Heart's Desire

It has increasingly come to the point that the actual distinction between person and computer depends less upon different ways of thinking than on different ways of life. The shaping of the human personality is a drawn-out process governed by a large number of complex, poorly understood and, in their effects, often difficult-to-judge factors. Primary is the experience of one’s own body in its successive stages–the helplessness of the infant, the establishment of contact with one’s surroundings, the discovery of the body’s kinetic possibilities, the daily routines of many years, getting dressed, chewing, defecation, the need for air, the need for touch, the sexual instinct–these primary, personality-forming experiences are dependent upon our human physiology such as it is constituted. A computer has a different physiology. However much its psychic conditions may resemble a human’s, it still seems impossible to let a computer live through the human experience. It is not the soul that separates the computer and the human; it is the body.


"Heart's Desire," Willy Kyrklund
Translated from Swedish by Paul Norlen, 2007
From 8 Variations, 1982
Found by MDD at wordswithoutborders.org