Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine | Joshua Pauling

I living in reality? And that's one of the reasons that I became convinced that the need for a podcast like this where we consistently talk about making a commitment to reality is important. And as I was thinking about it, I started to think about the old joke about a man at a party and he's talking to a woman and he says, hey, would you sleep with me for a million dollars? And the woman says, you know, for a million dollars, I think I would, And he says, okay,

what about fifty? It said fifty dollars? What kind of a woman, do you think I am? He says, well, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price. And I think that's a joke, but it could also act as a parable, a parable for our principles. And when we cease being committed to something, it's almost as though we become commodified when it comes to the practices

that we really commit ourselves to. And I wonder if for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of progress money, have we done that when it comes to reality and our humanity? I mean, your book is called are we all cyborgs now? Reclaiming our humanity from the machine? Have we done that to reality?

we need to be asking. Have we already crossed that threshold into viewing ourselves as machines and treating others as machines or objects. As you said, we tend to commodify ourselves. So yeah, I really like that as a starting point to a launching off point, and that's really where we start the book. Like I said, have we already sort

of crept into a cyborg existence? We call it the cyborg creep right, where it just sort of little by little, like you said, haggling over now right in the joke you gave, that creep has already sort of started, right, and it's underway, whether we have a chip in our brain, right,

whether we've actually literally merged with technology or not. Living in the digital age, it's so easy just to creep into that cyborg mindset and to really live through our machines in a way that in prior eras wasn't possible.

let's take chat, GBT and all of these large language models. Do they pass the Turing test? Like are they conscious? Do they have sentience, and I think that you made a really important distinction, that that's a distraction. The real question is that whether machines can think? But what about when humans start living like machines?

philosophers of technology in the book. And one of the stories I love the best is from Joseph Weisenbaum in the sixties, the MIT professor who was on the front edge of computer science and artificial intelligence as that was really emerging as a movement in the fifties and sixties, and he created what many have called the first chatbot, a program called Eliza, which could simulate human conversation in sort of a psychiatrist type setting, and he had people

testing it at MIT and including his secretary, and at one point a secretary asked him to leave the room so that she could continue her conversation with Eliza, and Weisenbaum really just became so distraught over what was happening with this very basic chatbot program. People were humanizing it, right, and so he really became a canary in the coal mine.

Wrote a great book called a Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he lays out his argument that we need to stop using this machine template to think about ourselves because just as you said, we end up humanizing our

machines and mechanizing our elves. Right, And so he really is one of the key figures we use in the book, and he has a lot to offer in his way of thinking about this from being on the front lines of this AI movement, if we could call it that, as it emerged to becoming one of the profits of warning about what would happen as we continually sort of

think of ourselves through the machine template. And you got to remember he's doing this in the sixties, long before we all carried around a supercomputer in our pocket, right, long before these large language models had the capabilities they have today. But the same basic problems problem remains.

think about everything that you discussed in the book and how much the technological world has already changed in less than two years. And is this something that you're keeping up with or sure? Obviously for the book.

what's happened since the book. For sure. When we wrote the book, the latest model was chat GPT four O that had just been released, and that O stands for omni, which I think is a pretty telling thing. Especially within the book, we refer to digital devices as omni tools, as things that can do way more than prior technologies and tools could which were tended to be single use tools, right, static things, whereas digital devices tend to be much more dynamic,

which also has effects on how they impact us. So yeah, lots has changed since the book, But the way we frame the book is that, look, we want to provide a framework for thinking about these things that will stand the test of time, and I think the framework is holding up well, and a lot of the things that we were sort of warning about and wagering on are coming to the fore I think, and coming to fruition.

Of course, we'll be wrong on some matters, but the overriding thing is the framework, Right, how do we think about these technological questions, because what's not going to change is our humanity, our understanding of what it means to be a human, our understanding of God and the world. And if we can ground the discussions there, then you know a book will be durable and be able to handle whatever comes in the tech future.

that as we go forward. But you talk about this technology and how it's changing, and how it's an omni tool, how it's so much different than prior versions of technology that our world came into contact with. How is this digitization and on the tool? How is it different? How is it a reality mediating mechanism as you call it?

You have gears and pulleys and levers, and you can sort of see how those things work. Digital technologies are hidden, they're obscured, and zeros and ones. They're almost like magic. And many philosophers of technology have pointed this out that when technology gets sufficiently complex, it's really indistinguishable from magic. Very few of us know how our smokephone works. We can't really peel back the layers in a way that's easy to understand. Prior technologies you could do that in

an easier way. Also, prior technologies tended to still involve the body in a more central way. I think of tools in a workshop, or even a car. You still traditionally have had to engage your body with the car, use your feet for the brakes, and use your hand with the steering wheel and so forth right. Digital technologies

are disembodying by their very nature. They are by sort of default, separating you from your body or allowing your ideas, your voice, your image to transport itself beyond your bodily presence. So that's different. And then perhaps the biggest difference, they go with us everywhere. They're ubiquitous. When I'm done using a hammer in my workshop to make furniture, a saw or chisel or even a table saw, right, an electricified tool, it stays there and I put the tool down or

I leave the tool. The digital goes with us and it talks back in a way that prior technologies don't. And those types of things have huge effects on our attention, our desires, and are really designed purposefully. Right. This is called persuasive design by Silicon Valley. I call it attention hacking. My hammer isn't designed with persuasive design to sort of hack my attention. It's designed for a specific task and then I put it down and I'm done. Digital devices

are not that way. So we need to really recognize that to start with that these things are different. Whether they're categorically different or not. We could have an argument about but certainly they're significantly different and have many more effects on our human capacities and abilities.

and I thought, I feel like I have to read it because it's the first chapter, but I don't want to. This doesn't sound interesting, this doesn't sound relevant. And yet, if you couldn't have set the stage for the issue in a better way, what has woodworking taught you about reality and the importance of being embodied?

way we think about ourselves in the digital world. So woodworking also bumps up against technological questions like I can choose to use hand tools or I can choose to use power tools. When I use hand tools, I'm oriented to the work differently than I am want to use power tools. If I'm using handplanes to flatten stock, then

I need to pay attention to the grain. I need to almost get in a state of flow, as many people call it, when I'm planing the wood and sort of getting into a rhythm with my body and listening with my ears to the handplane and the noise it's making over the wood, and I'm feeling with my hands any rough spots sort of chatter it's called where the

plane gets stuck. That creates a whole sense of engagement with my process, sort of a relationship to the wood that we might even say is intimate to a certain degree. When I use a power tool like a planer to surface wood, I plug it in, I hit the button, and I set the depth and I run it through and that's amazing. It's an amazing technology and I use it. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't orient me differently to the work. I don't have to pay attention to the grain. I just push it on through.

And when I'm making big woodworking projects, I'm very glad I have the planer because it speeds up my ability to actually turn a profit. But that type of technological dilemma we have all over our lives. Right, Maybe another good way to think about it would be a guy who goes to the forest with an axe to cut down trees and clear the forest, versus a guy who goes with a bulldozer in a logging truck. Right, that different tool, that different technology that bringing with him is

going to orient him to the forest differently. It's going to be much easier to clear cut the forest with a bulldozer and a logging truck. He might be a little more careful with the acts because it takes much more sweat and labor physical labor in the process of chopping down trees. So with that then in mind, then we can launch off into the digital world. Right, what are the trade offs? How are digital technologies orienting me

to the world and even to my perception of myself. Right, the amount of power I have over nature and over reality things like that.

comes to this, We've we've become heads on sticks, and this is in every realm. I mean, unfortunately it creeps into theology.

plausibility structures. So our ideas and our material culture together make things seem right, make things seem possible, make things seem desirable. So if we just highlight a few things along the way in the realm of ideas, we do have some antipathy to the body in ancient philosophy, certain strains of Greek thoughts or gnosticism and things like that, where the body is seen as really the anim me, something to transcend and get out of, sort of the

prison house of the soul. And of course that's not in all Greek philosophy. I don't want to simplify things there, but there are some strains where the body there's an antipathy to the body. So that would be one aspect. Then we could speed up to the enlightenment and see a thinker like Descartes. I think therefore I am where again sort of that brain on a stick mentality really creeps in. Further, those would again just be a few

highlights along the way in the realm of ideas. Maybe let's take a minute and talk about the material side though, when it comes to material environments and inventions, If we think about the development of technologies over time, in many ways they have increased our power over nature and in some ways made physical strength less important to survival, and by doing that that changes the way you think about

your relationship to the world. The classic examples to compare a medieval person to a modern person, the medieval person's experience of nature and bumping up against the limits of reality, and then comparing to a modern person. So medieval person's experience of the weather is going to be much more primal, if I could put it that way. You're going to experience the ups and downs of temperature in ways that we don't today. So we've insulated ourselves from that in

homes and in cars and all sorts of things. And that weather is not only going to be physically felt, but it's going to have a huge impact on your livelihood. As a medieval person, if there's a famine, will then there go your crops. So you were much more dependent on natural rhythms and natural forces, and that oriented you to the world as a creature, as a creature of God.

Now just fast forward to today, modern person, we insulate ourselves from the weather, as we already said, in highly insulated homes, and when we want to get warm or stay cool, we just push a button on the AC unit, or maybe on our phone. We just slide or tap and change the temperature in our home to stay warm.

In medieval times, you had a lot more labor to do, right, You had to chop the wood, you had to light the fire and deal with the consequences of that in your home or your small shed, basically whatever you were living in. Now we could go on transportation. The medieval person was bound to his local community. We have cars and planes, right, things that allow us to transcend our location of ways that prior generations didn't. And again that changes the way we think about ourselves, the world, and

even God. The medieval person it was easier for them to view themselves as a creature that was embedded in a community, that was bound to other people in ways that we don't. Right. We think of ourselves as autonomous in control and not as creatures, right, but as really self creators. So that would be a short answer to your question. I know we could go on and on there, but I don't know if you have any rabbit trails you want to run down there.

and one of the things that really caught me was your personal practices and how they create freedom for you to live an embodied life. One you say, you don't have internet at home.

We'd go to the library or I'd do it at school and then pronounce things to do at home or whatever. So that's been our approach for a long time. We do have smartphones now. I admit I've had a smartphone since COVID. I guess it was maybe a little bit before my wife and I did get smartphones at that point. But I will say, man, you can see its effects even when you know what it does. It's just so hard at tension spans and things. It just becomes the

default thing to do. We're actually thinking about purchasing one of these newer options that have emerged where trying to sort of return to sort of a dumb phone. There's a lot of good options out there for folks in this realm. The light phone, the yse phone, punked. There's a whole bunch of companies that are trying to provide a product that allows you to return the phone to the tool lane right rather than the omni toool lane. But that could be a hold on the rabbit trail there.

So now when we need the Internet, we can hotspot our phones, but even that is a barrier to entry, a small barrier. The computer's default setting is that it's off in our home and it's not connected to the internet. So if we need to do something with the computer, but then we open the computer and turn it on. If we need to use the Internet, then we would hotspot our phone and connect our laptop to the phone. So I do have access to the Internet at home now when I need it, But again I think it's

important to have some barriers to entry for people. This is just a classic strategy of habits and habit formation. James Clear talks about this and atomic habits. The things you want to create for good habits, you want to lower the barrier of entry towards and things that you want to avoid or eliminate. You raise the barrier to entry to So that's the way we do that with the relation to the Internet. We just raise the barrier

a little bit. We make it harder to enter that realm, and we make things that we want to do, write better things easier to enter. And that principle just translates all over the place. In the home where do you keep your devices? Are there parts of your home that you don't allow them to go? What default activities do you want you and your children to do? What should it be easier to turn on right? Should it be easier to turn on the TV or a device? Or

should be easier to play board games right? Or read books or play the piano, those types of things.

talking is just intentionality. That's really like being intentional with your lives. Because with the phone, I mean, how many times have you heard somebody say, oh, I picked up my phone and an hour later I was still just sitting there scrolling through.

resist the nudges of the device. Yeah, intentionality is so key here, and the way we mostly orient to technology is we just go along with it. That's sort of our default set. The progress. You know, Newest is the greatest, Latest is greatest. If this, if we can do something technologically, we should, It's called the technological imperative. We totally need to push back on that and really develop a personal philosophy of technology. Newcour talks about this in digital minimalism.

That's the first step to realize the problem and develop a personal philosophy of technology and intentional relationship to your devices that then allows you to have freedom.

never had a TV in the home. I was like you, I was a very late adopter to the smartphone world. At one point I didn't even have a phone. I don't even I think about it. I constantly think about this, even just getting from point A to point a B. How did we do that before we had GPS? I mean, we clearly did, but I don't remember. And it's it's I'm thinking about my own life. And historically I was able to do this because I was very intentional about what I wanted out of life. I didn't want to

sit at home and watch TV. If I was at home, I would read. But a lot of the time I was just traveling and I was out there experiencing the world. And so if I have a hard time grasping you know, the idea of being intentional, because we think, man, that's going to be really hard. Just think about how inconvenient that's going to be. Just think about the lack of

efficiency that we're going to have in our household if we don't have these things. And I told you the woodworking chapter had happened again. You just had this penchant for writing these chapters that I got there and I thought, all right, this is a book on technology. Why do I want to learn about the Amish or the lad Heights? I mean, lut Heights. They're the fools, right, And yet

I was captivating. I mean I told my wife, I was like, I kind of just want to talk to him about the Amish because we as technology keeps coming out, like you think, you call it the time technological imperative, Like if we just have to go along with progress. I mean, we're in this rapidly flowing river and we don't know what to do, and we feel like if we don't go along. Now there's the macro. If we don't go along, I mean, everybody's scared of AI and

feels like we should put limits on this. But if we don't, they will. That's the macro if you're talking about countries. But then there's even just the issue of businesses. If we don't adapt, we're going to get left behind. And then it goes down to families, communities, individuals. If I don't, I'm going to get left behind. And I always over over the past several years, we're going to

become Amish if we don't do this. And I said that as a negative, But I mean, is there a sense that the Amish have this right?

Now the things that I love about the Amish. I went to a college in a portion of Pennsylvania that had some sort of Amish roots and Mennonite Brethren roots, and some of the professors really did a ton of research in this area and published books, and that was sort of my first exposure as a sort of a teen to this world and their way of thinking. And then when I went to grad school, I had another professor who would go and visit Amish communities and do

a lot of research that way. So that was sort of my gateway into thinking about this, and I've continued to be fascinated by these communities and especially their approach to technology. Now it's easy to think that, oh, they're anti tech, right, but it's a much more nuanced position. Really. They embrace certain technologies, and they're even willing to use certain mechanized things just that aren't necessarily connect to electrical grid. Right.

A lot of times they'll, for example, the woodworking world that I live in, they'll use mechanized woodworking tools, they just won't use them in their electric form, right, They'll run them on compressed air or something like that. There's actually folks that convert woodworking equipment to be Amish friendly, from running on electric motors to running on compressed air

and things like that. So they use technologies, but the questions they ask about technologies are ones we should ask, what is this going to do to the community, what is this going to do to the sacred precincts of the home, and what is this going to do to me? And those types of basic questions are just common sense questions for a great sort of diagnostic set of questions

to ask. In one of the books I read for that chapter and preparing, there was a bunch of people that were visiting, like I can't remember if it was an Amish like furniture factory or something, but some type of tour setting and the guide said, how many of you watch too much TV? And how many of you use your phone too much? And everybody's hand went up, right, how many of you would like to do something about that, right and change your relationship to all these devices? Everybody's hands,

Oh yeah, that's a great idea. And then the guy said, we actually do something about it. I think that's just a great way to think about it. They don't just complain or bemoan the situation. They've made decisions, very intentional decisions to craft a different relationship to technology for the sake of their community, for their family, and the passing down of a tradition right that they value. And in large part it works. Their retention rates are much higher

than other Christian denominations. Of course, we always hear stories of people that leave aumage communities, right, but that the norm is that they say. What's interesting though, some of the books that have been written more recently in this field are talking about the impact of the smartphone on amash communities because it's much harder to police because it goes with you in your pocket in a way that these prior technologies that they had questions about did not.

So that's that's going to be interesting to see how even the smartphone might affect Amish communities and is affecting Amish communities. There's a place in Amish communities for communal discernment, right, and that's really important.

smallest distinction makes the biggest difference. The Amish have access without ownership, so they use cars, but they don't own cars. They'll use phones, let's say, in their business, but they won't bring them into their home. And that discernment, that

distinguishing factor. How important is that? And what can we learn and almost bring in if we're trying to become somewhat Amish in our own world in terms of trying to embrace the embodiment of our day to day life, how can we do that by practicing that discernment Because on some level, it's almost what you're doing when you choose to have internet in your home via the hotspot. Yeah, yeah, you have the access, but it's not all encompassing ownership. It's not all the time.

the communal level. I think that's a really good way to think about this. None of us are saying that there's no goods that come from these potential technologies. It's just that we need to recognize the potential detriments and situate them in our lives in ways that allow us

hopefully to benefit from the goods and not to be impacted negatively by their detriments.

And so what they ended up doing is really resisting the latest technology that was emerging in the factories at the time, and they did become known for smashing some machines, and that's the origin of sort of the Luodite straw man is, oh, these are just people the smash machines and hate technology. But they actually knew how to use many of the machines in the factories. They were very

technologically adept. But they also realized where these new technologies were going and what it was going to do to the economy, to the nature of labor, was going to essentially reduce them to cogs in a machine in the factory, and they were concerned about that that then they would become replaceable, that this would have an impact on their income and on their families, and those things drove them

to raise serious questions about technological developments. So it wasn't again just like the Amish, it's it's not an anti tech approach. It's asking questions, what is this going to do to the meaning of my labor, the meaning of

my life, the way I provide for my family, and things like that.

on the electrical grid. But do you see a connection with the monastics and is there something as Christians that we could really take and absorb from the monastic influence of that has kind of been dormant for a lot of Western Christianity.

We can reclaim the wisdom of the fathers here, the Desert Fire monastic fathers. There's so much here, and we do have some quotes sort of sprinkled throughout the book from some of these folks, especially when they're talking about Acedia and sloth right and some of the seven Deadly sins, subduing the passions. We need to train ourselves to do so, and the wisdom of the monastics here is something we can definitely tap and should continue to tap in this age.

You know, the West, as you said, has especially you know, since the prosent Reformation, there's been sort of a looking down upon monasticism, and maybe there were some extremes that needed to be addressed. We could have a discussion about that, perhaps, but there's wisdom there in the intentional living and in the seriousness with which the disciplines are approached and the importance of reordering our desires right, retraining our desires towards higher,

higher ends and permanent things. And that's the type of wisdom we need today. And I think the monastic language also is helpful when we think about the relationship to digital devices that we have. Ian Harbor of Mere Orthodoxy wrote a recent article about this. Recently, he said we should have a monk's and a missionaries approach to the digital age, and I love the way he fleshed us out. And what he said is that most people should be

monks when it comes to the digital age. In other words, we should be very intentional about our relationship to the Internet, especially social media, and most of us probably don't need to spend a lot of time there, maybe none when it comes to social media. But then he also said

there's going to be a missionaries approach too. There are going to be people that devote time and effort to having an intentional relationship to social media, YouTube things like that, and producing good content and trying to bend this towards better ends. I think that monks and missionaries framework isn't a bad one to think about, right, that we need to have almost a monastic approach to these things, just because they're so alluring and so tempting and designed to

be such. But then there's also a place in which we need to be putting good con tent into this space to bring people out of that space, to show them that there's a better world, a deeper world, another world in which they can they can sort of learn to grow into. And for many you know that we're seeing this unfold and sort of the internet pipeline into Christianity.

There's a lot of folks that discover, let's say, at Jordan Peterson or some somebody in the manosphere, right, and then they start learning a little bit more about Christianity, and then all of a sudden they show up at a church. We just had a guy this Sunday show up, right, a young man who had been online, right, who had been doing going down that pathway, that pipeline, and then

all of a sudden he's here. So that there is a place for sort of missional, a missional approach to these things as well.

I think about when I was younger and I would bring somebody home and I'd talked to my dad afterwards, and he'd be like, how's her? Is she a Christians? Her faith? So, oh, she's not, but she's interested. And it's the term missionary dating. I'm gonna win her over, not her worldview, winning mine over. And my dad and his paternal wisdom would always say that rarely works out in the direction that you're intending. It actually almost always

brings the other person down. And I think that's relevant when discussing how intentional and careful we have to be, because I sit there and I think I'll have to admit, even with this podcast, I thought, do we need more noise?

Isn't the answer to remove ourselves? But at the same time, I see people coming in the front door of our church every Sunday, and I know that the vast majority of them are finding the church online, right, and so it's kind of walking that narrow path and being extremely careful and discerning, and it's just prayerful the whole time. I mean, maybe you're a monk animissionary. At the same time, that's possible because man, the mediums are so insidious. I mean,

the way that they can grab you. Even as I'm working on this podcast, I'm finding myself on social media more and on the internet more.

to navigate. And I think you know the way our churches has dealt with this is the internet can be a place sort of like the vestibule to the church, perhaps the narthex to the church. We want to have a footprint online, we want to have good material online, but We certainly don't want to give the impression that one can worship online, that one can have that sense of what happens on Sunday morning and in the embodied

community of the church. You can't replicate that online, and we shouldn't give the impression that we can. Right. So, for example, I know this is a bit of a rabbitrail, but we don't live stream our worship services. We record the sermon, the service of the word, portion of the service, but we do not record the Eucharist. We don't want to give the impression that one could attempt even to commune from home. We want them to come to partake of these things with us and become part of our community.

And with each video we post, we also have like a one minute explanation of that ahead of time. Hey, I hope this is a good thing for you to receive, but remember this isn't the real deal. This is not the embodied community where you're really hearing the living word of Jesus and receiving his living body that needs to take place in community in the flesh.

to be hurt by those the ramifications of that. And in just the same way, the church is the embodied all alternative to a digitized world, and we have to be intentional about how we approach that. As you said, I mean, you felt like you were going to ruffle feathers when you said, we don't do church online here, and there are some circumstances where somebody might be unable to come, but those are rare, right, And you can't mean, you can't allow that option to become the main thing

because the church is embodied. And I wondered, I wanted

to ask you, how do you think treating church's education has left us vulnerable to this ideology?

with better preachers and educators on YouTube. But if Christianity is about much more than information, right, But if it's about the formation of a person and a living encounter with Risen Christ in word and sacrament, well you cannot replicate that online, right, So I think, yeah, part of the problem is we've really had such a shallow view of what Christian worship is and also what Christianity is,

and it really goes two directions. The one direction is brain on a stick, right, that Christianity is just sort of an intellectual exercise, and this sermon is basically a lecture, and that's what you get at church. You get new information that then you like deploy in your life to be more productive and more efficient. That's one trajectory that's wrong, right,

or not complete, I should say. Then there's also a trajectory where you're like a heart on a stick, right, You're just a bundle of emotions, and what Christianity is is like an emotional high. It's experiential worship. You have these certain feelings about God, and that's incomplete too, right, So what we need is the full thing. We need the embodied worship, which, yes, there's information involved, but it's much more than information. It's formation. And there are emotions involved,

but there's more than emotions. It's emotions based on truth and goodness and beauty, and that you know, I would argue this would be a different argument, but that that historically the church has done in its worship service, which has historically been a pretty liturgical affair with embodied practices, kneeling, bowing, crossing yourself, right, you're using your body and worship, eating right, the Lord's Supper, talking about an embodied thing, hearing with

your ears, right, all of your senses are enveloped in in the divine service in the Sunday worship service.

of course, and clearly doing good work. In the example that I'm giving, where you walk in this art gallery and it's just these beautiful pictures of work that they're doing in the mission field, and then tugs on your heart strings and you donate there, and then you pour your coffee and you go in and you sit and it feels like you're in a hip coffee shop. Then you got a couple of songs, and I remember one of them was a pop song that they were baptizing

for use in worship. I mean it's it was relevant. I mean thematically, you could see, okay, that fits, But it was also hey, you like this song, We're gonna play this here. And then the pastor came out with the wire mic and I remember sitting there thinking, this is just a Ted talk. That's right, I mean, this is And I eventually left church and then started to

go more and more sacramental liturgical in my leanings. And that's when I started to see the purpose in church a little bit more, because otherwise, like you said, I can get a better Ted talk online. If all this is about hacking my personhood and becoming efficient and better, you know, I can do that somewhere else. I don't need to go to the church for that. They're going to do a worse job than the world at being the world.

and that relates to worship. Form communicates something right. Everything we do in worship communicates a theological truth or a theological falsehood, and we want to make sure that the medium and the message line up right, the form and the content align and are saying the same thing about who we are, about who God is, and how God comes to man.

there's been a lot of research on this. Philip Lee has a great book called Against the Protestant Gnostics from like the nineties. I think Michael Horton wrote one called in the Face of God talking about the gnostic tendencies

within evangelicalism. So I do think there's something there. I don't want to overplay that hand and you know, be uncharitable, but I do think that we should be willing to consider how those a memorialist view of the sacrament or some of the other teachings of evangelicalism can can nudge us towards disembodiment and really a false view of the body. Yeah.

smallow only exists for orthopraxy. It's only to guide right worship. It's not an end to itself. And I think that we've lost our humanity for the sake of greater data processing, because that's what we've become. It's all just how much information can I accumulate, and you compared it almost to like microplastics or pfas, and how we aren't made to process this amount of information and we're all experiencing almost like toxic shock.

about everything. We want to quantify everything, even ourselves. Everything is measurable, and think about the technologies that allowed us. We have apple watches that can keep our heart rate and steps and all of those things. There's actually a movement called the quantified self movement, which desires to quantify every aspect of human life right to basically become more

productive and efficient. And there may be some place for thinking about quantifying some aspects or measuring some aspects of our humanity, but when that becomes the default setting. We really are short circuiting what it means to be human to use an electrical analogy. And if we think about the way that God comes to man, it's very inefficient. God took on human flesh in one place at one time, in Jesus Christ, and to spread his message, she had

to walk around and talk to people. He you know, used spit and mud and touch and words and all of those things to heal. He couldn't simulcast his sermons, right, He couldn't livestream the resurrection, He couldn't use any of the modern communication technologies we have. And that wasn't an

accident that God came at that moment. The scriptures talk about this as the Chiros moment, the moment, the perfect moment for him to come was a time before he could be videotaped, a time before he could post on YouTube. I mean, you could just go on and on with the things that we would think would be efficient or effective in getting the message out. And instead it's this embodied, slow, incarnational way of spreading his man message, and that is intentional.

That's the pattern in the paradigm. The incarnation is the pattern in paradigm for for everything, And as you said, that that is our ultimate destiny. God became man so that man may become God in properly understood and that that is where we're headed. We're not headed to some you know, mechanized reality or some reality separate from our bodies, or some you know data world that that somebody like

you've all Noah Harari wants or something like that. We are destined for an embodied existence in union with God and one another, in a new heavens and new Earth. Yeah, very embodied, real destiny.

I'm constantly trying to understand what reality is right now because we are experiencing, I think, an extreme state of disorientation. And I wonder am I being alarmist or am I being a realist? Right? When you think about technologies like neuralink, and yeah, there can be really good implementation of that technology where you get somebody who's locked in and all of a sudden they're engaging the world. Right, that's the

best case scenario. But there's a lot of slippery slopes there, and I just can't help but I mean this is where you think about the Amish and you say, hey, if you don't do this, we're going to become Amish intentionally or otherwise. And yet it just can't help but to ponder constantly, in this moment that we're living through, where do we draw the line? Right? I mean, you

talk about are we all cyborgs now? And as we all exist with this smartphone in our hand, and it's the first thing we grab and we wake up, and the first thing or the last thing we look at before we go to bed, I mean, what's the difference between that and it being implanted? And yet there is a very real thing. And I know maybe I'm just I don't think that I'm living in this science fiction world where I think that's going to be a real thing. And I think that's why you started the book the

way that you did with the Wendell Berry quote. It's a decision that we're going to have to make. Do you see that? Do you feel that as strongly as I do?

before phone. We shouldn't pick it up first each day, and we shouldn't have it in a room at night. So we can make decisions to resist these things. So we could talk about some rs here. One We need to recognize, we need to recognize what the problems are and develop a intentional philosophy of technology. Then we can resist. We can intentionally make decisions that are hard. We can be weird and known it, and Christians always have, and

there's something attractive about being weird. Actually, my high school students loved it that I was weird. It actually gave me a sense of like credibility with them that I wasn't trying to be cool because I'm not cool. So just own it, right, own the weirdness. There's a sense in which that actually becomes attractive and almost anticipates the pendulum swing in some ways. That's happening on these technological questions. I collected phones long before in my classroom, long before

the anxious generation was suggesting this. Right, and now it's like in twenty states. But by being weird, I was already sort of thinking about some of these things. So, yeah, be weird to own it. We need to resist. Then we also need to replace and reclaim and recover what's good, true and beautiful. So there's a no aspect of this. Yes, we do need to say no to some things, but even more important, it's because there's better things we can

say yes to. Yes, And that's you know, like you were saying, the Christian response to this moment, We're just made for this moment in so many ways. Right, It's not about saying no, it's about we have a better yes. And by saying no to certain things, you give room for that.

familial tables in our homes. There's just so much Christianity has to offer this moment, and that's the vision that we need to cast. Not that we're negative nancies, but

we have something better. I think that's really where we need to end up on these things.

to have to make. And it's kind of like the proverbial lobster in a pop We're all so inundated with this technology and it's such a large part of our lives and our work lives, and it's coming into our churches. How do we do this? I mean, for example, if they start wiring models into human beings into our actual bodies. So like the neuralink type of thing. I mean this is there's almost going to be the temptation to become two different species in a sense. And how do we

resist that? Where do we draw the line? Because I gave the example of neuralink. If somebody's locked in, that's a very attractive technology. If you can create an artificial organ. All right, my son needed an artificial organ. I'm getting it right, I mean, I love my son, I want but where do we draw the line? How many organs? Assuming that it's possible, I'm sure. Do you get where I'm going with this?

is a human being? An embodied soul? The unity of body and soul is a human person and that grounding needs to be right there in the forefront when we're thinking about all these questions. Second off, you know, we want to think about technologies in relation to restoration of human capacities, right. So there's definitely restorative uses of technology,

knowlogy and medicine that I think we can embrace as Christians. Right, because of the Fall, things are broken, right, and medicine plays a role in restoring some of those things that are broken because of the Fall, because of disease and sickness forth. But when we start to cross over into enhancement, right, that's I think where we need to be very careful.

We will have to draw some hard lines, right, just like we do on abortion and other matters, right, which are related to technological questions.

But yeah, those would be guiding principles what is a human being? And then thinking about this in relation to restorative technologies that can probably have a place, but not in the realm of enhancement or body modification or things like that which which we're already seeing in realms that Christians say no to, right like transgenderism is body modification.

It's a technological attempt to change the body to align to who I think I am inside, to talk about narcissism, and we say no to that, We say no to transhumanism, we say no to attempts to sort of transcend our bodies digitally or technologically. And in a certain sense, you could even say that transgenderism is a subset of transhumanism. So we already in certain areas, are willing to place

some boundaries around things will continue. We will need to continue to do that as these medical dilemmas intensify.

be cost if you're left behind. But there will be cost, there will be sacrifices. I mean, do you do am I being alarmist or do you see that on the forefront?

to predict, because things change so quickly. I mean, even in the realm of LMS, there's been a huge cooling on that the last few months. Investment is starting to dry up. Some people are carling in a bubble. GBT was five was a huge disappointment as far as capabilities. You know, we can't predict exactly what the future is

going to look like, but yes, difficult decisions need to be made now and we'll continue to need to be made.

And if they do, what do we do? And as we talked about before, I mean, what do we do? Every time I go into church and I and I touch the physical walls. I kind of joke, but I mean it. This is like when we played tag as kids and you had a home base. And whenever I enter into the church and touch those walls, the physical walls of the temple, say you can't hurt me here.

This is home base. And I think, to answer my own question, in a sense, I mean, that's what we need to do, is that we need to retreat not from the world but into the temple, into the home base, and just really commit ourselves to that reality of the incarnation.

it's very hard to see the benefits. But if a group of people come together, say in a church or a community or a school, and agree to make certain decisions about technologies, then you start to really see the benefits. It's sort of like a synergy that occurs between the people. So yeah, I'm right there with you that the place to really resist this is in the church, and then that flows out into the home and then into sort

of small little platoons as Edwin Burgh called them. This is what the church knows how to do and has been doing for a long time. And I think in some ways. Honestly, that type of intentional raising of children or raising of the next generation in the human things and in the permanent things actually ends up being best preparation for service to the world as well. It actually

might have some economic benefits in the long run. I know, we don't make decisions based on pragmatic calculations or utilitarianism, but ironically, it turns out that what's going to be most relevant in the workplace is people that actually know how to think and know how to write and communicate without outsourcing everything to AI. So I think in the long run we're actually going to be doing everybody a service by resisting the sort of infiltration of the machine into everything.

of traditional churches, let's say call them high churches. Sacramento liturgical churches are experiencing an influx, and I think a lot of that stems from when anything goes in the world, the last true rebellion, as they call it, is to limit yourself and to actually embrace some sort of asceticism to really free yourself from the passions. And I think I think it took the world going to an extreme for people to come back to the church to see

that as the more attractive thing. And so you are providing hope in that sense, and that we just have to keep doing what we do. And like I said,

we're made for the moment. The church is the best alternative here. We just have to be ready when they come. You provide a lot of invitations to hope when you say you have the better Yes. One of them is the joy of thingness? What is the joy of thingness?

your body to create music. That's the joy of thingness. Using a hand plane is the joy of thingness. Going out in nature and tuning yourself to the environment and watching birds is the joy of thingness. Taking in the sunshine. I mean, we could just go on and on. Anything that involves our bodily senses in real time and real space are ways that we can sort of reconnect to that joy of what it means to be human and the joy of enjoying objects and jests that are made

by God and subcreated by us. You said to hear the birds, And this morning I went for a run. And usually when I go for a run, I changed one thing. So before you want to talk about like quantification and the problem that.

It's the same thing with the sleep trackers. I thought, I slept all this as I didn't, and how much of a creep that can become. But even this morning, because I wanted to prepare for our conversation, I said, I'm going to run without headphones. Love it. And a midway through the run, I could hear all of the birds and I was so much more in tune with the physical environment around me, and I almost got emotional. I thought, am I missing this? This feels new? This

probably isn't new. I'm just numb to it, or I'm not hearing it because I'm hearing some people like us talk.

true leisure save us? I mean, it sounds like you just want people to be lazy.

and a free person had leisure time. The person who was liberated free could do such things with their leisure. Today we think of leisure as like entertainment, right, watching TV, Internet, amusement parks, things like that, leisure time activities. But that's such a shallow view of leisure. So yeah, the recovery of true leisure, the developments of human capacities, and the sort of enjoyment of reality as it is not for the sake of quantification or pragmatism or something like that.

That actually is vital to recovering and reclaiming our culture. And as as Joseph Peeper says in Leisure the basis of culture, leisure actually is what made our culture what it is because we took seriously the permanent things and the importance of developing those human capacities that aren't utilitarian, that aren't economic.

themselves to thinking like that. And yeah, and it's it.

There are two words that I really, really really loved in your book, and I don't know that they would have stuck out to everybody, but it's that that thing where two people find something in common and oh wow, you talk about no agenda togetherness, no agenda, And those are two words that have been so near and dear to me for the past couple of years. As I've gotten more involved in my church community. They're constantly trying to put a label on everything. This is a bunch

of men. Get this is men's group, you know, we we need These are a bunch of old people. They're the old they the young at Heart group and all of these different groups. And I keep thinking to myself, now, you know what we need. We need no agenda togetherness, just to be together without Well, what's the end goal? What are we going to get out of this? What's what's there to just? I mean, is that something that you think about? Clearly it was in your book of course.

the sake of productivity or efficiency or quantification. It's going to be things to do that are of permanent value and whatnot. So, yeah, that's a great, a great thing to think about. Right, How are we in our lives finding ways to practice togetherness that doesn't have an agenda.

It isn't about what we're going to get out of this little time here or in some productivity sense, but more for the cultivation of who we are and cultivation of relationships with each other, which is something that transcends quantification and many times is very inefficient. Think about walking with somebody through depression or being at the bedside as somebody's near death. Those are very inefficient things. Those take time and hand to hand human care. But that's love.

That's who we are. Relational beings designed for love and communion with one another and with God.

his word and in his gifts in our homes. Great times for Chiro moments where we don't have to be driven by the clock. And ideally there can be times we're not driven by the clock at work and at school too, where we're not driven by shifts or bells,

but by the actual engagement that we're having with other people and the things that we're doing and.

that act of eating. Last weekend, I was at a conference in New Jersey speaking on education and technology, and in the airport when I was waiting for my flight to get home to Charlotte, a guy sat across from me, and he had a pizza. And you know what happens at the airports nowadays, everybody's just like this, right, nobody is interacting with each other. But he saw what I was reading, and he said Hey, brother, let's share some pizza. And so we sat This was just this was just

such an amazing moment to me. We sat there for a half hour waiting for our flight, sharing a pizza together, right, and talking about wonderful things. We had a wonderful conversation and just made a human connection because he was willing to say, Hey, do you want to have some of my pizza? You know, there's something about eating together that can do that. Right. It opens up avenues of conversation

that don't happen otherwise. There was a Cairo's moment for right right in the middle of a mechanized, quantified metric driven place like an airport, right where everything runs by Kronos. Thanks thanks to that guy for for embracing Cairos and sharing his pizza.

sake of our community. I mean, we really do believe that that's such an important thing to break bread together and just right, yeah, well.

That's the deepest reality of the universe right there, the living, resurrected body of Christ. As a parent and as a husband, what makes me feel most real is embracing my children and my wife.