Meghan O'Gieblyn > Quotes

“But each time I tried, something odd happened. At some point in the writing process I got stuck; I could not get the ideas to come together or the argument to take form—or rather, the argument kept changing. When writing in this divested way, in the realm of pure and unmediated ideas, anything is possible, and the possibilities overwhelmed me. I became too conscious of the words themselves and the fact that I could manipulate them endlessly, the way numbers can be manipulated apart from any concrete referent.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Privacy was a modern fixation, I said, and distinctly American. For most of human history we accepted that our lives were being watched, listened to, supervened upon by gods and spirits—not all of them benign, either.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners.

Here, work is work and money is money, and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States: Essays

“The universal mind—whether it goes by God, Brahman, or some other name—is a common feature of idealism. Without it, it’s difficult to explain why there is a shared, objective world that all of us experience, making the theory indistinguishable from solipsism.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system, meaning it is not made up of individual systems but is itself an irreducible whole”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“This is precisely the anxiety that Weber writes about in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestantism, he argued, introduced into Western culture a new, obsessive doubt about the status of one’s salvation. Those who cannot know whether or not they are chosen will do everything in their power to act as though they are, if only to ease their mind. They will go above and beyond what is required, in fact, because no assurance will ever convince them that their efforts have paid off. This doubt spurred a remarkable energy—the “Protestant work ethic,” a spirit of industriousness and self-regulation that created the necessary conditions for the rise of capitalism.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“To discover truth, it is necessary to work within the metaphors of our own time,”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“In the Judeo-Christian tradition it was generally assumed that a creator was always more complex and more powerful than its creature.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“As Stewart Brand, that great theologian of the information age, famously put it, “We are gods and might as well get good at it.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“It is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit,” Arendt writes, alluding to Descartes’s thought experiment, “who mocks us and frustrates our thirst for knowledge, so that whenever we search for that which we are not, we encounter only the patterns of our own minds.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“But the world that science reveals is so alien and bizarre that whenever we try to look beyond our human vantage point, we are confronted with our own reflection.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Today we continue to trust that things that can be objectively quantified maintain a “real” existence independent of our minds. As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once put it, reality is “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“There's a widespread misconception that biblical literalism is facile and mindless, but the doctrine I was introduced to at Moody was every bit as complicated and arcane as Marxist theory or post-structuralism.... In many ways, Christian literalism is even more complicated than liberal brands of theology because it involves the sticky task of reconciling the overlay myth—the story of redemption—with a wildly inconsistent body of scripture. This requires consummate parsing of Old Testament commands, distinguishing between the universal (e.g., thou shalt not kill) from those particular to the Mosaic law that are no longer relevant after the death of Christ (e.g., a sexually violated woman must marry her rapist). It requires making the elaborate case that the Song of Solomon, a book of Hebrew erotica that managed to wangle its way into the canon, is a metaphor about Christ's love for the church, and that the starkly nihilistic book of Ecclesiastes is a representation of the hopelessness of life without God.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, Interior States: Essays

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease.

This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“I learned that after the first English translation of The Divine Comedy, the word did not resurface in the language until the mid-twentieth century, in the work of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“What are we to make of the existence of historical patterns? It is often said that history repeats itself, sometimes as tragedy, sometimes as farce, sometimes with special flourishes and variations, but this notion stands at odds with our modern understanding of history as an arc of progress. As Weber pointed out, modernity hinges on the collective belief that history is an ongoing process, one in which we steadily increase our knowledge and technical mastery of the world. Unlike the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, who believed that history was cyclical, the modern standpoint is that time is going somewhere, that we are gaining knowledge and understanding of the world, that our inventions and discoveries build on one another in a cumulative fashion. But then why do the same problems—and even the same metaphors—keep appearing century after century in new form? More specifically, how is it that the computer metaphor—an analogy that was expressly designed to avoid the notion of a metaphysical soul—has returned to us these ancient religious ideas about physical transcendence and the disembodied spirit?”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“It was Max Planck, the physicist who struggled more than any other pioneer of quantum theory to accept the loss of a purely objective worldview, who acknowledged that the central problems of physics have always been reflexive. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature,” he wrote in 1932. “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.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“the metrics of success have become purely quantitative—page views, clicks, shares—”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Paul often spoke of Christ as an archetypal or ideal man who had opened the door to a new path for humanity. Christ was “second man” or “second Adam,” the first member of a new human race that was no longer constrained by the bondage of mortality.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“people did not object to these theories because they were theoretical but because they found such conclusions unacceptable. Many of the recent discoveries of quantum physics unsettled our belief in human exceptionality. They revealed that we are not in fact the central drama of the universe, that we are merely temporary collections of vibrations in fundamental quantum fields. “People want to believe that life has meaning, that humans stand at the center of existence.” He looked directly at me and added, “This is why religion continues to be so seductive, even now in the modern world.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Each of us, as individuals, can now give ourselves permission to dedicate our lives to finding meaning in the world,” Kastrup writes, “reassured by the knowledge that this meaning is really there.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“You Are Not a Gadget, the computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues that just as the Christian belief in an immanent Rapture often conditions disciples to accept certain ongoing realities on earth—persuading them to tolerate wars, environmental destruction, and social inequality—so too has the promise of a coming Singularity served to justify a technological culture that privileges information over human beings. “If you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife,” Lanier writes, “to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“Once final causes—the Aristotelian notion that nature has intrinsic purposes and goals—were banished from science, the spiritual and the ethical were no longer bound up with the physical processes of life but were relegated to that ghostly and uncertain realm of the subjective mind.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“We must abandon the idea,” he writes, “that humans are at the center of the ethical universe and bestow value on the rest of the natural world only insofar as it suits humanity’s ends.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“If all the transistors of all the world’s connected computers were accounted for at this moment, they would far exceed the number of synapses in the human brain.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine.” Like deep-learning systems, Trump was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns—they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal—”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“that supervenes on the hardware and is itself a kind of structural property of the brain.”
― Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning