On the philosophy of Jason Jorjani (updated review)
My old review of Jorjani's Prometheism, updated with new thoughts and caveats.
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My old review of Jorjani’s Prometheism
In “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024] I commented on the philosophy of Jason Jorjani.
I said: Jason Jorjani promotes a cosmist futurism on steroids called “prometheism” [Jorjani 2020]. Some of his ideas on science, technology, and evolution are similar and often very similar to mine, and I echo his call “to embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix” of reality. Jorjani also indulges in questionable conspiracy theories and political proposals, and the shadow of Nietzsche’s “cruelly intrepid” superman looms large in his book. I don’t see why future supermen should be cruel, and I prefer to think they’ll be nice and compassionate.
Earlier in the book I commented on Jorjani’s interpretation of Heidegger: technology is “ontologically prior to science” and even “ontologically prior to the natural phenomena” studied by science [Jorjani 2020]. According to Jorjani, this concept can be traced back to Martin Heidegger and like-minded philosophers like Bernard Stiegler.
My short passages about Jorjani were taken from a longer review of [Jorjani 2020] that I had published in my website turingchurch dot com. Since I still agree with everything I wrote there, I’m reproducing the review with minor edits. Here it is:
I decided to read “Prometheism” [Jorjani 2020] after a trusted friend recommended it as the “best and most original transhumanist-philosophy essay in a long time… A must-read for anybody interested in how to re-think and promote technology and the posthuman change.”
After reading it cover to cover, I love and hate the book, which is four books in one: An exploration of frontier philosophy, metaphysics, and cosmology; A visionary manifesto for our cosmic evolution; An anthology of conspiracy theories (some old, some trending, some new); A cultural engineering and political action program.
I don’t care for conspiracy theories and prefer to stay away from culture wars and partisan politics, so I’ll focus on the first two. About the others I’ll just say that some of Jorjani’s conspiracy theories are fun, and some aren’t. Some of Jorjani’s social and political proposals make sense to me, and some don’t.
Jorjani’s ideas on cosmology and our cosmic evolution are similar to mine, but painted with vivid, heroic, strong colors.
I agree with Jorjani: We must advance without limits and master not only genetic engineering, nanotechnology and all that, but also weirder things like zero-point energy, time travel, and the occult sciences of “paranormal” phenomena. This can and should be the basis of future religions.
Now, I stop here and try to stay sober, but Jorjani’s vivid, intoxicating words remind of Marinetti’s futurism, which Jorjani praises. Jorjani also enters the territory of conspiracy theories and cultural/political wars, from which I prefer to stay away. Of course, I realize that Jorjani’s formulation is stronger than mine, and much more likely to be embraced by hordes of passionate believers.
The title of Jorjani’s book is described as a contraction of Prometheus and Theism.
Is Jorjani saying that we should worship Prometheus as a God?
Yes, in some sense. Prometheus is a powerful archetype that takes a life of its own, hijacks the minds and hearts of masses of people, and guides the evolution of humanity. Prometheus is a “spectre” in the sense used by Marx and Engels in “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”
Prometheus is not a personal God that answers our prayers, remakes our world, and grants us resurrection. But it doesn’t matter because, by embracing the Prometheus spectre, we can do all that ourselves. Prometheus is “the destining force inherent to the evolution of technological science.”
Jorjani argues that technology is “ontologically prior to science” and even “ontologically prior to the natural phenomena” studied by science. According to him, this concept can be traced back to Martin Heidegger (see “The Question Concerning Technology”) and like-minded philosophers like Bernard Stiegler (see “La technique et le temps”).
Heidegger is often unclear and has been interpreted in different ways. Stiegler doesn’t add much in the way of clarity. But the ontological priority of technology makes a lot of sense to me. Changing the world (that is, technology) comes before understanding the world, as suggested by the words inscribed on the tomb of Karl Marx, and even before the world itself.
As I see things, the raw facts of the world come first. In his foreword to Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” [Zukav 2001], David Finkelstein noted that the theory of quantum mechanics leaves unanswered some questions that can only be answered by experience, and quoted Niels Bohr: “Experience is too rich for our theory.”
Perceiving the world comes before understanding the world. Karl Friston’s theory of active inference [Parr 2022], which makes a lot of sense to me, suggests that perception is one with action in an irreducible action-perception loop. That is, there’s no perceiving the world without acting upon the world to change it, and acting upon the world to change it is called technology. In Bohr’s quantum mechanics, it is the technology we use to study the fabric of quantum reality that defines the variables of our mathematical models of quantum reality.
This is how I make sense of the concept that technology is ontologically primary. However, in the spirit of neutral monism, I prefer to think that technology and natural phenomena are both ontologically primary in a logical loop. Or, what we call natural phenomena and what we call technology are aspects of primary stuff that comes before both.
Don’t let my references to Marx make you think that Jorjani is a Marxist: he isn’t.
Jorjani castigates “the reductively materialistic transhumanists” of today for deviating from the original conception of Nikolai Fedorov and the Russian Cosmists, who “certainly did not share the overly reductionist view” of many contemporary transhumanists.
“What is even more daring,” says Jorjani, “ is the will of Fedorov and his disciples, rooted in a heretical interpretation of the Russian Orthodox belief in the Resurrection, to demand that generations of the future use the advanced technology that they have invented in order to resurrect the dead so that they can become denizens of the future cosmic paradise.”
Jorjani adopts a simulation cosmology similar (with some tweaks) to that described by Rizwan Virk [Virk 2019, 2021]. Like Virk, Jorjani argues that the simulation hypothesis provides the best explanations of weird quantum phenomena.
Jorjani develops a philosophical cosmology that guarantees free will. Not fake “compatibilist” free will, but real “libertarian” free will, which is “a sine qua non of any meaningful concept of existence.” I totally agree.
We “could both be inside of a designed Cosmos and also have a certain degree of free will,” says Jorjani. We are living “inside of an information processing system - a gigantic quantum computer that is affected by various levels of consciousness that it generates…”
Past states of the world are archived in “Akashic records” like saved video games. Time travel is allowed in the simulation cosmology. Time travel paradoxes can be avoided by thinking of time travel into the past as “rebooting to an archived past state of play and making different choices inside of the game.”
So there are many worlds, but not all the worlds of Everett’s multiverse, which would be incompatible with free will. Interestingly, Virk makes a similar point in [Virk 2021].
Jorjani argues that paranormal phenomena (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, teleportation, reincarnation) “make sense in the context of the Simulation Hypothesis… we are communicatively connected to each other, first and foremost, through the information processing system…”
It’s worth noting that Jorjani’s simulation cosmology is more sophisticated than many popular accounts. Reality could be “simulations all the way down… nested within one another.” According to Jorjani, this is suggested by the theories of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, popularized by Michael Talbot in “The Holographic Universe” [Talbot 1996].
I read Talbot’s book long ago and found it very impressive. Here’s a nice case of synchronicity (also discussed at length by Jorjani): while writing the first version of this review in 2020 I found out that Talbot was born on my birthday and died on my wife’s birthday.
In “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” [Bohm 2002], Bohm explored the deep reality of the implicate order, which underlies our reality. I’ve argued that, even if deep reality is whole and undivided, the simulation hypothesis is a coherent and useful mental picture.
In Jorjani’s words, our reality unfolds “from out of a background of information that is being processed in a non-local and non-linear way at a level of reality that remains hidden from us.”
“On this view, there is no objective physical reality underlying the simulation that we subjectively perceive,” he continues. “If programmers are manipulating our perceptions, they too are part of a holographic universe and their experiences are, in the end, as ‘virtual’ as ours, when compared to the reality of the implicate order.”
But enough metaphysics. Remember that changing the world comes before understanding the world, and even before the world itself.
Who could tolerate “being the plaything of fifth-dimensional gods?” Jorjani answers: “No one other than the Prometheist who joins their ranks himself...”
“It is possible,” he says, “ that this means something like hacking through the coding matrix of a simulation and becoming one of its programmers… to access and recode this matrix… to embark on a cosmic conquest to recode the matrix of what has been mistaken for ‘reality.’”
And this is visionary transhumanism at its best, on steroids. This is my philosophy. I’ll forgive Jorjani for mixing it with conspiracy theories and some proposals that I dislike.
OK, this was my review of [Jorjani 2020]. Now I’ll add other thoughts and caveats.
New thoughts (and caveats)
Since writing the review above I’ve been reading other works by Jorjani, including “Closer Encounters” [Jorjani 2021], “Promethean Pirate” [Jorjani 2022], “Philosophy of the Future” [Jorjani 2024], and “Metapolemos” [Jorjani 2025]. Recently I’ve joined a study group dedicated to his philosophy, and so I’ve spent some time immersed in his works. I’ve also listened again to some podcasts with him, including those of Agah Bahari (1, 2, 3), who has also interviewed me (1, 2). I should list all the books by Jorjani that I’ve been reading and re-reading in the last few days, but Jorjani is a very prolific writer and the list would be long. Fortunately he often repeats himself, and recent books include considerations first made in previous books.
In the last paragraph of my previous review I said that Jorjani’s philosophy - without the conspiracy theories and political proposals - is my philosophy. But according to Jorjani himself, this must be wrong. Why? Because to him a philosophy must be an integrated whole.
Jorjani makes this point with a reference to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Both developed “an incredibly complex ontology or sophisticated epistemology, and they were also politically active.” But “there is no intrinsic connection between the political activities of these individuals and the ontology or epistemology that they have developed” [Jorjani 2024]. A real philosopher, according to Jorjani, is one who develops an integrated and consistent system of thought that encompasses ontology, epistemology, politics, and aesthetics.
According to this definition. I’m not a real philosopher (not that this bothers me much). Yes, I do have aesthetic preferences, and I do have political opinions. But I don’t feel the need to derive them from ontology or epistemology, because this would be like deriving geography from cosmology (Chapter 2 of “Tales of the Turing Church” [Prisco 2020]). In the last chapter of “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024] I make an attempt to derive some moral and ethical guidelines from my cosmology, but without insisting much.
I just don’t feel the need to force consistency and push it too far. Didn’t somebody say that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? Also, there are things that I’m just not interested in. Why should I want to speak about those things? And finally, I think any metaphysical system can be made compatible with any political system if one pushes hard enough.
I’ve referred to part of Jorjani’s production as “conspiracy theories,” but this pejorative term doesn’t do justice to him. Rather, that part of his work is a mythology for this century, complete with time travellers, time wars, reincarnation stories, superior beings, hidden history, alternative timelines and whatnot. Of course, since Jorjani strives for an overall consistent philosophy, his mythology is coherent with the rest of his thinking. And since he is a very good writer, his mythology looks and feels like a great science fiction epic.
I don’t even ask myself if Jorjani’s mythology is “true,” whatever that means. Jorjani himself says that readers shouldn’t get “hung up on Nazi Bells, the location of Atlantis, Martian time travelers, gray aliens…” and warns readers not to miss “the form of my thought by fixating on illustrative content” [Jorjani 2024].
This somewhat cryptic warning makes me think of Jorjani’s reference to “a new religion, which consists, in a sense, of noble lies, but these lies are noble because they do constructively guide masses of people” [Jorjani 2024].
I’ve argued that religion is science fiction (and science fiction can be religion), so I won’t object. However, I like to keep a sharper distinction between what I think about the world and my favorite science fiction. I read Jorjani’s mythology as science fiction. I’m persuaded that the universe or multiverse or whatever is weirder than we imagine, even weirder than we can imagine, and perhaps this weirdness manifests as Jorjani says. Or perhaps it manifests in other ways.
This brings me to Jorjani’s opposition to traditional religion. “An all-knowing and all-powerful God does not allow for free will,” he says. “The very concept of such an entity is logically incompatible with free will.”
Well, Christian philosophers (and, I’m sure, Islamic philosophers as well) have gone to great lengths to develop arguments that reconcile God’s foreknowledge of the future and human free will. I summarize some interesting and I think strong arguments in Chapter 3 of “Irrational mechanics” [Prisco 2024]. However, I’m not here to defend the traditional concept of God. I use the term God for the unattainable, infinitely far asymptotic limit of a progression of lesser gods (lowercase g), none of which is omniscient or omnipotent. I also think of God as a cosmic operating system that can be seen as an aggregate of individual agents like big and small gods, agents of Jorjani’s Prometheus type, and also little creatures like you and me. If we are small parts of a big God, then we participate in whatever kind of free will God has.
Jorjani says that he was “defamed as a genocidal Neo-Nazi in the pages of The New York Times” and other media [Jorjani 2022]. He’s referring to a 2017 article titled “Undercover With the Alt-Right” and related pieces. He defends himself at length in [Jorjani 2022]. I haven’t found exhortations to genocide in Jorjani’s writings. However, I can see that the overall tone of his writings does have a certain flavor that some could find unpleasant and even disturbing. While understanding their reactions, I don’t let this interfere with my appreciation of Jorjani’s metaphysics and ontology (similarly, I like Heidegger and the Italian futurists, and even Nietzsche, regardless of political associations).