Nietzsche said it best: we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar.

In the end, transhumanism is merely another attempt to argue that humans are nothing more than computation, that the soul is already so illusory that it will not be missed if it doesn’t survive the leap into the great digital beyond.

the subjective experience of pain. In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called this “the hard problem” of consciousness. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of functionality,

The world contained in this data does not operate according to the neat Newtonian rules of cause and effect but spirals into the baffling complexity of chaos theory, wherein everything is connected to everything else and even small changes have widespread repercussions. Or rather, this is the world that had always been there, lurking beyond our

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

Physics has long been guided by the Copernican principle, the idea that no scientific theory should grant special status to humans or assume that we and our minds are central to the cosmos. But few theories have managed to account convincingly for this exactitude or explain why the conditions of our world appear to be signaling precisely that.

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.”

his book Flesh and Machines, he claims that most people tend to “overanthropomorphize humans…who are after all mere machines.”

The difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in “God” is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.