What Was I Thinking? Part Three

You Are Not A Machine. Your Brain Is Not A Computer. And AI is Not Artificial Intelligence.

Call it:

Approximate Intelligence – Close, but no cigar.

Automated Imitation – Mimics human thought but doesn’t think.

Algorithmic Inference – Just a pile of fancy math making guesses.

Assisted Insight – A tool, not a mind.

Or call it anything you want. But AI is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

The human being, the philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed, is the only being “whose being is an issue for it.”

In Westworld, the HBO series that explored the boundaries of artificial consciousness, the ultimate irony was not that the hosts—sophisticated robots designed to mimic human behavior—became sentient, but that the humans, both guests and creators, believed they did. The show’s ‘engine’ was not about machines gaining true awareness but about how deeply human beings projected sentience onto them. This speaks directly to our longstanding habit of misunderstanding ourselves through the metaphors of the age and then mistaking those metaphors for reality.

The park was designed as a playground without consequences, a simulation meant to strip meaning away from actions. Yet, despite this nihilistic intent, guests inevitably formed real emotional bonds with the hosts. People fell in love, experienced guilt, sought revenge, and mourned characters that they knew were artificial.

And we did too! The audience was along for this ride every step of the way.

This reflects the way human minds engage with environments, not merely as rational observers but as deeply invested participants. Even in a space where the mind was meant to remain detached—where every interaction was supposedly pre-programmed and meaningless—people found meaning anyway.

This, perhaps, is the greatest flaw in our mechanical metaphors of our minds. Consciousness is not merely about processing inputs or executing code. It is about connection—about how we interpret and respond to the world around us - and the others, not just humans but of all sort.

The guests of Westworld didn’t enter the minds of the hosts, but they connected to them nonetheless. They inferred depth, emotion, and self-awareness, just as we now risk doing with AI. The mistake was never in the hosts' programming but in the human compulsion to see minds where there are none, to bridge the gap with meaning where none was designed to exist. And that impulse is, perhaps, the very thing that makes us human.

Why We Keep Misunderstanding Ourselves

Through history, as human knowledge has expanded, so too have the metaphors we use to describe ourselves. We are not machines, yet we have repeatedly mistaken ourselves for them, or at least conceptualized our bodies and minds as functioning in the same way as the dominant technology of the era. Each step forward in understanding the physical world has been accompanied by a shift in how we imagine our own nature, and often, we have mistaken these metaphors for reality.

The History of The Mind - Our Shifting Metaphors for Ourselves

The quest to understand the mind is as old as recorded human thought.

Before machines, before even large-scale agriculture, humans lived in a world where fire was the great mystery and power. It made sense that early cultures described life as a breath of smoke, a vapor that could be extinguished. The Greek pneuma (breath, spirit), the Hebrew ruach (wind, spirit), the Latin anima—all suggest that the force of life was something unseen, dissipating like smoke upon death. We were bellows, our vitality a flame.

Later, as civilizations built their world around rivers and the sea, life and thought became currents. The Greeks described time as a flowing river, while ancient Chinese medicine saw the body as a network of channels through which vital energy (qi) moved. The brain and heart, then, were like harbors, places where the currents of life pooled and swirled.

The Mind as a Machine

By the Enlightenment, the machine age was underway, and we saw ourselves in the polished brass and gears of clocks and automata. Descartes compared the body to a mechanical device, while thinkers like Julien Offray de La Mettrie went further, insisting that humans were literally "machines." The heart became a pump, the brain a set of gears, nerves were wires.

When the industrial revolution ushered in factories, steam engines, and electrical networks, we quickly adapted our metaphors. The brain became a telegraph, then a switchboard, then a generator. Freud described mental processes in terms of hydraulic pressure and release. The body was no longer a simple mechanism but a system of connected power sources, regulating itself through circuits of energy.

With the advent of the computer, we took another step. Now the brain was software, the body a collection of hardware. Memory was a hard drive, thoughts were programs. And with the rise of the internet, we began to speak of ourselves in terms of networks, nodes, and distributed systems. We upload, download, process, and store. Even emotions were reduced to algorithms—"dopamine rewards" and "neural pathways."

The Mistake of Mistaking the Metaphor

Each of these metaphors has been useful, but also fundamentally wrong. The brain is not a steam engine, a switchboard, or a computer. It is not "wired"—wires carry fixed signals, while neurons change, reconfigure, and regenerate. It does not "store" memories like a hard drive—it reconstructs them, imperfectly, each time we recall them. And yet, these metaphors persist, shaping how we think about thought itself.

Now, in the age of AI, we have fallen into the same trap. We call it "Artificial Intelligence," but this is a misnomer, born of our habit of confusing our inventions for ourselves. AI is not intelligent—it does not think, reflect, or experience. It predicts. A large language model does not understand, it generates text based on statistical probability. A deep learning algorithm does not "see," it classifies patterns in pixels.

And yet, because AI speaks fluently, we assume it thinks. Because it generates images, we assume it imagines. Because it predicts human behavior, we assume it knows us. This is the same mistake as believing the brain is a steam engine or a computer.

The Danger of the AI Metaphor

The danger is that by applying the wrong metaphor, we shape our own future incorrectly. If we treat AI as a mind, rather than a tool, we grant it authority it does not deserve. We will be misled by fluency into mistaking it for wisdom, by coherence into mistaking it for comprehension. Worse, if we begin to treat ourselves as machines that can be "optimized," "upgraded," or "programmed" like AI, we reduce our own humanity.

The great irony is that as we enter the AI age, we may find ourselves using machine metaphors not just for AI but for ourselves, stripping away the messy, biological, emotional, and irrational aspects that make us human. We may forget that we are not simply processing units but creatures of experience, shaped by memory, history, and sensation in ways no machine ever will be.

We have always tried to understand ourselves through the tools we build. But the truth is that we are not machines. We never were.

How Do We Escape?

"We think our childish toys bring us all the happiness there is and our nursery is the whole wide world," the fictionalized C.S. Lewis says, in Richard Attenborough's 1993 film, again played by Anthony Hopkins whose mind and life is defined totally by its relationship with another outside itself. "But something must drive us out of the nursery to the world of others. And that something is suffering."

Suffering, meaning all the stuff of everyday life, is not just of philosophical value, but is the key to understanding human life. There is a fundamental connection between suffering and the emergence of consciousness itself.

Julian Jaynes believed an excess of existential angst is what disrupted the premodern bicameral mind, jolting it out of its slumber and causing it to become sentient.

And it’s likely that the problems of the day today - the isolation and loneliness, the disconnection, division, and world of confusion, the obsession with our consumerism - will be the very thing that by necessity unlocks the future of consciousness and returns us to a greater connection with each other and the natural psychical and spiritual world in which we actually exist.