Bohr believed that whenever we encountered a paradox, it was a sign that we were hitting on something true and real. This was because of the fundamental disconnect between reality and the mind—a disjuncture that the bizarre quantum world made abundantly clear:

All perception is metaphor—as Wittgenstein put it, we never merely see, we always “see as.”

Nature was no longer a source of wonder but a force to be mastered, a system to be figured out. At its root, disenchantment describes the fact that everything in modern life, from our minds to the rotation of the planets, can be reduced to the causal mechanism of physical laws.

Science requires a third-person perspective, but consciousness is experienced solely from the first-person point of view. In philosophy this is referred to as the problem of other minds.

In the end, transhumanism is merely another attempt to argue that humans are nothing more than computation, that the soul is already so illusory that it will not be missed if it doesn’t survive the leap into the great digital beyond.

In order to do science, we had to translate these quantum phenomena into the language of classical physics—referring to cause and effect, space and time—accepting even as we did so that this language was necessarily metaphoric and anthropocentric.

“Thought and consciousness will not need to be programmed in,” he wrote. “They will emerge.”

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.

It seems only right that technology should restore to us the enchanted world that technology itself destroyed. Perhaps the very forces that facilitated our exile from Eden will one day reanimate our garden with digital life. Perhaps the only way out is through.