jean’s Reviews > God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning > Status Update

The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning… [The human mind] is driven, as Weber put it, by ‘an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position towards it.’

The [computation] metaphor had become pervasive, Epstein points out, that ‘there is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behavior that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behavior could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or a deity.’

“[McCulloch’s] theory was particularly vague when it came to the question of how computation gave way to the phenomenon of interior experience—the ability to see, to feel to have the sensation of self-awareness. While machines can replicate many of the functional properties of cognition…these processes are not accompanied by any first-person experience.”