I’ve spent years researching what it means to be alive. This is what I’ve learned | Melanie Challenger

To understand the experience of life, don’t look to the mind. Look to the body

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.