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

Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, redefined information so as to exclude the need for a conscious subject. All languages can be broken down into two aspects, syntax (the structure of the language, its form) and semantics (its content, or meaning). Shannon’s genius was to remove semantic meaning, which was not amenable to quantificat

Kurzweil opts for a more organic metaphor. “I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path,” he writes in The Age of Spiritual Machines. “The actual molecules of water change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.”

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

And as we increasingly come to speak of our minds as computers, computers are now granted the status of minds. In many sectors of artificial intelligence, terminology that was once couched in quotation marks when applied to machines—“behavior,” “memory,” “thinking”—are now taken as straightforward descriptions of their functions. Researchers say th

become aware of my own blurred boundaries, seized by the suspicion that I am not forming new opinions so much as assimilating them, that all my preferences can be predicted and neatly reduced to type, that the soul is little more than a data set.

But emergence in nature demonstrates that complex systems can self-organize in unexpected ways without being intended or designed. Order can arise from chaos. In machine intelligence, the hope persists that if we put the pieces together the right way—through either ingenuity or sheer accident—consciousness will simply emerge as a side effect of com

If what emerges from such efforts comes, as Rose puts it, “from regions beyond your control,” then at what point does the finished product transcend your wishes? At what point do you, the creator, lose control?

It 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.

Then came the dawn of modern science, which turned the world into a subject of investigation. 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 mecha