The Machine Metaphor - What Are We Missing?

Much has been made about how Darwin and Dawkins have refuted Paley’s “watchmaker argument”. I have shown elsewhere that this is not the case. However it is not the perceived failure of Paley’s argument that should concern us, rather we should focus on his success. Paley famously said nature is like a watch found on a heath…only much more complex. If we discover a watch we know there is a watchmaker. The innate assumption in this argument was lost not only on his predecessors Descartes and Hume, but Paley himself. 

Whether or not Paley was borrowing from earlier “watchmaker arguments” or not we can see where he, and the rest of Western thought went wrong. These arguments went back to the ancient Greeks but to see just how similar they were to Paley’s argument let’s look at Cicero’s version which states, in part “When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?” (bold and italics added). Now at first sight Paley’s argument appears stronger, a watch is far more complex than either a sun dial or a water clock. But what has dropped out of the argument, “and their artificers” is truly significant. Paley’s argument, and Western thought, fell victim to their own success. As scientists and philosophers debated Paley’s argument, the machine metaphor slipped beneath consciousness and became a preconception.

Once lodged in our “social imaginary” our vision is shaped by it. The old adage “seeing is believing” is turned on its head for it is far truer to say  “believing is seeing”. In the same way that “to a person equipped with a hammer, everything is a nail”  a scientist armed with a metaphor, “everything is a mechanism”. It worked exceedingly well in physics because the inanimate universe is very “clock-like”.

This was in fact  the bridge between the new way of “seeing” or “imagining” the world because it fit very well with the imagining of the world it was replacing which was formed by both the Bible and ancient Greco-Roman thought. As we read in Genesis 1 “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years”. In other words, the stars and planets worked like clocks, the metaphor fit.

However, Christianity has a very different view when it comes to life. For  when life is created God uses different language: “Be fruitful, fill the earth, each according to its own kind”.  So life exhibits a freedom, a wildness within constraint. Freedom in the words “fill the earth” and constraint “according to its own kind”. Life then is qualitatively different from inanimate things. The delineation between human beings and other living things is also clearly seen in the Christian perspective. For in contrast to the other living things that are merely made by God, humans are made “in His image”.

The Machine metaphor lodged in our subconscious, or as Barfield would say “figuration”, makes these distinctions “unreasonable”. If our primary pre-understanding of the world is that everything is a mechanism, then there can be no real, or more accurately, no substantive argument for anything immaterial. However, if we can bring our preconceptions into the light and reconsider them we may find new solutions. Take as one example the fairly well known description of human consciousness as a “ghost in the machine”. Many brilliant minds endorse variations of this notion, but if we stop and consider how we got to this conclusion would it not make more sense to reject the machine metaphor? After all, consciousness is required to do science. It is also something all of us experience everyday. The compelling aspect of this argument therefore, the reason why it bears “weight”, has nothing to do with evidence but in the preconception of the machine metaphor itself. We no longer see it as a metaphor but, rather, we see with it, or fail to see as the case may be.We cannot question the machine because it simply is. And what it has become is  an idol, a misrepresentation, that deceives us. 

Another example of this comes from a very different source far from the academic halls that would deny the existence of consciousness itself to a tribe that is lauded for a very different “denial”. The name of the tribe is the Piraha and they are famous for having no conception of God. Atheist groups tout these people as proof that primitive people had no god and that God therefore is a human invention. But is it not again far more likely, if we are able to look past the mechanistic preconception, that God has been lost to this tribe? For these very same people have no words for numbers either. And to argue that they never did seems to run counter to the fact that their children can indeed learn mathematics like any other human child. In the same way, despite the fact that their language is very simple, they are able to learn modern languages just fine. 

No, this tribal culture is not so much primitive as it is diminished. In this way it appears that the West shares with them not only a lack of consciousness of God but a kind of number blindness. Piraha have a problem because they don’t see numbers, a lack that allows them to be taken advantage of by others in trade. Whereas the West sees only numbers and so cannot see “themselves”. 

What is perceived as an advance is really a step too far. Chesterton in his book “The Dumb Ox” made the point that Aquinis paved the way for the scientific revolution by stating that “all human understanding begins with the senses” but he also made it clear that it was never his intention to claim that it was limited to the senses. Aquinas, being a sound philosopher, would immediately have seen, not being bound by a mechanistic preconception, that such a view, like the famous snake eating his own tail, is self-defeating.  

Now you may argue that it might still be true but how could you know without using reason and reason is part of your consciousness! This brings the point full circle because we began by asking what is lost in the machine metaphor and the answer is the same as what Paley left out of his argument, humanity. And ultimately science requires a scientist as surely as clock requires an artificer .