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

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.

But emergence in nature demonstrates that complex systems can self-organize in unexpected ways without being intended or designed. Order can arise from chaos.

Some critics have argued that emergentism is just an updated version of vitalism—the ancient notion that the world is animated by a life force or energy that permeates all things.

Emergentists, in contrast, believe that complex, dynamic systems cannot always be explained in terms of their constituent parts. It’s not simply a matter of peering into the brain with MRIs and discovering a particular area or system that is responsible for consciousness. The mind is instead a kind of structural pattern that emerges from the comple

Abstract thought was a late development in human evolution, and not as important as we liked to believe; long before that our ancestors had learned to walk, to eat, to move about in an environment.

Perhaps our limited vantage as humans meant that all we could hope for were metaphors of our own making, that we would continually grasp at the shadow of absolute truths without any hope of attainment.

In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” In a way we are already living the dualistic existence that Kurzweil promised. In addition to our physi