Hoh, "teleophobia", what a word for the aversion to ascribing will and purpose to living things. > You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphise people? The mechani

Hoh, "teleophobia", what a word for the aversion to ascribing will and purpose to living things. > You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphise people? The mechanistic/behaviorist way of looking at the world is fundamental to science as a discipline, and I suspect this originated from the crisis of religion - the split between matter and spirit, in terms of concepts. Consciousness and cognition have an uncomfortable resemblance to what we used to call "spirit". It reminds me of the "uncanny valley", how some machines are starting to behave awfully close to living creatures; and machine learning ("artificial intelligence") producing results that seem as if there's an awareness, a mind of its own. We know that they are just mechanisms, all matter and no spirit, but our guts sense a kinship - we have an emotional reaction to life or things that act like they're alive, like they're thinking. We look at an ant, moving around in the world, sensing and feeling, looking back at us with its eyes - and most of us would "anthropomorphise" it, to relate to it as "one of us". Our subjective experience tells us that we're not just objects, but something more, special, magical even. But, having rid of magic, science must understand and explain convincingly the mystery of life and mind, the very strange material existence of ourselves. Looking at how slime moulds crawl through mazes to find food, I get an uncanny feeling that it's alive and has a primitive mind. Or those sped-up films of plants reaching out their vines and tendrils, holding onto things and climbing toward the light - it has something in common with us at a fundamental level. Science offers explanations for these phenomena, yes - but it seems there are still missing pieces, concepts, models, to tell the full story. Self-organization of matter, swarm behaviors, distributed intelligence, information and computation..