This reminds me of a great snippet from one of Raymond Smulyan's books ("This Book Needs No Title") that I think best captures the implied and unfounded fear b

This reminds me of a great snippet from one of Raymond Smulyan's books ("This Book Needs No Title") that I think best captures the implied and unfounded fear behind these sort of articles. Here's the quote in full: “Recently I was with a group of mathematicians and philosophers. One philosopher asked me whether I believed man was a machine. I replied, ‘Do you really think it makes any difference?’ He most earnestly replied, ‘Of course! To me it is the most important question in philosophy.’ I had the following afterthoughts: I imagine that if my friend had finally come to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: ‘My God! How horrible! I am only a machine!’ But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: ‘How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!’” Adding my own thoughts to this, I think what generates these sort of articles is an intuitive and well justified resistance to the belief is "life is just a complex machine" but by using completely mistaken arguments. The essence of life, existence and consciousness can never be reduced to any mechanical or even logical processes (although some would like to believe otherwise), but the fact that it can bloom into amazing creations like the human mind or possibly in the distant future ti some human-made artificial mind doesn't detract from it's magic.