Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness

* Book: In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness. Jeremy Naydler. Taylor & Francis,

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Description

"Contemporary life is so deeply reliant upon digital technology that the computer has come to dominate almost every aspect of our culture. What is the philosophical and spiritual significance of this dependence on electronic technology, both for our relationship to nature and for the future of humanity? And, what processes in human perception and awareness have produced the situation we find ourselves in? As Jeremy Naydler elucidates in this penetrating study, we cannot understand the emergence of the computer without seeing it within the wider context of the evolution of human consciousness, which has taken place over millennia. Modern consciousness, he shows, has evolved in conjunction with the development of machines and under their intensifying shadow. The computer was the product of a long historical development, culminating in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. It was during this period that the first mechanical calculators were invented and the project to create more complex `thinking machines' began in earnest. But the seeds were sown many hundreds of years earlier, deep in antiquity. Naydler paints a vast panorama depicting human development and the emergence of electronic technology. His painstaking research illuminates an urgent question that concerns every living person today: What does it mean to be human and what, if anything, distinguishes us from machines?"

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42289015-in-the-shadow-of-the-machine)

Review

Mark Vernon:

""The question of what is unravelling in our times – be that environmentally, politically or spiritually – is pressing. Jeremy Naydler’s answer in this fascinating, wide-ranging, extensively researched and highly readable history of the rise of the machine might be summarised in this way: we have renounced close contact with the deities and intelligences that previously orientated humanity’s understanding of itself and the cosmos.

It is a loss of sight and light that has created a vacuum of meaning, filled by an infatuation with technology and reason. Both technology and reason existed before the modern period, of course, and in remarkably sophisticated forms. But the difference today is that they have ceased to operate in ways that unveil the divine domains that enlightened our forebears. It is the fundamental nature of this shift that Naydler brings out so strongly. He does not just tell the story of technological advance and the development of machines but achieves the more profound goal of illuminating the modifications to human experience and vision required to bring that about.

The book is a portrait of the mindset that places its hopes and longings in the idea of machines, which is the context in which we now live and move and have our being. Naydler insists that it is vital to have as full a feel for it as possible. If you are worried about it, Ludditism is not sufficient. Ignorance is not bliss. We must gain an understanding of the extent of the contemporary worldview if we are to perceive its edges and limitations.

He begins in deep antiquity with a subject he has studied in previous books, the participative consciousness found in ancient Egypt. He highlights its qualities by drawing arresting contrasts with ancient Mesopotamia. For example, in the latter region, between the Tigris and Euphrates, levers were used to lift water out of lakes and rivers for a thousand years before they were adopted by the people living alongside the Nile. The Egyptians must have known about the shaduf, as it is called, as they must have also known about another piece of technology based on the same principles, the wheel. And yet, they resisted them. The reason seems to have been a fear that these devices would inveigle themselves into the relationship ancient Egyptians enjoyed with the living deity of the Nile’s life-giving flow."

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

Discussion

The Emergence of Machinic Consciousness

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)