I begin with the observation that humans, like all our creaturely kin, are no more and no less than biological machines. How could we be anything else? We are made out of organic materials rather than metal screws and gears, and we run on oxygen, water, and calories from the food we eat rather than on gasoline or electricity (although our brains do run partly on electricity); but we are nevertheless – just like cars or computers – things that are functional systems of interactive parts that run on energy and produce energy and movement of various kinds and that are composed, through and through, of matter. The fact that humans are machines has been well established since Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy in the seventeenth century, and the mechanistic character of the human body and brain continues to be the generally agreed-upon view up to the present day, especially in neuroscientific research and in the thinking about humans that has grown up in conversation with neuroscience. ‘The three-pound, tofulike human brain’, says neuroscientist Christof Koch, ‘is by far the most complex chunk of organized active matter in the known universe. But it has to obey the same physical laws as dogs, trees and stars’.

In what follows, I will focus on the question of consciousness and will put forward an idea about how conversion might be the wellspring of human consciousness and selfhood. I will bring Shakespeare, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz, contributor to this volume Justin Smith, and a good number of others into the discussion. I will conclude with some thinking

out loud about the politics of conversion and consciousness and about how human conversion machines have begot scores of other kinds of conversion machines – texts, pictures, sculptures, buildings, works of music, and artifacts of many kinds. As I will suggest toward the end of the chapter, while conversion machines have a largely emancipatory function, not all human-made conversion machines work to awake the mind from its slumber inside the human machine; indeed, many of them serve to rewire and lock down the basic mechanistic character of human beings. Before I get to the complex operations of conversion machines, however, there is a more basic question to consider.

While I begin with the mechanistic nature of the human animal – and I intend not to lose sight of that fundamental and unexceptional fact – I nevertheless want to take up the question that was of great importance for Descartes and that continues to occupy the thinking of scientists and thinkers such as Koch, Daniel Dennett, David J. Chalmers, and many others.