Original X alt text

Davis: supplants the entropic reality of the body with an incorporeal simulation, a mighty simpleminded gnosticism at that. As Thompson notes, "With its detestation of the imprisonment of the soul in matter, its imagery of mind as light, male, and informational, a logos spermaticos, and the flesh as dark, female, and entrapping, Gnosticism is a basin of attraction that awaits those naive technologists who step outside modern society's conventional worldview. Thompson's point is astute: As modern Prometheans pursue the "rational" possibilities of science and technology, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to maintain the commonsensical perspective of the man on the street. Instead, such thinkers and tinkerers are loosed in a world of possibility whose profound metaphysical and religious dimensions they are often incapable of handling, let alone recognizing; as such, they find themselves unconsciously drawn to the soul's most adolescent fantasies of transcendence and immortality.