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

There could no longer be a purely “objective” view of the world that took into account the whole picture. Science was always particular to a specific observer and had to acknowledge our subjective outlook as humans. We could not speak of reality without speaking of ourselves.

As he spoke, it seemed to me that he was being rocketed upward by the power of his own vision, into the highest reaches of space, watching the earth become smaller and smaller until it shrank into a single pixel. Arendt once referred to the view of the earth from space as the “Archimedean point,” drawing on the popular anecdote that Archimedes once

As Anderson noted, researchers in virtually every field have so much information that it is difficult to find relationships between things or make predictions.

Quantities could not generate qualities.

Rizwan Virk, a video game programmer, notes that a core mantra in programming is “only render that which is being observed.”

But we are so easily convinced! How can we trust our subjective response to other minds when we ourselves have been “hardwired” by evolution to see life everywhere we look?

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

“Physics is not about how the world is,” he once said, “it is about what we can say about the world.”

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.