God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Physics is not about how the world is,” he once said, “it is about what we can say about the world.”

I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind,” and yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions—are in some sense destined to them—by elusive forces: some combination of hormones

“Each of us, as individuals, can now give ourselves permission to dedicate our lives to finding meaning in the world,” Kastrup writes, “reassured by the knowledge that this meaning is really there.”

“Thought and consciousness will not need to be programmed in,” he wrote. “They will emerge.”

For Arendt, the problem was not that we kept creating things in our image; it was that we imbued these artifacts with a kind of transcendent power. Rather than focusing on how to use science and technology to improve the human condition, we had come to believe that our instruments could connect us to higher truths.

As Yuval Noah Harari points out, we already defer to machine wisdom to recommend books and restaurants and potential dates. It’s possible that once corporations realize their earnest ambition to know the customer better than she knows herself, we will accept recommendations on whom to marry, what career to pursue, whom to vote for.

Nature was no longer a source of wonder but a force to be mastered, a system to be figured out. At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws.

We keep trying to reclaim the Archimedean point, hoping that science will allow us to transcend the prison of our perception and see the world objectively. But the world that science reveals is so alien and bizarre that whenever we try to look beyond our human vantage point, we are confronted with our own reflection. “It is really as though we were

His conclusion is echoed by the writer James Bridle, who has declared the era of cloud computing “the New Dark Age,” a regress to a time when knowledge could be obtained only through revelation, without true understanding.

Norbert Wiener, the grandfather of cybernetics, wrote that “we are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”