“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)
Language shapes our experience and helps create our everyday reality. The words, concepts, and metaphors we use influence what we see, value, and aim for and how we interact with other people and the natural world.
In this series of videos, we are going to explore the man as machine metaphor, or more broadly the metaphor that equates all living organisms with complex machines. As we will discover, this metaphor has warped our view of reality and is a prime cause of the sickness that plagues the modern world.
In this first video, relying on the work of the philosopher Iain McGilchrist, we are going to focus on the inaccuracies of the metaphor, looking at why living organisms differ from machines in the most fundamental of ways.
“It’s not even as though the fiction of the machine is harmless. It can be seen behind many of the more inhuman consequences of our technological society: our attitudes to both what human life is and to the living world at large.”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
The metaphor of living organisms as machines, or what can be called the machine model of life, has roots that stretch back to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was at this time that natural philosophers, such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, began mapping the movements of the heavens with mathematical precision. Success in this endeavor gave rise to the idea that the universe is analogous to a great machine. Or as Kepler put it:
“My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork…Moreover I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry.”
Johannes Kepler, Letter to Herwart von Hohenburg, 1605
The machine model was soon expanded to new domains. For example, the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes undertook experiments on animals which led him to propose that these animals were essentially just elaborate machines. In the 20th century, behaviorist psychologists adopted this model for the functioning of man and in his 1969 article The Machine that is Man, the behaviorist B.F. Skinner wrote: “Man is a machine, but he is a very complex one.” Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, claimed that human beings are “meat computers”. And as Edward Kelly writes in Consciousness Unbound, this view of man as a complicated machine is held by “most contemporary psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of mind”. And according to this view:
“We human beings are nothing more than extremely complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is explainable…in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics—ultimately, that is, in terms of local interactions among tiny bits of matter moving in accordance with mathematical laws under the influence of fields of force…All aspects of mind and consciousness are produced by neurophysiological processes occurring in our brains… Our everyday experiences of enduring and purposeful selfhood…are just illusory by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery… This bleak vision dominates contemporary mainstream academic thinking, and there can be little doubt that it has contributed powerfully to the pervasive “disenchantment” of the modern world and its multifarious ills.”
Edward Kelly, Consciousness Unbound
While the machine model of living organisms has infiltrated the modern zeitgeist, it is a model that is wildly inaccurate. The differences between living organisms and machines are many and they strike at the heart of what it means to be alive.
