Wishing on Satellites

Wittgenstein, the Unsayable, and the Poverty of Technological Transcendence

“I saw two shooting stars last night,

I wished on them,

But they were only satellites.

It’s wrong to wish on space hardware...”

Wittgenstein’s Tracatatus Logico-Philosophicus remains an exquisite defence of metaphysical supernaturalism. It was not initially received as such owing to the reductionist and scientistic ideologies which were in rapacious formation at the time of its publication in 1921.

The book opens with two complementary claims: that “the world is everything that is the case” and that “the world is the totality of facts, not of things” - from which it does not follow that the “the world” is everything that there is. Or that there is no shadow world which gestures at us in non-propositional or extra-linguistic ways.

The logical positivists missed the subtlety of Wittgenstein’s mission and mistook the treatise for an eccentrically formulated reductionist manifesto, one suitable for conscription into their attempted coup against religion, ethics, and metaphysics in general.

In truth it was a refutation of that project. You could think of the latter sections of the Tractatus as a call for epistemic etiquette. When the most complete science is written in the most logically impeccable way the most valuable truths will be mostly and properly left unsaid. Because they are unsayable.

Stated slightly differently, secular scientists really ought to agree at least with the contours of Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism. They are happy to concede, for example, that for consciousness to be possible it must be limited by the requirements of adaptation and natural selection. There are some things we are just hard-wired to neither experience nor understand. Our survival depends on such exclusivity.

They are correct though not in the way they think they are. There are in God’s Mind colours, sounds, and other modalities unknowable to us because of the limitations which came with our creation. We come to knowledge of this only eschatologically. The Christian responds to this with gratitude- God is only giving us what we can cope with. For now.

The secular scientist is more affronted at the suggestion that the universe has more things in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in his philosophy.

The transhumanist project is a secularist tantrum over the limitations which make science possible in the first place. The program of “strong AI” (the quest for mechanised consciousness) is the most spiritually depressing species of this genus of idolatry.

I’ve written before about the philosophical mistakes which continue to animate the delusional ambitions of the high priests of the AI movement(s). I hesitate to repeat myself in case I become infected by the most salient of them: the idea that constant repetition of a thing generates something that wasn’t there in the first place. All AI is algorithmically amplified replication, good enough at what it does but incapable of getting frustrated when it mucks up.

Repetition can serve meaning, as in Rosary prayer, but it can never be constitutive of it.