Technology and Spirituality

This course provides students with an introduction to the frontier, cutting-edge, and weird world of engineered spirituality. In this world, advances in technology are used for new forms of spiritual exploration, extending the range of cognitive enhancement, consciousness hacking, and achieving altered and mystical states of awareness that are otherwise hard to access by ordinary means. Populated by a range and variety of digital prostheses that extends mind-body-machine couplings in directions that are surprising and novel—wearables that track brain activity to assist in achieving advanced meditative states, using neuro-feedback mechanisms to sync the emotional states of different people, curated psychedelic tourism that adjusts the design of the environment to induce a mystical experience, and artificial intelligence (AI) digital twins that track your biomarkers, stress levels, and google calendars to help one create a sense of peak performance—this world of spirit technology does the most to reveal the future shapes of spirituality and perhaps even religion. With the massive rise of people who identify as nones (or members of no organized religion, some of whom identify as atheist or agnostic), and spiritual but not religious in the US, as well as the overwhelming malaise that can be gleaned from the rising levels of loneliness and hopelessness amongst the people, engineered spirituality might become the norm sooner than we realize. This course provides students with front-row seating to this nascent new world.