Emergence of Machinic Consciousness

Discussion

Mark Vernon:

"There is the first century BCE Antikythera mechanism that was rediscovered on the Mediterranean seabed. It demonstrates a knowledge of clockwork and gears for making astronomical calculations that wasn’t surpassed until Pascal designed his calculating machine in the seventeenth century.

In other words, steam engines, watermills and possibly batteries existed in antiquity and yet there was no industrial revolution. The reason, Naydler proposes, is that there wasn’t the mindset for it. Gods and spirits were directly experienced in the rivers and skies that the machines engaged with, too, and so long as that awareness persisted, it did not occur to people that machines could overwrite and replace divine realities. Instead, they must work with them.

The balance was maintained in the medieval period. In particular, reason and contemplation, or ratio and intellectus, were designated as two related modes of understanding. Ratio dealt with the transient world of material life. Intellectus, which is close in meaning to our word ‘intuition’, could catch sight of eternity. They worked together, though asymmetrically: ratio had value in its own right but was also in the service of intellectus as it could clarify the mind and ready it to receive the higher insights of spiritual illumination.

The function of language became crucial, too. It was held to be a co-creation of human beings and God. Human words were, therefore, expressions of the divine Word, when correctly used. This is why the trivium of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric formed the basis of an education. It ensured that the mind stayed connected to the upper registers of reality.

But things began to change once more in the thirteenth century. Naydler explores the impact of the rise of the universities in Europe. They moved education out of the monasteries that were shaped by practices of contemplation. Disputation for its own sake became a matter of interest, as well as logic’s capacity to suggest rules and necessities that require no relationship to anything other than itself. The changes were captured in the doctrines of nominalism. William of Ockham, for example, proposed that human ideas have no intrinsic connection to wider reality. They create themselves and do not exist outside of the human mind. People could begin to experience their inner life without feeling it reflected the inner life of the universe.

This is the kind of consciousness within which machines could thrive and, sure enough, from the thirteenth century onwards, they start regularly to appear in everyday life. Watermills provide a case in point, becoming widespread as the technology of the cam integrated abstract logic and practical mechanics. Clocks become a feature of shared, public spaces too, and are particularly potent because of their psychological and spiritual impact. They change the experience people have of the day and its hours – the hour, for example, no longer being determined by the season and the quality of the light between sunrise and sunset and, instead, being fixed by the steady, regularity of the clockwork.

There is a more subtle reason for the revolutionary impact of clocks that Naydler explains. They could be seen to control and regulate themselves by harnessing gravity via the steady fall of a weight. It is hard, now, to regain a sense of how startling this technology would have seemed. Before machines like clocks, gravity was understood to be one of two basic forces in nature, alongside levity. Gravity caused things to fall to the Earth and the material pole of life, and levity moved them towards the heavens to connect with the spiritual dimensions of existence. The rising force was as crucial as the falling as it expressed the understanding that reality depends upon the upper domain. But then there appeared a machine that could be observed to operate without that link. It ran on gravity and gravity alone. That was a shock. It implied that the Earth might operate independently, too.

It is why the abolition of levity became an obsession for Galileo."

(https://www.markvernon.com/in-the-shadow-of-the-machine-review)