Even the hardware is reconceived as a kind of concretization of software. So the machine hovers as an unearthly abstraction with a vague and arbitrary relation to the world below. A science philosophically committed to materialism is a science committed to abstractions and the mechanisms upon which these abstractions can be impressed. Increasingly, the mechanism is simply equated with the abstractions it bears. And, of course, every organism is conceived as one of these disappearing mechanisms.
Life literally is a computation.
Only then can we see what is there. It requires a thoroughly qualitative looking, and the challenge of such a looking is what much of science rejected, starting at just about the same time those churchmen were brushing aside the telescope. But once you do begin to look, you can't avoid the sense that all those evolutionary mechanisms, however valid or even self-evident they might be, explain precious little. Whatever is qualitative and meaningful is speech, and the question about the relation between the sloth and its evolutionary history is a question about who speaks through this history. It is only when, enamored of our explanatory mechanisms, we turn a blind eye to the vivid, phenomenal presence of the organism in the world that this question begins to fade into apparent emptiness.