Why Is the Language of Transhumanists and Religion So Similar?

In reading this interesting (and, to me, eery and rather chilling) essay, I couldn’t help but think of C. S. Lewis’s brilliant novel That Hideous Strength:

“The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why?”

I’m not sure that the religious impulse — which I regard as a natural and normal one, very likely divinely implanted or (perhaps better) a legacy of our premortal past — ever really goes away.  Not, at least, with normal people.  Repressed, it simply takes new forms.  Some of which can be quite horrifying.

That Hideous Strength, by the way, is the prescient third volume of Lewis’s wonderful “Perelandra Trilogy.”  It can be read on its own, independently, but should ideally be read after Out of the Silent Planet (1) and Perelandra (2).

Posted from Grindelwald, Switzerland