Alan Watts wrote, in his collection of essays, “Does it matter?”
an enormous amount of current intellectual, philosophical, and even scientific discourse strikes me increasingly as absurd. It is an attempt to translate a nonlinear and multidimensional system of vibrations into a linear (alphabetical or mathematical) system of symbols; and it just can’t be done
Human beings have learned to do amazing things using mathematics, technology and our advances in materialist, reductionist sciences. But these advances tend to fool us into thinking that we can approach all of Life with the same ideas, concepts and methods. Alan Watts nails this error with his usual focused clarity. He wrote that back in the 1960s but 50 years on we are still making the same fundamental mistake.
Living organisms are not machines. Natural ecosystems are not elaborate mechanical technologies. We can’t squeeze open, dynamic phenomena into the same mechanical models which work in the fields of engineering and technology.
So there is a lot of fooling going on? When will the penny drop and the fundamental mistakes be seen for what they are – an illusion?
Sent from my iPad
Human machines, machine humans. Technology, may in the end, be biological itself.