If you have read this work, feel free to join along. Send me a message about it. Comment on this post. But if you haven’t, read these articles with an open mind. The concepts are simple. Deceptively so. Which can be frustrating for those looking for the point of the work. The foundation of On Having No Head can be traced back to the non-dual teachings of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta. So, without further ado…

And if I could thank God
That I am here, and that I am alive
And everyday I wake
I tell myself a little harmless lie
The whole wide world is mine

-Tom DeLonge (“Rite of Spring”)

To say that I have no head sounds like an invitation to provocation. But it’s not. It’s literally true. In fact, there could be nothing more true. And it was a great day for me when I realized this. Inside of a Biggby Coffee in East Lansing, Michigan.

For a few moments, all distinctions fell away. I was not here. And there was no out there. Everything just was. Concepts had no meaning. Chair. Table. Coffee. Barista. Window. Car. None of it. It was all a flowing whole.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Words failed me. Ironically, this peculiar event happened while reading Douglas Harding’s On Having No Head.

The book begins like this:

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head.

-Douglas Harding

Harding describes how the realization of having no head was “absurdly simple and unspectacular.” There was no secret knowledge. No moral code. No dogmas. It was simpler than that.

“[J]ust for the moment I stopped thinking,” Harding writes.

To stop thinking runs counter to Western values. In school, we are expected to think, think, think. Take tests. Complete homework. Pass exams. The same goes for our careers. The same goes for religion. The same goes for politics. We must think. At all times. Always. Without fail.

But Harding writes that his spiritual breakthrough happened when he stopped doing all the thinking he was so used to doing. “Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down,” he writes.

Thinking is our default setting. Thinking is what most of us do. All day. Every day.

But in Harding’s case, thinking failed him.

“For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine,” Harding writes. In those moments, the only thing that existed was the “Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.”

It wasn’t just an pure observation of the present moment. It was also the moment when he realized that there was no head on his shoulders. And all he needed to do to understand this was to look around.

And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

-Douglas Harding

From the first-person perspective, Harding discovered that he was headless. Where his head was supposed to be was a vast emptiness. But not an emptiness that offered nothing to observe. It was an emptiness that contained everything in the universe.

This is not philosophy. This is simply observation. And I experienced this same thing while sitting in a coffee shop. Instead of a head on my shoulders, there was everything else. Chair. Table. Coffee. Barista. Window. Car. None of it. It was all an interconnected, flowing whole.

Whatever or wherever my head was, it was not where I thought it was.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

-Douglas Harding

The most profound part of Harding’s testimony is that he lost any sense of “I” or “me” in the few moments that he lost his head. There was no barrier between me and the rest of the world that wasn’t me. It was just a comprehensive whole. Pure, agentless experience. The moment the self exposed itself as an illusion.

“It’s total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around,” Harding writes. Beside this passage, I scribbled: “The paradox of the self. You are no-thing and every-thing.”

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:12 make sense in light of this realization. Claiming that we are “looking through a glass darkly.” All of us, everyday, are looking through a glass darkly. But in realizing our headlessness, we get clarity on the nature of reality.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious.

-Douglas Harding

One result of non-dual meditation is to experience this “vast emptiness.” It is why I started meditating some time ago. To see my true self. Again and again. And it doesn’t always happen the same way. And it doesn’t last for long. But every now and again, I step into the vast emptiness. Where every thought falls away.

The discovery of my headlessness was not brought on by attaining some knowledge. Or some state of mind. It was the opposite. It happened when I stopped putting effort in to induce the experience.

Headlessness is always just a glimpse away.

When I gazed at myself I saw myself no more.

-Rumi

Till we see our nothing we cannot understand the value of our Being.

-Traherne

It had the biggest head you ever saw. A great enormous thing,—like nothing. A huge big—well, like a—I don't know—like an enormous big nothing.

-A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh

Your duty is to Be, and not be this or that.

-Ramana Maharshi

This newsletter is about thinking clearly about culture, science, religion, and the inner life. I’m not here to persuade you. Only to share what I find interesting. Maybe this article did not resonate with you. But maybe the next one will.

If you would like to follow my journey, consider subscribing to this newsletter. Two articles are published every single week. Maybe you will learn something. Or maybe you will have something to teach me about the topic. Either way, I would love to hear from you.

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Thank you for being here. It means the world to me!

I had lost a head and gained the world.
-Douglas Harding (On Having No Head)

I’ve stopped reading Western philosophy. For the most part.

Over the past ten years, I’ve spent countless hours studying the important philosophical texts by the greatest thinkers. Plato. Aristotle. Bacon. Descartes. Kant. Schopenhauer. Nietzsche. Sartre.

I’ve even spent time with lesser-known downers. Michelstaedter. Mainländer. Zapffe. Benatar. Ligotti. Thinking, for whatever reason, that they might have something novel to say about the world.

I searched the works of these thinkers like the Bereans searched the scriptures.1 But in the end, I discovered a lot of selfishness, self-delusion, and self-righteousness smeared across the pages. And just as dogmatic as religion, in many cases.

But it wasn’t all bad.

I learned a lot over the past decade. And I don’t regret any of it. But at some point, I realized that it was time to move on.

My inevitable divorce from Western philosophy happened after reading a little book called On Having No Head. By an English writer named Douglas Harding. Sam Harris had mentioned the work during one of his podcast episodes. So, I gave it a read.

To make a short story shorter, On Having No Head changed my life. It ignited my first spiritual experience. Right there in a Biggby Coffee in East Lansing, Michigan. I realized I had no head.

Literally.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. -Douglas Harding

When I looked around the coffee shop, I could see everyone else’s head. But I couldn’t see my own. In place of my head was the world. Chairs. Tables. Coffee. Baristas. Doors. Windows.

I was, experientially speaking, the universe.

Everything played upon the surface of my eyeballs. There was no there there. There was only here. There was no past. There was no future. There was only right now. Right this second.

This struck me as so obvious. It had been right there the whole time.

Call it a flow state. Call it dissolution of the self. Call it Buddha nature. Call it whatever you want. All I know is that, for those few moments, I had experienced the universe for what it is. Everything was connected. There were no independent objects in the world.

It was one, cohesive whole.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. [...] Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. -Douglas Harding

Nothing that I’d read in Western philosophy had come close to achieving a description as sublime as the one above. Only later did I find that this experience, this realization, is the cornerstone of non-dual meditation taught in Zen, Dzogchen, and even Advaita Vedanta.

More recently, I have committed myself to the study and practice of Zen Buddhism.

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice. -Shunryu Suzuki

While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life. The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself. -Shunryu Suzuki

Over the next few weeks, I will do an in-depth study of On Having No Head. What makes this little book so compelling is that it invites you to experience what Harding experienced, as opposed to learning intellectual concepts.

There is a lot more to say. But I will leave it here for now.

This newsletter is about thinking clearly about culture, science, religion, and the inner life. I’m not here to persuade you. Only to share what I find interesting. Maybe this article did not resonate with you. But maybe the next one will.

If you would like to follow my journey, consider subscribing to this newsletter. Two articles are published every single week. Maybe you will learn something. Or maybe you will have something to teach me about the topic. Either way, I would love to hear from you.

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Thank you for being here. It means the world to me!

A spectre is haunting us—the spectre of Artificial Superintelligence.
-AI Researcher #1782 (probably)

The seeds of worship and sacrifice are nourished by the dew of fear, uncertainty, and a capitulation to powerlessness. Many major religions have been at this for a long time.

This is nothing new.

But now, these seeds have sprouted inside AI companies.

Some Anthropic employees are apparently convinced that their machine(s) might be in the ghost. Rumors are floating around Silicon Valley that these employees have started to “worship” Claude.

Those at OpenAI have not been immune to similar accusations. Ranging from wooden effigies to a cult that wanted to save the world from killer AIs.

Whatever is happening inside the walls of these AI companies, it is generating unusual behavior by those who work at them.

Sean Thomas, writing for The Spectator, noted:

If true, it chimes with an old sci-fi prediction and with what we know of human nature. If we build a superintelligence, we will first fall in love with it. Then we will worship it. Finally we will make sacrifices to it. That is how Homo sapiens is made; it is how we respond to all-powerful and omniscient beings. We come fitted with a God module, and AI will fire it.

Since we first appeared on the scene, Homo sapiens have fallen under the intoxicating desire for the divine. Usually driven by a zealous appetite for credulity and ignorance.

But we have since found a way out of that cave. We discovered heliocentrism. We discovered the theory of evolution. We discovered germ theory. We are figuring out the nature of this place, little by little. As a result, many have found refuge in the “God of the gaps” to keep their understanding of the divine alive.

Maybe Thomas is “fixed with a God module,” but he does not speak for those who value science and reason. Which raises alarming questions about these Anthropic employees. Something strange is happening inside those walls.

What inspires their “worship” of Artificial Intelligence? What could possibly motivate that kind of behavior? To answer this question, we must understand what motivated religious worship in the past.

Most men are harassed and buffeted by life, and crave supernatural assistance when natural forces fail them; they gratefully accept faiths that give dignity and hope to their existence, and order and meaning to the world; they could hardly condone so patiently the careless brutalities of nature, the bloodshed and chicaneries of history, or their own tribulations and bereavements, if they could not trust that these are parts of an inscrutable but divine design. A cosmos without known cause or fate is an intellectual prison; we long to believe that the great drama has a just author and a noble end. -Will Durant

We want a reason for why things turn out the way they do. If things go devastatingly wrong, we want a justification for why it has happened that way. If life is to have any meaning at all, there must be an Author who is guiding every instance along, so as to lead to a noble end. That is what we tell ourselves.

There are things buried beneath these concerns. There is fear. There is uncertainty. There is the feeling of powerlessness. A lot of times, we feel trapped in a world that we have no control over. We do not know what is going to happen next. We are on the lookout for any signs that we have made the creator of the universe angry.

But this is where reverent worship turns sinister.

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought. -Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? -Douglas Adams

Dawkins’ words play nicely with a report the BBC published last month. It could be that these AI researchers have been reduced to their survival instincts. Some employees are being forced to work up to 90 hours per week. Which includes a brutal work culture, unforgiving performance reviews, and unpredictable layoffs.

Obviously, LLMs are not going to take over the world. The hypothetical advent of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is what people have in mind when they worry about an AI takeover. Defined as a form of AI whose cognitive abilities would far exceed the best human minds in virtually ever domain, including creativity, scientific reasoning, strategic planning, social understanding, and general problem-solving.

No such technology exists. . . yet.

In a previous article, covering the longevity guru Bryan Johnson, I mentioned what some experts believe about the future of this technology.

And finally, perhaps the most compelling, considering current debates around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its place in our future, there is “the singularity.” The scientist-turned-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has long been convinced that “the singularity”—where man and machine merge—is not only inevitable, but it is much closer than we think. Kurzweil, in an interview with The Guardian, said, “We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots—robots the size of molecules—that will go non-invasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”

These AI companies are fashioned with a lot of gray cranks. And they have managed to convince their employees to turn those cranks, as hard and as long as possible, in the hopes of achieving a feat that almost no one is encouraged by.

It is reasonable to fear the unknown. But it is unreasonable to worship the unknown out of fear. And I wonder if that is what is happening inside AI companies.

This newsletter is about thinking clearly about culture, science, religion, and the inner life. I’m not here to persuade you. Only to share what I find interesting. Maybe this article did not resonate with you. But maybe the next one will.

If you would like to follow my journey, consider subscribing to this newsletter. Two articles are published every single week. Maybe you will learn something. Or maybe you will have something to teach me about the topic. Either way, I would love to hear from you.

And finally: Thank you for being here. It means the world to me!

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He put it this way:

It's clear to me that religions are in the end too complex, interesting and on occasion wise to be abandoned simply to those who believe in them.1

My impression is that de Botton is too charitable in his representation of the value of the Christian institution. However, he does manage to expose a few moral paradoxes of the religion, in describing what has come to be known as the Feast of Fools. A popular festival during the Middle Ages, in which the ecclesiastical ritual was parodied to the point of blasphemy, heresy, and sexual debauchery.

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Of course, Christians did not come up with the Feast of Fools in a vacuum. It is debated whether it is a Christian adaptation of the pagan festivities related to Saturnalia. If this is the case, the festival would demonstrate that pagan practices were baked into the very religion that prides itself on being different and distinct from pagan practice. The mind reels.

De Botton writes:

In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites. [italics mine]

De Botton seems to give credence to religious systems that acknowledge we need a release from restraint. That we need space to indulge in our baser natures. In principle, that is fine. But in practice, that lends itself to hypocrisy.

I grant that many Christians have had moments of honor, politeness, and concern for the poor. Countless examples can be drummed up. But those virtues are often overshadowed by a deluge of sexual perversion, manipulation, coercion, torture, and endless threats of eternal damnation. This hypocrisy does not get a pass simply because Christians acknowledge that we need a reprieve from restraint.

De Botton goes on:

Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festum fatuorum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen’, engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken’s Arse, the Gospel according to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married’ donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.

Nietzsche’s representation of the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies inherent in all of us comes to mind. Christians, for most of the year, remained in an Apollonian state. One of order and restraint. Until they were cast, headlong, into a Dionysian revelry. This turbulent party lasted four days. During this short window, believers were allowed to untether themselves from the rules, laws, and social norms that otherwise welded the community together.

The Feast of Fools could be compared to The Purge, a 2013 flick about a 12-hour period where any and all crime is permitted.

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Christians gave themselves up to heresy and sodomy during this strange festival. The very same behaviors that might get an outsider threatened, maligned, tortured, or even killed. A classic iteration of all this for me, but not for thee.

But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.’

The Paris Faculty of Theology conceded that humans were “poorly put together.” That our nature went against the grain of holiness, prudence, and restraint. And that this Dionysian period was a release valve where our lusts could be put on brief display. All this was defended as a method to “return with greater zeal to the service of God.”

This riddle of moral paradox and hypocrisy goes a long way toward explaining how the Catholic Church, for example, whose leadership upholds celibacy as some kind of virtue, has engaged in child sexual abuse for centuries. Could it be that the guilty parties have rationalized their degenerate behavior as a result of being “poorly put together”? This slope turns out to be very slippery.

In Footnote 14 of Sam Harris’ book, The Moral Landscape, he writes:

Consider the ludicrous ideology that made [sexual abuse in the church] possible: the Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception: preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children.

Of course, none of this should strike anyone as new or surprising. But it is imperative to shine a light on the moral confusion inherent in a religion that has spawned 2.3 billion believers.

Perhaps de Botton is correct, here, that Christianity has something to offer the secular world, in terms of its ideas about community, structure, and reverence. But it is absurd to suggest that an institution can be extracted from the practices it affords. Because the practices themselves are what give shape to the institution.

Consequently, the average person is reduced to a powerless onlooker, forced to watch the whole confused scene. Forced to helplessly watch on as AI companies and national governments debate and deliberate over our fate in light of this emerging technology.

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It is not difficult, at this point, to be intellectually and emotionally numbed by AI news. The proliferation of content tends to diminish the perceived importance and immediacy of an issue, if it is delivered as routine or emotionally dilute. This is particularly true of AI. (The same happens to be true of violence, sex, and social media content.) If there is such a thing as AI fatigue, many Americans are experiencing it.

We become less engaged or invested when overtly contradictory information is published every day about where AI is headed. A kind of paralysis by analysis.

On the one hand, the Trump administration is apparently unfazed by the rapid, and potentially dangerous, development of AI, claiming that American AI companies need to keep pace with China. And on the other hand, one Anthropic researcher recently claimed that there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI will “kill all humans.”

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What are we to do with this information?

If we take these propositions at face value, it is not unreasonable to conclude that we may be racing, headlong, to our own destruction.

Some have drawn a glimpse of optimism after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay last week, calling for a pause or slow down in AI development.

The current models are an almost endless gold mine of insight into both how to build AI well and what can sometimes go wrong with it if it isn’t built well. I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.

Further, Amodei wrote that “embedded evaluators” should be invited inside AI companies, who would “check at the level of nuts and bolts whether an AI company is actually following the training, development, operational, and safeguards practices they claim to be following.”

Ostensibly, this sounds like a move in the right direction. If there are third-party evaluators inside these giant AI companies, the thinking is that it would prevent said companies from going off the rails, thus creating and deploying seriously dangerous technology.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, usually bitter rivals in the AI space, have come to the support of Amodei’s essay.

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However, agreement among American AI companies is not the most challenging part of this equation. A major player in the AI race is China, who, to put it lightly, is skeptical of any American entity suggesting the slowdown of critical technology that could bolster its military interests.

A Chinese editorial claimed that Amodei’s essay was “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.”

In the summer, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that the “development of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation.”

Even if it is granted that AI companies and national governments will eventually come to an agreement on how to implement guardrails that safeguard against life-ending technology, it is not guaranteed that these entities will stop covert research, beyond the reach of “embedded evaluators.”

In fact, it could be argued that guardrails would only be implemented as a smokescreen, deliberately opening a backdoor to covert research.

Attempting to understand the short- and long-term trajectory of AI amounts to stepping inside a funhouse of confusion, contradiction, and utter uncertainty.

Opinions and approaches on how we should handle AI are so disparate and paradoxical as to produce mental jams in anyone sincerely trying to understand the logic of it all.

And, perhaps most pessimistically, AI is wrapped around the axle of geopolitics.

If we imagine, for a moment, that AI is a vehicle, our leaders could be thought of as piled in the front passenger seat, arguing about the direction we need to go in. Each one insisting that their idea is the right one. Meanwhile, we are all crammed in the backseat, helplessly watching the vehicle speeding toward a cliff, nervously looking at our leaders, biting our collective knuckles, hoping that someone responsible is willing to take control of the wheel.

Virtually every major civilization throughout history has had a conception of the afterlife. The Egyptians mummified their kings and crammed tombs with gold in a convoluted effort to subvert soul death. The Hindus hold that the soul cycles through different lives, ever reaching toward liberation, while the Buddhists, rejecting the notion of a fixed self, believe in a current of karma that seeks release from the cycle itself. Islam promises Jannah to the faithful, and, of course, Christianity teaches a resurrection, whose consummation is an eternity with God. Through different cultures and idiosyncratic vocabulary, the foundation has stayed the same: Humans never truly die or cease to exist.

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It is no small miracle that we exist at all. That matter could weave itself from the chaos of starstuff, attain self-awareness, and develop a desire to persist is, itself, almost a divine act. Some may say, since we have punched through the black glass of non-existence, it would be absurd to conclude that our lives ended when our bodies expired.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. -Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

Consequently, every era has drummed up clever campaigns against the prospect of death. But it was not always clear what kind of campaign would appear in the twenty-first century. Until now.

Mr. Immortal

Bryan Johnson is a 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who, in 2013, sold his payment processing company to PayPal for $800 million. After selling his company and going through a divorce, he shifted his attention and a considerable amount of his wealth toward a single goal: staying alive…forever.

According to his website, Blueprint, “[n]ow is the first time in 2,000 years for a new, globally adopted ideology to emerge,” adding that “AI is progressing faster than any of us can comprehend, causing us to reexamine everything we think about ourselves, each other and society.”

Johnson’s conception of a “new, globally adopted ideology” points toward a future where humans do not die. Not only on a personal level, but in every conceivable way. And the path to achieve this is by leveraging AI. His manifesto is short and sweet:

Don’t die individually.
Don’t kill each other.
Don’t destroy the planet.
Align AI with Don’t Die.

Johnson has hired more than thirty physicians who monitor the biological age of his organs and track hundreds of biomarkers. He is ostensibly the most measured human being in history. He adheres to a strict daily regimen, which includes ingesting 91 supplements, eating a calorie-controlled vegan diet (with his last meal before noon), and always sleeping alone. He has been vocal about his intention to achieve immortality by 2039.

What motivates Johnson is nothing new, but his method is certainly among the most literal. He has taken the wish that Gilgamesh carried to the bottom of the sea and the same hope that inspired the Egyptians to pack their tombs, and hollowed out all the layers of metaphor. No gods, ceremony, or afterlife. Just hard data, supplements, and the belief that the human body can be transmuted into something beyond its nature.

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Despite his high aspirations, Johnson was reminded that his body is, well, mortal. In May, his team found something unexpected in his blood panel: anti-parietal cell antibodies, approximately five times the normal ceiling. And his immune system started eating away at his stomach.

The diagnosis? Autoimmune gastritis. Currently, this disease is incurable and chronic, in which the body indefinitely goes to war with itself. Johnson had apparently spent 11 years with consistently low ferritin that no amount of iron supplementation could resolve, a mystery that his bench of medical specialists couldn’t seem to crack.

Doctors eventually tied it to an autoimmune thyroid condition Johnson has had since he was 21. These two diseases co-occur, which is known as thyrogastric syndrome. However, Johnson has refused to slow down, extending open invitations to researchers working on regulatory T-cells and antigen-specific tolerance, conceiving of his incurable disease as a solvable problem that just has not been resolved yet.

Until recently, I did not pay much attention to the so-called longevity gurus out there. To borrow a line from Sam Harris, who used it in a different context, “it somehow felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel.” Even though Johnson is the most rigorously monitored human on this planet, having a body with more sensors and datapoints attached to it than most commercial aircraft, he was still utterly powerless to keep his body from launching an incurable assault against itself. Optimization, it appears, was gravely mistaken for prevention, in his case.

But Johnson is not really the subject here. He is merely the latest and most literal expression of humanity’s desire to live beyond its expiration date.

An old, old argument

The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered by many to be among the oldest and greatest works of literature, points to our overwhelming desire to evade death. In the myth, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, watches his best friend, Enkidu, die, and afterward sets out on a quest to ensure the same thing will not happen to him. During his journey, he learns of a plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth. After tying stones to his feet and sinking to the bottom of the sea, he retrieves the much-desired plant. But on the way home, while Gilgamesh is bathing, a serpent steals the plant. Consequently, the king returns home to Uruk empty-handed. That is, he returns home no more immortal than when he left.

How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him, and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?
-Epic of Gilgamesh

Or consider the idea of life-giving waters. The earliest account of a Fountain of Youth comes from the 5th century BCE by the Greek historian Herodotus. In Book III of his famous work, The Histories, Herodotus describes a peculiar spring located in the land of the Macrobians, a mythical, exceptionally tall, and good-looking people residing in the Horn of Africa. Many of these people were believed to live past 120 years.

The spring had peculiar qualities. It was said that nothing could float in the water, including wood or lighter substances. Everything would sink to the bottom, and it carried the scent of violets. When the Macrobians bathed in it, their skin turned sleek, smooth, and glossy, almost as if they had washed themselves in fine oil.

Even throughout many Christian denominations today, baptism is a symbolic gesture of rebirth, or renewal (John 3:4-5). And in the book of Job, it is asked, “Can the dead live again? If so, this would give me hope through all my years of struggle, and I would eagerly await the release of death” (Job 14:14).

For millennia, mankind has demanded a justification for the struggles and misfortunes that life daily inflicts upon him. He tells himself, This cannot be all life is. There has to be more to existence than what I have experienced. Life must go on somewhere else, whether among the stars or in the cradle of the gods. And despite his yearning, despite his mad insistence, the vaults of ambrosia appear to be locked from the inside.

The new arguments

Today, rebirth, renewal, and the effort to reverse engineer aging have stumbled out of the phantasmagoric caves of religion and myth, and have leaped into the metropolis of experimental science.

If you have the cash or credit line to foot the ~$232,000 ticket (if you’re a paying member), Tomorrow.bio will happily cool your deceased body to around two hundred degrees below zero, and store you in liquid nitrogen on the bet that future medicine will be such that, at some point, you will be thawed out and live again.

But the more future-minded transhumanists out there can opt to have only their brain cryopreserved, which lowers the price to ~$87,000. The thought, here, is that at some point in the future, scientists will be able to upload your consciousness. This is called mind uploading.

Tomorrow.bio is not the only cryopreservation company betting on future science. Alcor, the oldest Cryonics organization still in operation, offers the same services at a competitive rate. And if you feel so inclined, they can also freeze your pets.

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The interesting part is how Alcor defines death, noting on its site that death “is only permanent when the structures encoding memory and personality (necessary for consciousness) have become so disrupted that it becomes theoretically impossible to recover the person. This is called ‘information-theoretic death’.” They go on to say that “Cryonics is currently the best-known method for pausing the dying process in a way that allows for potentially restoring good health with medical technology in the future. Cryonics is an ambulance to the future.” Does this have the sour, lip-puckering taste of religious magisteria dressed up as academic science to anyone else?

And finally, perhaps the most compelling, considering current debates around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its place in our future, there is “the singularity.” The scientist-turned-futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has long been convinced that “the singularity”—where man and machine merge—is not only inevitable, but it is much closer than we think. Kurzweil, in an interview with The Guardian, said, “We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots—robots the size of molecules—that will go non-invasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”

Consciousness, it appears, is the cornerstone life-extension efforts. If there really is a way to elude death, the solution will have to take place at the level of consciousness.

“I think that we are headed toward a hybrid future,” Oxford University’s Marcus du Sautoy said, during an interview with Popular Mechanics. “We still believe that we are the only beings with a high level of consciousness. This is part of the whole Copernican journey that we are not unique. We’re not at the center.”

Our assumption that we are the only species with a high level of consciousness, while perhaps true for the moment, has been challenged since ancient times. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod, at the turn of the 8^th century BCE, wrote a bizarre story about what seemed to be a robot named Talos. According to the tale, it was forged by the godly blacksmith Haephestus and imbued with ichor, the very same life force that pumped through the veins of the Grecian gods themselves. Talos, it could be said, is the first description of an artificial lifeform. And Pandora, the first human woman in Greek mythology, was also artificially made, with each god contributing something of their own to complete her. The similarities to these stories and AI are, in some ways, uncanny.

If there is one thing that binds the age-defying, or age-terminating, ambition of religion and science, it is the insistence that the ancient hardware with which we are bound is nothing more than a starting point, a beginning meant to be shucked for something that transcends it.

Contempt for what we are

In Albert Camus’s 1951 book-length essay, The Rebel, he writes that “man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” While he was writing about the human refusal to accept any given condition, from politics to metaphysics, without protest, it fits our current subject with unusual precision.

Beneath the youth-giving fountains, cryo-preserved bodies, and hundreds of daily supplements, it seems there is more contempt than optimism for the human condition. In other words, there is a refusal to accept the fact that we are not perfect creatures, who can somehow cheat death with the right exercise routine or correctly calibrated freezer.

That is not to suggest that we should stop providing life-saving treatment, cancer research, or dissemination of vaccines. No sane person would advocate for such a thing. We need a science that aims to provide each person a certain quality of life, for as long as possible. This does not seem to be the goal of the longevity crowd. It is easy to imagine Johnson, while striving to remain youthful for as long as possible, could fall into the business of extending life for nothing more than merely extending life.

Consider a human who, discovering a very rare substance that can extend their life for five years each time they consume it, spends every waking moment trying to get their hands on the next batch of supply. They have no time for friends, family, travel, holidays, or entertainment. Every single moment they are awake is devoted to resupplying the substance that sustains the condition that has them desperately searching for it. This would amount to a Sisyphean imprisonment riddled with despair and paranoia.

Compare Johnson and the longevity community’s perception of life to Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and bioethicist who wrote a 2014 essay for The Atlantic, entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Emanuel does not argue in favor of suicide. And he has said, on more than one occasion, that he opposes euthanasia and physician-assisted death. But beyond the age of 75, Emanuel wrote that he would decline preventative screenings entirely, refuse flu shots and antibiotics administered for their own sake, and turn down cardiac stress tests, pacemakers, defibrillators, and bypass surgery, accepting only palliative treatment if he happens to be in pain.

Again, Emanuel is not pushing for a self-induced end to his life at 75. He has made a deal with himself that he will stop attempting to stave off the reaper, if it naturally comes knocking on his door.

For Emanuel, life is measured in its quality, not its quantity. At the end of the piece, he writes:

Seventy-five years is all I want to live. I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime. My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible. That, after all, would mean still being creative after 75.

Conversely, Johnson has pushed all his chips in on the hand of longevity: no small talk, no meals after noon, no nights spent beside another person, all wagered against a payout that has no secured arrival date.

And despite the sensors, the specialists, and the discipline, his own body still delivered him a disease that cannot be cured. Even if the researchers he has recruited to solve his illness succeed, there is no way for Johnson to get a refund on all the years he declined to live life simply to get more of it.