God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn

In an era where technology and philosophy are rapidly converging, God, Human, Animal, Machine was a very insightful and thought-provoking read. It engagingly navigates the intersections of seemingly disparate but contemporarily very intricate fields of technology, data, algorithms, philosophy, consciousness, and search for a meaning of life.

As an avid philosophy reader and someone trying to stay up to date with the dizzyingly fast developments in technology, I found O'Gieblyn 's exploration timely and profoundly intriguing, which opened quite a few new vistas for me.

I was especially fascinated by the contemporary articulation of the good old “mind-body” problem and enchantment-disenchantment.

Reminder:

The mind-body problem in philosophy is the question of how the mind and body are related to each other and whether they are separate entities or one and the same.

Enchantment sees magic and faith in the world, mostly thru religion and belief systems. Disenchantment sees order and explanation, mostly thru science. (Nietzsche famously argues that we moved from enchantment to disenchantment by the death of God, with the advent of science and reason)

The Main Idea in One Sentence

How do technology and artificial intelligence intersect with philosophical inquiries about consciousness, what it means to be human, and the search for meaning in life in our times?

Key Takeaways

Disenchantment in the Modern World and Consciousness

Artificial intelligence and information technology have taken over many old philosophical inquiries like the mind and body problem, free will, and immortality. These questions are now engineering problems. (I have read a lot about the mind-body problem, from Descartes dualism to Avicenna’s (ibn-Sina) “Flying Man” thought experiment, but never thought about it thru the lens of artificial intelligence and information technology, which was quite an “a-ha” moment for me reading the book)

“The universal tendency among mankind to conceive of all beings like themselves” – David Hume

Metaphors are crucial in our search for truth, they structure our thinking. All perception is metaphor, as Wittgenstein put it. We see our image everywhere. (Ever used bad words for a malfunctioning appliance that you would use for humans?)

There is a hypothesis that the idea of God emerged as a result of this habit of seeing our image everywhere. Were we made in God’s image, or did we make him in ours? Just like that, as we built computers, we projected our image in them.

Solipsism (a term I had not heard before reading this book) is there to stay. (Solipsism: The belief that the self is the only thing that can be known to exist. One's own mind is the only true reality; everything else is uncertain or imaginary)

Descartes believed that there were two types of substances in the world: material stuff and thinking stuff. Animals were essentially machines and did not have a soul. The human soul was the seat of the rational mind and was separate from the body. The soul was not part of the physical world.

• Is the brain a hardware that runs the mind’s software?

Artificial intelligence's rapid progress in higher cognition worries us, which we try to manage by believing that true consciousness is defined by emotions, perception, and the ability to experience and feel, qualities we share with animals.

Modern science has given us a world that lacks inherent meaning. This causes us to feel disenchanted. (disenchantment) As humans, we not only desire to know (as Aristotle starts Metaphysics), but also have a need for religion, ethics, and metaphysics. (Ironic finish to the sentence!)

17th Century’s mechanistic philosophy not only divorced body from mind, but also matter from meaning. (This reminded me of Newton’s bringing about the permanent divorce of science and religion in the same century, which I had covered in my key takeaways from Five Equations That Changed the World)

“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” -Max Weber

(As a devout "believer" in science as a method, I quite agree with Max Weber's quote above and I had a similar articulation in my book, for which I was influenced by David Hume's "is vs. ought to be")

Kurzweil (former director of engineering at Google) argues we may need to merge our bodies with technology. This could transform us into “posthumans” through the use of brain implants, nanotechnology, and mind uploading (as they become available soon)

Kurzweil insists we are headed towards total re-enchantment (Singularity), due in 2045.

The neuroscientist Michael Graziano paints a similar future where we all exist in the cloud.

Transhumanism promises the transcendent (religious) to be restored through science, which obliterated religion in the first place.

Elon Musk launched Neuralink in 2019, which aims to connect the human brain to a computer. He claims that it will allow us to live forever by transferring our minds onto machines. In an interview, he said, “If your biological self dies, you can upload into a new unit”.

?“Special” Us and Our Search for Meaning

Intelligence is not only for the human realm. The anthropocentric view is to be challenged as there are decentralized forms of intelligence (like in plants)

The recent discoveries in quantum physics have challenged our belief in our human exceptionality. They revealed that we are not the central drama of the universe. (A blow to humanism?) We want to believe that life has meaning and that we stand at the center of existence. (Hence, religion still attracts)

Patterns exist in the mind, not in the world. (This is just brilliant!)

Bohr argued It is impossible to separate the observed from the observer. “Reality” is always influenced by ourselves. (Kantian things-in-themselves (noumena) vs. phenomena and Husserl’s Phenomenology is in play here)

“Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.” -Niels Bohr

?i?ek once made a joke to the effect of the video gaming principle “only render that which is being observed”. He said, “God got a little lazy when he was creating the universe, like the video game programmer who doesn’t bother to meticulously work out the interior of a house that the player is not meant to enter. He stopped at a subatomic level, because he thought humans would be too stupid to progress so far.”

To the simulationists (no such word exists!), “What makes us so special to be picked to be simulated?” ?(Good question)

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature, 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.” -Max Planck ?

(The above quote from Max Planck reminded of a quote I remember hearing on “brain”, along the lines of, “we are trying to understand our brains, by using our brains…Tricky…”)

Re-Enchantment

Was Enlightenment a true awakening or just a way to pretend we moved away from an enchanted world? We do not like to accept some of the bitter truths that come with materialism. This draws us back to old beliefs and myths despite modern science.

We endlessly search for absolute experience and spiritual wholeness due to the meaninglessness of a disenchanted world. *

“Panpsychism offers a way of ‘re-enchanting’ the universe. In the panpsychist view, the universe is like us; we belong in it.” -Philip Goff

Is panpsychism a way out of our anthropocentric view?

“One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist.”

Science reduces everything to causal mechanisms impressively until it fails to explain consciousness. Then dualism becomes attractive, but it then leads to panpsychism. This leads to the idea that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness, known as idealism.

How could anyone argue that the existence of matter is as certain as the existence of mind?

The Power of Algorithms

In the year 2001 alone, the amount of information generated doubled that of all information produced in human history. In 2002 it doubled again, and this trend has continued every year since.

There is too much information to find “cause and effect” relationships. The world has become too complex to operate in a Newtonian way. Everything is connected to everything.

This amount of data pushed companies like Google to advocate for feeding numbers into algorithms to make predictions rather than creating theories, which are not needed anymore.

“Who knows why people do what they do?. The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.” -Chris Anderson

Will Advanced AI become the God, from whom we will be taking marching orders?

Harari argues we are moving from liberal humanism, which claims that the individual knows what is best for herself, to dataism, where algorithms know what is best for the individual.

***

Just like how a new virus can spread more easily among people who have not built immunity against it, some ideas and messages can also spread more easily by bypassing our logical thinking and triggering our automatic responses.

God, Human, Animal, Machine engagingly connects the realms of technology and philosophy. The book gave me new perspectives to reevaluate our understanding of consciousness, being human, and the search for meaning in an increasingly digital world. This book was not just a thought-provoking read but also a different lens through which to view technological progress and our philosophical evolution.

22 December 2023

Kaan Demiryurek