My freshmen year of college I was assigned to read the 17th century work by René Descartes Discourse on Method, the original home of The Cogito: I think therefore I am. The thinker was the sine qua non of the person.
The Cogito, while being first and foremost an epistemological tool for Descartes, entails an anthropology that says, “your body isn’t you, it is the container of you; the most “you” part of you is your thoughts, not your body.” ‘Potentiality’ aside, I didn’t like how it could be used to dismiss the unborn or the mentally impaired from full personhood. Beyond simply being revolted by the ethical implications, I saw it as simply non-functional. People must relate bodily, therefore the body is substantive, not accidental, to the person.
The Rationalists, being idealists, were interesting to study, but seemed dismissable because their ideas were impractical, unactionable, and hypothetical; one couldn’t consistently actually live in congruence with the purported anthropology. Technology, having an ecological effect on our social processes and imagination, is facilitating a shift on this.
Another key aspect of Cartesian thought that connects with the current change: degrees of reality. Some parts of reality are more and less real than other parts of reality. There are three layers to this reality: thoughts, bodies, and then properties. Historian Richard Tarnas observes:
the cogito revealed an essential hierarchy and division in the world...res cogitans—thinking substance, subjective experience, spirit, consciousness, that which man perceives as within was understood as fundamentally different and separate from res extensa— extended substance, the objective world, matter, the physical body.
This radical dualism is anthropologically significant because the thinking substance is the ground of reality, proceeding physical substances.
Additionally, Descartes distinguishes between substances and modes; the material or ingredients of a thing is separate from its properties. This adds another layer: “the properties of your body are not integral to your body.”
Modern queer theorists hold to a similar dualism. A constructivist view of the person finds a person in the willing, thinking self. To root the self in the physical body, for Judith Butler, is to make oneself complicit with the “Regime of heterosexuality” because “matter itself is founded through a set of violations, ones which are unwittingly repeated in the contemporary invocation.” So we are left with a Cartesian maxim: “I think therefore I am.”
The body, as the container of the mind, has properties, but they are not authoritative or ontologically significant. In Cartesian terms, they are less real. For the queer theorists and Cartesians alike, your thoughts are the most real, your body the next most real, and the properties of your body the least real; the hierarchy of you is inside out. Descartes, a Roman Catholic, would likely hate to be associated with this, but nonetheless, his anthropological dualism, aided by technology, opens the door to Queer Theory.
Why the dramatic rise in the popularity of queer theory, and Cartesian anthropology along with it, in the last few decades? Technology has moved this ontological vision from hypothetical to plausible. Having the ability to manipulate the body through interventions, we can now do, not just think, “cogito ergo sum.” I think I am a woman, therefore, I can ‘live as a woman’ with the assistance of surgeries, hormones, and government-issued IDs.
To a large swath of the population, this trend will not slow, but will accelerate due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence; people, especially young people, will be socially conditioned to relate to non-persons as though they are persons. Why should a young person care whether or not the AI Instagram Counselor is a real person or not? If it meets my felt social-emotional needs, if the dopamine hits correctly, and if my lived experience of the interaction with the App tells me that it was a person, who cares?
Much has been said about the deleterious effects digitization is having on mental health; less has been said about the anthropology and sociology it begets.
Young people raised in the digital world functionally believe in their own version of Degrees of Reality. Persons do not exist in a false binary of real or fake, they are on a spectrum of more and less real. Experientially, there will be less and less noticeable difference between FaceTiming your cousin who lives in another time zone and doing a call with your AI girlfriend; neither are inhabiting bodies, both present as pixels and generated sound waves. Replacing physical presence with pixelated presences proves that persons are not necessarily embodied.
What makes a person? A thinking thing. What differences does it make if that thinking thing is a brain or an algorithm? Who am I to say that Suzi Screen isn’t a person? She says she is and the dopamine she gives me is real, therefore she is real enough. The generation raised on iPads will not care what animates intelligence; emphasis on materiality feels like gender essentialism and that is obviously transphobic.
The plausibility structures for relationships beget by AI and queer theory cannot distinguish between algorithms and persons just like it cannot distinguish between male and female. Not only can it not make those distinctions, but it is fundamentally uninterested in making them. The transhuman and transgender phenomena share a general disrespect for the authority of bodies to tell the truth about human interaction.
The generation that is conditioned to relate to artificial intelligences will not blink an eye at gender reassignments. I can take the chip out of Robot Body A and put it into Robot Body B and there is continuity of consciousness; the same is true with remodeling our physical bodies. After all, what is the difference between a man getting a haircut and a man cutting up his genitals? The body is not defined by its properties anyway.
The convergence of queer theory and artificial intelligence is Making Cartesianism Great Again, but this time, rather than living in the academy, it is living in homes, schools, and the marketplace; the Cogito is presently self-actualizing. As cogito ero sum replaces imago dei, we trade the plausibility structures of Christendom for bastardized Cartesian thought, Neo-Cartesiandom we could call it.
What are we to do about the rise and triumph of the digitized self? First, we must center our Christology on the incarnation of Jesus. Docetism taught that Jesus did not truly have a body, but that he merely appeared to have a body; the body was his appearance, but not him. Gnostic disdain for the flesh drives the post-hoc rationalization of Cartesianism.
Second, we must root our anthropology in the physicality of the imago dei. As Herman Bavinck said, humans do not "bear or have the image of God, but he or she is the image of God." Chronologically speaking, in Genesis Adam is made flesh and then ensouled, not made soul and then embodied. The new heresy we face is anthropological docetism, neodocetism: bodies are not persons, they are merely the appearance of or holders of persons.
Third, we must celebrate the sacraments and do so eschatologically. Paul builds his argument against sexual confusion by anchoring our lives to our future-and-bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 6:14). The Body we partake of in the Lord’s Table is a risen body, the firstfruits of the New Creation. As Abraham Kuyper said, “True conservatism seeks to preserve what is in terms of what it will become in Christ, that is, resurrected from the dead.”
The physicality of the sacraments and the synchronous bodily context of the sacraments reminds us of the physicality of God’s salvation. You cannot eat and drink digitally. You cannot greet one another with a holy kiss digitally. You cannot address one another in songs and hymns and spiritual songs digitally. Podcasts, playlists, and hologram preachers are not the gathering of a church; bad ecclesiology will beget bad anthropolgy and vice versa.
Fourth and finally, live with gusto in the real world. "Eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart" (Ecclesiastes 9:7). God does not live and work in degrees of reality; the real world is where God is. The doctrine of creation is not a matter of theorizing origins, but of living with Jesus in the flesh in the midst of the theater of his glory. Resist the Digital Self by relishing in the creational, embodied and ensouled self.