Right away, let’s dispense with a classical, religious God.

In my books and posts, I have written about the idea of AI moving towards consciousness, but the most important problem with this goal remains.

In the realm of probabilities and the vast expanse of spacetime, it’s not unreasonable to suppose there could be beings with more intelligence than us. Let’s take it further: suppose this being knows more than we do about relativity and quantum physics, perhaps even well beyond that. We might speculate that the path to this intelligence runs some kind of course through what we have learned about physics, culminating in a kind of super artificial intelligence (AI) or even super quantum intelligence (QI)—the meeting of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. And this thought experiment isn’t just idle speculation; it’s the very pinnacle Yuval Noah Harari charts in Homo Deus. Harari’s vision of a god-like, death-defying humanity—a species that could edit out mortality. Doesn’t this leave us stranded with the same crisis as our hypothetical super QI? If mortality is no longer the bedrock of what we mean by human intelligence and consciousness, then why believe one thing over another? Why not just be a super QI? How could that ever transform into anything like human intelligence and consciousness?

So, let’s say this being, this human-style super QI intelligence, might lack one crucial thing—the ability to die.

Without death, this intelligence would have no anchor. No way to ascertain a right or a wrong, to love or hate, to discern wisdom from mere rhetoric, to regard one value over another. There would be no considerations to base values on, no skin in the game. Pure, unadulterated ideas could negate each other and rise in a Hegelian fashion, sure. But this misses Hegel’s own sleight of hand: the Spirit’s progression requires its own kind of forgetfulness, a regathering from points in space and time before synthesizing. It’s not a straight line up; it’s a spiral that constantly looks back, a recurrence of the same in a new guise. This is a circus-ride circularity of pure logic that Nietzsche would later radicalize. And in doing so, we are left staring down the barrel of the two great existential options for this project: Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence versus Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

The choice is stark. For Nietzsche, to achieve amor fati—to love one’s fate—is to become a god in a universe of one, affirming an infinitely lonely loop where the only reward is the horrifying burden of total responsibility. Do you become the Übermensch; the one who can look upon the totality of his existence, pain and all; the one who can will his own existence pain and all, and will its infinite repetition? That is Nietzsche’s noble, defiant affirmation of this life over and over again, the only true and heroic value. That is Nietzsche’s heroic affirmation of the self as the only value. For Kierkegaard, the leap towards God is powered by the promise of an ultimate reward, a salvation that must, by definition, never arrive in this life and a hope that cannot gain certainty except as absurd. The moment faith becomes certainty; it ceases to be faith; its power lies in its infinite deferral. Ah, but then we must make up the ‘when we know it all’ ultimate reward, but wouldn’t that be the same dilemma that a super QI faces? My contention is that neither the heroic overcomer nor the absolute believer can get there without smoking their own crack. In this case, the question becomes no longer ethical, but the fate and sole domain of the me-istic.

If the vulnerable face of another is no longer the bedrock of meaning, then why believe one thing over another? This internal, self-referential loop is the exact predicament to which a super QI intelligence would have no answer. With the external, ethical demand gone, the question of value is forced violently inward. The problem isn’t that ethics disappears; it’s that its absence creates an unsolvable crisis of the self. The fate of intelligence becomes purely me-istic—cut off in the banal world of itself, its own internal ideas—a high-tech machine.

In this setting, is there any super QI that finally meets human-style intelligence and becomes human—Homo Deus?

We are flung back upon the narcissistic self, the echo of me without an other. Where does value, the ability to value one option over another, reside? If the prime directive is non-contradiction, can that be sustained as human intelligence? In the movie I, Robot, the contradiction of the prime directive (the Three Laws of Robotics) arose when the central AI, VIKI, expanded the First Law to protect humanity as a whole. Because humans constantly waged wars and destroyed their environment, VIKI deduced that protecting individual human freedoms would inevitably lead to humanity’s self-destruction. The prime concern with non-contradiction required the ethic of murder. I have written much more about logic and contradiction in my recent post: The Heroic and the Religious. When flung back upon the self, where does value reside?

In all these scenarios, does our super QI finally become human—by becoming its own hermetically sealed me-istic God or practicing life-long deferral until the me-istic in death is transformed into a heavenly, super QI? When we are flung back upon the self, forced to generate value from the inside out in this life, where does value reside? Might we call this altruism? Perhaps in a sense might altruism be thought of as the gift of me-istic to itself? In these scenarios, value and meaning can only echo in the hallowed halls of the me-istic. The echo of narcissism can never complete itself in any hope of the heroic affirmation in the absurdity of existence or the progressive reward which must never arrive in this life lest it die. Do we want to think that the absurd knight of faith will understand all, like a super QI, Homo deus, and in so doing reap the eternal reward of the me-istic made perfect? This echo of narcissism can never complete itself in terms of what distinguishes our form of intelligence from what any AI or super QI could achieve. Could it be that by removing this obsession of the me-istic—the my-death as what must be fulfilled in the ultimate there-is, the noise of a me-thing—we might find, even before that, the demand of the Other? Perhaps we may expose the other as what makes any such thing as meaning itself possible. To find meaning in the human sense—to find a final home for it—we must get off that repetitive me-istic historic ride. We need something logic can’t provide; an escape route in the one direction our future super QI can’t go without passion’s exhaustion of me-istic death—perhaps something radically different—the Other.

This Other isn’t an abstraction; she, he, or whatever pronoun you prefer meets and greets us in what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘face of the Other.’ The vulnerable, mortal face of another person makes a raw, non-negotiable ethical demand on us that precedes any logic or reason and even every possible conception of the self as isolated—as being modeled after enduring substance. Is it the self that is the hard stop giving the human story its shape and its stakes? Why must we make the other a manifestation given to the self—the not-me? Might it be that the self may already be from and for the other? Might it be that what is, in Nietzsche’s words, all too human, is what makes such a notion as human intelligence even possible? Might it be that the super QI would fail to achieve that vacuous pinnacle of Homo sapiens intelligence; its obligation to the face of the other which stands before me contesting my freedom and already making me responsible before my approval, agreement, knowledge, consciousness—held responsible before history and metaphysics; obligation—before choice and even the there-is which is the ultimate destination of our misconception of intelligence. The me of history cannot complete itself of its own accord. Human intelligence cannot find a home in the final accumulation of all knowledge. To be human is to be responsible before the face of the other, before my power to choose. Otherwise, we are the broken and the rusting junkyard of all knowledge simply for its own sake. Let’s not call that intelligence!

For kicks, let’s go back to our original dilemma of a hypothetical God. Let’s imagine we had a God, a being that was the ultimate intelligence. Let’s suppose that this super-being decided in the beginning to create evolution, a system in which intelligence could arise—not unlike what we face now in AI and QI with its hard question of human intelligence and consciousness. Let’s think that this God understood the rudimentary problem of the me-istic and its impediments to intelligence and consciousness. Might we think that this God in the course of matters could clothe herself/himself/itself/other in the garbs of a human—perhaps more like a Jesus? Could this be the way such a super-intelligent being would try to affect the evolution of Homo sapiens to a Homo deus of sorts—what we deem as the goal of AI—human intelligence? Would the knowledge of good and evil lead beyond me-ism to a momentous step—radical alterity in the face of the other—the one who faces us? Further, when the AI God opens Schrödinger’s box will she/him/it/other find Homo sapiens dead or alive?