God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

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

Today, as AI continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.

These algorithms are not the sly devil that has outsmarted its creator. They have become instead the absolute sovereign who demands blind submission. As these technologies become increasingly integrated into the spheres of public life, many people now find themselves in a position much like Job’s, denied the right to know why they were refused a lo

“When I am absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to reflect and inform everything I’ve been thinking about in my work,” Ottessa Moshfegh notes in an essay. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing ab

As Yuval Noah Harari points out, we already defer to machine wisdom to recommend books and restaurants and potential dates. It’s possible that once corporations realize their earnest ambition to know the customer better than she knows herself, we will accept recommendations on whom to marry, what career to pursue, whom to vote for.

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:

Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?

Kastrup writes in The Idea of the World, “the meanings we think to discern in the world may not, after all, be more personal projections, but actual properties of the world.”

If the world were truly random and accidental, without any intrinsic purpose, agency, or telos, then why were our physical laws fine-tuned with such precision? How did nature come to display what the physicist Paul Davies once called “a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rati