So if you think that machines are alive and also think, that has sort of problematized it a bit more, but there is a mode of understanding intelligence now. Particularly if you put artificial in front of the word intelligence, that assumes that thinking is possible without living, what we might call a kind of lifeless thinking. And in a sense, my book is trying to push against that conception of what it means to think. So to be a thinker in the spiritual way, or however you might put it, that I try to attend to in the book is to practice thinking, not like a robot, if you will, or at least not in the way that you think you can get away with in a sort of lifeless mode. But rather, true thinking, proper thinking is a living way of thinking, such that you live out your thoughts and then use your thoughts to think about how you might live.

In our latest podcast, King-Ho Leung discusses his new book, Spiritual Life and Secular Thought.