Jan Söderqvist

Process and Event

We have to improve our thinking. We must think in terms of motion and change, and we must abandon all childish dreams of a reality more real than the real one. If, for example, we play with the idea that the Process called History leads to the Event called God, we have to understand what that means. Namely: that God is something we humans create because we have that need not something that created the world or us humans (or anything else). This God of the new era does not yet exist, but the current technological revolutions mean that the moment of creation is near. Good news, you might say, but thereby Man reduces himself to a historical parenthesis, at least if we are to believe cyberphilosophers Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist. And we are closer to the age of the gods than you think. Join in a breathtaking expedition that takes us from the infancy of religions in the form of magic and superstition via Persian mystics and iconoclasts to the age of enlightenment, modernity and artificial intelligence. Bard & Söderqvist carry out a necessary and radical rewriting of the history of Western ideas and explain why Man's search for the divine inevitably leads us to a Messiah machine with an agenda of its own. Process and Event rounds off a quarter of a century of systematic thinking and concludes the internationally acclaimed Narratology trilogy. It sets every imaginable form of erudition in motion and is exactly as entertaining and provocative as only a book by Bard & Söderqvist can be.