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

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.

Our machine-takeover fantasy is the outcome of an ancient delusion that the mind is a separate substance, a “thinking thing” that might somehow live beyond death. It arises ultimately from our fears about the fragility of embodied life. “The body is a source of endless trouble to us,” Plato complained more than 2,000 years ago.

By the digital age, Marvin Minsky was declaring the body a “meat machine”. Today, the techno-philosopher Ray Kurzweil promises “a backup version of ourselves” in the cloud. The immortal soul has been rebranded as the digital self.

For the past six years, I have been researching the latest evidence for how life and intelligence actually work. Far from being marginal, our bodies are essential to who we are, because life and intelligence require a unique form of physical holism and integration.

What’s more, research into the origins of life, including Nick Lane and William Martin’s work on membrane bioenergetics, suggests that these capabilities may depend on particular elements and conditions, rather than an abstract formula of some sort.

These unique qualities enable biological beings to do something remarkable in the cosmos. Our bodies both generate and direct energy to preserve our own organisation. In this sense, it is the body that is synonymous with selfhood.

This is no longer a philosophical claim. In cognitive science, Lawrence Barsalou’s influential account of “grounded cognition” argues that thought depends on perception, bodily states and situation. In neuroscience, Antonio Damasio’s “somatic marker” hypothesis, tested through the Iowa Gambling Task, shows how bodily feeling helps guide decision-making before explicit reasoning catches up. More recent work shows that the brain is constantly predicting and regulating signals from the heart, gut, lungs and viscera.

The intelligent actions of organisms, then, arise from the imperatives of whole bodies that must preserve their own conditions for existence. Holistic processes like homeostasis are more decisive than minds, and the body drives many critical state changes, including aspects of gene regulation.

Ultimately, little of intelligence can meaningfully be said to be controlled by a separable thinking part that you might identify as who you are. Instead, intelligence is the sum of minute reformations across the associated regions of our bodies. In fact, mind often enters late, receiving and integrating acts the body has already begun.

Wanting a cup of coffee, for instance, isn’t an abstract decision but the body in full spate – molecules accumulating, cells signalling and chemical cascades translating into action. In other words, we are not brains in vats. We are embodied creatures fully immersed in the world.

Yet today, the body’s intelligence is being systematically disrupted. We are living through the rapid translation of a biological life in nature into a technologically mediated life. This represents a refusal of our remarkable living bodies on a global scale.

For Spelman, somatophobia isn’t simply fear of one’s body. It is a structure of devaluation manifesting in misogyny, racism and class hierarchy. AI is an expensive form of mimicry, copying the patterns of our thought while lacking the bodies that bring real meaning and intelligence. Meanwhile, information devices are co-opting our physical experiences. We are passing into a virtual realm, and with this comes the narrowing of human agency.

Where does body-refusal take us? We are burnt out by hyper-connectivity and the expectation that our “deliverables” will be available 24 hours a day. One study linked working 55 hours or more a week to a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease.

At the same time, we have become increasingly sedentary, changed like unwitting cyborgs by the machines that drive this productivity. In 2024, the World Health Organization reported that nearly one-third of adults worldwide did not meet recommended physical activity levels. We are living as though cognition can be separated from movement, circulation, muscles and the wider environment.

We boast that our machines have enabled global connectivity. But another 2025 report on social connection found that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, linked to about 100 deaths every hour. Humans aren’t just minds exchanging information. We are whole beings that regulate one another through touch, voice, smell, gesture and shared time.

Meanwhile, we continue to encode a social hierarchy in which some people get to be minds and others are reduced to bodies. In western society, white people have too often been permitted to be thinkers and leaders, while brown bodies are fixed in roles of labour or dependency. Only those with power have the privilege of forgetting their bodies. The powerless are rarely allowed to be anything else.

In my research, I argue that being alive is first and foremost a way of being a body. Being genuinely intelligent depends on the complete system of body and energy flow that we find only in biological organisms.

As such, neither information nor mind – nor AI – are alive or intelligent in any meaningful sense. The body-denying impulse is therefore also a form of life-denial. Should we be surprised that we are destroying life on Earth to unprecedented degrees?

When the self is imagined as mind or information, the living body becomes an inconvenience, a disposable support system. This is not just a philosophical mistake. It alters how we approach medicine, mental health and other species. But we are not machines. We are precious bodies – dynamic, perceptive and determined.

Pain matters because a body can be damaged. Love matters because embodied beings are dependent, social and mortal. Grief matters because living bodies can be irreversibly lost. This is the thrilling intelligence of life. Meaning is not produced by raw information; it begins wherever a living body has something at stake.

Ironically, most AI models do not share our confusion. Recently, I asked ChatGPT about the endpoint of the machine metaphor. The reply: “In truth, I am only an artifact of statistical patterns.” Well, indeed. That so many of us have been drawn away from embodied reality into physically sedentary lives is the endpoint of an obsession with mental life as the essence of who we are. It is time to recall the body.

Melanie Challenger is a researcher and writer on history of ideas and history and philosophy of science. Her newest book Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World will be released on 11 August

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