Are you a machine?

In chapter 12 of Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter With Things, he elegantly debunks the myth that the living, organic world is anything like a machine. With many examples of totally un-machine like behaviour, McGilchrist completely dismantles the notion that organisms like ourselves, or single cells for that matter, are anything like a machine. The second half of the chapter he addresses the reasons why the machine model has been so pervasive in our perception of just about everything.

I think this is an important awareness for us as some strive for a transhuman future and try to convince us this is a good thing. The transhumanist agenda of marrying human to machine only makes sense if the human is seen as one type of 'machine' and computer/hardware another type of machine, that can seamlessly integrate. I have no doubt it can be of use in some cases - artificial limbs come to mind - but doubt its wisdom when attempting to 'evolve' the human race as a human/machine hybrid (a cyborg). The other part of the transhumanist dream is gene editing and the manipulation of our genome for 'enhancement', tackling disease, and longevity. They sound like noble pursuits but they conceptualise DNA like a computer program, and as we will explore, it's way more different and complex than that.

But quite apart from transhumanism, using a model to conceptualise a reality that is very unlike the model is severely limiting and forces an unhealthy bias. Machines are designed from the bottom up for a purpose. Utility is fundamental. Output, productivity, service, is all foundational to the model. As we will see below, the world of the living, the organic, is quite unlike a utility, unlike a machine, and should be conceptualised in a completely different way. A human has more in common with a river than a robot....<<<Read More>>>...