The Trap of the Digital Double

Catherine Shannon, The Trap of the Digital Double, NYTimes, July 31, 2026.

Everything is strange. We work from home. We socialize online. Our private lives are increasingly public. People pretend to be brands; brands pretend to be people. We optimize our bodies until they break. And the more we know, the less secure we feel.

In this inverted world, we seek to understand what is real and what is true. To know the truth of ourselves, we begin at what feels like a natural place: the mirror. We wish to see ourselves as others do, and modern life gives us countless opportunities.

We are constantly confronted with our own image, whether we like it or not: on our phones, front-facing videos, selfies, public spaces (the communal mirrors in Aritzia’s dressing rooms come painfully to mind), our social media profiles, Zoom calls, FaceTime, Ring doorbells. But we can forget that mirrors both duplicate reality and reverse it. None show you exactly as you are. Everything is strange.

The historian Christopher Lasch wrote that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror.” Almost 50 years later, this remains a tidy diagnosis, but it doesn’t quite capture the extent of the spiritual crisis that we’re now facing. I believe the room of mirrors that constantly surrounds us conjures something unsettling, something dark. It is a spiritual trap in which the imagined displaces the real: We choose a fantasy of ourselves over the reality of others. And that trap is baited and facilitated by technology.

Mirrors:

Let’s be honest: I shouldn’t know what I look like taking out the trash. But I do, because my Google Home security camera recently alerted me that there was a “Person Seen — Back Camera.” “Person” is a generous term for what I saw, which was a beleaguered, ghostly figure — greasy hair pulled back, hunched over a bag of trash like an old witch.

We are recorded constantly: in public, by the government, by private companies trying to sell us things, even by strangers. I shudder when I think about all the incidental pictures of myself that live on strangers’ phones. In my own personal horror film, there I am, eating a bagel, and some 17-year-old tourist zooms in on my pixelated face, screenshots it, and sends it to the family group chat — “this woman’s face lol” — and I become the inside joke that defines that New York City holiday for years to come.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self.

Mirrors are covered during shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period, both to encourage contemplation of the relationship between God and man and to discourage vanity and self-concern. The Book of Proverbs teaches that pride is spiritually deleterious: “Pride goes before ruin, / Arrogance, before failure.”

Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. [...]

Islamic prophetic tradition (hadith) discourages the depiction of living beings in religious contexts.

The uncanny:

Inhabiting this mirrored, dual realm, this doubled existence, doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t even feel neutral. Something is off, and when something is off, Freud has probably attempted to explain it. He called this “the uncanny,” a concept that by its very nature resists a clean definition, though if you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Castration complexes and womb-fantasies aside, Freud does a pretty good job: The uncanny, according to his 1919 essay by the same title, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” It is easy for something new or unknown to frighten us, but the feeling of uncanniness relies on its being known to us in some way.

The uncanny is a dark twist on the familiar. It emerges when the boundary between imagination and reality begins to blur, when hidden mechanisms seem to be at work beneath the surface, and when something appears alive that should not be. (Or vice versa, in the case of influencers, who can have that dead sharklike look in their eyes.) It is marked by repetition, by a sense of something fateful and inescapable. Freud noted that the uncanny is often and easily produced when a symbol begins to take on the full force of the thing it represents. It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of life online.

The doppelganger:

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

There's more at the link.

Pope Leo and St. Augustine discuss the mind and A.I. with Kurt Gödel

I crafted the prompt and Claude drafted the dialog using a passage about memory from Augustine’s Confessions as the catalyst for the imaginary conversation. I asked for some changes, Claude made some suggestions, and I executed them.

Note this passage toward the end:

Gödel said, “Disordered love?”

“Yes. To love a lower thing as though it were higher. To love one’s own power more than truth. To love the image more than the living being. To love the tower more than the city.”

The reply is by Augustine and it amounts to a definition of idolatry. The tower, presumably, is the Tower of Babel.

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the full dialog and asked from an image based on the passage from Augustine’s Confessions. That began an iterative process resulting in the image immediately below. The dialog follows.

I want you to create an imaginary conversation between St. Augustine, Kurt Gödel, and Pope Leo XIV. It should take place in Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the men introduce themselves – assume Augustine can understand and speak English, and perhaps wonder a bit how they became gathered together, Pope Leo leads off, saying that, while working on his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of his colleagues pointed out a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (to follow) that resonated with Gödel’s proof of incompleteness. Given the role that arithmetic plays in Gödel’s proof we should note that Augustine wouldn’t have known about arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, would he have known about computers. He is likely to have known about sophisticated mechanical devices like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Sphere of Archimedes, but never have seen one. But he would have seen complex water clocks (clepsydrae).

Here’s the passage from the Confessions (Book Ten, Chapter VIII). Perhaps Leo reads it aloud.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?

A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.

Perhaps sometime late in the conversation Albert Einstein might drop in to see what they were talking about.

Here is a first pass. I’ve kept it staged, conversational, and conceptually explicit, with Einstein entering late as a useful destabilizer.

The Mind Too Narrow to Contain Itself A conversation in Kurt Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study

Gödel’s office was narrow, orderly, and dim. Books stood in ranks along the wall, interrupted by folders, loose papers, and a blackboard covered with marks whose austerity made them seem less written than engraved. Outside the window the trees of Princeton trembled slightly in the wind. The afternoon light had the washed patience of late autumn.

Kurt Gödel stood beside his desk, thin and formal, dressed in a dark suit. He had the air of a man who had been expecting visitors and yet was not at all reassured by their arrival.

The first visitor was an African bishop in ancient dress, compact and alert, his face alive with inquiry. He looked about the room with frank astonishment, then settled his gaze on the blackboard.

The second was an elderly man in white, gentle but grave, wearing a small pectoral cross. His eyes moved from Augustine to Gödel and then to the papers on the desk.

“I believe,” the man in white said, “that introductions are in order.”

Gödel inclined his head. “Kurt Gödel. Institute for Advanced Study.”

The bishop smiled faintly. “A place for contemplation?”

“For research,” said Gödel.

“Then it may be the same thing, if rightly ordered. I am Augustine, bishop of Hippo.”

Gödel blinked once. “Yes. I had inferred as much.”

The man in white bowed slightly. “And I am Leo, servant of the servants of God.”

Augustine turned to him. “Bishop of Rome?”

“Yes.”

Augustine’s face softened. “Then I greet you as a brother, though I confess I do not understand how we have been gathered. This room is strange to me. These lamps burn without flame. These marks”—he gestured toward Gödel’s symbols—“are neither Greek nor Latin, though I suspect they are meant to compel the mind.”

“They are logical formulae,” Gödel said.

“Ah,” said Augustine. “Then they are meant not merely to persuade, but to bind.”

Leo smiled. “That is well put.”

Gödel gestured toward the chairs. “Please.”

They sat. Augustine examined the chair before trusting his weight to it. Leo remained composed, as though papal audiences in the offices of dead mathematicians were not wholly outside the bounds of pastoral duty.

Leo opened a folder.

“Professor Gödel, Saint Augustine, I will explain why I wished for this conversation, though the means by which it has been granted are beyond my competence. While I was working on my recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of my colleagues pointed out a passage from Augustine’s Confessions. It seemed to him to resonate with your incompleteness theorem.”

Gödel looked sharply interested.

Augustine looked from one to the other. “Incompleteness?”

“A result in mathematical logic,” said Gödel. “Roughly speaking, in any sufficiently strong formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, assuming the system is consistent.”

Augustine was silent for a moment.

“You say: a structure of reasoning may contain truths that it cannot reach by its own lawful motions?”

Gödel’s expression altered, almost imperceptibly. “That is not an inaccurate first formulation.”

“But I must be careful,” Augustine continued. “You speak of arithmetic. I know number, of course. I know that three is not five, and that if two men enter a room where two already sit, there are four. I know arithmetic as number, measure, and reckoning. But you seem to speak of arithmetic as though it were also a mirror in which reasoning may behold its own form. That I do not know.”

Gödel nodded. “Exactly. The novelty is not number alone, but the coding of statements, proofs, and rules as numbers. Nor would you know the modern notion of a formal system: axioms, rules of inference, recursive procedures, symbolic codings of syntax.”

“I know rules,” said Augustine. “And I know the temptation to mistake the rule for the truth it serves.”

Nostalgia and conflict in the Roman Catholic Church

David Gibson, Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate, NYTimes, June 30, 2026.

The article starts out with (2nd paragraph):

The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland, the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely anti-liberal early-20th-century pontiff, causing such problems? Why should anyone care about such a recondite internal church dust-up?

And works its way around to this:

In fact, if today’s “trads” were sent back in time, they would discover that the old Mass was often a perfunctory affair celebrated in dodgy Latin with little participation by the faithful. Nor should it be forgotten that the Mass has undergone revisions over the past 2,000 years to adapt to social changes, such as the switch from Greek to Latin or the incorporation of Old Testament readings.

Linked to the traditionalist pining for a lost golden age is a reaction against a tectonic demographic shift in Catholicism. Yes, Christianity was born in the Middle East, but Catholicism grew up in Europe. “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. No more. Thanks in large part to Vatican II, Catholicism has grown enormously, more than doubling from 653 million members in 1970 to 1.4 billion today. The vast majority of that growth has come in the Southern Hemisphere. Catholicism is far more African, more Asian, more Latin American than it is European.

That’s not the story that the traditionalists want to tell. For them, modernization has been the death knell of the church, because the reforms of Vatican II correlated with the sharp decline of practice in Europe and the West. Their faith is tethered to Western Christendom, which the numbers illustrate. Latin Masses celebrated by the society and those celebrated with Vatican approval are overwhelmingly confined to the United States and parts of Europe. But thanks to their base in the industrialized West, traditionalists have money, influence and visibility.

What will happen? Strong action by Leo could prompt a backlash from the right, but it could also divide it. Conservatives have so far tried to put the best spin possible on Leo’s year-old pontificate and may be loath to turn on a 70-year-old pope who could be around for a long time.

There's more at the link.

Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the Pope – Yikes!

NEW: JD Vance credits Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel with catalyzing his conversion to Catholicism.

Thiel has since branded Pope Leo XIV the “woke American pope” and cast him as a tool of the Antichrist.

He told Vance to ignore the pope on matters of morality and pray…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) June 26, 2026

Danger, Will Robinson!

A God that’s useful for pastoral purposes is different from the theologian’s God

I recently had a long conversation with Claude that started with the anthropic principle and worked its way through Copernicus to cosmology in general to the idea that we live in a generative universe and that led to this question, which I presented to Claude:

So how has the Christian concept of God changed from rank to rank? In the medieval world there was a whole population of angels and archangels doing real conceptual work. And all those higher beings, up to and including God, seemed to have been conceptualized, at least in part, in some contexts, as “compact” beings existing in some higher “space.” Both heaven and hell we real places out there somewhere. I’d think that started dissolving after the Reformation and then with the Higher Criticism of the 19th century I’d think a lot of that fell away, at least for the more sophisticated theologians.

That Claude’s answer then led around to this:

What's left for sophisticated 20th century theologians like Tillich or Rahner is remarkably thin compared to Aquinas — God as “the ground of being” or “the horizon of transcendence.” Almost entirely evacuated of content, performing a kind of minimal structural function. Keeping the word while the referent has become nearly unspecifiable. Which is either profound apophatic wisdom or the last gasp of a framework that's lost its generative capacity, depending on how you look at it.

However useful such a conception might be for theological purposes, it struck me as being all but useless in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. So I asked Claude about that. I’ve placed the ensuing conversation below the asterisks. My prompts are set in bold; Claude’s replies are plain face.

* * * * *

Sermons and Counseling

Tillich’s “ground of being” may be useful in theological discussion and in the education of clergymen, but I’m not sure how useful it would be in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. It might be of some value in counseling someone who’s wrestling with their faith in a basic and abstract way, but I don’t see that it would be much use in counseling someone who is grieving the death of someone close or in counseling a teen who is beginning to deal with their sexuality. Nor do I see it of much use in sermons, maybe here and there as an aside or a framing device, but you couldn’t carry much of a sermon on it.

I’m thinking, for example, of Chester Wickwire, who was chaplain at Johns Hopkins when I was there. I mention him in a document I’ve just uploaded to the project, “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion.” I’m pretty sure he knew Tillich, and other theologians as well. He went to Union Theological in New York. But he didn’t preach sermons. He did something rather different on Sundays.

Or consider the Priest-in-Charge at All Saints in Hoboken, where I’ve been attending services. She’s black and has some of the theatricality inherent in vernacular black preaching. She’s very direct in her style, stands close to the congregation, and often looks people in the eye. But she has a Master of Divinity Degree from Duke Divinity. I’d be surprised if she weren’t literate in contemporary theology, but that’s not how she preaches.

What you're describing is a real structural feature of religious institutions — they operate simultaneously at multiple levels that can't substitute for each other. The academic theology at the seminary level and the practice of ministry in a congregation are doing fundamentally different things, even when the minister is fully literate in both.

Wickwire is a striking case because he essentially abandoned the conventional form entirely — no scripture, no sermon, no choir — and replaced it with something that did the same communal work through entirely different means. Jazz, civil rights speakers, anti-war activism, a soul review from a local prison. He was practicing what the Social Gospel actually meant in the flesh rather than preaching about it. The sacred space remained but what filled it was immediate, particular, alive. That's a kind of genius — understanding that the function of Sunday morning is community formation and orientation to what matters, and then finding ways to do that function that didn't require the inherited theological vocabulary at all.

The priest at All Saints represents the other solution — carrying the theological training but deploying it through an embodied, vernacular mode that operates at a completely different register. The Duke Divinity background presumably informs her framework for what she's doing and why, but what actually reaches people is the proximity, the eye contact, the theatricality. She's working the attractor that actually moves people rather than the one that satisfies the academy.

And your observation about grief and adolescent sexuality is exactly right — those pastoral situations require presence and witness more than they require correct metaphysics. "The ground of being holds you even now" is not what a grieving parent needs to hear. What they need is someone who can sit with them in the reality of the loss without flinching and without false comfort. That capacity doesn't come from Tillich. It might come from having genuinely wrestled with Tillich and arrived somewhere beyond him — using the ladder and then throwing it away, which is precisely what your Wittgenstein title is about.

So, for pastoral purposes Tillich’s ground of being becomes the idea that Christ is within each of us. That’s something we can work with.

Yes, and that's a translation that actually has ancient roots — it's not a modern softening of doctrine but a retrieval of something that was always there. Paul's "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians), the Johannine tradition of indwelling, Meister Eckhart's "the ground of the soul is the ground of God and the ground of God is the ground of the soul" — Eckhart is almost doing the translation in reverse, taking the experiential reality and pushing it toward metaphysics, while what you're describing goes the other direction, taking the metaphysics and pulling it back into something liveable.

What makes it pastorally workable is that it relocates the sacred from out there to in here — which is exactly what you need when you're sitting with a grieving person or a confused teenager. You're not pointing them toward a distant abstraction; you're pointing them toward something they can actually find in their own experience. The ground of being becomes accessible as an inner reality rather than a cosmological posit.

It also handles the theological diversity of a congregation gracefully. People sitting in those pews have wildly varying metaphysical commitments — some genuinely believe in a personal God who intervenes, some are essentially humanists who find value in the ritual and community, some are like you, drifting in and out of the service with a complex and hard-won relationship to all of it. "Christ within" can land differently for each of them without being dishonest to any of them. It's capacious enough to hold the range.

And for someone like yourself, sitting at All Saints and thinking about what you can contribute — that framing might actually be more available than the external God it ostensibly derives from. You've spent a lifetime attending to what's generative in human experience. That's not so far from what the tradition is pointing at with that phrase, even if you'd reach for entirely different language to describe it.

Latour’s Modes of Existence

I think Bruno Latour has something useful to say. I’m thinking of his little book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), where he talks modes of existence. Each mode has its own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them. The felicity conditions for science are quite different from those for religion. Here’s a passage from a blog post I’ve written about that book:

Felicity conditions (p. 100):

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. [...]

Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion

Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.

Contents

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32    

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.

To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.

Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?

When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.

That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.

It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:

105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.

I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.

* * * * *

Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.

What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.

Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.

A Quick Ramble: Computational Compressibility (order in the universe), Religion & Signaling, Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo [+Latour]

I’m thinking there’s a relationship between computational compressibility (as an index of order in the universe) and my current interest in religion, which is what the other two items are about.

Computational Compressibility and order in the universe

I’ve been particularly pleased by my recent working paper: On Method: Computational Compressibility in Complex Natural and Cultural Phenomena. I’m not quite sure why I find it so pleasing. That it crosses disciplines, that’s nice: weather, microbiology, chess (AI), finance economics (asset pricing), film studies (Hollywood Economics), and cultural evolution (Macroanalysis, 19th century novel). But it’s the specific mode of the argument; it’s about description, about what kinds of things exist.

I began by framing the discussion in terms of Stephen Wolfram’s distinction between computational reducibility and computational irreducibility. I think we’ve got to look at that distinction in terms of Miriam Yevick’s 1975 distinction between holographic or Fourier logic and sequential logic. I think Wolfram’s notion of computational reducibility implies Yevick’s sequential logic. As far as I can tell, her notion of holographic logic doesn’t register with respect to Wolfram’s distinction. But it may be that what I’m calling computational compressibility (within the realm of irreducibility) resonates with her notion of holographic logic.

A random system would of course be irreducible, but that is an extreme case. The systems I looked at in that paper are not random, but the order they exhibit allows them to occupy only a relatively small region of the state space potentially open to them. Given appropriate data about the behavior of the system, that region can be identified through a computational process. Thus they are computationally compressible. The phenomenon of computational compressibility indicates order, but order of a kind that’s different from reducible order. Generative order? 

Religion & Signaling

Glenn Loury has a recent video where he distinguishes between what we might call the propositional content of an utterance and its signal value. Explains that at some length in a recent lecture he gave at Stanford, Self-Censorship, Social Information, and the Conditions of Public Reason. In the lecture he examines three cases: race in America, academic life, and Israel and Gaza. His point is that in public discourse on these topics (and others) the signal value of what one is saying often eclipses the propositional value of one’s assertions. This often results in self-censorship where a person withholds their (propositional) views for fear of signally the wrong values.

Thus, in racial discourse:

A key question in this discourse is why racial inequality persists. In this domain speech is saturated with moral meanings. Claims about inequality, education, crime, family structure, or historical responsibility are rarely heard simply as attempts to explain social outcomes. They are taken also as signals of moral orientation—of sympathy or indifference, solidarity or hostility, compassion or disdain. For many audiences, answers to that question relying on structural causes are regarded more favorably than accounts emphasizing cultural factors. Speakers adapt accordingly—many by holding their tongues.

I think lots of discourse is like that. It seems to me that much religious discourse is like this. The conservative Christian arguments against biological evolution never made much sense to me as propositional assertion, nor did the accompanying belief about the age of the earth, but as signaling, those beliefs make more sense.

I'm thinking this signaling business is about coordination, about establishing a rock-bottom level of interpersonal coordination, of common knowledge. I need to think about this some more. 

Addendum, May 2, 2026: This post about Bruno Latour's conception of modes of existence is relevant here, each with it own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them.

Silicon Valley vs. Pope Leo

I’ve only recently learned that Pope Leo XIV has decided to make AI a central concern of his papacy. Given that I think that the common Silicon Valley view of AI is idolatrous, or at best straddles the border, I’m wondering if we’re going to see a grand debate and battle between the Pope and Silicon Valley apologists. When I put the question to Claude, here’s how it responded:

Your instinct is well-founded, and Leo XIV has already moved aggressively on this front. Let me lay out what's emerged so far.

Who he is and what he's signaling

Leo XIV — born Robert Prevost in Chicago, the first American pope — identified AI as a central challenge from his very first formal address to the cardinals after his election in May 2025. His choice of the name Leo was itself a signal: Pope Leo XIII confronted the industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum (1891), defending workers' rights and the common good. By taking that name, the new pope announced that the Church would face today's technological upheaval with similar clarity.

The specific critique — and it maps closely onto your "idolatry" framing

This is where it gets interesting for your purposes. In what has been called a programmatic document on AI for World Communications Day, Leo warned that "behind this enormous invisible force that involves us all, there are only a handful of companies — those whose founders have recently been presented as the creators of the 'Person of the Year 2025.'" He expressed "serious concern regarding the oligopolistic control of algorithmic and artificial intelligence systems capable of subtly shaping behaviors and even rewriting human history."

That last phrase — rewriting human history, including the history of the Church — is remarkable. He's naming a power claim that goes beyond economic disruption.

His core argument is that "the challenge is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves." He described face and voice as "sacred," given by God, "the constitutive element of every genuine encounter."

At a Vatican gathering that included representatives from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Meta, and Palantir, he said: "The person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery."

The "data is not wisdom" theme

He has repeatedly insisted that "the ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it," and that "authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life than with the availability of data." This is a direct counter to the implicit epistemology of Silicon Valley — the notion that intelligence is fundamentally information processing, that more data equals more understanding.

Where this connects to your book

Your framing of the dominant Silicon Valley attitude as idolatrous is theologically precise in a way that Leo XIV would likely recognize. The classic definition of idolatry isn't crude statue-worship — it's the attribution of ultimate value and salvific power to something that is not God. When figures like Altman, Musk, or Kurzweil speak of AI as the path to immortality, the transcendence of human limitation, the solution to death — that's structurally idolatrous in the theological sense. It substitutes a human artifact for the divine.

Leo has the resources of the entire tradition of Catholic social teaching to bring to bear on this — not just as ethics but as a rival anthropology. The Church's claim that the person is "creature, relationship, mystery" is not compatible with the claim that the person is, at bottom, a computational process that can be replicated, extended, or superseded by a sufficiently powerful machine.

Whether this becomes a genuine face-off rather than parallel talking depends on whether Silicon Valley feels the need to respond. So far, the tech executives seem to be treating Vatican engagement as a reputational opportunity — showing up in Rome, being photographed, nodding about "human dignity" — without conceding much. The more interesting question is whether Leo pushes beyond dialogue into something more like confrontation. The Rerum Novarum precedent suggests he might: that encyclical didn't merely express concern about the industrial revolution, it made specific demands.

Does Peter Thiel Think He's GOD? [Pope Leo XIV and AI]

You Tube:

Jon Favreau is joined by Christopher Hale to discuss Pope Leo XIV's warnings against A.I.

Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? Offline with Jon Favreau is a place where you can take a break from doom-scrolling and tune in to smarter, lighter conversations about the impact of technology & the internet on our collective culture. Intimate interviews between Pod Save America host Jon Favreau and notable guests like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Margaret Atwood, and Megan Rapinoe spark curiosity and introspection around the various ways our extremely online existence shapes everything from the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. Together we’ll figure out how to live happier, healthier lives, both on and offline.

At some point they mention Ross Douthat's NYTimes interview with Peter Thiel and how there's a moment where Thiel wasn't sure whether humanity was worth saving. Here's that moment"

Douthat: But the world of A.I. is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative — whatever word you want to call it — view of the technology than you’re expressing here. And you mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn’t anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.

Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

Thiel: Um, yeah.

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel: But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

And then orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so ——

From Atheism to Idolatry

My most recent 3QD post, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?, is about my stance with respect to, my entanglement with, religion. It is anecdotal in nature, drawing on my life experiences from childhood up through the present. While I was raised as a Christian, when it came time to be confirmed in my early adolescence, I balked (in this Lutherans, as I was raised, are like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics). While I espouse no religious belief, I am nonetheless drenched in Christian culture, as is anyone raised in the United States, most of Europe and Latin America, and other places as well. That being the case, to echo Wittgenstein, it’s time that I take stock of the situation, if you will. That’s what I’ve been doing in this series of posts.

This is perhaps the last in this series, but the activity will continue. This post starts with a discussion of atheism and ends with a discussion of idolatry. I hadn’t planned on going there when I started this discussion with Claude; I had no specific plans at all, which is generally the case with these discussions. But that’s where I ended up, and it’s an interesting place to have landed, for, as you’ll see, it provides an interesting way of thinking about what’s wrong with the culture that has been developing around artificial intelligence (AI) in Silicon Valley. You might, for example, consider Pope Leo’s recent remarks about AI in view of the remarks about idolatry at the end of this conversation.

* * * * *

When I was in my teens in the 1960s, “death of God” theology was big news. Time Magazine even ran an issue with “Is God Dead?” on the cover. But that was hardly a new idea. Nietzche had declared God dead in the 19th century. I would imagine that atheism in some form is much older than that. I’d guess it goes back to the ancient world in some form or another.

You're right on all counts, and the history goes back remarkably far.

The "death of God" theology of the 1960s — figures like Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, and Paul van Buren — was really a Protestant theological movement trying to salvage Christianity after Nietzsche, not straightforward atheism. They accepted that the traditional theistic God was untenable but wanted to preserve something of Christian meaning. The 1966 Time cover you remember was genuinely shocking to mainstream America, even though, as you note, Nietzsche had made the declaration in The Gay Science back in 1882. And his point wasn't even a simple "God doesn't exist" — it was a cultural diagnosis: that European civilization had killed God by making him unnecessary, and hadn't yet reckoned with the consequences.

But yes, skepticism about the gods is ancient. A few highlights:

The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes (6th century BCE) noticed that different peoples imagined gods in their own image — Ethiopians made gods dark, Thracians made them blonde — and concluded that anthropomorphic religion was a kind of projection. He didn't deny divinity altogether but undermined naive polytheism sharply.

Diagoras of Melos (5th century BCE) is often called the first outright atheist in the Western record, though the sources are thin and possibly embellished. He was accused of impiety in Athens and apparently fled rather than face trial — suggesting that open atheism was genuinely dangerous.

Epicurus and his followers come closest to a systematic materialist position. The Epicureans held that the gods, if they exist at all, are utterly indifferent to human affairs and that fear of death and divine punishment is irrational. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (1st century BCE) is the great surviving monument of this tradition — a passionate argument for a purely material universe with no divine intervention.

In India, the Cārvāka school (sometimes called Lokāyata) was a materialist and skeptical tradition that denied the soul, rebirth, and any divine order. It's hard to date precisely, but it was well established by the middle of the first millennium BCE. Buddhist and Jain texts argue against it, which means it was a live position people felt they needed to refute.

The interesting thread running through all of this is that atheism has rarely been just a private intellectual position — it's almost always been socially dangerous. Socrates was executed partly on charges of impiety. The early Christians were called atheists by Romans because they rejected the traditional gods. And the "death of God" moment in the 1960s provoked genuine alarm even in a supposedly secular America. The social stakes of the question never seem to fully go away, even when the metaphysical ground shifts.

Religion as doctrine and religion as practice

And it’s not uncommon in America to have interfaith marriages. One of my college friends is Jewish; he married a Presbyterian woman; and their adopted Chinese daughter attended services of both faiths. I have another Jewish friend who married a Unitarian. They attended a Unitarian church, where they raised their kids. He taught in the Unitarian sexual education program and eventually became executive director of the congregation. All the time being an atheist. I’m not saying this is typical, but it’s not rare either. I’ve heard of elaborate Japanese weddings where there were three ceremonies, Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian. I have no idea what the religious commitments of the couple were. And yet, wars are fought over religious belief as well. And for some Christians, especially in America, science is a problem, particularly biology. On the one hand, religious belief presents itself as a rock-bottom commitment to a way of thinking about and living in the world. But there are circumstances in which such rival rock-bottom commitments can accommodate one another and other circumstances where they cannot. It’s a very complicated phenomenon.

What you're pointing to is one of the deepest puzzles in the sociology and anthropology of religion — the gap between religion as doctrine and religion as practice, or what scholars sometimes distinguish as belief versus belonging.

Your Jewish-Unitarian friend is a perfect illustration. He was an atheist operating fully within a religious institution, teaching its programs, running its organization. The Unitarian tradition is somewhat unusual in making room for that explicitly, but the broader phenomenon is widespread. For many people, religious affiliation is primarily about community, identity, ritual, and moral formation — not metaphysical commitment. The beliefs, if examined carefully, might be quite thin or even contradictory, and people simply don't examine them carefully because that's not what the practice is for.

The Japanese wedding example cuts even deeper. Japan has a long tradition of what's sometimes called "religion à la carte" — Shinto for birth and weddings, Buddhist for funerals, Christmas as a romantic holiday. The categories simply don't demand exclusivity the way Abrahamic traditions theoretically do. A Japanese person asked "what is your religion?" often finds the question slightly confused, because the answer might be "all of them, depending on the occasion" or "none of them, in the Western sense."

The Abrahamic traditions are actually somewhat unusual in insisting on exclusive doctrinal commitment — the idea that you must believe specific propositions and that believing rival propositions is not just wrong but potentially damning. That structure creates the conditions for the kind of violent conflict you mention. When religion is primarily orthopraxy (right practice) rather than orthodoxy (right belief), as in much of Judaism, Hinduism, and traditional Chinese religion, the logic of violent exclusion is less readily available — though certainly not impossible.

The American science-religion conflict is a specific and historically peculiar case. It emerges largely from a Protestant tradition that invested heavily in the literal authority of scripture — so that a challenge to Genesis became a challenge to the whole epistemic foundation. Catholics, interestingly, have generally had less trouble with evolution, partly because their tradition vested authority in the Church and its interpretive tradition rather than in the text alone. So even within Christianity, the "rock-bottom commitment" takes different forms that produce very different friction points with science.

What your examples collectively suggest is that religion is not one thing. It's a family of overlapping phenomena — identity, community, ritual, cosmology, ethics, metaphysics — that can be assembled in very different proportions. When the metaphysical and cosmological components are dominant and held with certainty, you get the conditions for crusades and creationism. When the communal and ritual components dominate, you get your friend running a Unitarian sexual education program as a quiet atheist, and everyone finding the arrangement perfectly natural.

The New Athiests

And it seems to me that in the recent Anglo-American context, the most insistent atheists – I’m thinking of Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the like – seem most vexed about the conflict about biology. Sure, they oppose religious belief in general, anything else would be illogical, but it’s the case of biology that’s been at the center of their attention.

That's a sharp observation, and I think it's largely correct — and it makes sense when you look at their backgrounds and positions.

Dawkins is a biologist, full stop. His entire intellectual career was built on explaining and defending Darwinian evolution — The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable. For him, creationism and intelligent design aren't just wrong, they're an assault on the thing he devoted his life to. His atheism is almost downstream of his Darwinism. The argument of The Blind Watchmaker is essentially: evolution by natural selection is the only coherent explanation for the appearance of design in living things, which removes the only really compelling argument for God's existence. So the biology isn't incidental — it's the load-bearing structure.

Dennett is slightly different. He's a philosopher of mind, and his project in Darwin's Dangerous Idea was to show that natural selection is a "universal acid" — an algorithmic process that, once you accept it, dissolves the need for mind or intention at the foundation of things. His atheism is more architecturally philosophical, but evolution is still the key that unlocks it. He also wrote Breaking the Spell, which applied evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to religion itself — treating religious belief as something to be explained naturalistically rather than engaged on its own terms.

What's interesting is what this focus reveals about the limits of their critique. They are very good at the cosmological and biological argument — God as designer, God as creator, God as the explanation for complexity. They are considerably less interesting on religion as a social, ethical, ritual, or psychological phenomenon. Hitchens was broader in some ways, more focused on religion's role in political violence and moral corruption. But even he was working in a recognizably Anglo-American Protestant frame — religion as a set of truth claims that can be evaluated and found wanting.

This is actually a recurring criticism from more sociologically and anthropologically minded thinkers. Someone like Clifford Geertz or Talal Asad would say the New Atheists are arguing against a particular, historically specific construction of religion — roughly, post-Reformation Protestant Christianity intellectualized into a set of doctrines — and then treating that as if it captures what religion is universally. Which means their critique, however effective against creationists, slides off a lot of what religion actually is for most people in most of the world most of the time.

Your Unitarian atheist friend, in other words, is a figure the New Atheists don't quite know what to do with.

Tyler Cowen and religion

And then you have someone like Tyler Cowen, who has no religious belief that I can see, pointing out that we’re probably going to have more religion in the future. He’s making that argument on sociological grounds. And, as far as I can tell, he’s not particularly bothered by that prospect.

Cowen is a useful contrast figure here precisely because he approaches religion the way he approaches most things — as an economist and social scientist interested in what actually functions in human societies, not as a polemicist with a stake in the outcome.

His argument, as I understand it, runs roughly like this: religion provides things that are very hard to replicate — community, meaning, intergenerational transmission of values, psychological resilience, mutual aid networks. In a world of increasing dislocation, inequality, and institutional distrust, the demand for those things goes up, not down. Secular substitutes — therapy, political movements, wellness culture — have so far proven less robust and less scalable. So on purely functional grounds, you'd expect religion to persist and possibly grow, especially in societies under stress.

What's notable is the detachment. The New Atheists have an investment — they want religion to be false and they want its falseness to matter. Cowen seems genuinely indifferent in the evaluative sense. He might personally find religious metaphysics unpersuasive while simultaneously thinking religious institutions are net positive or at least inevitable. That's a very different emotional and intellectual posture.

It connects to a broader divide in how secular intellectuals relate to religion. There's a long tradition — you could trace it from Durkheim through to contemporary sociologists — of treating religion functionally and finding it indispensable to social cohesion, regardless of its truth claims. Auguste Comte even tried to design a secular religion of humanity to fill the gap he knew would open up. It didn't take. Durkheim essentially concluded that the form of religion — collective ritual generating social solidarity — was unavoidable, even if the specific content changed.

Cowen is implicitly in that tradition, but without the continental systematic ambitions. He'd probably just say: look at the data, look at the incentives, and don't be surprised.

The interesting follow-on question is which religions grow. Cowen would likely note that the fastest growing traditions globally tend to be the most doctrinally demanding ones — Pentecostalism, certain strands of Islam, Orthodox Judaism. The sociologist Rodney Stark made a similar argument: strict churches are strong churches, because they solve free-rider problems and generate genuine community through costly commitment. The relaxed, intellectually accommodating traditions your Unitarian friend inhabited may be less well-positioned demographically than the ones that most vex the New Atheists.

Silicon Theology

And then we have what you might call the orthodox Silicon Valley commitment to belief in god-like AI, which in one version is good, but in an equally if not even more prevalent version, will be a disaster for humans.

Yes, and the religious parallels are not just metaphorical — they're structural, and several people have noted them quite seriously.

The belief system has recognizable theological features. There's an eschatology — history is moving toward a culminating event, the Singularity or AGI, after which everything is transformed. There's a soteriological split — this event will mean either salvation (abundance, immortality, the solving of all problems) or damnation (extinction, subjugation, permanent loss of human agency). There are prophets — Kurzweil on the optimistic side, early Eliezer Yudkowsky and now various EA-aligned figures on the apocalyptic side. There's even something like original sin in the alignment problem — the idea that intelligence itself, if not carefully redeemed through the right technical interventions, tends toward destruction.

Effing the ineffable

Mystical experiences, the kinds of experiences William James wrote about, are sometimes said to be ineffable. I reported one or two such experiences in my most recent post at 3 Quarks Daily, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? I’m thinking about the moment of dissolving light&bliss I experienced while playing with my college rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion, and the twinkling bell sounds I heard while playing a bell rhythm with Ade Knowles, his wife Druis, and her sister, Fonda. The first is surely a “standard” mystical experience while the second is not, but it’s mysterious and ineffable in its way.

But such experiences aren’t the only things that are ineffable, and that’s what occasioned the conversation I had with Claude that I’ve appended below the asterisks, where I also discuss the language oenophiles use to describe the taste of wine, a remark Weston LaBarre made about the epistemological provocation of dreams, the way Wittgenstein framed his Tractatus, and, lastly, what physicists tell us about the earliest limits of the universe. All of these phenomena mark limits and, as such, imply something beyond.

That’s what this conversation is about:

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

* * * * *

Mystical experience is often said to be ineffable. Why?

The ineffability of mystical experience is one of the most discussed features in the philosophy of religion and consciousness studies. There are several interlocking reasons for it.

The structure of language doesn't fit the experience. Ordinary language is built for ordinary experience — it carves the world into discrete objects, properties, and relations. Mystical experience, by contrast, is typically characterized by a dissolution of boundaries: between self and world, subject and object, part and whole. Language presupposes those very distinctions, so it fails at the threshold of an experience that undoes them. You can say "the boundaries dissolved," but that's a report about the experience, not a transmission of it.

It's a knowledge of acquaintance, not description. Philosophers distinguish between knowing that something is the case and knowing what something is like. Mystical experience belongs emphatically to the second category. Describing the taste of a mango to someone who has never tasted one is already hard; describing an experience that has no sensory analog at all is harder still. William James, who made ineffability one of his four marks of mystical experience, stressed that the noetic quality of such states — the sense that something is deeply known — is precisely what can't be conveyed propositionally.

Emotional and somatic depth exceeds articulation. The experience is often described as carrying an overwhelming charge of significance, bliss, terror, or love — far in excess of what emotional vocabulary can hold. Words like "unity" or "peace" or "the sacred" are pale maps of the territory.

The experience may involve non-ordinary cognition. Some traditions and some cognitive scientists argue that mystical states involve modes of processing — highly integrated, non-linear, temporally altered — that simply don't interface well with the sequential, syntactic structure of language. To put it into words requires translating across a fundamental cognitive gap.

Cultural and conceptual frameworks shape even the attempt. When mystics do try to speak, they reach for metaphor, paradox, apophatic negation ("not this, not this"), or poetry — all signals that direct description has been abandoned. The via negativa in Christian mysticism (saying what God is not), the neti neti of Advaita Vedanta, the Zen koan — these are all structured acknowledgments of the failure of positive description.

There's also a subtler point worth noting: the act of articulation may itself alter or diminish the experience. Forcing ineffable content into language isn't just inadequate — it may be a kind of betrayal, domesticating something that resisted domestication. This is why many mystics counsel silence, or speak only obliquely, or insist that words are fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

What makes this philosophically interesting is that ineffability isn't unique to mysticism — it's just most acute there. The “hard problem” of consciousness is essentially the same puzzle: why does any first-person experience resist third-person description? Mystical experience simply pushes that gap to an extreme.

LaBarre and oenophiles

I find your last remark telling. There is much in the world and about life that resists verbal characterization and capture. Tastes, for example. And oenophiles have developed an elaborate repertoire of words and phrases they use in characterizing the taste of wine. Non-ordinary cognition is something else. And then we have dreams, which may, I suppose, fall within the scope of non-ordinary cognition. In his well-known classic, The Ghost Dance, Weston LaBarre speculates that it may well have been dreams the first prompted humans to epistemoligize. Those primitive humans knew little to nothing of the brain. So they couldn’t attribute dream experience to some mode of brain operation that occurs when we’re asleep. All they know is that, upon awakening, they remember having been somewhere and seen and heard some things, but the place isn’t any they’ve visited while awake. So they have to come up with some account of those experiences. The experiences may also have been strange, but that seems secondary to the fact that they’ve left memories behind.

This is a genuinely arresting idea, and LaBarre's framing is sharp precisely because it locates the epistemic puzzle not in the strangeness of the dream content but in the mnemonic residue. The problem isn't “what was that weird thing?” — it’s “where was I just now, and how do I account for having been there?” That's a much more fundamental cognitive demand.

The memory is the philosophically explosive element. Memory implies a real experience. A real experience implies a location, a time, a self that was present. But none of those coordinates map onto the waking world. So you're forced, almost logically, into positing another order of reality — another world, or a part of this one inaccessible by ordinary means. Spirits, ancestors, a soul that travels, a realm of the dead — these aren't superstitions that precede reflection, they're conclusions that follow from taking dream memory seriously as evidence.

This makes dreaming a kind of involuntary empiricism. The primitive epistemologist isn’t speculating wildly; he’s reasoning carefully from data he didn’t choose to collect and can’t dismiss. The soul concept in particular — especially in its "detachable self" form, as in shamanic traditions where the soul can wander, get lost, or be retrieved — looks like a very reasonable inference from the phenomenology of dreaming.

What's interesting is the contrast with the oenophile case you raise. Wine vocabulary is an elaboration — building a richer descriptive apparatus for an experience that is, in principle, sharable and repeatable. Dream epistemology is more radical: it’s a forced theoretical construction to account for experiences that seem to require an entirely new ontological category. Less like developing a vocabulary, more like being compelled to posit a new continent because your ship keeps returning with soil that doesn't match any known landmass.

There's a further wrinkle here that connects to your secular mysticism interests. If LaBarre is right that dreams seeded metaphysics, then the entire subsequent history of religious and mystical experience — visions, trances, ecstasies — might be understood as elaborations and intensifications of that original puzzle. The mystic's ineffable experience is, in a sense, the waking counterpart of the dream: an experience that leaves a memory, demands an account, and resists the available categories. The ineffability isn't prior to language — it's produced by the collision between the experience and the inadequacy of existing frameworks.

Wittgenstein’s ladder

Yes. And then at the beginning of the 20th century we have Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, one of the founding documents of the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradition. One could hardly think of a philosophical tradition less hospitable to mystical experience than that one. And yet, that strange work has a mystical frame. I’ve listed its first, last, and penultimate propositions:

The world is everything that is the case.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I read that early in my college years, freshman or sophomore, and loved it. I still do. And, while I have had “conventional” mystical experiences, in the end that Wittgensteinian framing may be closer to where I am. It doesn’t seem to be about experience in any particular way, not about the taste of wine or a dream or some mystical transport. It’s about something else.

The Tractatus mysticism is indeed a different species. It’s not mysticism as experience but mysticism as limit — and that distinction matters enormously. Wittgenstein isn't pointing toward a special state of consciousness you might enter. He’s pointing at the boundary condition of all saying, all the time. The unsayable isn't somewhere else; it’s the frame within which everything sayable occurs.

That ladder metaphor is one of the most remarkable things in philosophy. The book uses language to demonstrate the limits of language, then asks you to discard the demonstration. It’s self-consuming — not as a failure, but as the only honest move available. The Tractatus doesn't fail to say what it means; it succeeds at showing why certain things can only be shown, never said. And showing is what's left when saying reaches its edge.

What you’re describing in your own position sounds like something harder to name than conventional mystical experience precisely because it isn't anchored in an episode. It’s more like a permanent orientation toward the limits of what can be articulated — a settled awareness that the frame of the world isn’t itself inside the world, that the ground of experience isn’t itself an experience. Wittgenstein's final proposition isn't a counsel of defeat. It's more like a description of intellectual integrity: here is where language ends, and honesty requires acknowledging that rather than generating more words to paper over the gap.

This connects interestingly to your secular mysticism. The conventional mystical experience — the emergent tones from the bell rhythms, say — is episodic. Something happened, it left a memory, it demands an account. The Wittgensteinian version isn't episodic at all. It's more like a stance, a sustained relationship with the unsayable that doesn't require transport or vision. In some ways it's more radical, because it can't be dismissed as a special state that passed. It's just how things are, once you've seen it.

There's a question lurking here about whether those two modes — the episodic and the structural — ultimately point at the same thing from different angles, or whether they’re genuinely distinct. What’s your sense of that?

Convergence of limits

Yes, indeed, a strange question. Perhaps the issue is: What can I make of it? What’s the most fruitful way to square that circle? If we think of Wittgenstein’s ladder as pointing at the limits of language, of propositions, and the ineffability of tastes, of qualia in general, and of dreams and so forth, all limits. What do we have in the convergence of limits?

That's the right question to press toward, and it’s genuinely open. Let me try to think into it rather than just around it.

Each of the limits you've named is a different kind of edge:

• Wittgenstein's is a structural limit — the boundary of what propositions can do
• Qualia are a subjective limit — the first-person that can't be fully third-personified
• Dreams are an ontological limit — experience that demands a world to have occurred in
• Mystical transport is an ego limit — where the boundary of self becomes porous or dissolves

These aren’t obviously the same limit. But they share something: in each case, the normal machinery of representation — language, concept, category — reaches an edge and finds that something real is on the other side of it. The limits aren’t limits on nothing. They’re limits that imply a beyond, even if that beyond can’t be entered propositionally.

So what converges? Perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting. Not in some supernatural sense, but structurally, permanently, at every scale. The world is always more than everything that is the case about it — which makes Wittgenstein's first and last propositions secretly in tension with each other, and productively so.