Meyer took great pains to insist that the significance of human inwardness—“soul,” “self,” “mind,” “consciousness”—is restricted to the subjective life of the individual. It can have no scientific value because it cannot be observed and measured: “We do not deny the soul, but we do not devote our time to it. We find enough, and more than enough, to do studying the body.” The soul is “your own business,” an intimate experience and irreducible mystery that are formally exempt from scientific inquiry: “Human societies can thus be understood as originating from natural laws, not in the sense of groups of souls tho, but in the sense of groups of organisms.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1155