God Human Animal Machine is about interrogating the modern “disenchanted world”: the earth, and the universe, as material, physical realms without any purposeful design. The enchanted world of medieval Christianity was one animated by meaning. Any rock may have been placed with intention. The river cuts through the valley in order to make it fertile. Then along came Descartes: I think, therefore I am. In his footsteps, modern science has displaced God, and we claim to believe that matter is only matter.
O’Gieblyn traces how the old metaphors of Christian thought are as pernicious as life itself. She maps how the mind-matter dichotomy becomes welded to metaphors of software, hardware, and computation. Hopes for the afterlife rest on the mind’s far-future uploading to the cloud. Algorithmic prediction resurrects determinism, except its predestination is not dictated by a Calvinist God but by the Machine, equally inscrutable to human logic. All we can do is submit.
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