We must remember that relations of analogy and metaphor are meant to realize our world, not replace it. With all the political wars surrounding our lives, we must pay special attention to a latent troop rapidly approaching our collective mind, the army of the machine. As technology progresses and impresses itself onto global human culture, it becomes easier and more natural to describe our biology, psychology, spirituality, and culture using relations to technology, computation, and mechanics.

In fact these are great models to use, because in many ways their structure and function reflects ours. But as such models become more detailed and (hopefully) accurate, we should cast a skeptic’s eye on how we use them, because it becomes easy to project the happenings of our world down to the happenings of our models. We must not forget that such models exist to help us understand components and aspects of our own reality and selves.

My fear is that the “matrix” will arrive, made by mankind, and we will rejoice, and we will enter… and forget that the matrix is merely another model, another tool, a simulation to understand our natural world. Simulations are just models representing some natural aspect. It is in fact probably impossible to create a relation between two aspects that exhibits a one to one onto mapping between them. In the same light, the world of the machine and the world of the organism are two different aspects entirely, and there exists no complete model relating the two. In essence they are different beasts, and while the post-Newtonian community has been fascinated with the reductionist, mechanical world-view, we must not accept it as natural. This view is just that, a view of how things really operate in the natural world. Let us not make the same mistake as Descartes, when he saw that machines function in similar ways to living things, concluding that life thus works exactly like machines work. Again, there is no perfect mapping relation between machine and organism.

Technology will continue to develop, and mankind must realize his own reality as natural, not mechanic. The moment we falter, and accept as truth the Newtonian world-view, will be the moment the human soul is lost (for more fun, check out my theory about the Grey aliens).

• posted 2004-09-07

Reading over my initial entry, I am somewhat humored, but still concerned. While the power that comes with knowledge remains to be used wisely, it is important to reconsider the idea of relating natural phenomena and mathematical models. While to me it seems very clear that these two can never be mapped one to one, the fashionable road to venture down has you consider just how “conscious” machines can become. One fork leads into the notion of strong artificial intelligence, while another (with bright fluorescent signs put up by Ray Kurzweil) into the possibility that machine and man can one day soon evolve together. In fact Kurzweil posits this possible reality is the one imaginable in which the human race as we know it will survive…

• posted 2006-01-07

Came across a quasi-review of Kurzweil’s “Are We Spiritual Machines” on the web site of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design.

• posted 2006-01-21

Richard Lewontin’s book The Triple Helix begins by introducing the fact that metaphor drives progress in biology. He posits that the molecular biology revolution has been facilitated by the use of the so-called “mechanistic” metaphor.

I believe that he also recognizes the subtle distinction between modeling and reality. The book begins:

“It is not possible to do the work of science without using a language that is filled with metaphors. … Indeed, the entire body of modern science rests on Descartes’s metaphor of the world as a machine… While we cannot dispense with metaphors in thinking about nature, there is a great risk of confusing the metaphor with the thing of real interest. We cease to see the world as if it were like a machine and take it to be a machine (sic).”

He concludes the first chapter by saying, “The organism does not compute itself from the information in its genes nor even from the information in the genes and the sequence of environments. The metaphor of computation is just a trendy form of Descartes’s metaphor of the machine. Like any metaphor, it catches some aspect of the truth but leads us astray if we take it too seriously.”

To end this addition, Lewontin provides a nice thought from Alexander Rosenblueth and Norbert Weiner, “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”

• posted 2006-03-21