jean’s Reviews > God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning > Status Update
jean
is on page 196 of 304
“‘Understanding’, like meaning, is an anthropocentric concept—one that information technologies were deliberately built to elide. In a way Anderson’s piece underscored the extent to which the technical logic has seeped into the real world we inhabit, such that even when information is decoded & given to us as output, we cannot always make sense of it or understand how the machine reached its conclusion.”
— Jan 31, 2026 12:12PM
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jean’s Previous Updates
jean
is on page 189 of 304
“It’s not merely that computers can transcend us in sheer brain power—solving theorems faster than we can, finding solutions more efficiently—but that they can actually understand the world in a way that we cannot. [Arendt] found this proposition especially alarming.”
— Jan 31, 2026 12:05PM
jean
is on page 46 of 304
The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning… [The human mind] is driven, as Weber put it, by ‘an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position towards it.’
— Jan 25, 2026 10:24AM
jean
is on page 40 of 304
As the writer Doug Sikkema points out, the belief that science is capable of explaining the entirety of our mental lives entails ‘a philosophical leap.’ It requires ignoring the fact that the modern scientific project has been so successful precisely because it excluded, from the beginning, aspects of nature that it could not systematically explain.
— Jan 25, 2026 10:17AM
jean
is on page 24 of 304
The [computation] metaphor had become pervasive, Epstein points out, that ‘there is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behavior that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behavior could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or a deity.’
— Jan 25, 2026 09:54AM
jean
is on page 13 of 304
“[McCulloch’s] theory was particularly vague when it came to the question of how computation gave way to the phenomenon of interior experience—the ability to see, to feel to have the sensation of self-awareness. While machines can replicate many of the functional properties of cognition…these processes are not accompanied by any first-person experience.”
— Jan 25, 2026 09:38AM
