to quote Emerson, “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

For Arendt, the problem was not that we kept creating things in our image; it was that we imbued these artifacts with a kind of transcendent power. Rather than focusing on how to use science and technology to improve the human condition, we had come to believe that our instruments could connect us to higher truths.

Metaphors, after all, are not merely linguistic tools; they structure how we think about the world, and when an analogy becomes ubiquitous, it is impossible to think around it.

he seemed to recognize the shadowy line between prediction and determination—and the impossibility of outsmarting a game in which all bets are against you.

” It was from these annihilated foundations that cybernetics took shape as an all-encompassing system that would restore the world to its original order and comprehensiveness, “a general mathematization that would allow a reconstruction from below, in practice, of the lost unity of the sciences.” It was this desire for unity and universality that l

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.

Nobody could reach my true self—my mind—which resided elsewhere. My true self was the brain that consumed books in bed each morning with an absorption so deep I often forgot to eat. And yet this “real” self was so ephemeral. It existed in perfect isolation, without witness, and seemed to change from one day to the next.

While machines can replicate many of the functional properties of cognition—prediction, pattern-recognition, solving mathematical theorems—these processes are not accompanied by any first-person experience.

The priest who performed the rites told one newspaper, “All things have a bit of soul.”