https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56097578-god-human-animal-machine
main ideas
- what differentiates human from machine?
- our metaphors for describing humanity and our cognitive processes have grown increasingly mechanical, to the concern of linguists
- We ‘process’ information, ‘retrieve’ memories, prescribing purely mechanical operations to the functions of our minds
- “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”
- Descartes disenchanted the world, separating mind from matter
- Only the soul was immaterial, “not in any way part of the material world”
- Thomas Nagel - “the view from nowhere” - conviction that to describe the world empirically, we put aside our subjective experiences
- this has led to the conclusion that because consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, it does not exist
- “the true trauma of disenchantment is that the world is devoid of intrinsic meaning”
- Hume “argued against not only the existence of the soul but of the reality of the self”
- The soul has become a dead metaphor
- Consciousness and self-awareness is a first-person experience, which cannot be externally observed or studied
- Claude Shannon removed semantic meaning (non quantifiable) such that information became purely mathematical - the thinking mind was removed from the concept of information - even the terminology for describing computers (learn, reason, understand) is anthropomorphic
- “increasingly difficult to tell the difference between matter and form, medium and message, metaphor and reality”
- Eliminativists claim consciousness does not exist
other notable quotes
- “Even the suspicion that the world is ordered (…) speaks to this larger impulse to see human intention and human purpose in every last quirk of ‘creation’”
- “For centuries we said we were made in God’s image, when in truth we made him in ours”
- “consciousness can be observed only from the inside”
- we are hardwired “to see life everywhere we look”
- Maimonides believed that “the image of God in humans was consciousness, or self-awareness: the ability to conceive of oneself as a self”
- Tertullian of Carthage said “the rational element” was granted to us by “a rational God”
- “interior experience was more important, and more reliable, than my actions in the world”
- When Deep Blue won in chess against Garry Kasparov, Douglas Hofstadter, who once said chess was a creative activity like art, said “My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now I realize it doesn’t”
- “Nietzsche said it best: we haven’t gotten rid of God because we still believe in grammar”
- “What profit has anyone gained from their profound meditations?”
- “Privacy was a modern fixation, and distinctly American” - people have always believed their lives were watched by God
- “simulation of life”