Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

In part one, I briefly talked about the seemingly coincidental similarity between the exponentially increasing complexity of reality in general and the ever quickening development and advancement of electronic technologies (among many other things not mentioned). The Universe (as far as we can tell) began with a sluggish pace that took billions of years of time to go by before molecules could form, later whole solar systems, then life itself, and now the advanced technologies that our own minds have given birth to. So too has the progression of these technologies started off at a sluggish pace with inventions like the wheel thousands of years ago, and then things snowballed from there on. Though the wheel probably wasn’t mans first paradigm-shifting invention. It was more likely to be the club, or some form of weapon used for either hunting or self defense.

So where are all of these technologies going? A more intriguing question might be: Do they have a single unifying purpose? Do the last several thousands of years of technological ingenuity represent a process equivalent to laying a foundation for something greater? Is there some common goal down the road that technology is helping to bring us towards? Scientists of old (or rather, those who are advocates of metaphysical naturalism or accidentalism… in other words, people who prefer to remove awe and wonder out of reality and turn everything into shades of gray; opponents of teleology) would like you to think that there could be no such thing. That the past 13 or 14 some billion years, and the formation of galaxies, our solar system and life as we know it is all a grand accident. An accidentalist would say that you have eyes not because you needed to see, but because you accidentally evolved them into being over the course of several millions of years and your species survived as a result. On the other hand, teleologist would suggest that a species evolved eyes in order to achieve an underlying desire to see and further adapt to its environment.

It is pretty interesting debate…until you notice that the accidentalist argument doesn’t take things such as creativity, the imagination and free will into account. You don’t accidentally invent something purposelessly with no goal in mind. You don’t do or think of anything without some form of goal in mind. I would find it difficult to argue that the computer was invented accidentally. The computer was invented as a result of what you might call “corrective feedback.” That is to say the short comings of a previous technology (or the genetics of a particular life form) were corrected (advanced) with the invention of a better technology based off of the previous generation, or by the combination of two complimentary technologies (or two survival oriented strains of DNA). An early example of this dates back to the addition of a governor being added to the steam engine. Another example might be the changing of skin color as a result of how much sunlight several generations of a particular group of humans are exposed to. Do you get a tan by accident?

Let’s take this notion of teleology, run with it and suggest that the universe and everything in it is goal oriented. It gets really interesting when you apply this philosophy to biology alone and presume the progression of evolution to have a goal of some sort. So what’s the goal of evolution and has it been reached yet? In short, I don’t think the goal has been reached. Some might say the mere existence of the human race seems achievement enough. After all, we are the most intelligent species on this planet if not the whole universe (as far as we have been able to detect). No other species has surpassed us in ability to invent and create new technologies. But this view presumes humans to be the perfected product of evolution at its finite best. Do you think the human race represents the perfected finality of biological evolution? You can’t answer that before attempting to figure out why we evolved into what we are in the first place.

This is where I briefly talk about this “conquest of dimensionality.” What do I mean by that? Well, if you go way back into the dawn of simple life, look at what it was capable of perceiving: jack squat. A single celled organisms or slimes stabilized on clay surfaces at most had practically no sense of the environment around it. They were immobile, had no perception of light or space or time. No ability to conceive of the past, present or future. But through evolution, what you see is the development of sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, the classic 5 senses in other words) and organs of locomotion (arms, legs, fins, etc). And then…there’s the human brain. That one mysterious evolutionary development which we still have no idea how to interpret or make sense of. What we do know about it is it’s probably one of the most complex things in all the universe. (And it’s still evolving).

Out of this brain, over the course of thousands of years, we have worked collectively in one form or another to give birth to social systems, technologies, creative ideas, language (very important), so on and so forth. To what end? Nobody knows for certain just yet, but to answer the question about whether or not the goal of biological evolution under the wing of teleology has been achieved would appear to be a plain and clear NO! Why? Because biology (human biology, anyway) appears to be attempting to find a way to co-evolve with machines, if not become machines. (Enter the Twilight Zone theme song). Why? It’s a strategy for survival.

In part 3: The symbiotic relationships of man and machine — past, present and future.