'The cosmos, in its natural and cultural modes, remains a commons, whatever capitalists may believe. The intimacy of our relationality diverges wildly from the semblance of state and corporate control. Actual intelligence can be neither patented nor automated. All that has been fenced are the recorded traces of our collective intelligence, our past products, not the living activity that produced and produces them still. That activity remains inalienably ours, so long as we remember how to exercise it. But exercising it well under current conditions requires philosophical discipline.

The philosophical labor of resisting the mechanization of mind may be enhanced by the recollection of conceptual implements forged before the analogy had canalized so many converts. I turn next to some ideas developed by Hegel, Whitehead, and Ruyer. Hegel philosophized amid the looms of the first industrial age, Whitehead as the new physics dissolved the old clock-work universe that had made the machine seem the self-evident model of everything, and Ruyer at the birth of cybernetics, when the claim that thinking organisms simply are information machines was first proposed in earnest. Each wrote before the equation of thinking with computing had settled into an ambient creed, so obvious it hardly needs mentioning (unless, of course, one is in the company of religious fanatics who still believe in the dignity of souls). Each could still regard the idea of machine minds as a proposal to be critically examined rather than an ontology to be assumed'.

Segall