In a 1982 article, the American feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman coined the term “somatophobia” to describe the strange human delusion that we are minds rather than bodies.

Forty years later, artificial intelligence is everywhere, offering the most powerful illusion yet that intelligence can exist without flesh. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a recent study believe that tools like ChatGPT possess some consciousness and feeling. We are living in the age of somatophobia. Now is the moment to resist it.

Our machine-takeover fantasy is the outcome of an ancient delusion that the mind is a separate substance, a “thinking thing” that might somehow live beyond death. It arises ultimately from our fears about the fragility of embodied life. “The body is a source of endless trouble to us,” Plato complained more than 2,000 years ago.

By the digital age, Marvin Minsky was declaring the body a “meat machine”. Today, the techno-philosopher Ray Kurzweil promises “a backup version of ourselves” in the cloud. The immortal soul has been rebranded as the digital self.

For the past six years, I have been researching the latest evidence for how life and intelligence actually work. Far from being marginal, our bodies are essential to who we are, because life and intelligence require a unique form of physical holism and integration.

What’s more, research into the origins of life, including Nick Lane and William Martin’s work on membrane bioenergetics, suggests that these capabilities may depend on particular elements and conditions, rather than an abstract formula of some sort.

These unique qualities enable biological beings to do something remarkable in the cosmos. Our bodies both generate and direct energy to preserve our own organisation. In this sense, it is the body that is synonymous with selfhood.

This is no longer a........

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