Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:04] Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today, as previously promised, we are going to be beginning our multi part series on AI, digital narcissism and human dignity. This was a presentation that I delivered earlier this year at a Christian summer school in January 2026, and it was originally formatted as three.
[00:00:32] So it was a lecture series in three parts, each one 60 minutes long. We're gonna do things a little bit different with the podcast version of this presentation because I know that a lot of my listeners have told me they really enjoy half our blocks of content. So we're gonna break this presentation down into six different parts. Obviously, the reason for engaging with this subject matter is because we are now in a great cacophony of voices all declaring all sorts of different things about AI. A lot of promises are, a lot of warnings are being sounded. There's a lot of people who are all over the map on this issue. But there's one fundamental thing that often gets forgotten in the midst of all of this, and that really is the question of human anthropology. And this matters a lot because when we engage with AI or when we think about AI, it very much is intimately connected to our humanity. This is not simply something like other benign forms of technology that might sit in the corner until we want to use them. This is a technology that very much is interacting consistently now on a regular basis with human persons. And often human persons are using this technology or allowing this technology to guide them in different ways. It is a technology that is intimately connected with the human persons who actually program and put the parameters in place for different AI and how it might actually be applied in the real world. And, and of course there is a mimicking of certain aspects of humanity.
[00:02:06] And one of the big problems that we've got right now is a great confusion because we've really forgotten our anthropology and the importance of human anthropology.
[00:02:15] And so in the midst of this, this particular technology, I think, has created all sorts of confusions and problems for us in our culture and potential risks that lay ahead down the road if we are not careful in regards to this technology. And so this is a fundamentally important topic. So let's just dive right on in now. And what I'm gonna do to make things nice and easy for you is I'm gonna bring my slides up on screen so you'll be able to see me and the slides from the presentation as I speak to them. The most important thing I am going to remind you of and keep reminding you of during these podcast episodes is that all glory goes to God for anything good that you receive from this particular content. All the rubbish that's my fault, and please God, you'll forget it really quickly and it just won't stay with you. Okay, in these sessions, over these six podcast episodes, what are we going to be doing? Well, we're going to be looking at three key things we're going to be unpacking in a big way, human dignity. Like I've already said, human anthropology is essential to this conversation and, and largely it has been forgotten. And there's a reason why we have basically lost sight of our anthropology and that is because we have lost sight of the sacred transcendent vision, the theological underpinnings, the religious and spiritual underpinnings of Christianity, which gave rise to our authentic anthropology or authentic understanding of who we are and what it is to be a person in the West.
[00:03:47] And what this anthropology gave to us, this Christian vision of reality and this understanding of what a human person is, is it referenced us in relation to God, our Creator. And so what that means is if we are made in the image and likeness of God, and this is the Christian claim, then it's going to be very important to understand who God is. And that will give us a key reference point for understanding who we are. And then from there it's also going to give us other key compass points to, to guide our interaction with the world around us, including our interaction with technology. So this really matters. We are then going to talk about morality and technology and the interplay between the two. And then lastly, the last two episodes of the series are going to focus in, in particular and in a big way specifically on responding to AI. Now there's going to be AI related content woven throughout the entire six parts of this podcast.
[00:04:42] But what we're going to do first is something that I think is very essential but pretty much as I said, gets forgotten or doesn't happen in these conversations. We are going to build a really strong anthropological and anthropology is basically what it means to be human, an anthropological understanding of our humanity and also an authentic moral vision. And so in doing that, I think that then gives us the essential building blocks we need to, to then examine AI more closely and contemplate the implications of it and what it might mean in relation to the human experience and how we might interact with it as human persons.
[00:05:21] A few years ago, my wife and I were in Japan for my brother in law's wedding. He's a PhD in robotics, and he works over there.
[00:05:30] And we were in a place called Tsukubami, which is the Japanese town where they got married. And I walked out of our hotel one night where we were staying. This is many years ago.
[00:05:42] And my old cruddy cell phone, I took a photograph. So you have to forgive the grainy nature of this image. This was not a high definition iPhone at all. But immediately across from our hotel was a corporation, a business, a robotics company of all companies, actually.
[00:06:00] And the name of the company was Cyberdyne. Now, if you are familiar with film and television law, straight away you're gonna say, hey, I know that name. Cyberdyne. Where do I know that? Well, Cyberdyne Systems was the corporation in the Terminator movies, and it was the Cyberdyne company that gave rise to the Terminators. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the basic fundamental plot points of that particular story.
[00:06:26] You have an artificial intelligence that goes rogue and tries to destroy humanity. Now, I think for a lot of people, that could well be a key reference for how they think about the issue of AI or how they think about AI in general. If it's not that, then possibly it's going to be HAL as an HAL, the AI computer from 2001, the Stanley Kubrick film. And this AI once again goes rogue and views the human astronauts on this mission as being an anathema, as being a virus that threatens its core mission. And so it goes rogue and turns on the human astronauts. Or maybe you might think of something like the film AI Artificial Intelligence.
[00:07:12] That was a Spielberg film, which is actually not a bad film, even though it didn't get as much acclaim at the time. And by the way, fun fact, this project was originally also a Stanley Kubrick project. But he felt that maybe Steven Spielberg would do a better job of actually making this film, so he handed it off to him. I would really like to have seen Kubrick's version of this particular movie. It's basically a retelling of Pinocchio with artificial intelligence. And there are some very interesting and profound moral and anthropological themes embroiled in that particular film, even though I find myself frustrated by it, because this was a film that was made during Spielberg's period of soft focusing and soft lighting around the edges of his characters. Films like Minority Report, this one here. Another one was War of the Worlds. And there's this sort of soft focus imagery and lighting around the edges of images of characters and other things. And yeah, it was really frustrating because it hasn't aged particularly well, but still the film and the subject matter is kind of profound and it's about artificial intelligence. So maybe these are the reference points that people are using. And as I said, there's a reason why I think people would probably fall back on these sorts of reference points when they think about artificial intelligence. That is because we have lost sight of an authentic anthropology, a sacred, transcendent sense of our identity, which was given to us by Christianity. And so, naturally, what are you going to do if you're not sure of who you are, you're not sure of how to theologically grapple with and grapple with, say, a moral philosophy, when you're encountering big new and very frightening prospects like artificial intelligence, what are you going to fall back on? You're probably going to fall back on film and television, the mythological storytelling of your culture, and you're going to use that as your reference point, just by way of a counterpoint to the examples that I have just highlighted. If you're looking for a really great fictional account of the interplay between faith and science and morality and technology, et cetera, then I would highly recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was written by Walter M Miller Jr he came back from World War II and wrote a phenomenal novel. And it is really, well, it's doing two things, actually, this novel. One is it's a retelling of the history of the Christian west and in particular the relationship between the Christian church and the sciences. And it does this very, very well. The other thing that it does, though, is it's a fictional tale that's told in three separate ages. And what it's about is it's about the interplay between humanity and science, humanity and technology, and it explores, I think, some very profound and important themes. And it starts in a world, imagine the present day world, but we have been subjected to a total nuclear holocaust in and basically everything has been destroyed, a lot of life has been destroyed, technology has been wiped out. And it centres around the story of a group of monks in different ages, all located in the same monastery. And basically what they are doing at the start of the story, it's told in three separate ages. And in the first age we've got a monk who is stumbling through this rubble and recovering old, dead documents. They don't really understand what they are like things like, for example, circuit diagrams, but these monks, using the old ways, are faithfully copying and replicating these old documents. And then there is a major time jump. And in the second part of the story. We have now technology and science advancing and has. It has advanced a lot more. And then there is a third time jump again. And now we're in the future. We've got space travel, we've got all sorts of stuff going on. And basically, effectively, there's a type of. I won't spoil it for you, but things have basically almost come full circle and there's these profound interactions between different characters. And really what's being explored here is the interplay between faith and science and morality and technology. And it's a very, very enjoyable read. It is a very good novel and I would highly recommend it, if you haven't already read it. Like I said, though, we don't want to rely on these fictional accounts that we see in films of something like AI and technology.
[00:11:39] What we actually want to do, if we want to understand this topic well and engage with it well, is we really want to go back and I think, explore and understand an authentic human anthropology.
[00:11:50] And there is no doubt in my mind that the Christian anthropology is the authentic one. It is the good, true and beautiful anthropology, and it is the only one which I think, by which we can really form a fullness of our identity and also of human flourishing.
[00:12:08] Pope Benedict XVI once described humanity in this way. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.
[00:12:17] Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, Each of us is necessary. And there's a lot which is really quite profound tied up in that very simple statement, but it is a very, very important one. And I think in light of something like AI, this is becoming increasingly important, because it's not just that we can be fooled by AI's mimicry and think we're seeing something that we're not actually seeing, but I think also we can be fooled by AI into reducing our own humanity. In the process, we see AI mimicking certain human. Human traits, and then what we do is we devalue our own humanity by contrasting it with that, as if somehow that's all our humanity actually is.
[00:13:05] But this is a profoundly important tonic. This particular quote from the late Pope Benedict xvi, and what he's referencing here, of course, is what in Christian anthropology is known as the imago dei, the image of God, that every single human person is made in the image of God. Genesis, chapter one, verse 27. Genesis, which means beginnings, the book of beginnings, the very first chapter of that book makes a profound and important declaration. In verse 27, in the image of God, he made them male and female. He created them. That's a profound statement about what it is to be human. Psalm 8amplifies this point in an even more stark and really quite profound way. When you stop and think about it, the psalmist in Psalm 8 declares, what. What are human beings that you should think of them? Oh, God, you have made them a little lower than God.
[00:14:00] So, in other words, in the order of creation in the Christian anthropology, the human person is right up there. The human person, every human person is profoundly important. They have profound worth. They have profound value. As the Scriptures would say to us in Psalm 139, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. To be a person is not simply to be a highly evolved animal. It is not simply to be a clever animal personhood. To be a person is a whole nother level of what the Greeks would call actuation. We'll explore that a bit more soon. But it is a whole separate and different way of being.
[00:14:42] It's not like being an animal with a few extra bits added on.
[00:14:46] It's certainly well above plant and mineral life. It really is quite profound to be a human person, to be made in the image of God. And every person has profound worth because of that. So what's important to understand here is what this means and what's entailed in our human dignity. And of course, part of this is understanding who God is, because that's going to have a profound implication for who we are and how we might find flourishing in this life.
[00:15:11] So, first of all, what is it that makes us unique? We are not like plants, we are not like animals.
[00:15:17] We are not like minerals or rocks. We are not even like AI or other computers. Why is that? What makes us so different? What is it about human personhood that is unique? Well, one of the first and obvious things that we can point to is the fact that we have rationality and free will. We have a rational intellect and a free will. We have the ability to. To actually think, not just think. We can actually think about thinking. That's what it means to have rationality.
[00:15:51] We don't just think clever thoughts. We actually think about the act of thinking itself. It's why we do philosophy, it's why we do theology, it's why we do the sciences. We ask the deeper why questions, and clearly, as human persons, we are not satisfied, like with just any old answer. That desire for truth that is baked into the human person is really quite a profound thing. So we don't just think, we think about thinking. There are some Animals that can do really clever thinking, but we actually think about thinking. That's why we ask the big why questions. Like I said, you won't find a chicken wandering its way around the local poultry farm thinking to itself, what is the meaning of my chicken existence? How do I live a good moral chicken life?
[00:16:38] Where are my friends going in that big red and white truck with KFC on the side of it? They don't ask the big why questions like we do. We also have free will. We have the capacity to choose. Related to this, as human persons, we have something called transcendence. And there's two ways in which transcendence is relevant to the human person.
[00:16:59] Transcendence is simply from the word transcend, which means to rise above.
[00:17:04] And there's two ways that we rise above. First of all, when it comes to our free will, we rise above our urges. We can actually rise above our passions, our urges. We can actually choose to do the good, even when we might be tempted to do the exact opposite. So we are not just urge driven creatures. And this is quite a profound difference.
[00:17:28] The other type of transcendence that we have is religious transcendence. We look above, we seek out the divine, we seek out spirituality. We have done this from the very beginning of the human experience.
[00:17:40] Atheism really is a tiny minority, outlier. In actual fact, the natural default human position is very much one of seeking out religious transcendence. And it's fundamentally important to who we are as human persons. We build altars, churches, temples, we seek out the divine. By way of contrast, you won't find that your cat is building a little older one day and is suddenly worshipping your dog. And that's not just because cats are probably the atheists of the animal kingdom. And I can say that as a cat owner, but it's because there's something fundamentally different about animals and human persons.
[00:18:19] Now, you don't have to tune into this podcast series to know that this is true. You don't have to study philosophy. You, you don't have to be a theologian. This is what we would call a self evident truth. If you can think well and you were to stop and contemplate the world, it would become pretty obvious to you. Of course there is something profoundly different about the human person. And in fact, it's so obvious that we have structured our world accordingly. Let me explain what I mean. Let's imagine that you got home tonight and found that your next door neighbor's dog had broken into your house, had destroyed all your favorite stuff, and was Chewing on your favourite pair of shoes. What's the first thing that you would do? Would you call the police and demand that this dog be arrested for breaking and entering?
[00:19:00] Maybe you know that this dog has done this a few times to different homes in the neighbourhood. So three strikes. Obviously it's going to have to go before a judge and then probably it's going to go to jail, right? And then when the police arrive to lead it out in little doggy handcuffs, you notice that it's got a little crucifix hanging around its neck and you think, oh, it's a Christian dog, it's a Catholic. So maybe we need to get the local priest down here. Maybe it might actually need a conversation about morality and moral philosophy. And maybe, hopefully it might even want to have confession and make a good confession for its sins. And then after all of that, perhaps we would have a restorative justice process and victim statements and victim impact statements would be read out to the dog and there'd be restorative justice, etc. Etc. And counseling to ensure that it never does this kind of thing again. Now if I propose that to you as a solution here, you would look at me and think that I was mad because obviously that's not how we treat or interact with animals. And it's because animals don't share our anthropology. They are not the same as human persons, even really clever animals. There's a key difference here because if you did come home tonight and find that not your next door neighbor's dog, but your next door neighbor had broken into your house and he as a human person had destroyed your staff and was chewing on your favorite pair of shoes and he was mentally okay, he just didn't like you. And he's done this to multiple people in the neighbourhood who have annoyed him for whatever reason, you would almost certainly call the police. You would expect that all of that other stuff I've talked about might well follow on from that, including possibly even jail time to keep the community safe. There might be some punishment, there would be restorative justice. All those other kinds of things that you wouldn't do for an animal, you would do for a human person.
[00:20:42] That's because we instinctively know that there is a key fundamental difference operating here that's going on here. This is why we don't put dogs on trial when they bite people. But you would put a human person on trial for assault if they did that. There are fundamental differences here and they are self evident differences.
[00:20:59] There is a difference here of a substantial difference here. That that dog, for example, did not sit outside your house and think to itself, I'm so morally conflicted by what would doggy Jesus do? It just had an urge and then it followed that urge that strongly overtook it in that moment. Your next door neighbor as a human person who is made in the image of God has the capacity to stop and to contemplate and to transcend his urges. There's something very different going on here. Now another aspect of our human anthropology and being made in the image of God relates to this important truth about the Christian version, vision of reality. The Christian vision of reality is relational. The first and most important relationship that all human persons are called into, Jesus says this in the Gospels, is a relationship with God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul. The second most important relationship is relationship with neighbour. Love your neighbour as self. And then there is another component to this, a relational component. As stewards of the natural order, the created order, we are called into a type of relationship with the created order around us. And unfortunately, this is one area where there has been great distortion of late and not just in the last 10, 15, 20 years, but this has been going on for a couple hundred years now. There is a, rather than a relationship with nature. We'll talk more about that in an upcoming episode. There tends to be a dominance of nature and as a result of that, things are out of whack. But the Christian vision of reality is inherently relational. Now you may know this, but what you may not have perhaps possibly clued into, and I know some people haven't, is the reason why this is so. This is not just God. Jesus saying, hey, be relational with God and with neighbour and with the world around you. This is a good thing. It's very much inherently tied to who we are in the Christian anthropology because remember, we're made in the image of God.
[00:22:57] So if we want to understand a lot about who we are, we should understand who, you know, God is. And if we understand who God is, we're going to get real clarity, very good clarity for our human flourishing about who we are and what it is that we should be doing to flourish and what we should be avoiding if we want to avoid diminishing ourselves as a human person.
[00:23:14] God in the Christian vision of reality is not a single solitary being.
[00:23:20] God is triune, a trinity of three divine persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, all engaged in an eternal act of self giving love. So in the Christian vision of reality, our God is a community of three divine persons engaged In a perpetual act of self giving love. Before anything else was brought into existence in this cosmos, there was community, a divine community, and there was self giving love. And everything flow float out of that. That is so profound when you think about the implications of what that says about the way in which the world and our cosmos is ordered. But it also is profound when you think about the fact that we are made in the image of God. Because what it means is that we are inherently relational by nature. We are made that way because we image a God who is pure relationship, pure community. And we are also made for self giving love. So this is another important component of the way that we image God.
[00:24:20] Other ways that we image God that are important, we image God and friendship, community and self giving love. Like I've just talked about the inherently relational nature of who we are. We image God in our personhood, we've just talked about that in our intellect and in our will. We also image God in our work. And this is important. The importance of dignified work and the dignity of work itself for the human person is profoundly important. And in fact not just that, but there is a profound dignity in our work because we become co creators with God. God creates the matter, the material stuff that we would take and then shape in our work. You know, when you till the garden, or a very profound example of this is a mother and a father, when they produce a new human child.
[00:25:05] So in that process, what you see is a total self giving love that is fruitful.
[00:25:12] And they are co creators with God. God creates every human soul, but he leaves it to us as human parents, as husbands and wives to create the biological matter that is the other part of every human person.
[00:25:27] So in all of our work we are co creators with God and our work is profoundly important. God worked. Christ works and sweats in the garden. There's a sort of, you can see the parallel with the, the Old Testament, the Fall. And then in Gethsemane, the garden of Gethsemane, what's going on? Christ also works and his work is obviously the work of salvation. But there's something profound about this. We are made in the image of a God who works. And also we image God in our rest. We often forget this, but our rest is a sign of the life to come. It's pointing us to the fact that our eternity will be a rest in God. And so we're not talking about laziness here, but we're talking about something much more profound than that. So the human person is made in lots of different ways and we image God in lots of different ways. And another key thing that I think is important to note at this particular juncture, and we're going to come back to this for a, and I'm telling you this for a key reason, is that when we are engaging with the world around us, we discover meaning and creativity. We discover our meaning in dignified work, we discover our meaning in communion with others and communion with God. We discover our meaning and truth. This is the right application of our reason when it's orientated towards truth. We discover our meaning in goodness, the right orientation of our will, of our actions towards truth. And we act in ways that are good and avoid evil. We discover our meaning and beauty. And these are all very profound, important things to understand for a couple of reasons, not least of which is when we think about our interaction with technology and how it might have negative impacts in regards to all of these different aspects of the human experience.
[00:27:12] Now like I said, this is just sort of the basic fundamental outline, if you like, of what it is to be a person. That's the first port of call. That's the first thing you've really got to understand if you are going to, I think, engaged properly and well with AI.
[00:27:27] But we are living in a culture that doesn't have an authentic anthropological grounding anymore, because in order to stay connected to that, you have to remain connected to that sacred, transcendent religious tradition. It's through the practice of liturgy, of prayer, of reading of the scriptures, of a life of faith that we remain very intimately connected to our authentic anthropology and we move away from those things and we very quickly a cultural memory starts to erode and we orientate ourselves in ways that are not good. So what I want to do just to finish out this first episode in our six part series on AI and human dignity, is I want to start unpacking some of the reasons why our typical secular anthropology is deficient and the key philosophies or ideologies that have shaped or led to those particular deficiencies. The source of those things, where have they come from? And the first, and I think really key one to understand in all of this comes to us from this man here. Rene Descartes, 1596-1650. Rene Descartes is famous for saying, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.
[00:28:41] And what he's meaning by this is it's an answer effectively to a question, how do I know that I actually exist?
[00:28:49] And Descartes response to this is, it's kind of simple. But it's also kind of obvious, and in many ways it's kind of profound, really, but it's sort of obvious when you stop and think about it. So how do I know that I really exist? Well, Descartes would say, I think, therefore I am. So in other words, I'm thinking about that question, how do I know that I really exist? And the fact that I'm actually asking myself that question, I'm thinking means I obviously exist, because if I didn't exist, I wouldn't be able to think and ask myself that question. Pretty straightforward. That's not really the problem in our modern anthropology, our typical secular anthropology that Descartes has left us with. Instead, the problem we are left with after Descartes is his Cartesian dualism. Cartesian after his last name, Descartes, and dualism meaning two.
[00:29:43] And what he literally does is he splits the human person into two parts. And he says that we are not actually our bodies. Our bodies are a machine that we inhabit. We are souls. Today, people might say we are consciousnesses. So you're a consciousness in a body, you inhabit a body in that way. People might even say, if they're really hard materialists, you're a brain inside a body. But the point is, he separates the human person from their body and says, in actual fact, you are a soul inside a body, and that body is like a machine. So if you've heard people talking about, you know, the ghost in the shell, the ghost in the machine, people saying, you know, this is just a meat suit, all that kind of stuff, this is very much a Cartesian idea. If you've ever seen the Men in Black films, I can't remember which one it is, but one of those films, there's an alien that looks fully human until the head opens up of what looks like a normal human being. The head opens up in little segments, and then you see a tiny little alien at the controls, that's a great metaphor for Rene Descartes and Cartesian dualism, because the implication is that you're not really your body. The body is just a machine. You're like that little alien. Your soul basically is like that alien that inhabits a body and controls it and all that other kind of stuff.
[00:31:07] Now, this idea, this erroneous idea, has some profound implications for, for example, starting with knowledge and truth.
[00:31:15] How do you or how can you be certain of anything in this particular schema? So think about this. How do you know anything that you know?
[00:31:24] Where has all your knowledge come from? It has come to you via Your five bodily, physical senses. So it's through your body that and your embodied interaction with the world that you know anything about the world, that you learn anything at all. It's, you know, touch, taste, sight, sound and smell. All of those senses are what gives you knowledge. Now here's the problem.
[00:31:49] If Descartes is correct and you're nothing more than a soul, then you're not your body, your body's just a machine. So, but it's not like you can then step out of your body as a, you know, a soul which is not corporeal, not bodily, not material, and check that your material body is calibrated correctly so that it's actually telling you true things about the world.
[00:32:10] So how do you know that what your body is actually telling you about the world is actually true? This is really where the door starts to open for irrational skepticism. And this is why you have absurdities today, like people who will. I've heard people say things like nothing is knowable for certain. Now that's obviously an absurdity because if nothing is knowable for certain, then you can't know for certain that nothing is knowable for certain. There's a bit of a paradox here. Basically you can have certainty or you can have the absence of certainty, which is uncertainty. But what you can't say is there is total uncertainty, because you can't have uncertainty unless you first have some certainty.
[00:32:52] Certainty is the thing that exists.
[00:32:55] Uncertainty is the privation, the absence of certainty. So you've got to have certainty. You can never not have it. Like you might not understand or might not know, or you personally as a subject might be uncertain about something. But what you can't claim is that certainty itself does not exist, that there is no such thing as certainty. That is an absurdity, it's a self refuting proposition.
[00:33:16] So you get that kind of stuff. You also get other variations of this. Like people who are writing papers today claiming that we are living in a matrix like simulation of the world. This is all just a simulation. This is very much a Cartesian idea because what Descartes leaves us with in the west is this very erroneous idea that we are effectively persons without bodies or disembodied persons, that our bodies are not essentially part of who we are as persons. It is not at all scientific to think about the person in this way. So for example, when you hear someone say something today like I was born inside the wrong body, I, the person was born inside the wrong body, that is not a scientific proposition.
[00:34:08] It is Cartesian Dualism.
[00:34:11] And so this sort of idea is very prevalent in our culture.
[00:34:16] And I think this is important as our starting point to understand, because this very much underpins the big push we have now for the virtual, or to treat the virtual world, the online world, as if it is somehow equivalent to embodied real living, when it is absolutely not. And this is a real blind spot for our culture. And it's a very dangerous one. When you are thinking about something like AI and you are making determinations about what you think an AI actually is.
[00:34:48] Is it self aware? Has it got personhood? All those kinds of questions, they are fundamentally tied up in this. Now, if this is not the correct anthropology, then what is? Well, in a nutshell, here it is. Christians are not materialists. That's the first point. So the opposite of Cartesian dualism is materialism, which would say that the human person is nothing more than their material body. That is also a falsehood. And this is what happens on the back of people pushing back against Rene Descartes. You see an embrace of another era on the other end of the spectrum, which is the idea that we are nothing more than our bodies, that we are nothing more than a collection of atoms, we are nothing more than our materials. So Christians are not materialists. Instead, the Christian version of reality, the Christian anthropology, declares that the human person is a unified whole of both body and soul.
[00:35:46] And there are distinct things happening right at each level. But the human person is a unified whole of both body and soul.
[00:35:57] When you sleep, for example, you don't cease to be a human person.
[00:36:02] Even though you're not conscious, you are not doing anything, quote unquote soul. Like in that state, you are not self aware, you have no consciousness, you have no free will. When you sleep, you don't do anything exclusively human. Your brain's on autopilot. You're unconscious. You don't even realize that eight hours has elapsed you. You basically wake up and oh my gosh, it feels like I just went to sleep.
[00:36:26] You are not conscious, you are not self aware. You don't do anything exclusively human when you sleep, but you don't cease to be a human person when you're sleeping. It wouldn't be okay to rob you if you're asleep. It wouldn't be okay to assault you or kill you just because you were asleep. You are still a human person. So what this is pointing to is the truth that the human person is a unified whole of both body and soul. The body is fundamentally part of the person, and it's Actually an essential part, as you'll see, of the human person. Our embodied reality really matters. And this is very much something that stems from and is so central to the. One of the fundamental and essential mysteries of the Christian tradition, and that is the Incarnation of Christ.
[00:37:16] So God becomes human, becomes one of us. It's just a profound thing to contemplate, even in and of itself. But then you realize that this has all sorts of other implications attached to it. Like the fact that when you know God says in the Christian vision of reality that he knows us, he's not just speaking, like academically or intellectually. He's not just saying, oh, I know all about you, or I observe you because I'm ever present, so I know about you. No, no, God knows us because God actually has lived the human experience and the tiredness and the sufferings and everything else.
[00:37:51] God has become man.
[00:37:54] That is really quite profound. And what's embroiled in the Incarnation, it says a lot about our humanity. We often think about it as a framing of what it says about God and His love for us. And that's all very good and true, but it's also equally true to understand what it says about our humanity, the fact that Christ inhabits an actual human body.
[00:38:14] And in fact, one of the first heresies that the Church has to go to battle against is the heresy of Gnosticism. And you get different variations and different, you know, ideations of this particular heresy, which are claiming, for example, that bodies are bad, that bodily related things are evil. And the Church has to say, no, that is absolutely not true. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Mary was given the title Mother of God by the Church. It's to refute the idea that God in the person of Jesus Christ did not actually have a human body. Of course he did. He had a human mother, and so he had a human body. It's a very profound and important thing. So it's not just the fact that Christ is embodied, it's also that we believe in a bodily resurrection. So Christ resurrects from the grave with that human body. He doesn't sort of dispense of it and get rid of it, doesn't return his pure spirit. He then ascends to the right hand of the Father with that body.
[00:39:14] And that's profound. It's not like Jesus says, great, I can finally get rid of this meat suit and head on back to the Father. But he ascends with a human body.
[00:39:24] And that is profound in all sorts of ways, not least of which is what it says about our humanity now being elevated into the very life of God, and what it says about the redemption of creation, in particular, us as human persons and humans.
[00:39:40] And of course, one of the fundamental beliefs of the Christian tradition is we believe in a final bodily resurrection. So our bodies matter. We're not supposed to be separated from them. We are a unified whole of both body and soul. We are incarnational and corporeal, corporeal, bodily, incarnational. We are incarnated souls, a unified whole of both body and soul. And the question I want to leave you with to contemplate is, as we end this first episode in the series, is this. Have we already surrendered far too much of ourselves to technology because of this flawed ideology? Because of Cartesian dualism, Because we tend to think of ourselves as other than our body?
[00:40:25] Have we already surrendered too much of ourselves, our humanity, to technology? Have we really stopped thinking well about technology as a result of all of this? And like I said, in our next episode, we're going to jump straight back in and we're going to start with that question and we're going to explore some ways in which I think we can already see the problems here before we even get into AI, between the. The relationship between persons and the technology as a direct result of this idea. Thank you very much for tuning into this first episode of AI Digital Narcissism and Human Dignity. I hope you found the first one engaging. We've got five more episodes to come and as I said, in future episodes, we're going to carry on unpacking the Christian vision of anthropology, the typical secular anthropology, and what the flaws might be. And then we're going to take a big, deep dive into artificial intelligence and the implications for this foundation that we are building now, what it means when we think about AI and when we interact with AI. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatchers. Hi there. If you're enjoying our content, then why not consider becoming a paid supporter of our work? You can do that at either Substack or Patreon, and the link for both are in the show notes for this episode. If you do become a supporter, then you'll get access to exclusive content, early release content, and also you'll be helping to fund all of the offline work that we do as well, all of the youth camps and the events that we speak at and all that other stuff that happens that you don't see online.
[00:41:58] A huge thank you to all of our paid subscribers. It's thanks to you that this episode is made possible.
