THE OTHERS

A scholar of religion and UFO encounters seeks a unifying theory of “superhuman” intelligence.

A professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Pasulka grounds her explorations on deep readings in her Catholic faith and in philosophy, religion, the paranormal, science fiction, consciousness, and technology, as well as her interviews with UFO experiencers. All of this erudition leads her to see the similarities among gods, demons, angels, aliens from outer space, and ChatGPT, for starters. She lays side by side for contrast and comparison the cosmic schemes of a range of thinkers, including philosopher René Girard, sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, media theorist Marshall McLuhan, paleoanthropologist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, to name the better-known sources. Some, like Clarke and McLuhan, are techno-pessimists, while others like Chardin and Leary are optimists—but they all theorize about where humans fit into the most likely cosmic scheme, one in which, far from being the best and brightest, we lie in the shadow of nonhuman superintelligence, whether supernatural, biological, or “post-biological” (i.e., machine). “If religion arose as…an organic set of strategies for negotiating contact with what we can hardly comprehend, omniscient nonhuman intelligence, and as new forms of machine intelligence confront us,” Pasulka writes, “perhaps religion may prove to be the most efficient structure resilient enough to make sense of them.” Those of a decidedly secular humanist bent might be tempted to view this book’s acceptance of “esoteric knowledge” as a lack of critical acuity. But it’s worth sticking with it for the provocative ideas of astrobiologist Steven J. Dick, which bring it all together.

A free-wheeling but never out-of-control rumination.