A note I jotted to myself sometime in the past. I don’t recall the circumstances, but the question posed feels universal.
The spiritualists cringe and argue against any description of self-conscious life as mechanism, that any mere machine is necessarily only an accumulation of parts and processes that can never rise above its own origins. They offer in its place a description that makes of us a vessel to contain an essential self that is gifted from without, a near complete something that a priori transcends the mechanistic. From where? Choose your own myth of origin. But they all presume a Maker. The question must then be put—what separates the divinely made from the “naturally” made or, later, the self-made? Are they not in the end all simply made things and as such all mechanisms?