I’ve spent years researching what it means to be alive. This is what I’ve learned

‘By the digital age, Marvin Minsky was declaring the body a “meat machine”.’ Photograph: kieferpix/Getty Images/iStockphoto

In a 1982 article, the American feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman coined the term “somatophobia” to describe the strange human delusion that we are minds rather than bodies.

Forty years later, artificial intelligence is everywhere, offering the most powerful illusion yet that intelligence can exist without flesh. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a recent study believe that tools like ChatGPT possess some consciousness and feeling. We are living in the age of somatophobia. Now is the moment to resist it.