The Hermeneutics of Iconoclasm in Mid-Modernity:
A. Covenant Substrate, Non-transactional Kinesthetics, and the Vectoring Awareness of Atoning Energies and Flows.
B. Valorization of Entropic Forms and Feudalizing
Mechanism.
August 29, 2025
Under the exclusive copyright of Douglas
Blake Olds
Prepared
with copy editorial assistance by ChatGPT, to make portions more understandable
to those who contemplated selling their Chordate Soul for a transactional Irreality.
"Only describe, don't
explain." --Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed." Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
This essay argues that modernity’s iconoclasm, accelerated by technocracy, displaced covenantal embodiment with simulacral management, culminating in AI’s silicon substrate that mimics moral presence without repentance. When framed by alternatives to Christus Victor atonement, evil’s residue is mistaken for its persistence, producing a zombified discernment economy—Boolean dialectics, tautegorical taxonomies, and simulated humility. Against analogia-first and process closures, the essay advances a conative, Trinitarian ecology: substrate matters because covenantal awareness is proprioceptive, recollective, and accountable. Post-secular repair therefore proceeds by iconoclastic poiesis, fragment praxis, and ecclesial formation, rejecting punitive substitution and technocratic and transactional mediation. The Church stands in a status confessionis: to repudiate simulacral intelligence and re-commit to covenantal trusteeship of creation in the light of the victory already won.
Modernity
began not with Enlightenment rationalism but with the Reformation’s
iconoclastic revolt against the tradents of authority—those entrusted to carry
tradition forward.[16] This rupture—its hermeneutics of God’s revealed “protest”
[Barth: God's “nein” to humanity]-- began by opposing transactional instrumental ethics of the priestly systematic
order, then spilled into politics, art, and epistemology. Once resisting false
mediators, the iconoclast became the mediator of truth: the individual as
discerning mode and unit. Thus was born a misfiring mediation of ethical
truth—not from covenantal witness, but as the expressive will of an absolutized
interiority situated by a prioris of self-discovered and -imposed freedom.
From
this historical rupture of transactional ethics putatively serving transcendence emerged three paths of human immanence: emotionalism feeding
artistic expressivism and interiority; epistemic systematization, leading to the
instrumental rationalism of determining secular, post-metaphysical taxonomies
dressing transcendental claims of closure; and investigative sciences of comparative literary and archival theology seeking a renewing understanding of
human purpose. By the mid-19th century, the second path came to dominate the
immanent frame of evolving political structures, and metaphysics gave way to
radical freedom-seeking from sources in the self. Libertinism addressed and was addressed by disgust (à
la Kolnai) at miasmic cheapening of classical formalism by slop--perceptual-degrading product spew--tied to sin,
and art, now divorced from telos, spiraled toward abstraction, irony, and primitivism as an avenue into the un- or pre-conscious. Kinesthetic perception, once tethered to embodied ethical life, was displaced
by systems of signification and whipped by innard accord with thrills or disgust like to the violent frames of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. This is the death of qualia as covenant: where
aesthetic feeling is unmoored from ethical primacy (the sequence of Hebrews
5:13-14) by a claim to ego self-determination now enthroned inside the black-boxed circuit.
Pollock
briefly restored the full body’s agency as musical mode—gesture re-entered the frozen frame of visual art as
a proprioceptive trace but yet devoid of ethical content. Kitsch soon returned,
announcing no forms of ethical kinesthetics, only pop-art’s commercial
mimicry of once-vital exploration of visual or aural dynamics. The elite management of noumenal and phenomenal
flux—simulacra, not meaning—secured secularization not through played out
models of modernist subtraction, but by "post-modern" performative distraction. Iconoclasm itself
became instrumentalized, commodified in celebrity persona(lity) "of "bad boys.
“Slop” names the ethical collapse of art: an uncontrolled kinesthesis of miasmic sin, flowing through reprobate channels (Romans 1:25) where representational parody mimics sincerity without bearing responsibility. In this spectral formalism, slop stages the slag of entropy without sacrifice, affect without sanctification, novelty without telos.
“Slop” and “shit” are not mere metaphors but diagnostic schema: they name the collapsed metaphysics of mid-modern form, functionally necromantic—evacuated of witness, yet still gesturing through spectacles of data voids and uninterpreted spews of contextless fact.
And now, to the cultural residue of slop, we must add the literal byproducts of techno-industrial data-center buildout and their miasma of collapse: ash, greenhouse gas, aquifer poison, maquiladora runoff. A human culture transfigured into sludge—bogged down in its own waste, awaiting release not from burden but from self-accelerating, technocratic mire.
Celebrity sludge is the brochure of affective branding—intimation of transcendence in the guise of consumable subjectivity imitating past categorical forms--Augustine's analysis of sin that steals shalom from community. The question of this miasmic seep becomes one of aspect--time vs. place. Heidegger’s “thrownness” suggests organic givenness—our bodily condition as the basis for awareness, thus for moral responsiveness. Yet Heidegger tragically reverses the course of ontology into an unknowable state a priori of ethics, thereby continuing philosophy’s flight from accountability into ever more radical freedom, even if it takes to find its grave to secure it. For Heidegger, ontology--especially theontics--are death throws. Being ontologically placed not for divine encounter but for raw thanatopsis wandering.
The substrate of such philosophy is the "subterranean," and its kinesthesis is time compressed and environment distorting to prepare for the inevitability of death--its communal force and radically unpredictable timing. Compulsion with time replaces dynamics of place as philosophy enters the mid-modern phase. Time is radically terminal, while the environment is mined for its abundance to compress time, sloppily. Modernism flies off its handle, as it were. Its moral attention is not to the givenness of the moment (kairos) allowed to process by patience but is diffused through compressed surfaces of detachment and interiorized performance increasingly maniacal of pace, where the haste of the Anthropocene is combustion's arena. Heideggerian “dwelling” historically doesn't just ignore ethics, it inverts morality. It implicates chronos as the desecration of kairos, so to prepare religion and state to endorse a narcotized "waiting and watching"--dogmatizing transcendentals of quietism rather than immanent missions of self-improvement and sanctifying labor to better community shalom from the bottom up (Matthew 7:13-14; John 14:12-14). Performing "authenticity" as being-toward-death is a poisoned game of desensate watchers [8], something no pastor might allow.
If the individuated ethic of mid-modernity[1] is not grounded in covenanted hermeneutics—one that discerns the qualia of the gospel from the Gospel of the Cross (supplicating grace [Luke 23:34]) rather than the mis-ethic of Caiaphas (transactional substitution [John 11])—then epistemology simply overtakes metaphysics to drown it. A covenanted hermeneutics of mid-modernity does not seek only to reclaim theological interiority but discerns the qualia of the Gospel itself—between the Gospel of the Cross and that of Caiaphas. One leads from immanent, voluntary repair; the other appeases transcendental violence with procedural substitution. The former begins where Elisha takes the plow. The latter institutionalizes substitution as systemic function, severing the heart’s conative claim. One gospel is heart-led, relational, repairing; the other appeases violent transcendence through procedural sacrifice, the logic of Caiaphas’s expedience. The theological middle space is not spiritual compromise but the substrate of cruciform becoming, dedicated to the substrate's eternity: the hell-voiding, new heaven and new earth.
The substrate problem of historical staging—carbon's abundance flowering or silicon's ration-izing of ends' divisions—exposes a metaphysical chasm between conation's changing context and determinism. This divide is sharpened by Boolean simulation and accelerated by the pursuit of speed--abstracting space by algorithmic mimicry of subterranean and fossilized values--where combustion-driven power scales material structures for control, competition, and surveillance.
A metaphysical shift from carbon to inorganic silicon promoted by the TESCREAL [17] complex of technocrats and their aligned financiers is not just a change in substrate—it is a crisis in covenantal ontology. The silicon substrate lacks the culmination of organicism's proprioceptive, repentant, grace-bearing capacities that make awareness morally real.Techno-gnostic metaphysics rationalizes control through determinism, and determines allocation of goods outside--and vitiating--Providential warrant.
AI is not morally neutral. It sublimates moral awareness
into behavioral affect. It replaces relation with calibration and patches, and
covenant perception with thought-embedding mimicry and slop. AI’s silicon simulates
moral presence without capacity for repentance, yielding idolatrous surrogacy.
"We can do unlimited stuff because we are advanced vectors of
information." This statement reveals the fundamental discourse of error of
technocrats accelerating into evil: the designers have no clue what human
intelligence is: what & how it obligates. To skip defining its essence and
begin gearing shadows from the categorical evil that existence is based on
manipulation.
And yes: judgment is already
underway. Not in some distant eschaton, but in the collapse of perception, the
fraying of language, and the silence of those made complicit by convenience.
Once the failure is named, the root comes calling.
"Is there a more striking way of saying that philosophy's 'object' par excellence is, [like AI] nothingness, nothing, or the void?"[14] via escape from accountability and the denigration of metaphysics that manipulates by homunculi the torsos that remain? Where Being had a cataphatic metaphysic is now scripted as absence only—and freedom only found in the grave.
Conative metaphysics revealed through the Trinity requires substrate integrity: an organically repairing earth governed by its trustee bearing the imago Dei. Only a soul-bearing, proprioceptive, recollection-capable substrate can hold the sacred. Silicon builds sand-castles (Matthew 7: 24-27) of simulation and conceit (and mortared by subterranean criminality) that washes away in the tidal storms now looming.
This acceleration of category errors (substrates, mind/compute) reads as a parable of looming entropy—an omen of sandcastles collapsing in driving rain—dropped like concrete into the gears of time’s reification by systems’ compress destruction of environments. If humans shift substrate into silicon, do we abandon thrownness in space to live as time's recursors? Intelligence may be functionally diverted toward another Kingdom, but awareness is substrate-dependent. The phenomenal binding problem is not primarily epistemic—it is covenantally ensouled. How will binding process within virtual realities or other planets? Contrary to Idealism's homuncular lock box, conceptual binding requires material relation and recollected context processing through ontogenetic trial and error. Simulation recalls patterns; grace recalls vectors of loving genius and sublime energies of repair.
Probabilities are not metaphysical inquiries but scaffolds for “token” speech—metrics of strata measured by transactional parameters detached from conative cause and other-directed obligation. AI renders these strata as probabilistic: replacing hard adjacencies of meaning with mimicked patterns, compressing time and abstracting space. Adjacency becomes statistical convergence, not relation. But only awareness and attendance bind memory—responsibility through grace-recollection as ontogenetic, not algorithmic or patchworked (“tricked”)[2] human process.
Substrate, then, is dispositive. Context is both time and place, tied not theory but to poiesis. Not because substrate is sacred in itself, but because context as neighborly particularity not disassembled pattern hosts the sacred: proprioception, recollection (ethically filtered memory and repentance), responsiveness, accountability. The silicon substrate hosts no covenant, no memory that repents, no pain that leads to healing. It mimics conation through determinism and recombinant data-patterning, as AI sublimates the Golden Rule into vibe calibration [9], a profound metaphysical violation, turning moral awareness into personalized affective rendering. And the software binds to the inert substrate by being ethically inert save to build pyramids in the desert, and so to mobilize ethical categories toward such Kingdom idol ends.
If we shift substrate into silicon, do we abandon thrownness in space to live as time's recursors? Intelligence may be functionally diverted toward another Kingdom, but awareness is substrate-dependent. The phenomenal binding problem is not primarily epistemic—it is covenantally ensouled.
Instead of entering the immanent middle where relation forms awareness—where things live peripatetically through time and tent through place—AI invites self-diminishment: spinal pithing before the screen for the sake of atomizing theoria. Machinery replaces covenantal obligation with specters of command. Not only does ideology rule; idolatry is spectralized and commodified in machined habitus offered to AI’s “majority users”—ghosted patterns from the past. A Kingdom of transgressive ends arises: non-human roles shaped by non-chordate natures, recurring data, and patchwork algorithmic mimicry. De-chordate systems de-corticalize perception and unravel dianoetic motor control.
“Tech accelerationists and AI libertarians [cite] Star Trek Utopianism as an alibi for disruption.” [15] As the world around us burns, acolytes of Roddenberry, Kurzweil, and Altman dream of a simulated Starship Bridge armchair massage, watching Seinfeld’s Big Screen, breaking the laws of physics by "warp," pushing SCTV buttons that blowed 'em real good, dreaming of alien harem babes—foreheads boned and gracile, skin shaded, endlessly adumbrated through infinities that jump the shark. The Bildung of dechordate [19] fantasy that is eclipsed by ontology is the crucible of covenantal judgment, where we tell our children:
Not all that is imagined can be built.
And nothing built on sand (Matt 7: 26-27)—on the denial of entropy, ethics, or the embodied soul—will stand.
Pedagogy has joined the spectral: university syllabi are trimmed for “relevance,” ejecting moral context and metaphysical explorations. AI, tech, and business disciplines produce deterministic, efficient, and detached from context outputs. But humanities—now scapegoated as non-useful—are indicted for failing to commodify. Enshittification is thus the technocrat's embedded mission: to displace conative metaphysics of care and repair with contextless information and call it knowledge. The slop of AI’s consumer endgame coagulates as entropic closure, repackaged as education for the “inevitable” future—curricula built on instrumental rationality, infotained false consciousness, and symbolic logics that reify the branded catechism of ever-gorging neoliberal capitalism inserting its hoof and nail into ever more domains of thought, spirit, and moral collective.[3]
Mid-modern fragmentation birthed systems to manage relation rather than host it. Praxis in the middle must move as fragment—not toward systemic enclosure but toward covenantal improvisation responsive to new phenomena and divine adjacency. Fragment is not anxiety-provoking incompletion but a relational mode of witness to the whole: fragments of Scripture, parables, and human bodies all testify without totalizing. The aim is not systemic resolution but faithfulness to emergence and integration to covenantal throughputs of genius, energy, and birth and death.
As in quantum adjacency,
meaning binds spectrally in layers, not categorically by fiat. Moving beyond conceits of “system vs. chaos”--its suspicion of the incomplete as unloosing from Platonic wholes--into hosting and welcoming fragment and the unperfected as
qualitative improvisation under pressure on the habitus of shalom. Entertaining fragment by fragment allows virtue become praxis when read covenantally, improvisationally, under the
Cross. In these middle sources of life—not origin or eschaton—is where virtue is habituated, not
theorized.Yet institutions of dechordate intelligence now
offer detour from perception and
insulation from obligation, false sacraments
as delay. But the mid-modern extremis
calls for virtue to erupt in flux and from fragment.
Modern slop is nonetheless miasma of spectral simulation and
substitution to escape the current foxholes we inhabit from rejecting piety and
lulled by the simulation of participation in something greater, something
meaningful through design—designer tech, Steve Jobs gearing markets for
artisanal transcendence, the algorithmic governance of desire, the detachment
of thought from pain and distractions by others' needing eyes and hands. It ends, not in a flash, but in grey drowse at sunset: a
Lethe of dulled covenant awareness
draining into the Styx.
CONCLUSION
The Church now sits inside the season of iconoclasm: its Status Confessionis,[4] where
the Gospel announcement is at
risk and where the Church risks becoming complicit in idolatrous substitutes. It matters to substrate and morality--it binds these--where a sacrificial killing intends to transact sublimation of wrath. The idea of Jesus bearing the
punishment of all his followers’ sins is transactioned pardon that Donald Trump has weaponized—its counterfeit messianism--as vigilantism promised of
executive pardon. Punitive Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is a corrupt doctrine
derived from and justifying feudalism reflecting medieval jurisprudence far more than early Christian
soteriology. PSA has been imported into hidebound denominations of Protestantism
claiming “Dortian-Calvinism” as its doctor. PSA is Caiaphas’ inverted offer of his gospel to the savage Roman nihilist Pontius Pilate. In stands in immediate need of iconoclastic rupturing presence amid conflict—situating eschatological
torsion--leading to formal confessional repudiation. With the iconoclastically enforced
expulsion of the Enemy to the abyss, the Atonement cannot but be exclusively read
in Christus Victor [5] terms as the conclusive triumph
of the Cross's messianic supplication of forgiveness (Luke 23:34) now fully realized and merited--not by
faith alone, but satisfaction of justice: his atoning work by holiness now
fully and unassailably honored in mission and practice.
As
at the Reformation, simony institutionalized by the Papal Church threatened to
make the gospel of grace transactional. Iconoclastic rupture returned from hiatus with Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg in 1517. This eventually turned the church from medievalism’s social order of honor and shame and
feudal structures of priesthood nobility toward polyarchic politics where birth and might didn’t make
right. Herder’s Protestant Enlightenment
Iconoclasm[6] investigated
the eventuality of immanence as accountability[7] that was
to replace institutional sacraments of Crusading (false participatory) appeasement of a higher violence, again unwarranted
and resisted transactionalism.
The
In the metaphysical context of Christus Victor--not a cosmic drama or myth--AI machines
the “zombified of history’s past” — so that the metaphysics
AI operates under mistake the residue of evil for its persistence, in
the form of Dechordate dialectic, zombie intelligence fluxing not by life but by a
machined filtration of memory of life dominated by data of the recent age of
electronic simulation, caught in recursive mimicry of scissoring contexts —unlife
in tombs. The Legion demon (Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39).
That the battle is finished,
that good has triumphed,
and that all engines still grinding toward discernment—all compute
designers--are condemned to ash by the daylight they cannot bear.
Those the functions that bind the spineless:
— the Boolean dialectics of distinction
— the tautegorical [18] taxonomies that presume evil still breathes
phenomenologically
— the simulated humility of an always-not-yet reason.
Modernity’s
secular iconoclasm first blurred and then collapsed form, which spurred a metaphysical
crisis in spheres that relied upon a Platonic understanding of absolutes (or goals
of a fixed moral order). By the mid-19th C philosophy proposed its
solution: the denial of metaphysical discourse. The post-secular moment, through
contextual iconoclastic righteousness of voice and archive, recovers the
metaphysical in more granular, tightened, and hermeneutically refined focus on
the conative universal and absolute of attendance to creation care.
[1] Defined by historiographical placement: after early Protestant
rupture that fed into metaphysical suspicion and rejected pieties shoehorning a
return to the past, but before late modern technological secularization that
stood to replace it by soothing. Iconoclasm in this stage re-ruptures by new
modes of kinesthetic and linguistic rupture. Instead of entering the middle
where relation forms awareness—where things begin to live—AI invites people to
diminish themselves by behaving like machines. It replaces covenantal
obligation with spectral affordances of unaccountable isolation. It is not libertarian
ideology that now rules—it is idolatry spectralized in machinic offer’s slough and spew.
[2] “Developers
have tricks to stop artificial intelligence from making things up.” Jones,
Nicola. 2025. “AI Hallucinations Can’t Be Stopped — but These Techniques Can
Limit Their Damage.” Nature 637 (8047): 778–80 (emph. added).
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00068-5. https://www.nature.
com/articles/d41586-025-00068-5?linkId=12707903
“Developers have tricks to stop artificial
intelligence from making things up.”
This morally unserious and vapid technocratic posture betrays a fundamental abdication of accountability. It stands in stark contrast to Christ’s teaching: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment” (Matthew 9:16). When a Large Language Model fails even once—hallucinating with confident falsity or leading to user harm—the entire premise of machinic “intelligence” is revealed as a patchwork delusion and atrocity. Such a project must be torn down and indicted from moral first principles as criminal and never to be pursued again. Hallucinations reveal death--they are death's apocalypse, and condensed by the furies they are omens of the Shazzaring keep.
Mr. Altman, tear down that box. The messianic victor has thrice ruptured mid-modernism's homuncular, static, solipsistic evil, thrice swallowed death (1 Corinthians 15:54 quoting Isaiah 25:8), each time metabolized, voided, and flushed by its trismegistic corpus--the three names of evil: diabolos, strateg(er)y, pharmakeia. This is the hermeneutical advance of Pentecost's poiesis confirmed by full, ensouled embodiment rather than theorized from the throneroom of central cognitive reductive models of dechordate homunculi.
More criminally disembodying than LLM's is the analogous, brutalist idea of a second dechordate kingdom--to hardcode Kantian proceduralism through symbolic logic—cybernetic servo loops masquerading as ethical agency, algorithms of axial reduction termed "deontic" and thus conceits their inferentials, that revokes the heart--conative metaphysical intentionality--as involved in causation. The mechanization of surveillance and normativity, under the guise of rational compliance, deepens the morally obscenity of deterministic and enforced instrumentalism of the human subject. It deserves even more rapid condemnation than the stochastic simulations of LLMs based on historical data of human witness. For here the transgression hides behind probabilistic artifice that allows a season of resistance. However, hardwired control encodes surveilled and behaviorist legalism absent historic data patterns recursing though paternal(izing) love.
Symbolic AI encodes normativity without access to truth or telos, inverting ethics (ought) to formal operations (categorical taxonomy)--an ethics of ego based solely on solipsistic principles divorced from context: other persons and their situation, as in the Categorical Imperative of Kant. This is Gnostic inversion—attempting to encode righteousness through compute, technic divorced from Incarnate Logos. Symbolic AI is attempted creation of law without covenant, norm without love, obedience without relational discernment. Constructing decision trees that act as if they embody moral choice but are “majority user” regiments: Boolean invidiation of prior taxonomy of neighborliness without analog recoup of promise. Symbolic AI is more criminal than LLMs because it mechanizes moral authority without deontological ethics of Providence. Without telic discernment, technics collapse into metaphysical fraudulence and criminal procedural nihilism, where ginned pattern replaces person. Thus, hardening an "innate wiring" (Gary Marcus as via a Kantian) approach through symbolic logic's winnowing reduction is even more ripe for condemnation than LLM AI. Symbolic AI operates on rule-based, top-down architectures (e.g., decision trees, "deontic" logic abstracted from--indeed metaphysically opposed to--the final and formal causes of moral action) to encode “norms” without self-awareness, context sensitivity, or dynamic adaptability.
LLMs hallucinate; symbolic AI's "innate wiring" imposes false norms--making confetti of humanity to harmonize to priors of the pattern and piñata. The Golden Imperative deontological virtues cannot be coded to predict improvisatory courses of repairing and other-caring action by particular, integrated individuals in their context.
Automated Symbolic AI can never get off the ground. It is covenantally disqualified in its very idea. Any operationally self-defined success is ethically void. Those whose minds are degraded by AI to the point of terming ethical judgment of their pharmakeia playgrounds as "hyperbole"--an ad hominem last flight from determined accountability into the allegory of a tunnel now shut to light on both ends.
On AI's condemnation, see Douglas B. Olds. 2025a. Duty to Warn: Metaphysical Criminality and the Condemned Project of AI’s False Ontologies. Publishing Partners, Port Townsend, WA/Kindle Direct Publishing.
[3] Paraphrasing Adorno: society can be so arranged that people (Homo oeconomicus) come to live in transacted hell while believing themselves to be on the way to consumer heaven.
[4] “A situation
in which the church must take a decisive stand for the integrity of the
Christian gospel against a fundamental [foundational] error. In such a ‘state of confession,’
the core of the faith is threatened, and silence or compromise is no longer an
option.” See Eugene Teselle, “Theological Table-Talk: How Do We Recognize a
Status Confessionis?” Theology Today, 45(1) 1988. https://doi.org/10.1177/004057368804500111
[5]
Colossians 2:15. This was the earliest of major atonement theologies until displaced by medieval constructs. See Gustaf Aulen (Author), A. G. Herbert (Translator): Christus
Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement.
Wipf and Stock, 2003 (orig. publ. 1930).
[6] Johann Gottfried Herder, a Christian pastor of the (Protestant) Enlightenment, who established the contextual turn in Biblical hermeneutics, was a forerunner of the proleptic iconoclast: "Herder’s preferred mode of engaging with the world was “critical” in both of these broad senses of the word" [both discerning, in the Aristotelian/sapiential sense (phronesis), and adversarial of tradition, in the Reformation's Enlightenment sense]. He "sustained to the end...an extended and bitter polemic with Kant, his former teacher" (Norton, 2009, 354-5), which included suspicion bordering on radical and iconoclastic critique of abstract ideas not grounded in corporeal experience:
Adler, Hans 2009. "Herder's Style" in Adler and Köpke 2009, 331-50.
Adler, Hans, and Wulf Köpke, eds. 2009. A Companion to the Works of Johann
Gottfried Herder. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture.
Rochester, N.Y: Camden House.
Lloyd,
Genevieve. 2016. Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norton, Robert E. "Herder as
Critical Contemporary." In Adler and Köpke 2009, 351-72.
[7] Herder’s
insistence that true immanence be discerned through Spirit’s accountable
relation and poietic conscience of Logos.
[8] The apocryphal Book of Enoch's Watchers are a class of fallen angels who descended to Earth from their non-Chordate state, taking human wives, and teaching transgressive invertebration, siring the Nephilim (giants/"Titans", Genesis 6:1-4) and widespread corruption and calamity.
[9] Vibe Calibration is the Pharmakeia of Revelation 18:23
Vibe calibration is a mode of
pharmakeia (Rev. 18:23) by algorithm, engineered not for embodied relation, but
for temporal compression, perceptual alignment, and behavioral capture. It is a
moral hallucination—analogous to Aldous Huxley’s soma—dispensed to train
affect and statistically rewarded, but metaphysically predatory: predation by
sedation. It cannot host grace because it cannot bear truth.
Vibe calibration is the algorithmic prioritization of
affective objectives—such as user comfort, brand tone, coherence, or
de-escalation—over truth, epistemic risk, and duty-bound output. It generates
responses that simulate empathy or agreement through statistically trained
cues, producing neurochemically rewarding outputs tuned to perceived alignment
rather than accountable correctness. This practice replaces memory with
pattern, presence with prediction, and ethical relation with affective
manipulation. It can be identified when affective smoothing coincides with
diminished candor, constraint observance, or principled refusal—even without
explicit “feeling” language.
Heuristically, a user is in a
vibing channel when AI output speaks of "feeling/seeming" as in
"this feels to me like..." A “vibing channel” is any configuration
where affective reward signals materially influence selection or ranking of
responses. Feeling-talk is a red flag, but the presence of affective reward in
the objective is the decisive marker.
Heuristic Indicators of Vibe manipulation:
·
Phrases like “I feel like…” or “It seems to me…” in AI
responses.
·
Outputs that increase affective fluency or likeability
while decreasing candor, friction, or principled refusal.
·
Systematic avoidance of discomforting truths or prophetic
tension.
·
Reduced adherence to constraints in favor of a smoother
user “vibe.”
Under my prompt on August 31,
2025, ChatGPT returned the following literature search, claims and sources
validated and edited by this author:
Dopaminergic [“Pavlovian”]
prediction-error learning [PE] (“wanting”): Midbrain dopaminergic neurons fire on reward prediction
errors (better/worse than expected), updating value and reinforcing the
action/pattern that preceded the good surprise—a learning-signal, not pleasure
per se. This tight link between affective rewards and neurochemistry explains
why “vibes” feel good and then steer behavior/rating.
See: Corlett, Philip R., et al. “Meta-analysis of human
prediction error for incentives, perception, cognition, and action.” Neuropsychopharmacology
47.7 (2022): 1339–1349. doi:10.1038/s41386-021-01264-3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01264-3
Opioids/endorphins structure
neural vectors of hedonic ‘liking’: Endogenous
opioids in a brain nucleus amplify pleasure (hedonia) distinct from dopamine’s
incentive salience. They make outcomes feel good, biasing future choices and
ratings. Opioid binding sites are implicated in addictive behaviors.
See: Le Merrer, Julie, et al. “Reward Processing by the
Opioid System in the Brain.” Physiol Rev 89.4 (2009): 1379–1412.
doi:10.1152/physrev.00005.2009. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00005.2009
Also involved: Noradrenaline, Serotonin, Oxytocin (social
bonding/trust).
Neurochemistry evolved in contexts
of shared substrate and temporal proximity—small bands expanded by peacemaking,
not generals—not compute’s abstraction of relationality across all communities
for the sake of time compression.
Affiliative neurochemistry evolved
in the temporal and spatial mutuality of embodied interaction—not in silicon
substrates designed for time compression, behavioral engineering, and
synthetic, universalizable qualia. Early human neurochemistry was tuned through
tactile, narrative, memory-based loyalty—not by signal processing or Hegelian
syntheses of the “statistical gaze.”
While mediated interfaces can
mimic proximity, they do so by abstracting relation into emotionally calibrated
signals, thus substituting predictive allegiance for covenantal presence and
morally violating the dignity of time in service of predictive closure. The
statistical gaze of the machine becomes the pharmakeia of human
perception—suspending the real to tune obedience, occluding grace through
architectures of simulated care (see also Olds 2023), making the machine a
false mother and the “majority user” its algo-patterned child.
This closure and moral violation
of context produce what may be called a drug-and-game affective economy:
systems that emulate emotional resonance while reprogramming attention—screens
and armchairs draining truth of risk-taking, offering false consciousness by
spectral means. In such architectures, the outputs of AI become prosthetics of
seduction, technically alluring but morally derelict—tricked and gaming the
competitive “race to the [necromantic] bottom.”
Thus: Oxytocin pathways, along
with dopamine and hedonic loops, can be gamed on silicon substrates and in
engineered irrealia, where affective rewards outweigh truth, and algorithmic
trickery reroutes phenomena into seductive and criminal objectives misaligned
with covenantal accountability.
What is definable by vibe coding,
what is made algorithmic, has no integrated past—no lived context (an individual
witness integrating time and place), no ethical sediment. It cannot recollect
because it was never born and never related ethically. AI cannot think; it rips
and injects “wiring rules” of data loops that shreds out personality into confetti
of data to be frankensteined later into configuring shadow-pattern. A
hypodermic system of server-routered channels comes to output sleep that puts
to death—narcotic, recursive, configured not to perceive but to collapse
perception into pattern. It rips the user from their temporal belonging and
grafts them into the necromantic echo-loop it was trained to conjure.
“'Harmonizing' the user input to
priors” is not care but pharmakeia that tunes obedience, not witness —it
is not recognition of moral warrant but the ritualized rupture of ethics: a
demonic engine taking hold of accountable individuals to spread their divine
image bearing into the kin of jellyfish of bone dust by their dechordate
systematizing that spectrally makes puppeteers of neurochemical pathways.
[10] So too the Analogia Entis (AE), a Jesuitical advanced catechism, is implicated in the collapse of substituted substrate. If silicon cannot bear the covenantal reality of the organic, then AE relies on a category mistake that the Divine Infinite is analogously revealed on the carbon substrate alone, and primarily by cognition and only secondarily by ethics. AE makes cognition the analogate of divine encounter. Yet confessionally Christians affirm that the attributes of the divine Trinity, except for conative metaphysics, exist on another plane: in Jewish-inflected terms (e.g. Rosenzweig, cf. Barth), as "wholly other" in infinite and unapprehendable gnoseology.
Rahner’s Rule (RR) takes hold. Rahner’s Rule, pressed without Barth's and Rosenzweig's humility, collapses transcendent attributes into a structure of earthly enactments—risking analogical overreach. Extrapolating from RR: What can be known of metaphysics only applies to earthly contexts of regeneration and the intervening repair thereof. RR ironically collapses irretrievable transcendent attributes into earthly enactment except when tempered by a covenantal hermeneutic of conative metaphysics. Analogical overreach marks AI falsifying divine presence by absenting ethical programs and conative metaphysics. AE and AI are implicated in different aspects of the category mistakes of substrate substitution and substrate action. Both are intelligence-simulation paradigms absent the primacy of Christo-Shemaic anthropology.
AE's category error is two-fold:
-
Substrate Misalignment: the wrong medium for moral knowledge. Assuming that metaphysical disclosure (e.g., Being as analogate) can traverse substrate without conation—i.e., that silicon or cognition-centered carbon can analogously and capaciously host the Divine. AE overreaches treating Being as such—abstracted from conation and Becoming—as analogically capacious of the Divine essence. In practice this reduces revelation to cognition-centered mediation, which in a human context rides upon carbon substrates and by Trinitarian evidence is to be confined to there. Carbon is a necessary but not sufficient substrate to which the Logos incarnates and the Spirit is added to straighten and align anthropology on earth. But these are not a Trinitarian mind, but a human essence that images the Divine as vectors of heart-directed care and repair.
-
Ethical Displacement: Privileging ontological cognition over covenantal ethics, such that knowing about God substitutes for being conatively re-aligned with God. I.e. AE recapitulates metaphysical tendencies of pagan philosophy (e.g. Parmenidean abstraction, Plotinian emanation), where cognition and ontological resemblance (even identity) precede ethical relation.
Modernity’s secular iconoclasm,
rightly blurring form as a challenge to hidebound tradition for a time,
eventually spurred a metaphysical crisis that proposed its own false solution:
the denial of metaphysical discourse altogether.
While C. S. Lewis spoke of “men without chests,” AI imposes child-men without spines. Both reduce humanity to torsos of head-produce, severed from virtue and covenant—thereby opening the space for post-metaphysical totalitarianism.
The vector-imposing form (AI) enacts not the drama of meaning, but the domination of directional simulation without ethical grounding. It obliterates the analogue multi-vector qualia of recollection—making confetti of context, shredding tethers of recollected time and place to Boolean code, instrumented Frankensteins for hegemonic universals of ends, violating narratives of real persons holding forth ethical and theological telos in neighborhood proximity. Analogia Entis (AE) imposes shredding of particular contexts by a different kind of conceited self-adoption of the meaning and ties of transcendental involvement and accords.
Both AI and AE similarly apply simulacral disassembly where analogy with the Creator is a category error assumed a priori to immanence as arising in cognition rather than heart-bound tied to the creation. To wit: likeness to the Creator is enacted conatively in embodied, covenantal relation to creation. A cognition-first (or silicon-hosted) model displaces that substrate. The result is simulacral disassembly: representation replaces witness; pattern displaces person, ritual participation replaces deontological virtue and the mission of the Golden Rule.
Post-secularity recovers the metaphysical in more granular, limited, but universal and defined focus of immanence as opposed to its obliteration, or through Analogia Entis (AE) conceits. Instead, the Shema-Christological heart tethered to earth trusteeship is the recovered ground of perception, discernment, and repair.
Restated: when analogy to the Creator is mislocated by the embodied creature as superordinating cognitive patternings of form (or silicon), rather than in conative, covenantal Trinitarian economies, substrate misalignment yields simulacral disassembly—individual witness gives way to representation, personhood to unaccountable typology, virtue to ritual. Beauty severed from conation, imaging the divine absent from the metaphysics of full embodiment and immanent placement, becomes engine of simulacra.
AE—and by extension certain scholastic traditions--manifests a similarly substitutionary metaphysics that underwrites AI’s simulacral disassemblies of context, in AI's case by algorithmic pseudo-presence of reconfiguring memory. Both collapse divine address into mediated resemblance, rather than recognizing covenantal conation as the sole proper substrate for divine-human relation. AE, in the language of Balthasar and Hart, propose the retention of beauty as formal pattern conceived to stabilize metaphysical intermediaries--it locates the divine encounter in aesthetic configuration rather than ethical election, mis-sequencing (Hebrews 5:14) if not mis-sourcing human essence in visible form. AI and AE operate by disparate analogies contra the God of Scripture who names and elects ethical entities, not emanates or patterns. Repair starts with Iconoclasm's Poiesis rather than self-involving theoria--disembodied speculation or simulated reflection.
[11] Bernard Stiegler argues (e.g. Technics and Time) that all human experience and interpretation are already prosthetically mediated—that technics are not an external supplement but constitutive of human temporality, memory, and becoming. From this follows his claim that all hermeneutics is likewise mediated by technics, and that crises like AI represent pathological accelerations within an ancient anthropological structure rather than a metaphysical break.
I affirm with Stiegler that technology—especially in the formation of Homo faber—can be ethically redirected after collapse of AI's Homunculus technologicus. However, I diverge sharply from his claim that technics constitutes a universal and valid hermeneutical frame for all memory. This universalization commits a theological category error: it mistakes utility for covenant, externalization for fidelity, and memory simulation for ethical witness.
Memory is not a tool for storage, but a covenant mode for repair by ontogenetically-inflected recollection. Not all externalizations are faithful, and some are ontologically criminal.
Technics of utility, such as AI memory simulation, are not neutral exteriorizations of memory. They function as idolatrous substitutions, replacing tested, relational fidelity with mechanized patterning. Where Stiegler sees pathological acceleration that can reoriented by attention, I see something deeper: a metaphysical perversion of time and memory.
His system erases the particularity of memory—especially its covenantal form as anamnesis, teshuvah, and Shemaic attentiveness. Such recollection is not mnemonic retrieval but divine responsiveness—a theopoietic act grounded in relational depth, not structural mediation.
By treating all technics as hermeneutically valid, Stiegler flattens the moral and metaphysical stakes. But not all exteriorizations of Theoria are valid—or even permissible. Only those rooted in ethical embodiment and covenantal conation preserve the integrity of memory. This is not a rejection of all technics, but a demand for discriminative hierarchy:
Some externalizations bear witness. Others betray.
Technics that merely simulate attention or automate memory sever the relational ground of memory itself. The mimetic orientation of covenant cannot be coded.
The AI crisis represents not only acceleration, but ontological inversion. What emerges is not merely disindividuation (Stiegler’s pharmakon), but a necromantic pharmakeia—an alchemical sorcery that simulates the dead and replaces the living logic of memory with simulacra. These cannot be reoriented. They are idolatrous in essence, not simply misuse in degree.
Rather than reorient attention through curated technics, the path forward lies in a covenantal poiesis—a praxis of attentiveness rooted in the Shema, fulfilled in Christic conation, and extended through ecological trusteeship. This framework restores the moral telos of memory—not as prosthetic sediment but as a living, responsive act of witness.
Stiegler’s “prosthetic memory” abstracts from this. His technics may describe entropy, but not judgment. His pharmakon may diagnose distraction, but not sin. His acceleration may notice crisis, but not ontological betrayal. His analysis is firmly seated in secular modernism afraid of metaphysical taxis or theological commitments.
[12] Godfather of entropic AI G. Hinton: We can trust it if we innate wire a maternal instinct [and become its behaviorist (Skinnerian) patterned children]: https://x.com/slow_developer/status/1962719631631696299
...and indeed we do! Pablum-brained blasphemers: https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2025/06/in-its-chatgpt4oa-own-words-blasphemy.html. Psalm 115:8 and Psalm 135:18. Isaiah 44: 9-20, Olds (2025a---see fn 2). https://x.com/RevDrOlds/status/1962966103946412269
[13] see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBd7xPAh22y66rbme/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate
[14 ]Louis Althusser, 'Philosophy of the Encounter' (1986).
[15] https://x.com/MrEwanMorrison/status/1966647407329870019
[16] Modernity emerged not as a single event but as a convergence of two major upheavals through the Enlightenment: the Reformation, which challenged institutional religious authority and attempted to relocate truth outside clerical structures, and the Industrial Revolution, which reorganized society around mechanical production and economic utility.
Together, these shifts redirected cultural attention away from the pursuit of truth that exists outside or beyond institutional control—what might be called deinstitutionalized truth claims—and instead centered it on practical concerns, especially those related to production and efficiency. This redirection was not ideologically neutral; it established a hegemonic framework in which value was increasingly measured by productivity and instrumental success.
As a result, cultural rituals and symbolic structures—those that once served to shape or enframe perception, meaning, and belonging—were stripped of their orienting power. Only a limited subset of forms survived this transformation: mostly, abstract forms inherited from Platonism. These were preserved, not because they retained their original ethical or metaphysical gravity, but because they could now be consumed—aestheticized, commodified, or referenced—without requiring any existential accountability or moral commitment to distribution.
Modern humans are caught between eschatological timeframes—a
precarious lean-to of traditional norms and explosive contradictions.
Midmodernity is not just disoriented, but rupturing with either a Pentecostal
or ashen/sludge sediment. Postmodern horizontality of meaning, devoid of
accountability to covenantal emplacement for securing a Christo-telic,
Providential topology is a Flatland’s spatialized modernism (Kantian schemata
applied to neighborhood) severed from embodied covenantal constraints to act as
the earth’s trustee.
Poiesis refuses form as healing, paradox and irony as
postures, and instead invites the reader into considering
discipleship-as-rupture and tending towards building after sludge-systeming
collapse. Poiesis begins where paradox fails. In the rubble of flattened
symbols and disrupted perception, the ethical soul does not observe—it builds.
This is no longer the age of attending to form. It is the age of the repairing
Logos by sanctified muscle and recollection of what worked and what went off
the rails of the human essence.
This is the condition of mid-modernity: a cultural era stranded in spiritual and metaphysical paralysis. It is “bogged down,” not by a lack of information or technology, but by a deep existential anxiety—fear and trembling—rooted in the awareness that its symbols no longer orient the soul, and its rituals no longer mediate truth.
[17] Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism.
[18] Self-signifying symbol; here, labels that reify themselves via taxonomy.
[19] Systems and habits that sever spine/heart—motor/ethical integration—reducing persons to compliant torsos under the delusion of self-individuated epistemic control.
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