1
" 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
2
" 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
3
" 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
4
" 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
5
" 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
6
" 2019 essay David Chalmers notes that when he was in graduate school, there was a saying about philosophers: “One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist.” Although Chalmers cannot account for where the truism originated, he argues that its logic is more or less intuitive. In the beginning one is impressed by the success of science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanisms. Then, once it becomes clear that materialism has not managed to explain consciousness, dualism begins to seem more attractive. Eventually the inelegance of dualism leads one to a greater appreciation for the inscrutability of matter, which leads to the embrace of panpsychism. By taking each of these frameworks to their logical yet unsatisfying conclusions, “one comes to think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond consciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness.” This is idealism. "
― Meghan O'Gieblyn , God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
7
" Weber writes that “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ ” Science is so committed to describing the world objectively, he argued, without presuppositions, that it cannot even affirm its own intrinsic value; it can’t explain why technical mastery of the world is desirable, or why knowledge itself is worthwhile. "
― Meghan O'Gieblyn , God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
8
" It is not coincidental that New Calvinism, with its punishing, masculine God, flourished during the early years of the millennium, when the country at large succumbed to warmongering and regressive heroic myths. When I think back on my professor's rants against therapeutic deism and the feminized Christ, I cannot but see a distortion of the politics of the Bush era, in which the promise of compassionate conservatism collapsed into the lawless vigilantism of shock and awe. "
― Meghan O'Gieblyn , God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
10
" 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
