We Are Not Machines: Remembering What It Means to Be Human

This podcast has 6 primary chapters:

* Speak to Me of Weaving: From Human Hands to Mechanical Engines

* Speaking The Language of The Machine People

* The First Technologies

* The Trans-Humanist Current & Antlered Beings

* Welcome to The Machine Metaphor

* Living with The Machine People While Remembering What it Means to Be Human

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It is 2025, and humanity finds itself in a ‘battle of the senses’ - between the real and the simulated, the flesh and the mechanical, and the human and the machine. The dominant forces that cater to modern culture perpetually seek to ‘dehumanize’ us. The vision of transhumanism, a movement characterized by replacing human parts with machine parts, and the sudden deluge of AI software is ‘hijacking’ our innate human capacity to ‘shapeshift’ and enter into deep resonance with ‘other’. More and more, we are moving away from sensation, nature, and presence only to enter into ‘virtual landscapes’, a domain for which we are poorly suited.

If we follow this stream to its end, it leads to the actual ‘end of humanity’, in so far as we will become cyborgs. If we do not actively maintain our humanity we will be ‘the last people’. This is not outlandish or hyperbolic by any means; and there are already major players dead set on making it happen. Now, in 2025, we no longer see modern machine technology as a tool, but as something to become.

It may not be something you are considering doing, but there are many people who are salivating at the thought of connecting their brains directly to the matrix. What do you think will happen in the future when two subgroups of humanity find themselves at odd ends of such a deeply polarizing issue?

‘Becoming a cyborg’ is a more extreme version of what this podcast addresses. More so, and more relevant to us all, is the subtle, daily ways in which we are displaced from our bodies and made more ‘mechanical’ in behavior, while losing ‘touch’ with what it means to be human. We can see this showing up in the machine metaphors currently used by many people, such as when someone says they received “a download”, but also in words like:

Upload, Upgrade, Optimize, Re-program, Install, Bring Online, Defrag, Hack, and Rewire

I’m not referring to how these terms are used in computers, but how people apply them to their own bodies and minds. Such comparisons between humans and machines might seem to make sense at first glance, but they profoundly fail to capture the true mystery of being human. This is an insidious example of how we are being conditioned to ‘speak the language of the machines’.

The machine language, especially at its highest levels, like those found in computer systems and AI models, often draw us away from embodied sensation, because they do not have bodies. So in order to enter into resonance with them, we must displace ourselves from felt presence and enter into disembodied abstraction.

Humans evolved in deep wilderness, surrounded by elemental forces, animals, and vegetation. We share a soft animal body, pulsating with blood, sexual fluids, and sensation with much of life on this planet. Because of this, we are designed to speak ‘the energetic language of nature’, a language our nervous systems interpret through felt sensation.

To speak the language of nature is to speak a more primal, energetic language again - an innate human capacity if there ever was one. The natural world is a perpetually transforming and pulsating field of energy that could be characterized as a cacophony of signaling.

The signals of nature are heat, cold, pressure, weight, waves, rhythms, expansion, condensation, eruption, discharge, seepage, collection, and dispersal, among others. All of this is felt and experienced in bodies. Maintaining our humanity in the coming age will require a variety of practices - perhaps the most powerful of which is simple presence with the whispers of the world and feeling subtle ways in which energy moves through our bodies and nature.

Listen to The Elder Fire podcast to explore all of this through an epic sonic adventure. Learn to resist the machine, and remember what it means to be human.

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