Today’s discourse about Artificial Intelligence focuses on marketing and automation, centering the impact of technology on capitalism, labor, and privacy. But if we look back at the last half-century of developments in the fields that gave us this technology, we see a number of cutting-edge thinkers offering new ways to understand the relationship between technology and consciousness. Transhumanism, Autopoiesis theory, and the artificial life movement are just a few examples of radical approaches to life and consciousness that emerged from highly scientific and technological fields, only to be sidelined. However, these “radical” views in transhumanism and neuroscience have surprising overlap with core elements of hermetic and esoteric philosophies. In this talk I will focus on two specific ideas that have emerged from scientific fields – “autopoiesis” in evolutionary biology and the “closest continuer view” (CCV) in transhumanist philosophy – and I will examine their relationship to creative visualization, energy work, and past life exploration. By looking at these examples, I hope to motivate further inquiry into the broad overlap between theoretical ideas in transhumanism and neurophilosophy and the exploration of personal magickal practice.
