God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Meghan O'Gieblynamazon.comSaved by Alex Dobrenko and
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
It is impossible, as an MIT study on human behavior models points out, to determine “the internal states of the human,” so the predictions must rely on “an indirect estimation process,” looking at the various external states that can be measured and quantified. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is often misidentified as a form of totalitar
... See moreHe knew that it is not the grain that appears before all others that grows longest and bears the most abundant crop; he was even convinced that a doctrine too far advanced above the general level of its time would be condemned to temporary failure, that it would have to be buried, perhaps for a long time, but that in time it was also certain to be
... See moreIt seems impossible. But then again, aren’t all creative undertakings rooted in processes that remain mysterious to the creator? Artists have long understood that making is an elusive endeavor, one that makes the artist porous to larger forces that seem to arise from outside herself.
In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called this “the hard problem” of consciousness. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of functionality, the hard problem asks why brain processes are accompanied by first-person experience. If none of the other matter in the world is accompanied by mental qualities, then why should brain matter be any diff
... See moreBut we are so easily convinced! How can we trust our subjective response to other minds when we ourselves have been “hardwired” by evolution to see life everywhere we look?
The pointlessness of my existence would often hit me in the midst of some ordinary task—buying groceries, boarding a train—and I would become paralyzed by confusion and indecision. Any discrete action, detached from a larger context, comes to seem absurd, just as a word considered on its own, removed from the flow of language, quickly becomes meani
... See moreWhat makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent—and essentially religious—hopes that science itself obliterated.
We keep trying to transcend ourselves and our own interests, and yet the more the world becomes inhabited by our tools and technologies, the more unlikely it is “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that…is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.”
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.
The more I read about theories of mind, the more I’ve come to see my interior life as a hall of mirrors, capable of all kinds of tricks and sleights of hand.