J. Nilsson, 26th August 2023

Nietzsche believed that civilizations are to be judged by their loftiest elements. I am inclined to agree with him but seeing as he is the great transvaluator of all (traditional) values, and I am rather the adherent to traditional values, it seems appropriate to experiment with inverting the grand nihilist’s famous dictum. And so it is that I justify the following ruminations on artificial intelligence pornography (AIP).

There has been a panicked hum going through the public discourse of late regarding the dangers of artificial intelligence. Instead of adding to these tenebrous prognostications, which is not to say they are unfounded (quite the opposite), I will comment on what AI says about the depths to which modern civilization has already sunk.

AIP covers a range of different forms of pornography. This can include pornographic ‘chat bots’ or deep fake porn. For those fortunately out of the know, deep fake porn denotes the use of artificial intelligence to superimpose the likeness of others – typically women – onto the faces of pornographic performers.  The former are typically celebrities, and have typically not consented to the use of their visages. Much could be and indeed has been written about the ethical implications of deep fake porn, which will not be rehashed here. Again, moral concerns about deep fake porn are to my mind well founded. However, it is the metaphysical significance of this phenomenon which I feel called to comment upon. For this to be intelligible, a brief excursus on traditional historiosophy is called for.

One of, if not the leading prejudice of modernity is the superstition of historical progress. Even conservatives, when pushed, reveal themselves to be progressives. Progressivism, properly speaking, denotes a belief in the upward movement of humanity from some benighted and barbaric past towards some ill-defined goal. Its etymology does not support a narrow commitment to some particular agenda of gender deconstruction or racial justice. Thus understood progressivism denotes not an antonym to conservativism, but characterises the modern mentality generally.

This stands in marked contrast with how humanity as a whole saw the trajectory of history prior to modernity. I say humanity as a whole because, regardless of the particularities of the historical vision of any given segment of humanity, what was held in common prior to the descent into modernity was that humanity was experiencing a decline. It takes no great exercise of the imagination to see that this is true whether one takes the perspective of the Abrahamic civilizations, which see history as a ‘fall’ from an Edenic state, the East Asian traditions, which saw history as a gradual entropic disintegration from an original grand unity, or the cyclical vision of South Asia, which irrespective of its Hindu, Buddhist or Jain iterations, sees the present age as located in the descending phase of the cosmic cycle. Indeed, Buddhism would have it that we are in the midst of not one but two descending phases running in parallel! We are simultaneously in the phase of decline that follows the departure of a Buddha from the world and in the age of the five defilements, the declining phase of a cycle of far grander proportions, comparable to that of Hinduism.

René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times is unsurpassed in its lucidity and rigour as a synthesis of the metaphysical dynamics at play in the process of decline described in the variegated mythopoeic cosmologies of the different aforementioned civilizations. That work characterises the process of decline variously as an involution from the quality to quantity, from unity to multiplicity, from the essential to the substantial, from the unconditioned to the conditioned and from ultimate reality to unreality. In the latter phases of the descent the traditions teach, says Guénon, that the manifested world takes on the appearance of an inversion of the normal order of things. By the law of analogy, the bottom of the cycle must be a mirror image of the beginning of the cycle.

That pornography should be seen as a symptom of decline is unlikely to be a surprise to the reader, indeed it may well be seen as something of a pearl-clutching cliché. I therefore hasten to stress that we are speaking here not principally of moral degeneration but of metaphysical degeneration. What is stressed by Guénon and other writers of similar orientation is the losing sight of metaphysical reality. A consideration touched upon by Guénon and his disciples but rarely explored is that at later stages in the process of decline, when metaphysical truths begin to approach full occultation, humanity will become unmoored from material reality also. Predictions of what society in such a world may look like (mass depersonalisation-derealisation disorder?) would be imprudent as they run the risk of being overtaken by events, but one suspects that artificial intelligence will play a substantial role in this phase of decline.

A feature of the loss of sight of metaphysical truth that largely preceded loss of belief in its reality was the loss of experience of metaphysical truth. As humanity devolved, we descended gradually from a position where all of manifestation is sacralised, and so experienced as a theophany, to one wherein communion with the Absolute was progressively ghettoised in preparation for its final liquidation. This is not to criticise later revelations like those of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – for these are responses to decline (rather than the causes thereof) emanating from the mercy of the divine. In a similar manner, we have experienced a progressive alienation from material reality. One dimension of this alienation is correctly identified by Heidegger as our losing sight of dasein as it is obscured by the accumulated weight of inherited preconceptions and abstraction. To praise Heidegger here in spite of his manifold and manifest failures is to illustrate Guénon’s observation that modern thinkers’ value is usually to be found in their critiques rather than their positive programmes. A not unrelated process is to be identified in the dynamic by which technology progressively alienates us from the material facts of reality by mediating our experience of the physical world.

One readily available example of this is warfare. Combat initially involved skin-to-skin contact between combatants with an intimacy bordering on the sexual. Combat was then mediated through stabbing and striking instruments, to ranged instruments where the enemy is only seen from a distance to artillery and drone warfare. Another example that has likely already occurred to my reader is that another example is the internet. It is not an original observation that the internet has largely replaced the ‘town square’. Community was already an egregiously abused word before the emergence of the internet – Ferdinand Tönnies would have observed that what are often described as ‘communities’ are really societies. The internet has done a further violence to the concept by the emergence of entirely on-line ‘communities’. Quite aside from the insalubriousness of their ideas, online pseudo-communities like ‘incels’, the ‘dissident right’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ of yesterday represent an insulation of the individual from material reality as their interpersonal interactions are mediated by technology.

With this metaphysically grounded understanding of the direction of history, let us return to considering AIP. The principal purpose of pornography is to serve as a stimulant for masturbation. That is to say, it serves to simulate sexual activity. Sex, and coitus in particular, is held by the various traditions to have a powerful metaphysical dimension. Setting aside sexual magic, sacred prostitution and the initiatic use of sex in traditional societies, profane sexual love is loaded with metaphysical significance. With the sinking of humanity into modernity this metaphysical dimension of sexual love has been lost sight of. However, the power of sex on the merely material and psychic plane remained within view. Perhaps for this reason essentially religious sexual taboos often persisted long after their metaphysical import and foundation has been forgotten.

The sex act, the interfacing of one human body with another, is perhaps the most intensely felt material interactions two persons can have. It is only to be rivalled in this respect by act of killing. Perhaps this accounts for not infrequent involvement of an element of violence in sexual activity, particularly choking. It is the sex act which confers on the participants the greatest physical knowledge of another being. Its physical immediacy grounds individuals in material reality like nothing else save our mortality. If the pious (rightly) bemoan the degradation of sex in modernity to bestial promiscuity, then at least this promiscuity put a floor on decline ontologically speaking.

AIP divorces the sex act, so far as is possible, from its material dimension. Of course, a physical dimension remains, in so far as masturbation necessarily has a material dimension. When contrasted with the actual sex act, the intense relation to another’s material existence is gone. This is, naturally, true to an extent of pornography and masturbation in general – which may account for the general opposition of religions to these phenomena. However, AIP goes a step further in divorcing the ‘consumer’ from material reality. Artificial intelligence chat applications allow for the same simulation of the psycho-social dimensions of sexual intercourse that, for example, a sex line operator does – but without the latter’s human element. A sex line operator is only engaging with their client for financial compensation, but said operator remains a real, material being. To put things crudely, masturbating to a message from artificial intelligence  is possessed of greater unreality than masturbating to a message from an enfleshed human being. Masturbating to pornography is to detach oneself from reality, to imagine and simulate sex with someone one is not having sex with. But it remains within the realm of the possible that one could have sex with these people. Masturbating to deep fake pornography entails simulating sex not with people who actually exist, but a Shellian simulacra of a person with whom sex is an impossibility.

Artificial intelligence is rightly a source of concern for many. Chief amongst these should not be ethical concerns or worries about the loss of jobs, though this is not to make light of the suffering artificial intelligence may give rise to, but to its eschatological significance. Artificial intelligence is a new and major development in the long-standing dynamic of technology serving as a vehicle of decline, understood as a progressive falling away from truth. This providential dimension of artificial intelligence is perhaps not most significant in its application to sex, but it is here that this function is most acutely felt. If the reader is disturbed at all by the potential loss of mooring in material reality suggested in this article, then I urge them to be all the more disturbed by the loss of mooring in metaphysical reality that preceded it. If there occurred in the reader any stirring of a desire to reverse the process, they should look not to the previous stage of decline from which we are presently descending, but back to the origin from which we have fallen.