Why the Machine Hates Embodiment

A meditation on what it means to be human

Detail of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a body, that wants it gone…”
(With apologies to Robert Frost)

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For several months, this phrase has been rolling around in my head. I’ve been contemplating the all-out assault against what it means to be human and to have a body in our society.

I have to apologize to the late Robert Frost for the blatant injury to the opening of his Mending Wall poem, also repeated in another line:

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”

Frost goes on to suggest, tongue in cheek, that perhaps elves are responsible for tearing down his rock wall each winter, leaving him and his neighbor to walk its line each spring to rebuild it together. If you’ve never read it, it’s a lovely poem.

I, too, could suggest something like elves as the reason for this apparent assault against the human body. But, like Frost, I’d rather you said it for yourselves.

So what do I mean?

For quite some time, but increasingly in recent years, I have noticed a tendency in our culture—one that appears almost as a desire on the part of something—to destroy the importance of the human body and of being embodied to one another.

There are so many ways that attacks against the human body itself have increased, in the same way as the destruction of Creation has increased. While I believe these two patterns are related, that exploration is for another writing.

What I see occurring is a focused effort to minimize the importance of physical embodiment and presence. Think about it:

• The phone replaced human presence, and now texting replaces the human voice. In many business interactions, we now speak first with recorded or AI customer service or are told to use the online chatbot.

• In an office setting, communication by email is favoured over phone or in-person communication—though it is, in fact, almost always less efficient to email the person sitting in the cubicle across the room from you, rather than to speak directly with them.

• Remote work is now normalized, so team meetings are not in person.

• Video work meetings are also normalized.

• Doctor appointments that once required an in-person visit so that a doctor could perform physical and visual assessments are now frequently held as video calls.

• Even church has become, for many, a virtual experience—one in which they no longer meet fellow parishioners in person.

• Online shopping encourages us to buy without being present. Or, if we do go to a store, we’re encouraged to use self-checkout, without human assistance.

• We can monitor our houses and animals without being there in person, allowing us to be away for longer.

• So-called AI advances promise to remove human presence from far more of our interactions and existence. In fact, there is now a restaurant in New York called Better Days that is run entirely by AI and robotics. You order online, your food is prepared by a robotic system, and you are given a locker number with an access code. You pick up your food from that locker when an alert tells you it’s ready.

More and more, we are alienated from others, from the physical world, and from our bodies. I feel compelled to raise the question: What is it that is trying to do away with the human body? Why this urge to remove our embodiment—our physical presence—from one another?

The obvious answer is that this is what technology does: creates tools to replace the need for human action. However, I wonder if the real answer is a bit deeper than that?

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Many world religions treat the human body as something to be escaped. The material world is believed to be a hindrance to the life of the spirit. Therefore, the material realm must be escaped in favor of the spiritual. And so, we have all kinds of Eastern religions that attempt to escape the human body and its needs so that enlightenment or transcendence can be achieved.

This belief was the basis of Manichaeism, a third century AD heresy, which taught that the human body and matter were evil. Manichaeism encouraged escape from this physical prison through the spirit or by intelligence, and by adherence to a strict ascetic life. Manichaeism was itself a type of Gnosticism. Gnostics believed that the material world was the source of evil and suffering and must be escaped through secret knowledge.

In contrast, Christian faith is the only religion that tells us that, instead of humankind trying to attain connection to the divine by escaping the body, the divine came to earth and became human. Became one of us. Moved into our neighbourhood.¹

In so doing, the Christian worldview is the only one that hallows, elevates or sacramentalizes the material realm by means of God taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. This is known as the Incarnation.

Loren Wilkinson, professor emeritus of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., puts it this way:

“… The Christian belief in the Incarnation—that a loving Creator invented physical reality and then became a part of it in Jesus—forever changed how we value the knowledge we receive from our senses….

“For at God’s initiative, the Creator has chosen to enter creation and to become a creature. This does not “flatten” creation, but elevates it.”²

At the Fall (the moment in which humankind chose their way instead of God’s), we are told that curses were attached to this disobedience. One of them was that work would become hard. Not that work became bad, in and of itself, which is how this seems to have been translated by modern culture. Rather, the curse was that work would become something difficult, by the “sweat of our brow.”³

Yet, as a species, we have begun to treat work as though it was something to be escaped altogether—not just the difficulty of work, but work itself. This is concerning.

Yes, humankind has always created tools (technology) to help us avoid this difficulty and make work easier. Now, however, we’re increasingly creating technology to think for us and even eliminate the need for humans in work.

My concern is that that this urge to eliminate human work comes from a desire to escape a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. It comes from a misplaced idea that work is ignoble, beneath us—perhaps even part of a material world to be escaped. That the ‘sweat of our brow’ is something to be avoided, rather than just ameliorated. Sounds Gnostic, doesn’t it?

What if, rather than debasing us, work ennobles us? If the material realm was good enough for the Divine to enter, and if His entry into it thus elevated it, our work is transformed into an action we take with God to shape the stuff of the earth.

We are artisans, taking the good stuff of the earth (matter) and crafting it into something that is likewise “good.” We are given the task of both caring for and shaping Creation. This task reveals how we are made in the image and likeness of God, the Creator. The Incarnation has forever made the experience of being human something that approaches what it means to be God.

Indeed, Saint Athanasius, writing only 300 years after the resurrection of Christ, said that “He [God] assumed humanity that we might become God.”⁴ This oft-quoted and sometimes misunderstood line does not mean that we become God Himself. Rather, it means that in being able to see God in human flesh—as revealed in the humanity of Jesus—we can now understand who God is and more accurately begin to reflect His nature ourselves.

However, instead of seeing work as an opportunity to mirror God and reveal our made-in-His-image-ness, human history shows that we abuse the Creation and treat the shaping of it as something beneath our dignity—a task to be avoided altogether.

From the real…

In this same vein then, the technology we are creating seems to encourage us to become ever-more disembodied from each other, ourselves and the material realm, thus avoiding not only work, but other human beings made in the image of God—the very ones capable of revealing God’s nature to us.

Think how different our day-to-day work is from that of 50 to 100 years ago. Before, work was something you did with real tools, working in the physical realm.­ Even if you worked in the knowledge sector, you moved a writing implement on physical paper, carried it around, talked to real people about your ideas, and moved real creations and real money between real entities.

All of that has changed. Most knowledge workers spend our days in front of a screen and keyboard, the touch of our fingers on the keys the only physical contact we have with our work all day long. We might speak to real human beings—if we’re lucky. Increasingly, however, we are more and more isolated from real people and actual material objects. Most of our work takes place in an ether realm where we cannot touch the work of our hands.

An ether realm… an ethereal realm. A non-material realm. Made of ether, coming from the Greek “aither” which means “upper air.” You see? We’re still trying to escape the realm of matter and become disembodied, as if doing so would lead us to a non-incarnate version of God.

If the Machine has its way, soon we will be working in a completely virtual realm with completely virtual “things,” overseeing the creations of artificial intelligence. Or, perhaps super AIs will begin overseeing us. It’s hard to say. Either way, what is the value of being human in a virtual realm where machine thinking is predicted to be magnitudes more efficient than our own?

At its most extreme, this urge toward disembodiment looks like transhumanists uploading their consciousness into the cloud (if that were possible), perhaps ultimately powering artificial bodies with the contributions humanity has made.

If there ever was a desire to leave the human body and the material realm for a disembodied ethereal existence, this is it. This is the new Gnosticism.

I express some skepticism that this is where this urge will be able to go, and I’ll get to that in a minute. Nonetheless, our technology is clearly pushing us to ever-increasing removal from the physical realm.

In light of this, the most important thing one must do in this technium is to become more fully human and more fully embodied to each other. Insisting on embodiment is crucial to fighting this trend that wants to dispossess us of our humanity.

As a society, we have reached this impoverished place because we don’t actually believe that to be fully human is to be made in the image of God. Or, if we do believe it, as Christians do, we do not understand that by the fact of the Incarnation, God hallowed the physical realm.

…To the ether

He did not come to take us out of the material realm to some far-away heaven where we will sit on clouds (ether) doing nothing. Can you imagine anything more boring? This is a heretical view of heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.⁵

In fact, I would suggest that this popular caricature of heaven is more in keeping with the realm of the devil. The devil has no creative power. He cannot bring matter into existence, and without access to human embodiment, he cannot even shape the matter of earth. His realm contains not one stick of furniture. Only earth contains the stuff of Creation, originated by God and shaped by humans.

And now we come to the crux of the matter (oh, how literal that idiom is here). Satan is, and ever has been, jealous of the human body. He has no access to creativity: to create, to shape, to experience the ennobling that making something out of the stuff of the earth gives to humankind. Work ennobles humanity because it reveals how we are made in the image of God.

Saint Athanasius again: “…Evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.”⁶

Having lost his own, Satan is desperately jealous of the human body. I believe that he longs to inhabit a human body—to be made in the image and likeness of God—but cannot. Therefore, in his rage, he seeks to destroy what the Creator made, which includes not only the stuff of earth (Creation) but the human body as well. And this is what transhumanism does.

It has always been Satan’s desire to kill, steal and destroy.⁷ We can see how he has been able to inspire humans across history to join with him in this hatred. In current times, as the works of our hands have accelerated, we have reached a point where he would like to be able to get us to leave our very bodies, made in the image and likeness of God.

Ultimately, transhumanists want to leave our bodies completely. While we don’t know yet if it’s possible to fully connect our minds to ‘the cloud’ (ether) and thus discard our bodies, if this were possible, the human mind is not all that human beings are.

Yes, I know scientific materialism wants to tell us that the mind, its collection of electric synapses and connections, is all that we are. But this is a reductionist view of what it means to be human. Does wisdom reside in the mind, or in the spirit of a person? What about love, compassion, mercy and empathy? And importantly, what about the conscience? Sure, certain parts of our brain may light up when we express these uniquely human capacities. But it is a simplistic view of humanity that attributes these capacities to brain signals alone.

Having a human body is not the only thing that distinguishes us from machines. Even if a human consciousness could be uploaded, intact, to some kind of super AI and retain self-awareness (a very big if), a mind alone is not a human being.

The human spirit is created by God and shares in God’s essence. There can be no human spirit within a super AI, because the spirit and the mind are different realities. AI will always be inferior to humans in decision-making, because you cannot build wisdom, conscience, or divine inspiration into an AI.

Furthermore, God will not inspire or indwell an AI, because He is looking for a personal relationship with the human being.⁸ A super AI is not made in the image and likeness of God. In fact, if made, it would be an eviscerated image of humanity created by humanity, to which we attribute super-human qualities.⁹

One cannot create a soul, spirit or conscience for a super AI. That is part of the divine spark, and the divine spark must be given by God. And God only gives it through human conception.

The Icarus myth tells us that when humans try to outstrip the gods and become like gods themselves, they will fall. Consider the hubris of thinking that as humans, we could create a ‘living being’ better than God could make. Are we not doomed to fail?

In fact, if our current experience teaches us anything, it is that although we have all of this high-capacity computing power at our fingertips, we use it mainly for frivolous, stupid and dangerous things.¹⁰ Do we think we’re going to do any different with the increased power of AI?

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In light of all this, what ought we to do?

There is a whole movement toward digital minimalism and resisting the Machine out there, one that is well-represented here on Substack. One of the best expressions I have found of this comes from

Ruth Gaskovski

and

Peco

Gaskovski in their

School of the Unconformed

. This Canadian couple are creatively thinking through what Machine resistance means in the context of family, work and community.

I’ll be looking more into this subject in upcoming pieces, including speaking to some of those who have been thinking this subject through for quite some time.

As a start, we can insist on embodiment. Insist on communion with real people and real things. Insist on becoming more fully human and resist the dispossession of your humanity in every way. Resist the lie that to become enlightened means to leave the material and physical realm.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his eponymous essay, “Live not by lies.”

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“Gloria Dei est vivens homo.”

“Life in man is the glory of God,” or “The glory of God is living man,” often translated as “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

—Saint Irenaeus, AD 185, Against Heresies—the book which first exposed the absurdities of Gnosticism.

1. Bible, John 1:14, The Message translation.

2. Wilkinson, Circles and the Cross, 2023, p. 76.

3. Bible, Genesis 3:19.

4. St. Athanasius, On The Incarnation.

5. For a more accurate description of heaven, see Revelation 4:1-11, where heaven is described as full of light, sound, colour, action and living creatures. Revelation 21:2 additionally says that heaven descends to a new earth—but this also is a topic for a future exploration.

6. St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

7. Bible, John 10:9-11.

8. This is the message of the entire Bible.

9. We used to have a word for this, long ago. We called such creations idols.

10. As just one example, one cybersecurity firm says that 25 percent of all searches and 35 percent of all downloads on the Internet are pornography-related.

Your voice is needed, and we’d love to hear it in the comments below. However, if you choose to abandon the voice of love in your comments, remember that you are abandoning all of your beneficial power.

Love is the most powerful force in the universe, alone having the ability to create change for the better. Indeed, it is the only force that ever has.