On the Robots Inside Us

To put it vividly, your great-great- … grandmother was a robot! Not only are you descended from such macromolecular robots but you are composed of them: your hemoglobin molecules, your antibodies, your neurons, your vestibular-ocular reflex machinery—at every level of analysis from the molecular on up, your body (including your brain, of course) is found to be composed of machinery that dumbly does a wonderful, elegantly designed job.

Daniel Clement Dennett (born 1942) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, a leader in the field of philosophy of mind. He’s also known as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism (the other three being Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens).