--- > In his book *In Our Own Image* (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence. In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. --- > By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j15shtk6r33rqfqp3zv2xsmx) --- > The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. *Reasonable premise #1:* all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. *Reasonable premise #2:* all computers are information processors. *Faulty conclusion:* all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors. ---