Viktor Frankl offered the compelling observation that one of man’s strongest drives is his search for meaning. He also offered several forms of destructive reductionism (physiological, psychological, and sociological) that interfere with the search for meaning. Destructive reductionism diminishes life as nothing more than neurons firing or competing desires or social actors, and fails to capture the experience and meaning of being human.

The author of this paper adds digital reductionism to the list. “This is the belief that even humans or living things can be reduced into certain kinds of digital information processing machines.” The author counters this position by asserting that “‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ cannot be generated with the realization of living things.” This may not sound like a profound observation, but it is. If meaning is an important part of being human, and meaning cannot be realized outside of living things, then machines cannot experience meaning and hence cannot achieve a state of humanness. So the strong artificial intelligence hypothesis must be rejected.

This is but one slice of the author’s reasoning, and the paper is a little frustrating to read. It wanders around quite a bit and flirts with some very compelling ideas. In the end, though, it does not bring them into sufficient clarity to satisfy the reader. Hence, it is very much a work in progress with regard to its basic ideas, and it will be interesting to see what work might grow out of it.