STS Orion Crusader here, Polarizatunity.

[Minyatur]

I don't know why, but this topic is hitting a nerve with me.  There's just something so horrifying about being trapped inside a machine, powerless.  A great horror movie plot, if I were into such.  But I did find the other account to which I had referred.  Here it is, from Convoluted Universe Book 3.

How is the human body not a machine exactly?

That may be an intriguing philosophical question - and I don't understand enough about the metaphysics of a human body to answer that.  But the question misses the point.  

What is clearly different between a human body and the above accounts is freedom.  We have it, they don't, and that makes all the difference.  The above accounts describe ultimate enslavement.

Well if you look at lower densities, isn't that what it is for consciousness to be stuck in a system harvesting the emerging will? Rocks are stuck to be rocks and if you tried to picture yourself to be nothing more than a rock, for all the time a rock is a rock, you'd probably feel alike how you feel to contemplate yourself in something that is not how you have known yourself through.

Reading through it still made it seem better than being a sea-born creature stuck in water, or at least subjectively to me. I bet many beings in the cosmos laughed at the idea to see freedom in wingless creatures like us.