Review of God Human Animal Machine
“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
Lately, every time I sit down to write, I can’t help but think about God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn. So, rather than forcing myself to write about another topic and inevitably end up talking about her work, I’ll be efficient and write about it directly instead.
I first read God Human Animal Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning last summer. My uncle, whom I rarely see since he lives in Nebraska working as a creative writing professor, texted me out of the blue. “Can I give you a book recommendation? Given your research and interests, I’m curious what you think” and he sent me a picture of the book’s cover.
It was the summer before I started grad school, so I had plenty of free time and I quickly placed it on hold at my local library. I have since reread it multiple times and I briefly lent it to my cognitive psychology professor.
I often tell people that I want to write a book someday. God Human Animal Machine is exactly the kind of book I want to write.
Published in 2021, the book begins with O’Gieblyn recounting the time she received Sony’s “Aibo”—a robotic dog—in the mail. She described opening the box and pressing its power button, bringing it to life. After noting how “lifelike” Aibo behaved, O’Gieblyn quickly shifts to talking about Descartes’ Discourse on Method, and the concept of a soul.
The rest of the book follows this blueprint, masterfully interweaving ideas about technology, philosophy, religion, and her personal life. O’Gieblyn was impressively able to write about each in such proximity without compromising on depth or clarity.
O’Gieblyn, Christianity, and Transhumanism
A significant part of this book covers O’Gieblyn’s departure from her fundamentalist Christian faith and how that led to a struggle to find meaning in the modern world.
She became obsessed with transhumanism—a mostly secular worldview that believes in the merging of humanity with technology to improve our cognitive ability and lifespan. Ray Kurzweil, a famous transhumanist and computer scientist, praised the rationality of transhumanism, noting how it offers a way to thinking about the big picture “without resorting to wishful thinking or mysticism” (pg. 50).
Eventually, O’Gieblyn realized that Kurzweil’s optimistic prophecy of the singularity and humanity achieving immortality through technology was merely a recycled Christian rapture story. Many of his claims, such as those regarding consciousness, lack the scientific and rational basis that he claims they have.
On its own, this connection between transhumanism and Christian beliefs seems to have little significance. However, in 2012 Google hired Kurzweil to work on machine learning. Other supporters of transhumanism include influential figures of the tech world, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page—the very people who are setting the course for our future.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." —George Santayana
O’Gieblyn argues that we are metaphorically and literally attempting to create a god through technology. We can already see this happening as people describe the decision-making process of AI models as a “black box”, meaning that AI algorithms are so complex even the programmers are unable to understand how their own AI models go from input to output. The worrying implication is that we cannot question what we fail to comprehend; in some ways, it might as well be treated like the will of God.
She compared this to how in the 14th century the Western world began conceiving of a nominalist God, one whose will (and therefore the natural world) was unknowable and beyond human comprehension. This led to a theological and philosophical crisis because it meant that people not only lost their certainty in heavenly salvation but also their philosophical basis for understanding the natural world. The rain fell because God willed it, no other explanation was needed beyond that.
A similar loss of understanding could result from our reliance on advanced machine learning. Although these algorithms are much better than humans at predicting outcomes based on large datasets, they are often opaque in the sense that we cannot know how it made that prediction.
I heard a perfect example of this while at a talk given to the psychology department at my school. A computer science professor who researches AI brought up banks using AI models to help them determine who gets loans or not. Although the AI models are more efficient and supposedly less biased than a human (even though they are trained using older data, likely perpetuating past human bias), reliance on AI can cause problems when someone is not approved for a loan, and they ask the bank, ‘why not?’.
Unfortunately, other than general, pre-scripted, statements about credit scores, the complexity of these algorithms means that the banks cannot provide the potential borrower with a specific explanation for the decision. The bank will side with the cost-effective AI model, and the loan seeker will have little understanding of what they can do or change to acquire a loan.
They might as well sacrifice a goat.
O’Gieblyn writes about the fiction of modernity, specifically how we believe in the illusion that humanity has escaped the irrationality of its past. O’Gieblyn underwent this process on a smaller scale within her own life. She describes this as experiencing,
“the trauma of secularization—a process that spanned several centuries and that most of humanity endured with all the attentiveness of slow boiling toads—in an instant”.
After leaving her faith, she sought a more rational framework to understand the world and find meaning in her life. One that did not rely on faith. Instead, she came to the terrifying realization that many of these belief systems, including those claiming to be backed by science, are eerily similar to what she thought she left behind. Readers will undergo a similar journey as they read this book, where they find that even science ultimately rests on some unprovable beliefs and assumptions.
For example, the scientific method assumes that there is an accessible and objective reality that is independent of human observation. While this seems to be true, it cannot be scientifically verified because that requires an observation. Of course, it would be a mistake to discredit all of science because of this. The practice of science has uniquely provided humanity with the ability to predict the mechanical nature of reality which has produced radical improvements in technology, medicine, and quality of life. However, it is equally a mistake to ignore its limitations and assumptions.
In God Human Animal Machine, O’Gieblyn explored this through foundational figures of the hard sciences, such as Niels Bohr, the 1922 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and creator of the Bohr model of the atom. Bohr understood the limitations of physics well, saying, “Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world".
Near the end of the book, I was just as lost and desperate for meaning as O’Gieblyn. I began to share her pessimistic view of the future and skepticism of any framework that considers itself to be wholly “rational”.
For some readers, the ending of the book may leave them disappointed. O’Gieblyn exposes the the cracks and fault lines that lie underneath popular theories of reality without offering a satisfying alternative.
I found it refreshing to read an author who could point out the irrationality and limitations of other people’s ideas in addition to her own.
God Human Animal Machine is a necessary reminder that we exist within the same world that we are trying to understand. That we cannot escape, and should not ignore, the truth of our subjective experience in relation to knowledge about the natural world. That we are still influenced by ideas that seem to have no place in the 21st century, especially when they are forgotten.
O’Gieblyn recalibrates discussions about technology by placing an emphasis on human subjectivity and challenging accepted narratives that we take for granted.