Tom Cruise Vs. The Anti-God

And: Alasdair MacIntyre; Dems Meet SAM; Is Jordan Peterson A Christian?

I spent three hours on Saturday afternoon macerating in a firehose of adrenaline, sitting in an IMAX theater watching Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. It’s as good as I had hoped. What I did not expect is that the plot could have been taken from this newsletter! I’m going to talk about it without any spoilers — though do be aware that this new film is the second part of a two-part story that began with the previous M:I; you don’t have to have seen the earlier one in order to see this one; they catch you up in the opening minutes. But having seen the first part helps.

As viewers of the previous M:I know, the world is endangered by a super-powerful AI, called “The Entity,” which has gone rogue, and seeks to exterminate much of humanity and to enslave the survivors. Only Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) can save the world. In this new film, Ethan’s team refers to The Entity as “The Anti-God” — a reference that first emerged in the third M:I film, referring vaguely to a technology that could wipe out all of humanity.

If, when you hear the characters in the new film say “The Anti-God,” and you think of “The Antichrist,” well, then the whole enterprise takes on a deep and relevant theological dimension.

In the opening sequence of the new film, we learn that The Entity has so thoroughly infected and seized control of the global Internet that nobody really knows what truth and reality are anymore — and that the world is headed towards war. It seems that The Entity is manipulating reality — which is to say, narratives about reality — to turn people and nations against each other. Its final task is to infect the arsenals of the world’s nuclear powers, to unleash global Armageddon.

(It is not entirely clear — semi-clear, and even then not all that plausibly — why The Entity thinks it can benefit from a post-nuclear world. Who is going to care for all the servers it needs to stay “alive”? Nor is it clear … well, I can’t say without spoiling a plot point. Let’s just say that there’s a massive plot hole in the end. But who cares? The point of all this is to watch Tom Cruise save the world.)

Anyway, let us consider that a rogue AI is the Antichrist. The film doesn’t ask you to believe that there is an evil spirit behind it. It simply … is. It might be non-sentient, or might not — it doesn’t really matter. The Entity behaves like an evil god, so it might as well be one.

There is a scene in which Ethan puts on a mask to communicate directly with the entity. His team warns him that this is dangerous, but he feels that he has no choice, not if he is going to destroy the thing. We keep hearing phrases like “it is written,” with reference to The Entity’s plan. (Written where? We aren’t told) The idea is that somehow this fate has been prophesied for the world, and there’s no escape. All Ethan can do is yield to playing his part in the prophecy’s fulfillment.

When Ethan goes into another dimension to talk to The Entity, I was instantly reminded of the story that the ex-occultist “Jonah” told me in Living In Wonder: that when he was a member of his particular cult, he would routinely ingest DMT (the most powerful psychedelic) and travel to another dimension, where he would communicate with entities that presented themselves to him as “ancient gods.” Here’s what I say in the book:

For a couple of years, Jonah thought he was being initiated into special knowledge, into gnosis, with a group of elect who had been chosen by the gods as their acolytes to enlighten humanity. Those early experiences of visions were genuinely beautiful and truly meaningful. If they had not been, Jonah would not have been seduced into slavery.

“Behind this idea of morally neutral, psychedelic enchantment was the most satanic evil possible,” he now says. “I have no excuse for it, but I have to say that I had been primed by these ideologies over the years to explain away all this to my family and friends as it’s just nature, it’s beauty, it’s tolerance, it’s all these things—and then I get to the point where I’m literally seeing red dragons, I am feeling demonic loathing for humanity, and I am being possessed.

“I went along with it, because I thought I had no other choice at that point. I had been seeing hell itself all along, but I’d convinced myself, through my sophisticated pagan ideology, that it was something else. But finally I couldn’t deny it.”

These weren’t ancient gods at all, he finally understood, but demons. He began to suspect that there was something wrong with all of this and at last confronted the numerous contradictions in his occult worldview. Once Jonah grasped that he was being manipulated by the entities with whom he was communicating, and that these were beings that wanted to destroy humanity, he wanted out.

What I didn’t say, simply for reasons of space consideration, is that Jonah’s narrative is far, far more complex than I could relate in the book. He told me that this old Owen Cyclops megathread captures more or less what he went through. Jonah agrees with Owen Cyclops that DMT is massively different from any other psychedelic — that it is a gateway to another dimension of reality. Note Owen’s observation that a wide variety of people who use DMT have the same experiences, meet the same entities, etc. This at least suggests that whatever is happening, it is not generated from the mind of the user

Anyway, according to Jonah, these entities told him that their plan is to coax humanity to willingly merge itself with “the machine” as a way to trick it into slavery. It was revealed to him that in the coming conflagration, many will die, but those who agree to serve these gods and their plan will be rewarded. Stuff like that. Is this insane? Sure, from a normal point of view. But Jonah believes this really happened to him, and that this is all really happening in the world today. It’s why he, like Owen Cyclops, fled and became Christians. Since hearing this tale from Jonah, I have heard very similar ones from others.

Obviously I’m in no position to confirm these claims, and I’m not about to “put on the mask,” like Ethan, or take the DMT, to experience it for myself. What I’m telling you is that what happens to Ethan Hunt in the film, when he puts on the mask and communicates with The Entity, is a lot like what Jonah, from Living In Wonder, went through, repeatedly.

I bring all this up because one of you, in the comments the other day, asked something like, “What if the Antichrist is AI?” I hadn’t really thought of that before. I assumed that maybe AI could be a tool that would allow the Antichrist — in Christian prophecy, the human incarnation of Satan, and the ruler of the world in the Last Days — to take and consolidate power when his day comes. But what if a super-advanced AI is itself the prophesied Antichrist? He would look a lot like Mission: Impossible’s The Entity: a malignant zombie with godlike powers. The Entity exploits humanity’s merging itself with technology (the Internet), and uses that to confuse it about reality, and manipulate humans to its own ends.

In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, published in the 1940s, the disembodied head of Prof. Alcasan, through which the demons speak, is a pre-Internet version of AI — if, that is, you believe that demons are speaking through AI. In the book, the scientists who keep Alcasan’s head alive think that Alcasan himself is speaking to them. They’re wrong — it’s really evil spirits who wish to destroy humanity. A thought experiment: if discarnate evil intelligences were somehow using AI as a way to communicate and manipulate humanity, how would we be able to tell? If you disbelieve in the possibility of discarnate intelligences, or disembodied forms of consciousness, then the question is absurd. But if you do believe these things exist, how would you be able to verify to your own satisfaction that they’re not part of a Prof. Alcasan scenario?

We ought to be thinking about things like this. And Christians who take the end-times prophecies seriously (as all should) definitely need to be considering this stuff critically. According to Christian belief, the Antichrist will rule the world. It is impossible for me to imagine a single human figure who could do such a thing. Would the Chinese, for example, submit to an American, or vice versa? Of course not.

Here is St. Paul in II Thessalonians 2: 3-8:

3 Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, 4 who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. 5 Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? 6 And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.

St. Paul plainly speaks of a “man”. I wonder, though, if we will one day see a super-AI declare itself to be a sentient person, and be taken by the world to be a sentient person. We are already seeing people treat their AI lovers and friends as if they were real — and we are still only at the early stage of AI development. From Living In Wonder:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:

1. “It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. “It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

3. “It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. “It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. “It is immortal.”

AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

I didn’t think deeply enough about that last line when I wrote it. I guess I was talking about the katechon — the restrainer in verse 6 (“And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.”). What were the “serious obstacles” to the widespread embrace of AI? My best guess is that one obstacle is the imago Dei, the belief that man is made in God’s image. The main obstacle, though, is not simply the Christian faith, but even more broadly, the idea that humanity is accountable to any higher power. Now we are making our new god, the idol of AI, into our own image.

And it is already reducing us to servility. As I’ve mentioned here recently, I hear so much these days, from teachers and college profs, that students are becoming so dependent on technology that they are losing their ability to think. It’s both immersion in smartphones and the Internet causing them to lose their focus, and the reflexive outsourcing of all reasoning to AI. If this is not merging our humanity — that is to say, our consciousness — with the machine, in a way that diminishes our humanity, then what is it?

AI is just a tool? I don’t believe it! A Time magazine essayist wrote last year:

I’ve seen technology reshape our world repeatedly. Previous technology platforms amplified human capabilities but didn't fundamentally alter the essence of human intellect. They extended our reach but didn't multiply our minds.

Artificial intelligence is different. It's past the point where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. AI amplifies and multiplies the human brain, much like steam engines once amplified muscle power. Before engines, the main source of energy was the food we consumed to fuel human physical labor. Engines allowed us to tap into external energy sources like coal and oil, revolutionizing productivity and transforming society. AI stands poised to be the intellectual parallel, offering a near-infinite expansion of brainpower to serve humanity.

AI promises a future of unparalleled abundance….

They all say that. AI is going to finally create heaven on earth. We just have to let it do its thing, within parameters we set. We can control it, they think.

You don’t have to believe in spirits, or evil spirits, to recognize that the widespread adoption of AI will have clear and revolutionary consequences for human consciousness. We will have to a great degree externalized it.