In 2023, beloved actress Suzanne Somers succumbed to breast cancer. She was best known for her starring roles as Chrissy Snow in Three’s Company and Carol Foster Lambert in Step by Step. She also authored a number of books and was known for advertising the legendary ThighMaster device.
This October, her husband, Alan Hamel, announced something both astonishing and quite unsettling: he had created an artificial-intelligence “clone” of his late wife. According to reports, this digital and robotic re-creation mimics Somers’ voice, appearance, and even her conversational habits with eerie precision. Day by day, what we once thought was science fiction is becoming more and more a reality. Hamel’s experiment is a sad attempt to keep a loved one alive through data and circuitry. Some have referred to this concept as “digital necromancy.”
Although the very notion of this may seem tempting, it could also be viewed as a harmless devotion or even a form of technological curiosity. In my mind, however, it reveals a deep spiritual malaise of our age: humanity’s growing belief that technology can redeem what only God can restore. The project of transhumanism, the attempt to overcome mortality and perfect human nature through technology, has quietly moved from the speculative to the domestic. What Hamel calls love is, at its core, an act of self-creation: the belief that human ingenuity can somehow transcend death.
In one of my recent essays for Crisis Magazine, “Gender Ideology and Violence: Cultural Confusion and the Spiritual Battle,” I argued that gender ideology denies the created order by rejecting biological dimorphism and the givenness of both maleness and femaleness. Transhumanism represents the logical progression of this same rebellion. The transgender movement begins with the conviction that identity can be reconstructed at one’s will. Transhumanism radicalizes this idea into the dream of reengineering not just the body but also the species itself into what can be called a humanoid.
Not unrelated, over the past years, there have been many flirtations with the concept of transspeciesism. This concept bears a strong connection to Greek mythological creatures like the Chimera and the Minotaur. Deepfake AI is creating plenty of videos of this sort. Transgenderism, transspeciesism, and transhumanism rely on the metaphysical lie: namely, that man can define his own essence apart from God.
Recently, on my flight to Spain, I watched with fascination a deeply disturbing film titled Companion. The movie depicts a near-future world in which artificial beings are programmed with adaptive memories and simulated emotions and begin to blur the line between servant and master. These AI humanoid robots serve as friends or even romantic and sexual partners. The film exposes the ethical nightmare of tampering with consciousness and memory—of creating machines that can mimic remorse, affection, deception, and manipulation. These “companions” illustrate the danger inherent in the extreme application of non-reductive functionalism: the notion that consciousness can be duplicated solely through informational structures.
However, functionalism fails to account for the irreducible first-person perspective of conscious experience. Even the so-called non-reductive version unravels upon closer thought. It argues that consciousness can emerge from matter, ignoring the ontological chasm between being self-aware and being mechanical. The interior life of a person, the ability to know, to choose, and to love, transcends any web of functions or algorithms.
No pattern of physical causes can give rise to an immaterial soul. In turn, when memory becomes programmable, the very notion of moral responsibility is extinguished. Make no mistake: this is not a triumph of reason but a mechanization of evil, where empathy itself can be simulated for Machiavellian ends; it is a chilling reflection of humanity’s own capacity to imitate empathy while erasing the soul.
Long before Frankenstein, Greek mythology warned of unnatural procreation. Creations like the Minotaur and Chimera were born of transgressive unions that blurred the boundaries between man and beast. Later, H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau reimagined this impulse through grotesque biological experimentation, foreshadowing today’s biotechnological transgressions. Companion dramatizes that same ancient fear, echoed from Frankenstein to 2001: A Space Odyssey—the creature’s revolt against its creator, but with a distinctly modern twist: the machines inherit not only our intelligence but also our depravity.
In my 2020 lecture for the Science of Consciousness conference, “Artificial Intelligence, the Nature of Consciousness, Information, Reality, and the Possibility of the Afterlife,” I emphasized that memory is not a database but an act of self-presence. In other words, memory is a unified integration of intellect, will, and affectivity within an enduring subject reflecting the “sameness” of the self. Although replication of neural patterns may reproduce behavioral outputs, it does not reflect the ontological unity of a person. Information can store traces, but it cannot restore being.
