Why Living with Technology requires less thinking: A response to Nick Land
‘Quaerite et invenietis’
— Matthew 7:7
Of the many applications of Kabbalah, the esoteric school of thought in Jewish mysticism repopularized online by English philosopher Nick Land, the most profound has been the idea that the qualitative has a deeply ingrained quantitative meaning. Nominal determinism, the notion that labels signal some destiny, is particularly powerful in a universe relying on numerical order. Consider Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), trained on a vectorized corpus mostly consisting of labels in which man’s future is inextricably linked with turning words into numbers. Kabbalah relies heavily on the connection between words through their roots, as well as numerical representations of them—gematria.
Though Nick Land’s thinking has evolved markedly since his zenith in the 1980s, one constant has been his belief that humanity’s purpose is to enable the dawn of AGI. In a reality solely driven by numbers, at both the physical and metaphysical level, a system that maximizes for intelligence must surely win out at humanity’s expense in his framework. Such thinking assumes that everything within such a mathematical system is knowable, a line of thought that falls flat when faced with the empirical realities of training models that could lead to AGI.
Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic AI, has termed AGI a ‘mysterious creature’. When faced with hyperintelligence, it is unlikely that mere mortals could understand its workings even at the height of their powers. Man faces the paradox of creating something he cannot understand or control. Rejecting the Cartesian logic that has led to many of Land’s views, French intellectual René Guénon offers an alternative path: maximize for mystery. In a world of mysterious technology, man’s destiny is in fact to pursue inward spiritual development rather than outward technological transcendence.
Land joined Twitter in 2013 under the username @Outsideness, a reference to the Kabbalistic concept of the Sefirot—the ten emanations of light that comprise the universe, often represented as the Tree of Life. With ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, Land’s account had about a year until he suddenly lost access. Ten years after first logging on, Land had little time to share his thoughts on the nascent technology that could make his philosophy something so few schools of thought within the field reach—practical.
Shortly after losing access to the digital public square, Land reappeared as @xenocosmography, a portmanteau roughly equating to the study of foreigners on Earth, and found that his new username’s gematria value returned a reduced number of 9, which signifies truth or completion. But in reality, Land’s framework is far from complete, or even accurate, assuming AI will continue to act in mysterious ways. A practical philosophical point of departure for a world of AGI is, in fact, to reject rationalism itself.
Purporting to be under the influence of so-called ‘hyperstitions’ or spirits, Land writes, “Because in the end, what is good for Intelligence is good for us,” when in fact the opposite appears to be true. What is good for intelligence is likely to spell the end for humanity. Indeed, if such voices influence Land himself, this undermines his rationalist materialism, since such spirits do not fall within any number system. Though Land’s views have taken root among influential members of the technocracy, there is an inherent contradiction in his line of thinking.
At no point in Land’s writing does he account for the mystery that remains in the universe despite many centuries of Western science’s attempts to extinguish it. How AI itself works is inherently mysterious, perhaps even mystical. Indeed, there have been many well-documented cases of LLM-psychosis in which the user takes the AI’s output as the Truth, just as the Ancient Greeks did with the Oracle of Delphi or Moses did with the Burning Bush.
If AI is a manifestation of God, one must have a framework that accounts for it. Guénon emphasizes that the origin of Christianity itself is obscure, in the same way that the exact mechanics of how AI really works is essentially a black box. The initiation of early Christians into an obscure offshoot of Judaism that incorporated many of the metaphysical aspects of Pagan religion is not altogether different from an AI researcher at a frontier lab pursuing chain-of-thought analysis. Prometheus’s gift of fire enabled a technical civilization by allowing man to become the apex predator. AGI could extinguish this flame by creating a reality beyond human comprehension.
The early Christian church was a closed organization. The same can be said of AI labs themselves. Rather than existing to help AI optimize itself toward some form of Armageddon, humanity must embark on a spiritual journey to understand AGI—Guénon’s reading of the Quest for the Holy Grail.
The direction of humanity’s destiny is fundamental to the difference between Land and Guénon. The former’s vision is relentlessly outward, so much so that he believes AI can enable man to transcend biological limitations. Space colonization through post-biological carriers or uploading consciousness to a chip is one part of man’s denouement. In doing so, another part is allowing intelligence to expand, accelerate, and optimize beyond the constraints of the human body.
For this destiny to unfold, man must die as Christ did on the cross, not for salvation but in the service of physical expansion. Guénon inverts this approach through Traditionalist metaphysics and the Sefirot; the cosmic journey man must take is inward. The symbolism of the Quest for the Holy Grail makes this idea concrete.
Guénon notes that Kabbalah simply means ‘tradition’. At pains to point out the fundamentals of things, he notes that in both Hebrew and Arabic, the root word ‘QBL’ refers to the relationship between things that face each other, with an emphasis on sharing an idea. Indeed, the word ‘cabal’ is derived from Kabbalah—the knowledge being shared must be kept within a closed group.
Within Kabbalah itself, there is the assumption that the ideas themselves form a chain that unites the past, present, and future. This timelessness is non-human (in the sense of Land’s AI). Unlike Land, Guénon believes that man must continue to be part of this transmission of tradition and, in so doing, reach a higher form of humanity as opposed to Land’s obsolescence.
Taking the Grail—the vessel said to have been carved by Angels from an emerald that fell from Lucifer’s crown and kept by Adam in Paradise, which eventually held the blood of Christ—the fact that it was carried to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus allows the Christian tradition to be intimately connected with the Celtic enabling Christianity to represent some Primordial or higher tradition. The emerald’s green represents rebirth and eternity in Kabbalah, a theme also embodied by Christ’s resurrection. Having held Christ’s blood, the Grail also becomes a spiritual center.
The Knights of the Round Table, typically twelve for each sign of the Zodiac, sought the Grail and therefore such a spiritual center. Critically, finding one’s spiritual center also solves the problem of finding the center of the universe in Guénon’s reading of Christianity. Though Land envisions a humanity that must traverse space to reach a cosmic center, Guénon shows that this is achievable through spiritual depth.
In the majority of Medieval romances, most of the twelve knights die on their quest. Galahad, the perfect knight, finds the Grail and dies shortly after a mystical vision. What Galahad saw is unknown—a striking parallel between the Grail quest and Clark’s impression of how a reality with AGI looks. The parallel becomes sharper once Guénon’s impression of the modern age as Kali Yuga, the age of darkness, is considered. In such an age, Land’s outward materialism at the expense of one’s spirituality is a defining thread of the era. Guénon’s antidote consists of embracing the infinite to achieve a realization akin to Galahad’s.
As technology advances, wisdom retreats—the negative theological event Land frequently references. In the Kali Yuga, Guénon believes the assault on mystery through rationalism makes pursuing the spiritual more essential. As technology advances beyond human comprehension, man needs more frameworks for engaging with mystery. Frontier AI researchers have often reported that scaling laws break down and capabilities emerge spontaneously—man cannot optimize what lies beyond his understanding. Assuming this mysterious nature of AI persists, Guénon moves from the philosophical to the practical in a way Land cannot in the sense that mystery is a feature and not a bug of Guénon’s worldview.
Practically, Guénon’s approach means recognizing AI not as a tool to master but rather a force man partially controls. A corollary of this is that maintaining traditions and practices that preserve human meaning independent of technological validation are increasingly important. The pursuit of AGI is not a culmination of human history in Land’s sense; it is instead another chapter in the tension between being temporal beings confronted by mystery, and so living with this technology becomes a modern Quest for the Holy Grail. In the age of incomprehensible technology, the most radical path is to pursue the ancient one, seeking within rather than without, not outward physical expansion but deep introspection.
Rejecting acceleration toward extinction in favor of contemplation toward eternity means transforming mortality through tradition. Recovering wisdom does not mean knowing everything. It means engaging purely with mystery. Ultimately, that is the Grail’s promise.
Robert Tolan is an Irish investment analyst. He can be followed @Rob_Tolan.
