A Person Is More Than a Machine

“Of course inanimate nature, that part of nature most easily thought of as made of atoms, cannot be totally unlike ourselves. According to the doctrine of evolution, inanimate nature is merely an early stage of ourselves. The only sound way to hold to the particulate, mechanistic doctrine is to insist that we also are mere particles in motion, a machine which is part of a larger machine. Not only Friends, but all those who have looked into themselves know they are aware of something that is not machine-like – the experience of mutual love, the longing, caring love for a child or a friend, the experience of awe, the sensing of greatness in another, the feeling that comes at times when one is lifted out of oneself o listening to a piece of music or contemplating a work of art or reading a piece of poetry that suddenly speaks to one’s condition.”

— Theodor Benfey, 1980
Quaker chemistry professor