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The title of this talk is why you can't reverse engineer a human being, the metaphysics of the soul.

Practice usually precedes theory. the metaphysics of the soul.

Practice usually precedes theory, and in between there is storytelling.

The dream of fabricating a humanoid being goes way back.

In Jewish folklore, the golem was molded from mud and speech-endowed stone statues appear in Greek meth.

Long before medieval and Renaissance tinkerers fashioned various Androidase, that literally means human likenesses.

Pneumatic and mechanical automata were imagined and sometimes even constructed in ancient cultures, including in Egypt, India, and China. Aristotle, in the politics, hypothesized animated

fabrications as a technological substitute for slavery. If only an instrument could accomplish its own work, he said, like the

statues of Daedalus or the tripods of the Pestas. Plato's Socrates had earlier suggested that

such animated mechanical marvels untethered were fitting metaphors for the insecurity and unreliability

of opinion compared to knowledge.

As technology progressed, our stories have adapted.

In the 19th century, we got the corpse creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

and the child puppet of Carlo Colludy's Pinocchio.

20th century electronics brought us robotics and cybernetics and a literature full of increasingly

human-like marvels of engineering.

Sensing danger, Isaac Asimov's science fiction also gave us the three laws of robotics in the

1940s.

Philip K. Dick explored the challenges of life with

and asteroids in the 1960s and 70s, and the 70s and 80s brought us the lovable servant

...