Who Controls the Metaphor Police?

Tim Morton quotes a passage from Graham Harman’s post on strategic vitalism. Here’s the passage:

But it’s almost amusing that the human/inanimate divide is such a sacred thing to many contemporary people that they are angered by its metaphorical transgression as well. Indeed, this divide may be the central religious principle of modernism, as Latour decisively and permanently demonstrated in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that refutes so many things that refuse to die.

Yes.

But, just what are the metaphorical commitments of those who would police the human/inanimate divide, or its proxy, the animate/inanimate divide? One of the largest movements in Western thought over the past half millennium has been the imperative to locate all accounts of observable phenomena on the inanimate side of that divide. The name of this program is reductionism. Everything, ultimately is physics, and physics is about itty bitty and super-itty bitty particles in motion (and waves—whoops!).

The ultimate task of the metaphor police is to ensure that there is nothing essential, nothing vital, on the animate side of that line. One is allowed to talk on the animate side of the line if and only if one can: 1) demonstrate the connections back to the inanimate side of the line, and 2) show that all the real work’s being done on the inanimate side. This is called emergentism and it’s quite popular.

Howdy Doody Metaphysics in the Computer Age

Now, enter the computer. Computers, whether analog (remember those?) or digital, are physical devices, operating by known physical principles (more or less). And they process information, whatever that is—and believe me, just what it is, that’s a tad problematic once you get out of some very narrow conceptual confines. Moreover, you know what, boys and girls? If a computer can process enough information fast enough, it’ll be able to think. Really. Think. And so we’ve now shoved thinking onto the inanimate side of that line.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Three cheers: hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! Outstanding! Awesome! Way cool!

It gets better boys and girls, it really does.

Plants are alive, no? Yes. Can they think? No. Animals are alive, no? Yes. Can they think? No. Humans are alive, no? Yes. Can they think? YES! That’s right, boys and girls, we’re alive and we can think. Other things are alive, but they can’t think. It follows that thinking therefore implies aliveness.

Umm, err, Buffalo Bob? Yes, kid. I don’t think it follows at all, Buffalo Bob, you see . . . That’s right, kid. You don’t think. Now get lost. Now, where was I. Oh yeah.

If thinking implies aliveness, then our thinking computers must be alive, no? And since out thinking computers are made of inanimate matter according to known physical principles, it follows that they’re really dead and that, by analogy, anything that’s like the computer must, in fact, be dead, in principle. Since the human mind is like the computer, it follows, as the night the day, that the human mind is dead. If the mind is dead, then so must the body follow it into the kingdom of the dead.

The whole world, thus conceived, is dead.

Q.E.D.

Three cheers: hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! Outstanding! Awesome! Way cool!

Rock Paper Scissors

There is a term of art for what just happened: BULLSHIT! (pardon my French). Such is modern thought on these matters.

Computers are amazing devices. Really. And attempts to explain them as “just ones and zeros” are, as Marvin Minsky has pointed out somewhere, deeply deceptive. Ones and zeros, yes, sorta. But JUST? ones and zeros. No. Not quite.

What they are and what they do is quite complex and, despite the fact that we’ve built them according to known physical principles, we don’t really know how they work, or why they sometimes CRASH! As they most always do. The hardware, yes, that’s what we understand, more or less. The software, well, that’s a mess, has been for years and years. That’s where most of the bugs show up, in the software. The usage, “bug”, is a metaphor, or whatever, but they’re not at all understood and software that is bug-free is rare.

Think about that: We build them, but we don’t understand them. It’s like they’re always more than what we’ve designed. We build them, but we don’t understand them. They’re always withdrawing from us. Always. We build them, but we don’t understand them.

Computers have yet to think, nor is there any obvious prospect that they will do so in the foreseeable future. No doubt they will, in the not so distant future, do things, amazing things, that we cannot now forsee. But thinking . . .

The trouble is, we don’t know what thinking is, not really, not deeply. That’s why Turing had to think up that pesky test of his. The Turing test is a way for testing for thought without having to know what thought is. If the electromechanical thing can fool us . . . Well, it’s a dodgy business that Turing test. For what it’s worth, we haven’t been fooled yet. Whether or not we will be in the future . . .

Speaking of which, some of these Howdy Doody metaphysicians believe that one day the computers will outthink us and, out of the goodness of their thoughtful but dead little hearts, will make room in their capacious but dead little bowels for us to upload ourselves and so become immortal thoughts circulating endlessly in the nether regions of the Big Computer.

Can you believe that shit (pardon my French)? Well they do, and they’re the ones telling us we can’t use vitalist/animist language. It’s superstitious, or something.

Any anthropologist will tell you what’s going on. Taboo. Purity and Danger, to invoke the seminal work of Mary Douglas. The inanimate has been conceived as pure. Life, by contrast, is impure, it’s pollution. Life stinks up the universe. And yet here we are, alive, and s/thinking.

The computer as thinking machine—that’s what they were called when I was a kid, thinking machines—is a desperate attempt to purge the universe of life. We’ve already been through the drill: Computers are dead, computers think, that which thinks is alive, therefore life is really, in metaphysical principle, dead.

It’s the old deconstructive circle: rock, paper, scissors.

As an exercise, ponder this, grasshopper: Computers in Western science fiction typically go nuts and attempt to destroy all humans. Computers in Japanese science fiction, by contrast, are more concerned about living amicably with humans (cf. The Robot at Subaltern). There’s a deep and abiding animist undercurrent in Japanese culture that’s alive, and sanctioned, today. Mere accidental coincidence?

And that old deconstructive circle? It’s Chinese, then Japanese.