We Are Not Computers: An Invitation to Stop Using Machine Metaphors

A call to stop describing humanity through machine, mechanical or computing language....

The First Technologies

The first technologies stank of stone, ash and tree sap.

They were primal, and grisly.

Fire, rocks and clubs.

Emerging as hominids in a world of blood, bone and the deep base rhythms of wilderness, shaped how we understood tools.

And make no mistake, humans are tool users.

Within the animal kingdom this trait is quite rare, and is shared by Corvids, otters, primates, and ants primarily.

Out of all human capacities, this is perhaps one of the few that we truly excel in; it’s likely impossible to ‘think’ as a human being, outside the context of ‘tooling’.

Your hands are a marvel of organic ‘engineering’, and your brain devotes more neural tissue to ‘operating’ them, than any other area of the body precisely because we were designed by deep time, to use tools.

Human hands are tool making hands.

From the first tools (which were all hunting and cooking implements) we moved to making clothing, blankets, baskets, earthen huts, pelted tents, more refined weapons, and then...ritual objects that called, concentrated and expressed power.

But more critically: the tools we work with alter how we engage with the environment…as we shape the world with our tools, they shape our understanding of our place in it.

To ‘tool’ is a part of human sense making.

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Welcome to The Machine

Welcome my son

Welcome to the machine

What did you dream?

It's all right, we told you what to dream

You dreamed of a big star

He played a mean guitar

He always ate in the Steak Bar

He loved to drive in his Jaguar

- Pink Floyd

Our use of fire, stones and clubs has morphed and mutated (as most phenomena tends to) into modern machines.

We once relied on simple primal tools (and a highly developed skill set for using them) for survival...we now use complex tools (typically with very little individual skill in using them), for the same purpose.

While not a universal truth there is a tendency we observe: the simpler the tool, the more skilled the user must be to perform complex task with it.

Consider the difference between a sword and an assault rifle.

Much of modern machinery is made to be as ‘user friendly and low skill’ as possible, by a few select people who posses specialist skill sets in making them.

What does this say about how we understand our place in the world?

You probably do not know how most of the technology you use daily actually works, and if you do, you are in the minority.

Once…practically all humans could make fire from scratch (a refined skill), make tools of exquisite craftsmanship, and perform complex weaving from materials that did not give up their gifts easily.

While today you can buy a Native American headdress online, the act of actually making one was an ordeal that could take months, if not years, and required the human being to be skilled and highly attuned to environmental information flows.

Feathers, leather, rope, gathered dyes, songs, prayers, offerings, Ancestors, devotion…

You had to work for it.

In this era ‘the human being as technology’ reigned supreme.

The industrial revolution has brought with it incredible ease for a select few (the few who weave the modern narrative), and ushered in a time of cohabitation with and dependence upon machines, who do not require the average user to work for their gifts.

Evolution deposited within us the desire to work as little as possible because most task in the past were physically arduous.

This challenge called us to respond with creativity.

Now we have numb unimaginative hands made for typing, turning nobs, and filling test tubes.

Lots of output, for very little input.

Evolution's wet dream…or so, the modern world would have us believe.

Remember everything has a price, and there are no free rides; so while we may be expending less energy at the ‘control panel’, something else is being sacrificed.

Today...the toll we must pay is that of our innate humanity.

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The Trans-humanist Current & Antlered Beings

When you observe primitive hunter gatherer mythology, you notice a vast array of humans displaying antlers, elemental outgrowths, and/or various animal parts.

Shapeshifters, shamans, and magicians morph and mutate as well.

The becoming of something ‘other’ and in this manner, they become something ‘more’.

Shape-shifting is a part of being human.

From outright shamanic transmutations aided by psychedelics deep in the Jungle, to the wolf pelt worn by the hunter, to the ceremonial dresses worn by indigenous dancers…

We are malleable and change shape.

These transformations were a source of power, that would alter our abilities in profound ways, allowing us to take on the strength of ox, or the cunning of fox or the multidimensionality of Jaguar.

Viking Berserkers were known to dawn wolf and bear pelts, perform complex ritualistic dances, all while exposing themselves to extreme heat…

Then they would erupt into battle as unstoppable forces.

This is technology.

This was both an aspect of our emphatic nature resonating with the living creatures around us, and a type of spiritual technology we could cultivate.

Modern machine culture with it’s cushy cache of low skill gifts has led us to believe in a mechanical mythos and worship at the altar of a technocratic god.

So…

We envision a future of humans merged with machines.

Metal implants, neural chips and prosthetic limbs.

Sex robots, virtual realities and online gaming.

All this is encouraging us to become more like the machines we use as tools.

This is so pervasive that we map onto human organisms a ‘machine & computer language’ to describe organic phenomena.

This is a problem…we are not computers, or machines at all.

Any attempt to draw those parallels is basically a hatchet job cutting us apart at the seams and mistaking the modern mythos for the nature of reality.

+You and I have more in common with a bear, than we do with a laptop.

+You and I are more like an ocean, than a Rolls Royce.

+You and I more like an Oak tree, than a rocket ship.

When we become the animals and elements around us we touch on something that already lives in our bones, for all life comes from a common Ancestor, and the great elemental forces that echo throughout nature, are themselves Ancestors.

In this way, to dawn the antlers of an elk is to breath with our kin…

But to surgically implant a microchip into our brain is a trans-humanist hybrid breeding ground, meant to turn us into ‘something else’.

Yes, metal is an elemental force too, but microchips are not.

Do you really want to become that?

I don’t.

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Living with The Machine People

Before we continue, I want to draw a line in the sand.

I do not hate machines by any means.

Just recently my father invited me to drive his decked out $200,000.00 Porsche, and this was the first time I have driven a car of that ‘caliber’.

Honestly, I fell in love with it.

It literally it quickened my blood, excited me in ways I was not aware a machine could, and gave me a sense of ‘power’.

Not because of the supposed ‘status’ a car like that might confer (for which I could care less), but the sheer visceral experience of driving car like that is something else altogether.

The sounds it makes as it shifts gears…

The velvety smooth ways it takes sharp turns with ease at high speeds…

The raw ‘horse power’ and sprinting prowess it possesses that makes it feel like your riding a stallion…

Well...suffice to say, it ruined me for other cars (which is a shame since I am not the type to buy that kind of vehicle, even if I could afford it).

From an animist perspective, all is breathing the breath of life, and thus, I could feel the ‘essence’ of the car, as a kind of living force designed with a very specific purpose in mind.

It is a ‘being’.

We live with the machine people, and this is simply a fact of modern life.

We can honor that all emerges from the one source, and understand how we are different than they are.

We can appreciate their gifts, and respect their ‘race’ but still retain the integrity of our soft Ancestral body that oozes sexual fluids, courses with blood and flows with organic rhythms.

The greater question is: how to do we live in right relationship with them?

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Spiritual Technicians & Machine Metaphors

‘Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.’ ― Benjamin Lee Whorf

Words are magical.

They carry patterns of energy, and underlying intent.

This is why the word ‘spell’ is used to describe both the sequence of letters that create coherent language, and the casting of magical incantations.

The root word "spellam" initially referred to a "story, saying, tale, history, or narrative.

In the Indo-European tradition, words were consistently regarded as having magical properties or holding a potent, dangerous magic.

The world is made of stories.

Language both expresses the underlying stories we inhabit, and also actively shapes consciousness by shaping stories.

Here is a metaphor for you: language is like a blowtorch in the hands of a skilled technician, applied to metal…it shapes and expresses the art that lives inside our soul.

Especially when it comes to the metaphors that we use to describe reality, because all interpretation is metaphorical; said another way...reality is so utterly complex, that we only ever create metaphorical representations of what is occurring.

Basically, we tell stories...myths about the world.

With that understanding in place, let me ask you a question.

Have you ever wondered why we compare an elite athlete to a ‘well oiled machine’?

This simple statement holds within it a vast set of assumptions about the nature of reality that reflect the underlying trans-humanist undertow.

In truth, the two are incomparable: while a Porsche has incredible power and speed, it’s capacities are inherently narrow in scope with little adaptability; while a human’s is broad. Humans can make love with reckless abandon, dance, fight, swim, dive, jump, throw, climb, run, lift, roll, and twist. No known machine even comes close.

+We can learn and adapt to new stimuli.

+We can repair and regenerate damage endogenously.

+We posses a deep ancestral intelligence that informs our capacities today.

The Porsche cannot and does not, for it can only do that it is was built for...by humans.

If we inhabited an ancient Savanah, we might still compare someone’s strength to a lions, or a skilled dancers grace to a gazelle, but today, people use the machine metaphors, because they observe machines more than lions and gazelles.

This holds even more true in the age where computer gods reign supreme.

I abhor the use of computer language to describe human behavior, skills or dynamics, for they always fall deeply short.

Where I find this machine language the most troubling is in modern spiritual circles (the spiritual technicians of our time), with the use of terms like:

• Download

• Upload

• Upgrade

• Optimize

• Program

• Install

• Bring Online

• Install

• Defrag

• Fix

I do not judge anyone for using this language (and have caught myself slip into this paradigm from time to time), because machines are the primary reference point many people have for how nature works.

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Nature Supports Modern Computation, but Is Not Defined by It

These metaphors are not harmless.

In their world view, you are nothing: expendable, removable and trivial.

All these terms describe reductionist, fragmented and machine based ways of orientating that violently break you down into small disposable pieces, like the products of a Chinese sweat shop.

Many of them carry economical or monetary implications, comparing aspects of us to disposable cellphones, computer files, or laptops in need of ‘new’ features.

It says…

Anything that isn’t the way you want is basically broken, cheap or needs to be made better by modern experts.

The modern ‘self improvement’ movement salivates over this, because it emerged from the ‘cloud’ that considers humans as expendable resources: commodities.

It sells you ‘not-enoughness’ for breakfast.

It’s painful, and hurts me deeply.

Human systems are crafted by an incredibly profound wisdom that reaches far beyond all these petty, 21st century commercialized designs.

In truth, many of our ‘limited patterns’ are often much more than parts in need of improvement..

They can be gifts, survival strategies, teachers, brake systems, clues, road markers and more…

Humans are multidimensional, multidirectional beings—open-ended, non-linear, and adaptable biological systems—carrying within us a history that spans billions of years.

These machine metaphors do not describe reality, they describe the modern environment and mythos, of dissected parts, the wiring under the board, and internet access.

They are useful for their purpose and in their fields, but not to describe all of reality.

All of these metaphors work pragmatically because nature supports computation, but modern computation is one iteration of technology.

One iteration does not define the whole.

Consider…

Ancient Egypt ran on ‘stone’, and their technology expressed that. The Sanskrit culture focused on ‘sound’, and they developed incredible sonic methods. Most indigenous cultures concentrated on ‘plants and animals’, and thus they developed hunting and gathering.

We run electricity through coper wires, motherboards and servers, because of the resources (metals) that we have access to, and the paradigms of physics we currently understand.

If advanced alien species do exist they are likely far beyond modern computation, the paradigms that support it, and likely having access to materials we cannot imagine.

Although binary code does appear to be a facet of nature, modern computation is one expression of that.

While Yin and Yang theory is another.

The universe is weirder and more complex than modern machines.

Beehives Are More Advanced Than Quantum Computers

‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’- Physicist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin in 1897

That was right before Planck, Einstein, Poincare, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Schrodinger discovered relativity, and Quantum mechanics.

Oof…

I bet Lord Kelvin turns in his grave every time someone reads his quote, in which case, I apologize for disturbing his slumber…but sometimes sacrifices have to be made.

The point is that science is always changing.

It is never ‘right’, only less wrong.

People treat quantum mechanics like the ‘truth’, but what will physics be in 30,000 years?

Unrecognizable.

This is why I cringe when people compare us to ‘quantum computers’.

No.

We are not ‘quantum computers’, despite what many modern teachers say. We are something much more dazzling, and beautifully mysterious than anything humans have dreamed up. The combined intelligence of all the scientist on earth cannot create a ‘single’ biological cell from scratch, yet quantum computers already exist. Let that settle in…

We reference modern machines as the ‘height’ of creation, when a ‘simple beehive’ far outweighs anything we have built.

It is a self sustaining, multiheaded communal organism that reproduces, moves, calculates, communicates, reorganizes, reassembles, defends or retreats; all done at high speeds.

The action of single beehive can pollinate multiple acres in one day (depending on the crop).

A single hive is so utterly vast in scope that building one that is identical to theirs is far beyond the reach of any human organization.

Each human being is much more complex than even this…

Why then would we compare the 4 billion year old human organism to a ‘quantum computer"‘.

The machine mythos.

Every time we claim we ‘download’ something, we are reducing ourselves so much more than we realize.

My Invitation to You

One of the great task of the modern spiritual teacher is to re-attune our use of language.

Language matters.

We weave spells with every word.

I want to invite you to work magic on the metaphors you use in order to rewild and re-enchant them.

This inurn helps re-wild and re-enchant us.

If this calls to you then:

Take your inspiration from functions clearly expressed in biological and organic systems, which are anchored in ancestral ways of knowing and older ways of reasoning.

We were birthed from the primeval soup of ancient oceans, deep forest and open savanna, not sterile labs.

Our bones resonate with the bones of elk, whose antlers are already antennae that can transmit and receive signal.

It all remains a grand mystery, but when describing human dynamics they will be closer to the truth.

I want to offer a list of terms to play with that could replace the previous list of machine metaphors (which is not exhaustive or prescriptive), just exploratory.

• Absorb or Receive

• Transmit or Express

• Metamorphosis or Advance

• Balance or Harmonize

• Repattern or Recondition

• Increase Capacity or Ability

• To Sing Into Being or To Weave

• Dissolve or Digest

• Track or Echolocate

• Alchemize or Reshape

I leave you with these terms as seeds. May you water them, and bless them with the sunlight of your attention, that they may grow and bare fruit.