It is only a matter of time before humanity builds machines that outperform human brains in virtually every measurable domain. The trajectory is clear: artificial intelligence and neural networks will replicate—perhaps even improve upon—human cognition (LeCun, Bengio, & Hinton, 2015). But despite the surge in digital intelligence, one basic truth remains: mimicking cognition is not the same as being alive.
The most sophisticated supercomputer may “learn” language, interpret patterns, or defeat world champions in complex games. But it will never know what it means to feel a pang of desire, a burst of joy, or the aching weight of grief. “Machines can simulate emotions,” writes philosopher Thomas Metzinger (2018), “but they cannot feel them.” And this difference is not marginal—it is existential.
Human beings are not information-processing systems with sensors. We are affective organisms. Consciousness—true consciousness—is rooted in experience, not computation. Antonio Damasio (1999) wrote, “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”
To be human is to inhabit a body in time and space, shaped by millions of years of evolutionary history. Our moods shift with hormones. Our awareness is punctuated by appetite and exhaustion, intimacy and threat. These aren’t features of data—they are the textures of life. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) argues, “Your brain doesn’t react to the world. It constructs it. Emotion is your brain’s creation, not its reaction.”
A machine can simulate the expression of emotion, but it cannot simulate the meaning of that emotion. “There is no ghost in the machine,” as Gilbert Ryle (1949) famously declared. But the human is not a machine in the first place.
So yes, machines will get smarter. Yes, they will make us obsolete in many intellectual domains. But they will never be alive. They will never suffer. They will never love. And they will never know what it means to be.
Intelligence is not enough. Without feelings, there is no self. And without a self, there is no life.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace.
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
Metzinger, T. (2018). Artificial suffering: An argument for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology. Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 5(01), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1142/S2705078520500010
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. University of Chicago Press.