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

Rethinking Consciousness.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener,

In his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, Weber writes that “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” Science is so committed to describing the world objectively, he argued, without presuppositions, that it cannot even affirm its own intrinsic

It is driven, as Weber put it, by “an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position towards it.”

It is the conviction that in order to describe the world accurately and empirically, we must put aside res cogitans—the subjective, immediate way in which we experience the world in our minds—and limit ourselves to res extensa, the objective, mathematical language of physical facts. Without these distinctions, it’s difficult to imagine the hallmark

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, s

As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once put it, reality is “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

If “intelligence” means abstract thought, then it would be foolish to think that plants are engaging in it. But if it means merely the ability to solve problems or adapt to a particular environment, then it’s difficult to say that plants are not capable of intelligence. If “consciousness” denotes self-awareness in the strongest sense of the word, t

“It is very easy,” he wrote of one of his insect robots, “for an observer of a system to attribute more complex internal structure than really exists.