Man as Machine – The Great Delusion of the Modern World

Language shapes our experience and helps create our everyday reality. The words, concepts, and metaphors we use influence what we see, value, and aim for and how we interact with other people and the natural world.

In this series of videos, we are going to explore the man as machine metaphor, or more broadly the metaphor that equates all living organisms with complex machines. As we will discover, this metaphor has warped our view of reality and is a prime cause of the sickness that plagues the modern world.

In this first video, relying on the work of the philosopher Iain McGilchrist, we are going to focus on the inaccuracies of the metaphor, looking at why living organisms differ from machines in the most fundamental of ways.