Join us for a lecture in the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age Speaker Series with Tara Isabella Burton.
God-making: Magic and Transhumanism from the Renaissance to the Digital Age
Are we building God? In an era where artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of the Internet age renders the realm of information more present -- and real-feeling -- than the physical one, how do we understand ourselves theologically? And, no less importantly, how do we understand our relationship to reality? This talk will explore contemporary transhumanism -- from human self-transcendence to the rise of artificial intelligence -- as a specifically theological phenomenon, one rooted in the symbol set, rhetoric, and sacralization of the human found in the Western esoteric tradition. Often considered under the catch-all term "magic," or "learned magic," these schools of thought -- rooted in late antique Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, and frequently revived by scientists and humanists from Marsilio Ficino to Isaac Newton -- stress the necessity of human beings using gnosis to become Gods and perhaps even transcend their creature. This lecture will show the perennial influence of these ideas at various stages of what we now think of as "modernity", as well as their impact, in particular, on the twentieth-century counterculture that gave rise to the Internet.
About the Speaker
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, and the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon.
About the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age
Housed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age supports study and research into the possibilities for human flourishing in contemporary society.
The activities of the Forum combine philosophical reflection on human nature and the human good with practical reflection on the possibilities for living well, and for designing tools that contribute to human flourishing, in a world shaped by digital technology. Learn more: https://fhf.philosophy.illinois.edu/