reflects the deepest question I want to ask about the AI age and what happens after it. This question is about what we are going to CARE about in this new world as it emerges.
Workplace, Economy, Society
Each of these topics comes with a rich philosophical and spiritual background that reflects thousand of years of experiment and speculation in a wide variety of traditions.
But first, by way of background and context-setting, let me make two observations.
First, I am coming to think that these four themes will remain central to human experience and flourishing after AI has worked its way into all of our social and economic systems, which it most certainly will.
It is interesting to think about the kind of workplace and, more broadly, the kind of society, that could value and reward these things.
We currently work in a technocratically oriented world. Your ability to do complex technical tasks - coding, mathematical modelling, quantitative analysis and so on has been the ticket to success for many people, from accountants to engineers to entrepreneurs and technologists.
In fact, your ability to perform even the simplest technical tasks - use a computer for email, create PowerPoint presentations, author documents - has been the key to entering the workforce in the first place.
I don’t think any of that technocratic capability, from the simplest to the most complex, is going to matter very much in the future. These are precisely the tasks that AI can and will do. When the technocracy fails, we need a new aristocracy of the human.
So what remains? What are the inalienable and irreducible features of a human contribution to the economy and to society? How will we reward people financially and socially as we move out of technocratic valuations and towards aesthetic, relational, embodied and creative valuations of human effort? This is one set of things I want to look at during this series.
On Ecstasy
The second thing about these four themes is that they all have something in common. It’s not obvious what this thread is, and it’ll take a bit of work for you to follow me down this rabbit hole. But hang in there, it’s worth it I promise.
The thing that binds these things together is ecstasy. If you consider what each of these things are in the human experience, if you wonder what their underlying structure is, if you peer deeply into the abyss of these phenomena, I think you will see that their structure is fundamentally ecstatic.
Ecstasy is a very particular state of being. Now, by way of disclaimer, let me say that I usually despise it when a writer turns to dictionary definitions of words and homespun linguistics to explain an idea. But in this case, it is helpful to look at the word ‘ecstasy’ itself in order to understand the underlying philosophical idea.
The English word ‘ecstasy’ has a Greek origin. The Greek word is ‘ekstatis’, which combines the pronoun ‘ex,’ meaning out of, and the word ‘stasis,’ meaning ‘state of being.’
Put them together and you get the core idea of ecstasy. Ecstasy is where you are temporarily taken out of your normal state of being.
You become ‘ex-stasis.’
In each of these experiences - the experience of creativity, of beauty, of relationship and of embodiment - there is an opportunity for ecstatic experience.
Why is this important? It is important because it brings you closer to reality itself.
You can only realise the significance of this if you are prepared to go one step further with me. Let’s take this thought to its end. Let’s pursue a radically counter-intuitive hypothesis. Not just about ecstasy and its everyday availability to us in the experiences. Not just about how these human experiences stand to shape our future in the world after AI. It’s not just about those things, it is about the nature of reality itself.
The deeper idea here is that reality itself is relational. People and things exist because of their relations. They exist in the network of relations that constitute them.
And so, when we pursue ecstatic experience we become deeply aligned to how things really are.
The effect of this is that experiences of creativity, of aesthetic beauty, of deep relationships with others and of embodiment bring us closer than we can otherwise get to the truth of reality itself.
Neil