🦈The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: Rationalism Against Reason

Prophecy and Immortality are two sides of the same delusion.

Update May 2026 - I’ve converted this post to free. Enjoy! - David

Welcome to one of the final few pre-publication draft excerpts of “Stealing the Future.” Like other such excerpts and deep-dive essays, this piece is partially paywalled. Please consider becoming a supporter to read this and other pieces. A selection of book excerpts available to all readers can be found here.

Damien Hirst, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” 1991.

That is not dead which can Eternal lie/ And with strange eons, even death may die.”

– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

***

The Rationalists’ certain prophecy of AI’s arrival and a Rapture of the virtuous, like the certainty of prediction baked into techno-utopianism’s political project, ultimately hinges on a set of radical beliefs, all rooted in faith rather than science. One is the conception of the human mind as a binary computer, outputs reliably following from inputs, shared by the Rationalists, EAs, Kurzweil, Barbara Fried, and many others. The second, most directly expressed by Toby Ord and Yudkowsky, but implicit in all overconfident statistical modeling, is faith in a mechanistic Newtonian model of physical reality, and the reducibility of the unknown to mere risk.

These premises are the horse behind the cart, the absurd but necessary conditions for a badly desired dream: the dream of human transcendence from pure matter into immortal spirit through technological acceleration and capital investment. More than a dream of immortal life for individual humans, or of a continuous societal wholeness, it is the dream of a human species that continues forever.

The mixture in these discourses among apocalypse and utopia, between individual and species immortality, can be mistaken for conflict or fracture. But this tension has always run through human visions of apotheosis: the new silicon reason is stretched, like a taxidermied pelt, over the ancient bones of an unspeakable terror.

These anxieties are comforted with another updated classic: the lure of prophecy, with its promise of safety. If the Spartan Lycurgus credited the vaporous Oracles of Delphi with the injunction to create a state structured by military discipline, now it is Logic that dictates conformity with the Code of Maximization, if we wish to fend off doom.

While the Rationalists try to contain the devilish consequences of their logical “infohazards,” this lure of prophecy reveals its own fatal strategy. If only we could foresee, our actions would be radically more powerful - and those with foresight would be justified in gathering to themselves vast undemocratic power.

Wouldn’t it be nice, the techno-utopian mind whispers dreamily to itself, if the world were as simple as a circuit-board. We could defeat death, and live forever. And over time, these longings become their truth.

The techno-utopians seem unaware that these whispers have been heard many times, always to end in overreach and tragedy. Perhaps they are blinded by their disinterest in storytelling, having never read of King Lear’s doomed bid to turn mathematics into legacy. They are certainly unaware that more sophisticated humans have for thousands of years recognized the inner origins of these dreams, and sought to interrogate them. St. Augustine, writing in North Africa circa 400 AD, surveyed the barely-canonical book of Revelation and saw a metaphor for the terror of personal death. In fits and starts since then, the entire human species has become more self-aware about the role our mythology plays in mediating purely animal fears.

Nonetheless, we remain in thrall to this basic terror of death, and more broadly to our own duality as creatures of both dream and body. While many of us are strong enough to honestly struggle with this duality, just as many fall victim to what Freud, in an early and imperfect metaphor, called the “Oedipal complex.” This is mistakenly understood, including by Freud himself, as some desire for vengeance against either fathers or authority. But in both Kurzweil and Bankman-Fried we see the working out of the truer Oedipal complex: the desire to become a self-created being, what Ernest Becker calls causa-sui.

To become the causa sui means not merely to kill the father, but to become one’s own father, and turn all fathers into children, as Joe Bankman was transformed; or into performing ghosts, as Fredric Kurzweil became. To overcome the natural order is the promise of the modern hero, the nature of the “Sam-shaped hole” that Michael Lewis pined for. We are attracted to these people and their missions because they allow us “to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes” - the wish for maximum power, for the cure to all ailments, for the Philosopher’s Stone, for a mind free of “bias” - even for immortality.

Their claims and ideas are at best fantastical, at worst manipulative and destructive, but we are hypnotized by the “unconflicted person” - unconflicted, that is, by the inconveniences of reality, complexity, or nuance. “The causa-sui passion is an energetic fantasy that covers over the rumbling of man’s fundamental creatureliness,” a heroism that, like the confident idiot Bayesianism of the Rationalist and Effective Altruist, simply declares the imminent arrival of miracle cures, the future apotheosis of man, the enlightened future: an “absolute denial of threatening reality.[ Becker p. 106-107]”

Becker’s work was once celebrated, but a half-century of campaigns to discredit psychoanalysis - an effort deeply aligned with the Rationalist, determinist, technocratic, and anti-education projects of the contemporary reactionary right - has left the recipes mouldering. Nor ever throughout human history has the progress of self-understanding been linear or continuous. Centuries after Augustine, scholars of the Middle Ages again engaged in what Frank Kermode rightly calls naive apocalypticism: attempts to divine, from the unhinged rantings of Revelation, the exact date of the End Times. Symbolic figures like the Beast from the Land and the Woman Clothed with the Sun were tied to contemporary historical figures and events. Dates posited for Apocalypse included 1,000 A.D.; 1033; 1260; 1420, and on and on. When these dates came and went, debate continued among “those who simply thought the calculations were wrong.” [Kermode, “The Sense of an Ending,” p. 10]

The great majority of these naive theological calculations, Kermode observes, “assume that the end is pretty near.” As we’ve seen, this is equally true of projections of the arrival of the Singularity, The God-AI, and the immortality of uploaded minds. These discourses are a return to naive apocalypticism. Like the theologians who forgot Augustine’s ancient reflections, techno-utopianism’s insistence on a first-order rationality of timelines and calculations conceals the animal behind the ideal of pure reason.

“Consciousness can be uniformed and replaced by connective procedures,” Berardi notes, “but the unconscious cannot be obliterated.” (Breathing, 85) The animal and its fears remain the hidden external determinant of the Rationalist nightmare-dreams of apocalypse, utopia, and immortality. That these claims for an imminent forever were desires before they became conclusions is obvious from the endless gaps, elisions, and absurdities that undergird the techno-utopian formation. When a determinist like Barbara Fried or Robert Sapolsky runs up against the impossible challenge of actually disproving human free will, they insist that the discovery lies just around the corner. So, eternally, do robotic minds, unbiased thought, and predictive certainty.

These lacunae, these failed prophecies so enthusiastically leapt past, are the deep and crippling irony at the heart of the Logic of the Code: it is motivated not by reason, but by a desire that it must conceal even from itself. It is reason submitted to financial rule (Berardi 36): capital is necessary to build God and Heaven, and so capital determines all deductions. Above all, as Kurzweil so conveniently encodes in his little family drama, the techno-utopian’s “reason” is a slave to the shadowing terror of death.

The Logic of the Code promises immortality for both the individual, and for society. It promises that the human mind can be reproduced in eternal silicon[ Or even continuous with that of a living human, as assumed in the Rationalist’s reimagining of Hell as the endless simulated torture of one’s AI model, as posited by Roko’s Basilisk.], and that humanity can be made eternal through a total predictive capacity to forestall and prevent harm. It promises that there is one Truth, and that it can be found. That these promises must be fulfilled through the investment of a priestly class of techno-sages with great wealth and power goes largely without saying.

The bid for power is meant to “lever up” or accelerate the positive impact of these investments, but the illogic at the heart of these claims has made their harms much more apparent. The case of Sam Bankman-Fried illustrates how techno-rationalism’s root-and-branch destruction of epistemic humility actively undermines the believer’s ability to competently navigate the real world - except with the aid of capital guided by the same delusions. The prophecy implied by probabilistic determinism becomes a priori the answer it claims to be seeking, leading adherents to absurd positions - including the unshaken refusal to accept that their figureheads could be compulsive liars, drug addled speed-freaks, and financial incompetents.

This prophetic trap is illustrated in a work of art whose profound truth was revealed by its failure. Commissioned in 1991, Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” consists of a massive tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde. What was at first received as a stunt has over time revealed its profundity: The shark appears frozen mid-lunge, uncannily alive in its death, while its rigid vitrine evokes the industrial and calculated. As critic Roberta Smith described the piece in 2007, “the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don't quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.”

The frozen life-in-death of “Physical Impossibility” parallels the vitrine of circuits in which Ray Kurzweil dreams of displaying his father’s uncanny corpse/corpus. The shark that can’t stop swimming is the dead-alive future that the techno-utopians dream for humanity. But the piece ultimately captured a truth profound beyond Hirst’s seeming intention, when the eternal object proved to be more ephemeral than its living precursor: the shark, meant to be preserved indefinitely in its formaldehyde bath, began to deteriorate almost immediately.

The shark might have lived decades more in the wild, had the artist not made it into a symbol. But by 1993, its corpse had begun to putrefy, to cloud the crystal waters of its utopian eternity - not merely more dead than it might have been, but more foul and toxic by far than if its corpse had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. In 1993, the shark was skinned, stuffed, and returned to the vitrine, but this robbed the dead of the impression of life. “You could tell it wasn't real,” Hirst later assessed. “It had no weight." Ultimately, another shark died to represent immortality, when the original was replaced in 2006.

These are the deaths and deprivations that must precede, the sacrifices we make in the present to pursue the receding horizon of utopia.

The tragedy, drama, and essence of human existence are in the gap between meat and dream: between the limits of a living bodily self and the castles we build of pure Idea. The Logic of the Code succumbs to the dream, to the mistaking of a preserved shark for eternal life, of a lattice of numbers for the world. When the world defies the lattice, the code shatters, fragile, its bets failed, its promises broken beyond repair, an autism unable to evolve - and nobody responsible.

The insistence on eternity is a compulsion which the artist can replay in safe insulation - as a fiction. But when enacted sincerely in the real world, the dream of immortality cuts off all life in the pursuit of life’s extension. Attempts to capture nature’s moment inescapably render down to rot, failure - and fraud.