TRANSFIGURATION – HUMAN DESIRE’S FINAL DESTINY
‘The love that dances at the heart of things
shone out upon us …
from a human face.’
Malcolm Guite
You have no need for me to say that prophetically we stand in world history on a mountain peak similar to the one Jesus stood that day with the three and the three – Peter James and John; Moses Elijah and Jesus. A peculiar conjunction in TIME: PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE.
Exceptional, unprecedented THREE. The three humans have no idea what’s going on, caught up as they and we are in the bewildering speed and unexpected way with which events are unfolding in the maelstrom affecting our planet.
Peter James and John like us TODAY sense that things are not right and are going to get worse before they get better. In theology they call it ANAMNESIS – the moments like ours this morning, where we bring the Passion, Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus together for remembrance and reflection. The moment of TRANSITION, EXODUS, if you will, from talking about death as Jesus had prior to this moment… and actually passing through Valley of the Shadow of Death.
But in this moment TIME itself seems to be making a fool of us all: those from the past speaking to those in the present about what’s going to happen in the future seems like some kind of madness: an HALLUCINATORY moment.
Plasticity, temporality and dialectic, says Catherine Malabou, Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, may help us to understand this peculiar QUANTUM moment.
She uses a simple analogy: reading a book in any particular moment of time and then invites us to interrogate it by viewing it through the lens of Hegels’ notion of “plastic reading.”
First observation after asking the obvious question is this: the moment I’m experiencing is NOT absolutely divorced from the moment to come – that is to say I am confronted by a PARADOX: the FUTURE is not completely invisible to me in that moment – but equally the FUTURE is not absolutely visible to me in the present.
Second observation: when I read, I seem to be sitting in a kind of liminal world between the past, the present and the future where all three are neither completely invisible nor visible.
Third observation: against this background the FUTURE far from being passive exercises a frustration in us by its powerful propensity to erupt in us a precipitation of surprise which produces an ambience of disorientation in the present.
Conclusion: In this moment of reading, be it a book, or in our case the gospel account, or in the case of the disciples – Peter James and John in the cloud of knowing and unknowing, trying to interpret the sign – we find ourselves seeing and not seeing, caught in an envelope of in-betweenness, overcome by this powerful living, dynamic “grammar” of time speaking to us in a foreign language.
As Malcolm Guite puts it, they were listening to and seeing, “the love that dances at the heart of things,” shining, “out upon us from a human face.” A moment that occurred not in reading a book as it happens but in prayer – “as he was praying” Jesus, the one praying, his appearance changes, his face glows, even his clothes take on the brilliance and power of a flash of lightning before the thunder of the words assault their ears as the mental cloud becomes a material physical one covering them in confusion and fear, Peter singled out as “not knowing what he was saying”: “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him
In June I go to Rome to deliver a Paper. You could say in retrospect it will become for me and those who hear it a theological reflection of a different kind. It reads:
AI, Girard, Desire and Incarnation –
An Exodus to Transformation and the New Creation
the destiny of human desire in an autosapient world
Nikolai Blaskow
Adjunct Research Fellow Charles Sturt University,
Centre for Christianity and Culture, Canberra
ABSTRACT
At the outset (following Bratton (2015) I dismiss three misconceptions:
As Bratton suggests, the perception of AI as human, while being “a valid point of departure, is not a valid conclusion.” But given the rise of a new species, autosapiens, speculated by some in the Harvard Business Review to be agentic (they act); adaptive (they learn); amiable (they befriend), and arcane (they mystify) (Heimans and Tims 2024), suggests that not only do these AI actors threaten to displace experts and humans they also call into question the divine.
I concede that:
But argue that the world of algorithm and its ‘incomputable ‘Omega number (cited Parisi 127) is more than matched by another Omega and how Mimetic Theory (hitherto MT) reveals human desire’s final destiny.
Bohr: our ability to understand the world hinges on our taking account of the fact that our knowledge making practices are social-material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe.
Brittlestars are living testimony to the inseparability of knowing, being, and doing.
Brittlestars are not pure bits of nature or blank slates for the imprinting of culture. They are not mere resources or tools for human interventions. They are not simply superior optical engineers or natural inspirations for the enterprising ingenuity of humans.
Brittlestars are phenomena intra-actively produced and entangled with other phenomena. They are agentive beings, lively configurations of the world, with more entanglements than arms.
They are not merely objects of our knowledge-making and product-making projects. "Humans" and "brittlestars" learn about and co-constitute each other
In the game of geometrical optics
ALICE FULTON
Cascade Experiment
Because faith creates its verification
and reaching you will be no harder than believing
in a planet's caul of plasma,
or interacting with a comet
in its perihelion passage, no harder
than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological
impromptu flung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps,
for some denser, more difficult being,
a subsidiary instance, easier to grasp
than the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,
my stance is passional towards the universe and you.
Because faith in fact can help create those facts,
the way electrons exist only when they're measured,
or shy people stand alone at parties,
attract no one, then go home and feel more shy,
I begin by supposing our attrition's no quicker
than a star's, that like electrons
vanishing on one side
of a wall and appearing on the other
without leaving any holes or being
somewhere in between, the soul's decoupling
is an oscillation so inward nothing outward
as the eye can see it.
The childhood catechisms all had heaven,
an excitation of mist.
Grown, I thought a vacancy awaited me.
Now I find myself discarding and enlarging
both these views, an infidel of amplitude.
Because truths we don't suspect have a hard time
making themselves felt, as when thirteen species
of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females
stay undiscovered due to bias
against such things existing,
we have to meet the universe halfway.
Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what
looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.
The sky's high solid is anything
but, the sun going under hasn't
budged, and if death divests the self
it's the sole event in nature
that's exactly what it seems.
Because believing a thing's true
can bring about that truth,
and you might be the shy one, lizard or electron,
known only through advances
presuming your existence, let my glance be passional
toward the universe and you.
NOTE Alice Fulton, "Cascade Experiment," from Powers of Congress (Sarabande Books). Copyright © 1989, 1990, 1991, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2005 by Alice Fulton. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books and the author.