This is the Way Your World Ends

The church faces a change in human self-understanding as great or greater than that of the Enlightenment, but seems strangely complacent in its own destruction.

Conflicts over the theological status of LBGTQ+ persons that have stuttered through Christian communities over the last 70 years. They are urgent, and deeply affect the well being of hurting people. Yet they are a mere foretaste of conflicts to come. Humanity faces tectonic changes in our self-understanding that will sweep both sides of these late modern controversies down into obscurity as their debates become unintelligible in an emerging global culture. 

Each of us is currently participating and even hastening on these changes in what it means to be human. Have you had any part of your body replaced; from near ubiquitous lens replacement surgery for cataracts to heart valve replacement to replacements of knees, hips, kidneys, lungs, corneas, livers, skin and so on. Face transplants are now possible, and nervous system transplants are coming soon. 

A Texas hospital system has billboards advertising that it is "proud to serve the world's most complex machine." In Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffery Bishop documents how we have come to the place where the human person is seen as a machine, and thus as both a recipient and source of replacement parts. The first question asked when you enter a hospital is whether you have an "advance directive," because this is what will allow your body, should you die, to be harvested for parts to repair those complex machines that may have a few more years left in them. 

Not that these spare parts need to come from humans. Even now scientists are both building mechanical replacement parts and breeding animals to provide spare parts. Because humans whose parts are in good condition simply don't die quickly enough to fill the need. 

I anticipate a new heart valve within the year, and already have new lenses in my eyes, so I'm fully part of this movement to see the body as a machine filled with interchangeable parts.  

What made all this transplanting possible was a change in the way we define death. Since the late 1960's  death has been defined by the measurement of electrical activity in the brain rather than the cessation of heartbeat and breathing. This allows organs to be harvested while they are still fully viable and their cells are alive. And this has a profound influence on our self-understanding. 

It means that we identify the living self as a set of measurable states in one portion of the brain. These we define as "consciousness" and when we can no longer detect these states with electronic sensors the person is regarded as dead. And again I have some first hand experience with this, having had to make the decision with my siblings to remove my mother from life support when the doctors declared that she was "brain dead." I accepted, as many of you reading this accept, that when the measurable consciousness is gone the person has died. 

Yet there are some problems I fear most Christians haven't considered. First we have drugs that suppress consciousness so well that it cannot be measured. These allow for all kinds of operations on the human body without terrible pain (including transplants), but also mean that doctors can switch life off and on at will. So we really are the world's most complex machine, and an anesthesiologist turns us off and on while physician/mechanics repair and replace the broken pieces until the whole thing is just too worn out to be worth it. 

Unless we're been sentenced to the death penalty. Then someone (never a doctor) uses drugs to switch off consciousness, stop the heart and lungs, and then wait until the machine can't be turned back on again. Death by action, death by inaction.  

That turning off and on, by the way, will become more sophisticated in the foreseeable future. Already defibrillators are common in public places, a means to jump-start a heart that has ceased to function more effectively than the old manual resuscitations. Thank you lithium batteries and advanced electronics. But could we jump-start a brain that has slipped into unconsciousness? Almost certainly. 

Through a series of experiments carried out at Yale we now know that pig brains, removed from the body and bled out, can survive even after four hours usingan artificial blood compound and mechanical pump. (https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/04/18/yale-researchers-revive-cells-in-dead-pig-brains/) The neurons are functional and ready to work. Are they conscious? Well ethical concerns cause experimenters to keep them deeply sedated so no one knows. Not even a pig deserves to wake up disembodied with every severed nerve screaming pain. 

Now that we know that a brain deprived of blood for as long as 4 hours can survive, will we not work out a way to send the electrical pulses that will shock it back into consciousness? Of course we will. The ethical demand to be able to save a child who drowned, or indeed anyone whose brain could be viable will demand it. 

But this post isn't just about ethics. Its about what it means to be human. And my point is simple: Our self concept, worked out daily in the field of medicine, is that we are an embodied brain, and that our mind, our consciousness, consists of patterns of electrical activity within the brain. When the patterns are gone, so are we. If the patterns can be restored we'll be back. 

How then does that make us different from increasingly complex artificial intelligences that appear to us as patterns of electrical activity in a set of computer circuits. As it currently stands, of course, these circuits are far smaller and less sophisticated that the structure of the brain. And the "intelligence" they possess is far less sophisticated as well; something we all know from interacting with Siri, Alexas, or any of the chatbots we encounter on the internet. 

But they are already far more sophisticated than many animals. The extinction of a species, any species, is considered immoral. Is it immoral to pull the plug on a species of sophisticated AIs in order to recycle their parts? 

In closing I'll point out that our willing complicity in changing understandings of what it means to be alive have transformed our understanding of embodiment and being human. And our willing participation in treating emerging artificial intelligences as human by chatting with them, giving orders, even cursing at them, is participation in a changing understanding of what it means to be alive, and human, and conscious. 

We are deconstructing and reconstructing our own self-understanding, often without realizing it. 

We will soon have in our hands the power to recognize and choose far more than our sex, gender, and sexuality. We will become self-creators on a scale we can just begin to imagine. And even as we create a new kind of human person we will create and interact with new forms of apparently conscious beings with all the dangers and possibilities that entails. Indeed, as AI becomes more capable, more able to meet our human needs and more active in shaping our human minds we may find that we're creating our own gods; gods more persistent, reliable and consistent in many realms of human activity than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has proven to be. 

And if that doesn't influence our doctrine of Incarnation, and indeed require a complete rethinking, I'm not sure what does. Merely repeating creeds from the ancient world, or more contemporary creeds from emerging modernity, is an exercise in nostalgia when resuscitation is getting closer and closer to resurrection. 

If we as humans are engaged in dramatic self-transformation then we the Christian churches and their leaders seem to be floating along in blissful ignorance and replaying the familiar games of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theology.  We're struggling over sexuality when we've lost our grip on what it even means to be conscious and embodied humans. We're wrestling with understandings of God through the categories of antiquity and/or modernity when those categories are slipping into meaninglessness given dramatic changes in understanding the knower and what can be known. 

What is the Gospel for those who have already slipped beyond both the church and its understanding of the reality? Do we care?