“Modern scientists regard living bodies as elaborate machines. The ancients did the opposite and regarded elaborate machines as alive: thus, suns, planets and moons were all living gods.

It’s fascinating that the ancient mind was so attuned to life (and religion) and the modern mind to death (and atheism). Why did death become the ruling paradigm? It was because of empiricist materialist science. Science had no need of anything messy such as life and free will – so it ignored them and treated everything as machinery. This proved so successful that it became holy writ. To this day, science has nothing meaningful to say about life, mind, consciousness or free will, and doesn’t much care. Scientists expect some machine-like answer to present itself in due course. Mind states will, they expect, be shown to be materialist brain states. Consciousness will be shown to be a meaningless epiphenomenon. Free will won’t exist, and life will just be a peculiar mode of death associated with self-propelled motion. Happy with that?

Scientific materialism is the ultimate death cult. It exterminates meaning. It constitutes a pathological desire to be a machine rather than human.” …

“Aristotle had a biological, teleological view of science. In ancient times, no one anywhere on earth subscribed to the reductive, machine view of reality held by modern scientists. Is the modern view better and truer, or simply different? If the ancients saw life, mind, spirit and purposes everywhere, the “moderns” don’t see life, mind, spirit and purposes at all. For the moderns, life is just a weird phenomenon that emerges from arrangements of certain types of atoms and molecules. The same goes for mind.

The universe isn’t pursuing any purpose; it’s simply an enormous, deterministic process – a giant mechanism, obeying inescapable laws. The modern view is the dialectical antithesis of the ancient view, and that of course suggests that both are wrong and a synthesis is required in which the best of both are embraced, and the worst of both rejected. ILLUMINISM is the true synthesis of the two views.

It succeeds by doing something extraordinary. It invokes machine-like mathematics and then asserts that the fundamental unit of mathematics – the dimensionless point (monad) – is none other than a living, unconscious mind driven by a ferocious Will to Power to optimize itself. It’s a teleological, self-solving equation and the answer it wants is the one that contains the maximum actualization of potential.” Hyperreason, Mike Hockney

Leire Ruiz Nuñez, born in Spain (1991), studied architecture and philosophy, lives and works in Madrid.