Descartes’ Gambit: The Unexpected Course of an Objective, Rationalist ‘Path to Truth’

A rationalistic, objectively materialistic turn in Western philosophy is associated with thinkers such as Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, and others in the so-called Age of Reason or European Enlightenment of the 18th. That emphasis on reason and factual evidence arose from an era of the most vicious internecine warfare, motivated by competing claims to who’s version of ‘God’s Truth’ is superior. Descartes himself served as a soldier in these wars. It has been observed that Descartes’ emphasis upon individual reason, “methodological skepticism,” and mathematical analysis, were motivated by an impulse to generate a valid basis for ‘Truth’ that could be accepted by all rational thinkers -- while not being subject to religious doctrine. Such an approach might then provide a sectarian consensus upon ‘what is actual thus true,’ which could be shared by all regardless of religious beliefs. In other words, Descartes’ efforts are a response to the question: ‘What can we all agree upon so that we will not be killing each other over who is right?’  If there could be a 'path to truth' that was rationally self-evident and factually verifiable, then perhaps humans would not be so divided and violent.

However, in Descartes time, reality was understood as 'the work of God,' thus defined by church authorities. He understood all too well how dangerous it was to speak publicly about

'the truth.' His tactic for avoiding such conflict was to propose a “mind-body dualism,” in which mind and intelligence, thus ‘god the creator,’ were distinguished as non-physical phenomena, thus could be ‘set aside’ as separate from seeking understanding of the physical world. In that approach, the physical world could well be regarded as 'the work of God,' but could also be investigated and understood through rational and mathematical analysis because it was the physical result of 'divine mind.' We might call this 'Descartes' Gambit,' in which he seeks a path to 'truthful understanding of reality' by 'bracketing out' a primary aspect of it.

Considering the subsequent history of how scientific method evolved, and has come to be widely accepted across cultures as an accurate means of understanding reality, this ‘gambit’ seems to have been successful. There is now a widely shared scientific 'sense of reality' based on reductive materialistic principles. At the same time, many people both ‘trust science’ yet also hold religious beliefs about ‘divine powers’ that somehow create or guide the world. Yet, despite the seeming success of scientific method in providing a commonly shared sense of reality, it has not entirely prevented violent conflicts over whose religious beliefs and doctrines are ‘the absolute Truth,’ and thus should dominate the thinking of all people.

For those who embrace the causal determinism of material physics as the definition of reality, the issue of ‘divine agency,’ or spirituality, has been factually dismissed as delusional. Nonetheless, the issue of 'what is mind' and how it interacts with physical phenomena remains intensely debated. For some, mind is either an "epiphenomenon" that arises from the physical brain but does not have actual causal influence upon it. Others pose a distinction of "substance dualism," in which mind and body are fundamentally different 'substances' that have causal effects upon each other. Somewhat similarly, "emergent dualism" is a version of substance dualism that regards mind as 'coming into existence' when physical conditions, like the brain, attain a sufficient condition of complexity. Mind, then, 'emerges' from sufficiently complex physical conditions and then can influence those conditions: physical brains are a 'substance' that can 'give rise' to mental 'substances' that are not explicitly physical, and the two can interact.

Though this view does not appear to resolve the question of 'what is mind or spirit?,' except to characterize it as a 'non-physical substance' which emerges from sufficient complexity in physical substances, it actually does have some scientifically verifiable basis in fact. Complex adaptive system science can track levels of dynamical complexity in physical systems 'up to the point' that 'mind-like' properties of self-organizing, self-directing system network behaviors emerge. There is a point where the interactive dynamics of the system's physical parts become interdependently entangled, resulting in unpredictable effects that alter its forms or activities, which can be shown to be 'purposeful' for the system's continued existence. The system actually alters its own physical properties in an 'agentic' or agent-like manner. Such complex dynamical systems, from cells to societies, appear to manifest these emergent 'agentic properties' from a physical basis -- but, those properties cannot be entirely analyzed as explicitly physical phenomena.

That being the factual case, then we are now faced with scientific knowledge that provides factual insights into how agency, thus mind, emerges unpredictably from self-organizing systems, in ways that are ultimately inexplicable by deterministic ‘laws’ alone. Agency, once represented by the mythological and religious symbolism of spirits and divinities, is now a phenomenon that can be verified through the rationalistic application of quantitative analysis based upon our understanding of the physical world. What Descartes excluded, scientific method has now included, as a mathematically validated aspect of ‘objective reality.’

But does this factual basis for 'mind' emerging from physical conditions of sufficient complexity actually resolve the conundrum of 'what is mind?' Well, yes and no. The agentic or agent-like properties of complex adaptive systems can be described as 'dynamical phenomena,' in contrast to explicitly physical phenomena. The trouble remains that these dynamical phenomena 'happen' in ways that cannot be fully analyzed and reduced to sequential causal sequences. But their existence, their manifestation, and evidence for how that alters physical systems, can be quantitatively verified. So, we do have a 'rational, objectivist basis' for an inherent relationship between 'mind and body,' or spirit and matter, even though the 'mind' part is a kind of 'relational dynamical activity,' rather than an explicitly physical phenomena. The 'substance of mind' appears to be something like 'dynamically interactive interdependency.'

In that case, perhaps Descartes' attempt to create an objective basis for truth that can be shared by all ‘reasonable thinkers,’ thus perhaps avoid the violent conflicts arising from conflicting religious beliefs, has succeeded. In effect, both ‘spiritualistic’ and ‘materialistic’ attitudes have been quantitatively confirmed as intuitions of paradoxically ‘co-existing’ aspects of reality. The 'agency' of mind or spirit, represented by mythological and religious notions, is an actual 'dynamical phenomena,' and, it is interdependent with physical phenomena. However, culturally assimilating this ‘new/next worldview’ is obstructed by two opposing attitudes of ‘fundamentalistic belief.’ One arises from contemporary religions that assert the literal truth of their doctrines. The other, its antagonist, manifests from the prevailing ‘culture of science,' which is dominated by an assumption (based upon the deterministic ‘laws of physics’) that neither agency nor ‘free will’ are even possible. If a shared sense of objective reality sought by science has arrived through complex adaptive systems science, then it has transgressed both the literalism of religious belief and a dogmatic expectation that scientific reduction must provide an absolute deterministic definition of everything as physical or material phenomena.

Consequently, neither 'side' will be content with the unexpected conclusions of Descartes Gambit. For the religious literalists, gods or divinities are 'actual entities' that 'determine' the physical world. But systems science indicates that emergent agency, thus mind, is intrinsically unpredictable, thus non-deterministic, even though it can be shown to be teleologically purposeful. We might then say that mind or spirit is, well, necessarily 'improvisational.' Though it manifests in various characteristic ways, it is not 'a thing,' but, rather, a dynamical tendency in nature. For the doctrinaire materialists, the deterministic laws of physics 'must' account for all real phenomena, thus unpredictably yet purposeful emergent agency is fundamentally impossible. The literalistic theists and materialistic atheists do not appear wiling to 'give an inch.'

If scientific reduction has indeed thusly undercut both the absolutism of literalistic religious belief and the ‘dogma’ of deterministic causation – then how do we incorporate this change in scientific understanding to our cultural sense of reality? How are we to become the 'scientific spiritualists' that our science now indicates we must be, if we are to be scientifically realistic?

The Spirit of Technology -- "Psychopathic Hyper-Cyborgism"

Just what sort of creatures have we become, in our 'progress' from makers of hand axes to "artifically intelligent" androids? Human genetics have changed little in 200,000 years. But our human systems have changed drastically. Are we in control of our vast technological systems, or have we become the servants of our creation? If the latter, then what is the 'characteristic spirit' of our new master?

A variety of animals use tools, such as crows and chimpanzees. Our hominid ancestor, homo habilis, or "handy man," was named in reference to the stone tools found with its remains in the Oldewan region of East Africa. From its time, some 1.65 to 2.3 million years ago, through homo ergaster and homo erectus, hominids were tool makers. The species goes 'hand in hand,' as it were, with the purposeful creation of extra-bodily implements -- or technology. Human tool use is distinguished in part from other animal tool users by our ability to employ tools to make tools, or techno-logical skills that enhance technological extensions of bodily functions. That capacity gave an ape-like biped of modest physical strength, relative to other animals its size, the ability to act as a super-predator and eventyally extend its range across every continent except Antarctica.

It is useful to think of technology as 'leverage,' as in using a pole for a lever to increase one's ability to lift a heavy stone. A lever literally multiplies human strength. Externalizing human capacities provided more 'manipulative leverage', directly and indirectly, over objects, animals, plants, even other people. By the time of modern humans (or homo sapiens, meaning 'wise or knowledgeable man') this logical technique of making technology from technology enabled the manipulation of entire environments, construction of monumental architecture, supersonic flight, and the instantaneous transmission of information around the globe, etc. Along the way, our brain size increased considerably.

Genetic human evolution thus appears to have occurred, in part, through the interactions of body, mind, tools, and environments. The early use of technological enhancements of bodily functions created feedback loops between all four. Tool use and its consequences became an environmental factor that influenced which genetic traits natural selection favored. Traits of body function and intelligence that enhanced tool making promoted adaptive capacity, thus were favored by fitness selection. The interplay of body, mind, and tools became a fundamental trait of 'being human.' It literally altered the external environments within which humans lived, through hunting, herding, and agriculture -- each of which had its own technology. It is important to note that extensions of human capacities are not just implements and what we make with these, but include numbers, writing, calculation methods, and record keeping. Clearly, in terms of cultural evolution, this technological capacity has played a major role in the emergence of industrial civilization and its worldwide dominance as the primary form of human societies.

We would not be human, in the ways we are, without our technologically enhanced bodily and mental abilities. Our brains and minds have evolved to be techno-logical. The functions of our tools are 'in our minds,' yet, somehow, our 'minds are in our tools.' Though we are not our tools in a physical sense, we could not exist without our tools. We have 'externalized' our adaptive capacity. And contemporary humans are utterly dependent upon massively complicated technological systems for their survival. Indeed, most of our efforts are in some way or another 'in service to' those systems. They would not exist without us nor we without them. Of course, there are a handful among us who could go off into the woods and survive without modern technology, though such grow fewer by the day. The vast majority of us have no idea how to use an axe, a spear, start a fire from scratch, or build a shelter.

A cyborg is defined as an organism, a biological entity, but one that has enhanced abilities derived from some artificial technology which has been incorporated into the organism through an integrated feedback network. That is, the organism and the technology have become a 'single system.' For some people this cyborgism represents a dystopic future in which humans have become more like machines than animals. Think of the "Borg," from the Star Trek movies, and their ominous prediction of dominion, "Resistance is futile." But for others, modern humans seem unable to communicate or navigate without their smart phones, so have already become fully cyborgian. It even appears to many that our machines will displace our biological body-minds and carry on their evolution without us-- or that we will somehow live on in/as computers.

Given our co-evolution with technology, it might reasonably be said we were, from our very origins, cyborgs. A tool only exists 'as a tool' because it is integrated in a feedback network with a human mind and body. Human organisms only survive because they participate in such feedback networks. But clearly, we contemporary humans do not just 'use tools' to adapt to natural environments. We depend on vast technological systems to create and sustain the urbanized environments in which we live. These systems dictate the structure of our societies and economies. The more complex they become the more we depend upon them for our existence. Many people now feel that they no longer control their personal lives, but that Technology, writ large, is their master.

The Internet is not directly under our control. It is interdependent with and enables all the technological systems of our industrial economies that facilitate its operations. Though the whole of this network arises from the actions of millions of human agents. But, like an ant colony, those interactions enable purposeful self-organization and adaptation at a 'higher level.' There are numerous subsystems contributing this overall integration. Corporations like Apple, Google, and Facebook obsessively strive to expand its influence on us. That is the purpose of their existence. From a systems science perspective, it is a kind of "super organism" -- a self-directing meta-system that arises from interactions of biological agents but is not, itself, a biological entity. Humans are said to be the dominant species on the planet. But what about this super-organism of technology that we have externalized around us? The two are codependent, but which one has more influence over the other? Have the manipulators of tools become the tools of this complex adaptive system our species 'gave life to?' Have humans, who once enslaved other humans, now become the 'slaves' of their machinery? One thing is obvious: technological innovation appears compulsive. Our future is imagined as ever more technologically 'advanced.' Most believe technology will make us more comfortable, richer, more powerful, even happier. With the rise of "artificial intelligence," we begin to transfer what direct control we have over this super organism to its 'machine mind,' its own 'computational agency.' Though some experts warn that AI could 'turn on us,' it appears inevitable we will grant it autonomous 'android status.' We even see our selves in its terms, as 'computers.' We have progressively made, and experienced our selves, as ever more cyborgian.

Media theorist Marshal MacLuhan once observed that technological externalizations of human capacity have a psychological effect he termed an "outering," in which part of one's self is experienced as not just 'extended' but "amputated." Our tools, from stone axes to computers, displace experience of a body or mind function 'to' an external thing, tending to make one feel less capable or adaptive, less complete, even disabled, in the absence of the tool. In such a view, the elaboration of our cyborgian character diminishes our sense of 'sufficient inherent adaptive confidence.' Once having driven an automobile, walking can seem like an utterly inefficient mode of travel, lessening one's sense of one's own embodied capacity.

An additional idea worth considering is termed "extended cognition." The most obvious examples would be the extensions of computers or smart phones. In using these, human mental capacities are amplified by becoming interdependent with computational machines. With self-learning artificial intelligence, a machine is literally mimicking aspects of the human cognition with which it is networked. This notion is likely derived from anthropologist Gregory Bateson's concept of "extended mind." Bateson used the example of a blind person navigating with a cane. In the absence of vision, such a person must project a concept of an invisible world, must 'extend' their cognitive processes beyond their body. What is now termed "embodied cognition" considers how our consciousness derives in part from our external environments, actually networking with the tangible world of things and events. We are actually 'thinking with' or 'through' external aspects of our environments. In considering our cyborgian relationship with technology, this concept suggests how our minds and tools become networked into a particular complex adaptive system. This network has postive reinforcing feedback loops. Thus, unconsciously at least, we 'become our tools,' or our technology 'becomes us.' The more we are immersed in a technologically derived and dependent environment, the more our cognition is 'extended,' the more human agency becomes entangled in this cyborgian system -- as in when our smart phones are 'running our lives.' If we lose our smart phones, we feel we have 'lost our selves.'

In all this there is a sense of extremity. If a little control is good, more must be better. If our current technologized existence is threatened, then we need more technology. While humans have existed through technological adaptation for millennia, by the 21st Century, we have become utterly obsessed with this cyborgian aspect of our character. The result has been both astonishingly creative and horrifically destructive. Human populations have exploded, material comforts elaborated, but so has human brutality to both humans and natural systems. The industrialization of war, mass murder, and ecological exploitation are inseparable from modernity. Such devastation, heading now toward collapse of the biosphere, and thus human extinction, does not seem 'wise.' Homo sapiens appears to have become 'homo sapiens mechanicus' -- 'mechanically knowledgeable man.' We are knowledgeable about technology, but not wise about its consequences.

In mythical thinking, human behaviors are understood to be influenced by non-human spirits or divine agency. These 'forces' are represented as personifications that have archetypal character. There are gods and goddesses that personify the behaviors of war, wild nature, hearth and home, marriage, commerce, dance and music. Their character and recounted deeds provide insight into the patterns of thought and action human behaviors can express. Mythology is a symbolic form of psychology. The stories about how these gods influence human behavior often indicate what happens when one god or spirit 'takes over' and pushes behavior to an extreme. These archetypal metaphors of myth are psychological mirrors that can assist people to understand the behaviors of themselves and their societies. Among early civilizations, the Mesopotamians imagined a god-spirit with the capacity to build cities, Marduk. As the metaphor for technologically focused civilization-creation, he is represented as defeating and dismembering an animal-bodied goddess, Tiamat, who personified the chaotic creativity of wild nature. Accordingly, Marduk's character appears as aggressive, merciless, and triumphal. Here we see a mythological distinction aboout the human impulse to 'defeat wild nature' in the technologically empowered establishment of civilization as a 'tamed domain.' Psychologically, the 'wilful wildness' of Tiamat, and the 'forceful taming' of Marduk, are manifestations of archetypal behavioral patterns in 'human nature.' Posed as these are in an opposition that results in the triumph of the aggressive Marduk, a split is mirrored in human culture between The Wild and The Tame, with a reflexive bias toward the latter. The Mesopotamians were 'up front' and honest about the 'spiritual character' of their civilized system: it existed to triumph over Nature.

In our modern world we do not have such metaphoric symbolism that imagines the characteristic forces manifesting in our systems. At least, we do not have a culturally shared imaginal personification of our cyborgian character, of the spirit or 'godliness' of Technology -- though there are some candidates in popular imagination, such as "The Borg," "The Matrix," and Mary Shelly's earlier Dr. Frakenstein (the doctor, not his monster).

It is worth noting that what mythological background still reverberates in our modern cultures predisposes us to the 'conquest of Nature.' The Christian church once promoted the notion of "The Great Chain of Being." This is an extremely hierarchical, top-down conception of order in the world. At the apex reigns an omnipotent singular divinity, with humans in second rank of importance dominating animals, plants, etc. Tellingly, at the very bottom is a realm of 'devils and demons,' which can be understood as agents of corruption and disorder. Relative to other mythologies, this view of divine agency as infallibly 'in control of everything, forever' and humans as superior to all Nature, is rather exceptional.

Though we lack a contemporary 'mythological mirror,' we can apply a version of myth's archetypal characterization to our modern systems. This can be termed 'archetypal analysis' of system behavior. If we reflect upon technology as an adaptive system that asserts itself characteristically, we can look for examples. Historically, human amplification of bodily functions changed little for tens of thousands of years, while humans lived a "subsistence life-style" as hunter-gatherers. Then, perhaps in relation to climatic changes after the last Ice Age, human techno-logical extension diversified and flourished as civilized societies, amplifying human capacities for agriculture, manufacturing, architectural construction, and warfare. Tools were used to make the 'tools' of plows, irrigation systems, granaries, pottery, harnesses and carts for domesticated animal power, urbanized cities, ships for trading, instruments for writing, record keeping, and weapons of war. Civilizations with this level of technological amplification gained dominion over natural environments, accumulated surplus food, elaborated material possessions, advanced metalurgy, created money, generated centralized political states, conducted wars of conquest, institutionalized slavery, and often developed extreme inequity in their social hierarchies. This amplification of our cyborgian spirit gave social systems greater power over both the individuals that comprised those societies and the systems of natural environments.

Civilization is clearly an expression of techno-logical thinking, and the increases of manipulative control that this cyborgian aspect of 'being human' can generate. Indeed, it institutionalizes that control as the 'sine qua non,' the most essential aspect, of civilized society. The political state systems it enabled claimed a "monopoly on violence," the ultimate power of life and death over their subjects. By and large, a person's life no longer 'belonged to them,' or their community, but to technologically enabled authoritarian social systems. Now that is control.

And so it went, for thousands of years, again without much variation, until modern times. Along the way, numerous civilizations and empires flourished and typically collapsed, often due to how they debilitated of their environments, or conquest by some other civilized state. A prominent characteristic of these technologically amplified societies has been aggression towards each other and readiness to use violence toward their own subjects when these challenged existing social hierarchies. But the modern era, if we identify it with the technological eruption of the "industrial revolution," from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries, took cyborgism to a radically new level.

It is difficult now to comprehend the extent of that change in relationships between humans and technology. While vast quantities of material goods had been manufactured prior to the invention of steam engines, the earlier mode of manufacture was "cottage industry," meaning independent workers living in their homes who processed materials through manual weaving, pottery, blacksmithing, carpentry, etc. The cyborgs of that time still worked mostly with hand tools and governed their own work lives. With the advent of wood, then coal powered steam engines, the human/technology network changed dramatically. The mass-production factory and the time clock became the masters of working life. Railroads, steamships, telegraphs enabled world wide empires. The powers of the human/technology network multiplied through material science. Marduk was on the march and the remaining corners of the planet still under the dominion of wild Tiamat were rapidly subdued. Though the prevailing description of the industrialization regards modernity as 'human progress,' the brutality and destruction it imposed upon both people and natural systems is truly beyond conception. In pursuit of what we thought was 'the good,' we have often turned the already authoritarian state into totalitarian and fascistic systems. But the ultimate outcome is the present catastrophes of general ecological collapse and the disintegration of global climate regularities. The ancients were harmless compared to us. And still, exponential economic growth and ever greater technological advancement are 'the order of the day,' Cyborgism has become a kind of religion. We might term our behaviors as 'hyper-cyborgism.'

Critiques of this history often focus upon the greed of socio-economic elites and general human short-sightedness. But if our societies have become subordinated to the feedback loops between them and their technological systems, then our collective behaviors might better be understood as an expression of that network's biases -- its inherent archetypal impulses. If humans have become enthralled by these, then our behaviors likely express the same tendencies. It is crucial to consider here that we may think, even feel, we are acting from values and for purposes that are actually contradicted by the consequences of our cyborgean actions. We may feel our smart phones, Amazon shopping, jet travel, and consumer societies make our lives better, without realizing the misery of low wage workers, environmental devastation, and even damage to our own brains and bodies that result.

But why did our cyborgism escalate so vehemently to produce modernity? Why, after thousands of years of civilization, did the Industrial Revolution occur? It can be argued that the discovery of fossil fuel energy and the elaborations of the 'machine age' were not the primary causes but the consequences of cultural changes. Three cultural threads might be relevant here. One is the Christian notion of a top-down "Great Chain of Being," in which humans are destined to hold dominion over Nature. Another is the Christian derived regard for the individual, for human liberty from oppression. A third is the intellectual Enlightenment in Europe , which overlaps the era of the Industrial Revolution. Here it was thought that Reason and Science would 'liberate' humans from superstition, political tyranny, and economic inequality. Though there is an anti-religious aspect to these ideas, they actually reinforce the concept of human domination of Nature and the ultimate primacy of logical control of everything. In addition, Enlightenment thought promoted the primacy of individual liberty and the personal pursuit of material prosperity. So it has been argued that some people in this time period actually conceived technology as what would "redeem Adam," and make the earth a paradise for humans (See David F. Nobel's "The Religion of Technology"). Thus our tendency to be 'religious' about our hyper-cyborgism, to unconsciously grant it some 'divine agency,' has a 'cultural history' to it. It is supposed to 'save us' from our weakness, even 'make us immortal' by transferring our 'selves' into computational machines, where we can 'live forever' -- not as cyborgian humans, but as fully mechanical androids. To 'be god-like,' in reference to our cultural background, is to 'be infallibly in control' of everything. Try as we have, we are making a mess of it. Perhaps our android descendants will have more control over their 'selves' than we over ours.

From a systems science perspective, this run-away technologizing in pursuit of 'absolute control' can be understood generally as an exagerated expression of an inherent self-asserting impulse in complex adaptive systems. These are systems that manifest the capacity to regulate and adapt their forms and functions so as to further their continued existence. Natural selection for fitness favors the evolution of successful adaptations, both in genetic terms but also cultural ones. Orca whales are one genetic species but develop different hunting behaviors in different parts of the world, related to specific ecosystems where they live. These are considered cultural adaptations. So these different whale cultures are optimizing their adaptive capacities in different ways. Humans behave similarly. But with industrial technology, powered by fossil fuel energy, our self-asserting system impulse has 'run amok.' It has 'freed' us from the constraints of our environments to the degree that we are overwhelming the self-sustaining assertion of natural systems. If some aspect of human systems does not act to impose constraints on our hyper-cyborgism, the latter's inherent self-assertion will pursue its goal of 'absolute control' to its 'biocidal' conclusion.

Returning to the perspective of archetypal analysis, we can ask what are some basic traits of cyborgism, of the extending of human functions through tools. Tools use is 'technical' in the sense that it requires 'technique.' This word means 'a way of doing, performing, or executing a task' and a 'skillful or efficient means accomplishing a procedure.' There is an inherently sequential aspect to such technical skill, whether in knapping obsidian to make a hand axe a million years ago or generating computer code today. Machinery operates in highly sequenced processes. Computer programs are encoded with 'ones' and 'zeros.' It is binary, very 'either/or,' and must be 'read' in sequence. In these examples one finds a bias toward goal-directed thinking achieved through skillfully sequenced technique. Control and a kind of 'single mindedness' are essential. Technologically enabled civilized systems tend to be configured as 'top down' networks with 'command and control' structure that are maintained by sequential procedures.

The cyborgian in us favors such traits of thought and action. In the modern world, with all our machinery and digitalized devices, nearly everything we do is imbued with this sequential command and control mentality. Our environments are constantly facilitating it or even carrying it on 'automatically.' Indeed, there is a telling link between our computer age and the flint knapping of homo habilis. The term digital, which now refers to computer programing, data storage or transfer, and numbers, derives from the Latin digitus, meaning finger or toe. Presumably, this derivation comes from both 'counting with fingers' and the primary use of fingers to manipulate things -- to be technically skillful. And it is our fingers, after all, that are the primary interface of our networking with technology.

However 'mechanical minded' we have become, we humans are not machines. We are self-organizing, self-animating organisms. Creatures of emotion, makers of the symbolic expressions of art, who sing, dance, dream, suffer, and love. These aspects of 'being human' are not much expressed by our hyper-cyborgian obsession with technology. Cultural resistance to the impact of industrial technology began at the onset of the Industrial Revolution with the Romantic Movement. This "Romanticism" countered Enlightenment emphasis on reason and science by prioritizing intuition, emotion, aesthetic experience, and idealizing Nature in contrast to the degrading effects of industrialization. The Luddite movement of textile workers in the early 1800s resisted mechanization in defense of their craft-based skills and economy.The invention and use of the atomic bomb gave impetus to a whole genre of science fiction movies in the 1950s that imagined catastrophic consequences of our scientific technology. We have had five decades of environmental activism seeking to protect natural systems from human ones. But none of this has slowed our exponential "outtering" of human manipulative capacities in the pursuit of more control.

Contemporary psychology provides a way of characterizing behavior similar to myth's archetypal personification of gods and spirits. With its diagnostic terminology, it differentiates extreme expressions of human behaviors with terms such as narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, psychopathic, schizophrenic, psychotic, neurotic, paranoid, manic, depressive, dissociated, bi-polar, addictive, etc. Given the destructive impacts of our hyper-cyborgian civilization, we can examine it psycho-pathologically. If we examine our collective systems, with their now universal bias toward cyborgian extension of our capacities for manipulative control, what sort of 'personality traits' are revealed? Firstly, it appears that the more technologically enhanced a society is, the less it appears to notice or respond to the effects it has upon other systems, particularly those of the biosphere. It seems that emphasizing our cyborgian aspect progressively alienates human systems from natural ones. The world, even our selves, become 'just more material to be manipulated.' In exaggerating control of our environments we become insulated from and less empathic toward other life forms. Such inability to 'feel' the disruption or distress of 'others' resembles the psychological diagnosis of being psychopathic. That is an anti-social state of impaired ability to feel empathy or remorse, characterized by uninhibited egotism and a tendency to exploit others without regard for the consequences, or even for the 'pleasure' of being mean and destructive.

Our inability to stop exploiting both human "underclasses" and the biosphere in order to further indulgence in control and consumption also resembles an obsessive-compulsive diagnosis, as well as that of addiction. There is no doubt we 'know what we are doing,' but collectively we cannot stop, we manically pursue ever more -- or, at least, the self-asserting complex adapting system of Technology does so. Perhaps this narcissistic and compulsive behavior involves a symptom of collective neurosis, a deep anxiety about inadequacy in the face of our dependency on the technological system we feel we 'can't live without.' Then again, our over-emphasis upon the cyborgian side of our nature might be creating disassociation in which we have actually 'lost touch with reality.' All these psycho-pathological conditions appear to apply to our hyper-cyborgism. There is nothing practical or logical in pursuing utterly un-sustainable behaviors while knowingly driving the sixth great extinction of life on earth and collapsing the global climate system that has made earth habitable for our species. We are clinically insane.

The Mesopotamian god-spirit Marduk was a terror to Nature. But his powers were paltry compared to our civilization's god-spirit of hyper-cyborgism. We have created a monster. And, like all our tools, it is and is not us. We have extended our manipulative capacities into a system that has no empathy, no sociability, only a mania for extending its powers of exploitation. Yes, there are more benign and even beneficent aspects, like medicine and the pursuit of scientific knowledge. But these in no way compensate for the rampant despoilment of life occurring.

So how to contend with such a monstrosity in which our larger humanity has become entrained? In traditional pre-modern societies, tools were often regarded as 'having soul,' as somehow being 'self animating.' thus worthy of great respect. These were, after all, the means by which humans could survive and prosper. These "outtered" aspects of humanness had a kind of 'life of their own.' That was also how such people regarded the systems of nature, as fellow creatures with feelings. With our vast amplification of mechanical technology, it became easier to 'take it for granted.' We made it, it serves us. We have become "psychologically inflated" with our 'god-like' powers. Machines have been our slaves: used, abused, and readily discarded in favor of the next, more powerful version. We do not care about our tools so much as the advantages we gain by them. If we regarded them as 'having spirit,' or being an aspect of our 'spirit,' that has impacts on the 'spirit' of other systems, might we behave any differently?

If we are to avoid being rocketed to our extinction by the psychopathic temperament of our hyper-cyborgism, we shall have to differentiate our sense of being human from the seductive powers of it 'as an autonomous system', one which thrives by the subordination of our own agency to its manic purposes. But that means we must see our selves as "addicts," as 'out of touch with reality,' as "codependent enablers" of an "obsessive-compulsive sociopath," so that we might redirect our priorities, indeed our inherent cyborgism, to other, more life-sustaining purposes. In this view, it is not the individual persons so prominently acting in service to the "Technosphere," the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs, that are 'the problem.' It is 'The System,' as a complex adaptive network, as a 'creature in its own right.' Here there be dragons.

David F. Nobel: Religion of Technology

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/331339/the-religion-of-technology-by-david-f-noble/

Under A Falling Sky -- As Above, So Below. Only More So.

In the beginning was no thing, but The One -- a singularity of infinite density -- agitated by quantum fluctuations fomenting a Big Bang of cosmic expansion inflating into inconsistent differentiations of The Many -- pockets of energetic matter -- activating an ocean of gravitational waves whose tides and eddies roiled the flotsam and jetsam into stellar furnaces, contracting, transforming what was into what is through nucleosynthesis, colliding, exploding into ever distending space, populating it with new elements and endless variations of planetary concretions, galaxy upon galaxy, for 13 billion Earth orbits worth of traveling light, till The One that became The Many spanned 46 billion, so far as can be seen. And still, it rockets on, and out, swelling itself from itself with epic violence.

All this, and much more, is speculated by mortal sentience peering back in time from the thin veil of atmosphere clinging to a blue-green spec held in thrall by a minor star in an average barred galactic spiral churning its 100 plus billion blazing alchemical furnaces around an ordinary black hole of light-devouring gravitational compression, reminiscent of that originating infinite density.

However it came to be, this Cosmos that is our Earthly sky is ever rending and stretching, devouring and regurgitating, continually ordering itself out of its own disordering. Yet, on the time scale of our effervescent lives, even that of our species' entire existence, the vast celestial panoply appears to stand still. That familiar night canopy of twinkling dots is always tearing at itself, roiling, falling in and away, raining its star dust fragments down upon us as photons, microwaves, meteors, ghostly neutrinos that pass right through our pulsing bodies, even this solid-seeming planet.

So it is above. But how below? Truth be told, the science that reveals such cosmology tracks even greater complexity, more astonishing order emerging from disorder, within this thin organic film of biology where the same dissipation of potential energy that impels the cosmic creativity also fuels the emergence of purposeful agency. Systems science takes us on a fantastical journey into a maze of interdependent interactions jangling and agitating each other, like quantum fluctuations in the Big Bang, but from which continually emerge the unpredictably self-organizing behaviors of cells and bodies, brains and minds, cities and societies, moment by moment, all dependent upon a background cacophony of chaotically simultaneous activity that has no sequentially specifiable chronology, in which feedback ricochets off itself within and between systems like clouds of colliding cosmic debris.

We are that falling sky, condensed and amplified both in chaos and the ordering it begets, becoming creaturely systems far beyond prediction or control, for all our clinging to semblances of normality, addicted to habits and rational certainty, while within and all around us change is constant, disruption inherent, uncertainty intrinsic to the novel forms and functions emerging continually, bootstrapping the actual complexity of ordering within our wispy atmospheric envelope, thus the entire cosmos. Normality is not a routine, the ordinary not predictably ordered, disruption not simply destructive of our capacity to self-regulate and self-direct but actually essential to the mysterious manifestations of that agency. Futures are unknowable because these are continually emerging from the jittering fluctuations of each frothing instant. The only sense of security there is . . . is a false sense of security.

This ordering out of disorder which governs and guides itself with relative self-similarity over time, persisting both in spite and because of instability within and all around it, is astonishingly resilient while also being adaptive, yet has limits beyond which its crazy choreography of feedback synchronizations suddenly collapses, evaporates from the system it has maintained, overwhelmed by a little too much disruption, or a suffocating seizure of crippling continuity, like some stellar supernova that can not longer contain the forces within it, or a black hole of gravitational density that sucks the interplay of parts into a stifled singularity.

Under a falling sky, round and round, back and forth it goes as Life's myriad variations play out their self-asserting parts, interacting to animate the whole, that biospheric meta-system which, in turn, enables all those lesser actors' constantly shifting negotiations with each other -- individual microbes, plants, animals, whole species, ecologies, societies -- that, in turn, make the whole. There is no beginning, middle, or end, no single causal sequence, no central controller nor predetermining program here, nothing to reliably control, though much to be distorted where one component gains too much advantage over others. Complex ordering on the level of our biosphere is miraculous in so far as our powers of analytic reduction and causal prediction can go, arising from a fundamental mystery of self-organizing agency thatsystems science can demonstrate the existence of, but not fully explain.

Yes, yes, obviously there are causes and effects, deterministic laws of physics holding baseline continuities in the underlying realms of matter, material processes that can be, within narrow boundaries of time and space, manipulated with predictive confidence, the likes of which bewitch our attention by enabling us to manipulate our environments through stunning technological maneuvers, whetting our boundless appetites for ultimate knowledge and control of everything, everywhere, forever. But the same quantitative, mathematical scientific methods that give us such awesome powers of manifold manipulation reveal that there are, also, believe it or not, "acausal" events emerging in the self-organizing agency of complex adaptive systems, where semi-chaotic feedback network interactions suddenly synchronize unpredictably to generate adaptive behaviors that functionally promote a systems continued operations in response to changes within itself or its environment.

Under a falling sky, we manifest as physical matter bound to deterministic constraints yet also as the emergent property of self-directing psychic agency, which can only exist because it does not arise from predetermining factors, which enables us to be such master manipulators, which gives us the intelligence to create the science that reveals to us this seeming contradiction in 'how the world actually works,' that we dwell in and as a 'bi-dynamical' realm of causal and acausal events, where instability fosters ordering, which shows how limited our capacities for ultimate knowledge and control are, which lays before us the basis for a naturalistic concept of 'spiritual agency.'

Walk in wonder. Die in delight.