God, Human, Animal, Machine Quotes

“But each time I tried, something odd happened. At some point in the writing process I got stuck; I could not get the ideas to come together or the argument to take form—or rather, the argument kept changing. When writing in this divested way, in the realm of pure and unmediated ideas, anything is possible, and the possibilities overwhelmed me. I became too conscious of the words themselves and the fact that I could manipulate them endlessly, the way numbers can be manipulated apart from any concrete referent.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Privacy was a modern fixation, I said, and distinctly American. For most of human history we accepted that our lives were being watched, listened to, supervened upon by gods and spirits—not all of them benign, either.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system, meaning it is not made up of individual systems but is itself an irreducible whole”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“The universal mind—whether it goes by God, Brahman, or some other name—is a common feature of idealism. Without it, it’s difficult to explain why there is a shared, objective world that all of us experience, making the theory indistinguishable from solipsism.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our own time,”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“This is precisely the anxiety that Weber writes about in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestantism, he argued, introduced into Western culture a new, obsessive doubt about the status of one’s salvation. Those who cannot know whether or not they are chosen will do everything in their power to act as though they are, if only to ease their mind. They will go above and beyond what is required, in fact, because no assurance will ever convince them that their efforts have paid off. This doubt spurred a remarkable energy—the “Protestant work ethic,” a spirit of industriousness and self-regulation that created the necessary conditions for the rise of capitalism.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease.

This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“But the world that science reveals is so alien and bizarre that whenever we try to look beyond our human vantage point, we are confronted with our own reflection.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“the metrics of success have become purely quantitative—page views, clicks, shares—”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“In the Judeo-Christian tradition it was generally assumed that a creator was always more complex and more powerful than its creature.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“It is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit,” Arendt writes, alluding to Descartes’s thought experiment, “who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that whenever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“I learned that after the first English translation of The Divine Comedy, the word did not resurface in the language until the mid-twentieth century, in the work of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“As Stewart Brand, that great theologian of the information age, famously put it, “We are gods and might as well get good at it.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Paul often spoke of Christ as an archetypal or ideal man who had opened the door to a new path for humanity. Christ was “second man” or “second Adam,” the first member of a new human race that was no longer constrained by the bondage of mortality.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“It was Max Planck, the physicist who struggled more than any other pioneer of quantum theory to accept the loss of a purely objective worldview, who acknowledged that the central problems of physics have always been reflexive. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature,” he wrote in 1932. “And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Today we continue to trust that things that can be objectively quantified maintain a “real” existence independent of our minds. As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once put it, reality is “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“What are we to make of the existence of historical patterns? It is often said that history repeats itself, sometimes as tragedy, sometimes as farce, sometimes with special flourishes and variations, but this notion stands at odds with our modern understanding of history as an arc of progress. As Weber pointed out, modernity hinges on the collective belief that history is an ongoing process, one in which we steadily increase our knowledge and technical mastery of the world. Unlike the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, who believed that history was cyclical, the modern standpoint is that time is going somewhere, that we are gaining knowledge and understanding of the world, that our inventions and discoveries build on one another in a cumulative fashion. But then why do the same problems—and even the same metaphors—keep appearing century after century in new form? More specifically, how is it that the computer metaphor—an analogy that was expressly designed to avoid the notion of a metaphysical soul—has returned to us these ancient religious ideas about physical transcendence and the disembodied spirit?”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“One night while Descartes was alone at home, writing in his armchair near the fire (never a good place to entertain thought experiments), it occurred to him that there was no way to prove he was not dreaming.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“In addition to our physical bodies, there exists—somewhere in the ether—a second self that is purely informational and immaterial, a data set of our clicks, purchases, and likes that lingers not in some transcendent nirvana but rather in the shadowy dossiers of third-party aggregators. These second selves are entirely without agency or consciousness; they have no preferences, no desires, no hopes or spiritual impulses, and yet in the purely informational sphere of big data, it is they, not we, that are most valuable and real.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Once humanity is sufficiently connected via our information technologies, Teilhard predicted, we will all fuse into a single universal mind—the noosphere—enacting the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ promised.
This is already happening, of course, at a pace that is largely imperceptible—though during periods when I am particularly immersed in the internet, I’ve felt the pull of the gyre. I sense it most often in the speed with which ideas go viral, cascading across social platforms, such that the users who share them begin to seem less like agents than as hosts, nodes in the enormous brain. I sense it in the efficiency of consensus, the speed with which opinions fuse and solidify alongside the news cycle, like thought coalescing in the collective consciousness. We have terms that attempt to catalogue this merging—the “hive mind,” “groupthink”—though they feel somehow inadequate to the feeling I’m trying to describe, which expresses itself most often at the level of the individual. One tends to see it in others more readily than in oneself—the friends whose sense of humor flattens into the platform’s familiar lexicon, the family members whose voices dissolve into the hollow syntax of self-promotion—though there are times when I 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. I don’t know exactly what to call this state of affairs, but it does not feel like the Kingdom of God.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Bacon believed this tendency to see humanlike agency in nature was an outgrowth of our search for meaning. Because we ourselves have goals and ends and see our actions in terms of cause and effect, we attribute similar motivations to all natural phenomena. We are eager to create narratives about the physical world as though it were composed of agents embroiled in some grand cosmic drama. This tendency, he argued, is exacerbated by confirmation bias. Human consciousness is a meaning-making machine, and once it takes note of some coincidence or pattern, it will obsessively search for more evidence to corroborate it. “Human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it,” he writes in his Novum Organum. As a result, we are destined to find more order and regularity in the world than there actually is, and will always prefer scientific explanations that flatter our subjective longings. We reject “sober things, because they narrow hope.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine.” Like deep-learning systems, Trump was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns—they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal—”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Heisenberg claimed that quantum mechanics had complicated our search for some “true reality” that lurks behind the world we perceive.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Although Bohr was not religious, he once pointed out that paradoxes were a fixture of religious parables and koans because seemingly contradictory statements were needed to breach the gulf between the human and the spiritual realms. “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” he said.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“I had no recourse to any of the traditional methods of assurance—neither a benevolent God, whom I no longer believed in, nor the unimpeachable determinism of science, which quantum physics had thrown into question.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“The poetic images we created were just that—images of our own creation, not “correspondences” or metonyms for some eternal order.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“If the soul is truly immaterial and not integral to the body, then it becomes superfluous.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning