Why We’re Failing: We’re Not a Mechanism
The idea that Nature is a mechanism has a long history. Many ancient cultures studied the night sky and developed an understanding of astronomical cycles, enabling predictions of events such as eclipses. This regularity naturally encouraged the idea that the rest of Nature also functioned like a mechanism that once understood, could be used to predict future events and outcomes.
The ancients’ sophisticated understanding of astronomical cycles reached its apogee in the Antikythera Mechanism, a “fiendishly complex” device discovered by divers in 1900 in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The shipwreck dates to around 70 B.C., while researchers believe the device dates to around 200 B.C. Scattered references in ancient texts suggest the device may have been based on the work of Archimedes.
An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets.
The device, about the size of a hefty dictionary, contains dozens of intricate gears that operated various pointers on the front to predict the positions of the sun, moon and planets at a particular time, past or future.
he intricacy of the gearing is unlike any other from the ancient world, and researchers continue to make new discoveries about the device’s predictive capabilities.
The idea that Nature is a mechanism we can understand and exploit to our own benefit became the default model of how the world worked in the 19th century, as discoveries in chemistry and physics unraveled the mysteries of Nature and allowed humanity to engineer machines and new compounds based on the burgeoning knowledge of Nature’s mechanisms.
As our mastery expanded, this notion of Nature Is a Mechanism extended from chemistry and physics into biology and the mind. If we can devise a chemical that eradicates infectious diseases, couldn’t we do the same for cancer? And if we can devise a mechanism–a computing machine–to perform mathematical calculations, then couldn’t we mechanize intelligence?
The idea that Nature Is a Mechanism spread to economics and social sciences, fostering the belief that the economy is a mechanism that we can model and manipulate much like tuning an engine: just as we adjust the air and fuel mixture in an engine, we avoid recessions by tinkering with interest rates and the growth of the money supply.
In the social sciences, this mindset has led to the idea that if we collect enough data and perform rigorous computational analysis of the data, we can predict the outcomes of policy changes in education, housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.
A recent reader comment illustrates how this mindset is taken for granted. In response to a post on the alarming decline in the nutrient content of our food, including micro-nutrients drawn from the soil, the reader suggested that the solution was to simply take a supplement pill containing the trace minerals: the human body is a mechanism, and just as we top off the oil in an engine, all we have to do to achieve peak health is take a pill and the body will automatically uptake the trace minerals.
But this is not at all how the body actually works. The human body is not a mechanism, it’s more akin to a complex ecosystem than a machine. The uptake of micro-nutrients is poorly understood, as the processes involved are complex and interactive. Many studies have found that the vast majority of supplements are worthless; the body isn’t an engine that uptakes the nutrients in a pill the way an engine’s fuel tank is filled.
Absorption of nutrients depends on many complex, interactive systems: the body’s signaling of the need for specific nutrients, the digestion of real food by the microbiome, and the complex nature of real food, as opposed to pills and highly processed foods.
The truth is we have a very limited grasp of the complexities of the microbiome’s connections to our emotional and mental states, the effects of a microbiome starved of fiber and real food, the triggers for endorphins and dopamine that are linked to addiction and cravings, and many other aspects of nutrition, exercise and what we consume.
We prefer simple models for how the world works, and Nature Is a Mechanism is highly attractive because it’s 1) very simple and 2) it encourages us to believe we have god-like powers over Nature once we unravel the mechanisms at work.
We like to believe that we can predict the outcomes of whatever mechanism we’re manipulating, but we don’t understand that the consequences of our assumptions and actions play out far into the future in ways that our Mechanism Mindset cannot foresee.
In the mindset of Humans Are a Mechanism, Too, our bodies are seen as furnaces that burn whatever fuel is tossed into the stomach. But this is not reality; it is a simplistic distortion that generates failure on multiple levels.
We are far from understanding the many consequences of a diet of Ultra-Processed Foods, other than the obvious reality that consuming ultra-processed foods is destructive to our health. Consider this quote about the recent book Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food.
“These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.“
The same basic error infects the mindset of Artificial Intelligence: since Humans Are a mechanism, Too, then our mind / intelligence is also a mechanism that we can model and mechanize.
Consider this thought experiment.
Every computer is fundamentally a series of electronic gates that generate an output from an input. These gates can be understood as a mechanical device, an analog switching mechanism. So theoretically, a machine could be constructed of these analog mechanical switches that performed everything a computer does. This machine would be quite large, but nonetheless it would function just like its electronic cousin.
Now consider that these mechanical switches could be constructed from beer cans, and the entire mechanism driven by large windmills. This machine would perform the exact same functions as a computer running software that we declare is intelligent.
So we are effectively declaring that a large machine of beer cans and windmills is intelligent.
Um, no. And neither is the computer or the software.
The truth is we don’t even understand our own intelligence, and so claiming that a contraption of beer cans and windmills is equal to our own intelligence is absurd.
The human mind is extraordinarily complex, and we have only the vaguest notion of its interconnected workings. Consider this diagram of three networks that have been delineated in the human mind: the Default Mode Network, the Salience network and the Executive Control Network.
Together, these networks play key roles in what’s known as Transcendental Thinking, thinking that goes beyond the moment into the past and future, and evokes powerful emotions and insights.
Transcendent Thinking May Boost Teen Brains.
The simplistic model of Human Intelligence Is a Mechanism, Too holds that rational thought is the core of intelligence, and emotions are not only unnecessary, they inhibit clear thinking.
This turns out to be precisely the opposite of reality: emotions are a core driver of clear thinking. Without emotional intelligence, the rational mind makes fatal errors of judgment, fails to act ethically or advantageously, makes short-sighted decisions and acts irrationally. This was revealed when a human patient had a brain tumor cut out that took away his emotional / social intelligence: the patient “knew the right things and had the necessary memories to guide him, but he was unable to care about the implications of his decisions. The Damasios came to understand that the patient’s emotions were not properly informing his planning and cognition, and his social relationships suffered for it.”
Human intelligence isn’t a mechanism that can be mechanized by a machine, be it of beer cans and windmills or etched silicon wafers.
We are failing, as a species and as a society, because we’re embedded in a completely false and misleading belief about the nature of Nature and ourselves. Nature is not a mechanism, and neither are we.
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