Of Machines (new)
I had to polish up a piece of writing and submit it to the school literary magazine for an English project a while back. I went back and picked this post, and changed it a lot since my opinion changed a lot. Apparently it got accepted. I guess it’s nice that other people appreciated it, but to be honest, the school magazine doesn’t really reach too many readers. Anyhow, here’s the new version.
Of Machines
The theory of evolution states that a creature will slowly adapt to its environment, and if it does not, then it will die. The fastest to adapt becomes dominant, and so the strongest creature emerges on top, and the weakest is left lonely, awaiting its death. In this way, the animal kingdom is formed. What we have left is the cream of the crop. The animals left alive are those who could stay alive the best in their environment. So if an animal is nothing more than the best fit creature for its environment, then is everything we feel, and everything we are nothing but a result of where we live? If the Earth hadn’t formed exactly how it has, then no one would have exactly the same genetics, and we wouldn’t have made the decisions that we have. None of us would be the same person we are. If the theory of evolution is correct, then we truly are a product of the environment.
It all makes sense, even if it’s a little depressing. Considering that, at what point does a creature evolve so that it no longer adapts itself to better fit its environment, but its environment to better fit itself? Maybe everything changes at that point. Maybe once the animal starts changing its surrounding, the whole equation is shot. It can make decisions for itself. It is no longer defined by its surroundings. It could be why humans are so mixed up – wired up with useless things like emotions.
Consider genetics. If you think about it, genetics are really only slightly more complex than the code that tells machines what to do. Are humans just a string of zeros and ones, on the basic level? Or is there something more? This is where theology comes into the mix. Could our decision making, our emotions, could they lie not in the brain, but something else altogether? A soul, maybe. Or a mind that isn’t in our heads as grey matter, but totally beyond our understanding. It’s not like it’s never been thought of before, but I have to mention it. Maybe the soul was something that formed when humans started to make choices for themselves.
Lets put the whole “souls” thing aside for now, though, and assume that we really are just machines that are trying to preserve themselves (even if they are a little messed up). Genetics are a code that writes itself. It starts out as a single-celled organism, and then it begins to adapt, making its vessel bigger, and more intelligent. So intelligent, in fact, that it begins to destroy itself. Animals attack each other, because if they didn’t then there would be too many of them, and they would run out of room. And then they get more intelligent: humans arrive on the scene, and they’re so smart they start to mess with their environment. They build shelters. They cut down forests. They harvest animal meat like a vegetable. And they discover chemistry, which is where things begin to get gritty. Humans start finding chemicals that activate the pleasure center of their brain, and by the time they find out its bad, they’re addicted to them. They develop chemicals that inadvertently destroy the protection we have against radiation from space. And then they figure it all out, and try to clean it up. So here we are, fighting global warming, drug cartels, and deforestation. And it’s all our fault.
You could rightfully make the argument that the Taoists have made; that we would never be in so much trouble if we had never learned anything. But even if we could go back and change it, nearly all of us would rather keep our intelligent society and try to fix things than go back and make it so that we had never wrecked anything. And it’s true, really; the simplest machine works the best. At first glance, it seems like just telling the machine to learn and think for itself would be the simplest way to do things. The only problem is that the machine quickly makes itself complicated. It can learn the wrong things, which will misinform its thinking and learning in the future. It gets the idea to explain the things it doesn’t know not by observing and thinking, but by explaining it all by itself. Thus we have religion, and the theory that the universe revolves around the Earth, and all sorts of other things.
It remains to be seen if the human race can fix what’s gone wrong. Eventually, we can learn enough to undo the damage we’ve done to ourselves. The question is whether we can do that fast enough to save ourselves. We’re either going to need to patch up this planet which we’ve nearly ruined, or ditch it and blast off to a new one. People have been thinking about spaceships to colonize other planets, in case we mess up Earth so bad that it won’t ever get better. At this rate, never having put people on anything in space farther away than the moon, it’s unlikely that we can find our way far enough into space to find a hospitable planet before Earth finally gives out.
The human race is just a machine that was built badly. But it’s a machine that can learn, and adapt, and grow into something strong enough to save itself. Just as long as time doesn’t have anything to say about it.
