Heroes Not Zombies

“A machine has an extrinsic purpose – not its own but that if the person who made it. It exists purely to achieve an and: another being’s end. By contrast, a melody has an intrinsic purpose: it’s hardly pointless, but it has no other point than itself.” – Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things

Despite the fact that we can now understand reality through the lens of complexity science, the mechanistic, materialistic model remains the dominant one. I hope that will change soon.

We are not machines. We are not “machine like”. Machines are built by someone to serve a purpose set by whoever built them. To consider a human being, or indeed, any other living creature as a machine reduces them. It dehumanises people, devitalises Life. It sets up societies where individuals are reduced to cogs in a machine, replaceable, dispensable, having value only when they deliver for whoever hires them.

We are more like music than we are machines. Every one of us sings a unique melody, the melody we instantly recognise because every individual is unique.

I often refer to how everyone has their own unique story to tell…the one which allows them to know who they are, to make sense of life, and to communicate their inner experience to others. But this passage comparing machines to melodies makes me realise that we don’t just tell unique stories, we sing our singular songs.

Think how we use metaphors such as “singing from the same hymn sheet”, or of “working in harmony”, being “in tune with each other”.

Isn’t life a performance of a beautiful composition, one which we create and share as we live, day by day, moment by moment?