Heroes Not Zombies

I’d love to see the machine model of reality become much less used than it is. I understand how it came about. The rise of the machines which occurred during, or led to, the Industrial Revolution, transformed our societies and how we live together.

But we’ve learned a lot since those days. We looked inside the atom, that so called indivisible building block or reality and found that inside there’s nothing but waves and interactions. We mapped the human genome which was presented like a piece of computer code which determined our health and fate, and discovered that genes are turned in or off by environmental, personal factors. We’ve learned that the more interactions there are within a system, the more it functions as a whole, acquiring characteristics such as adaptability, and creative, emergent growth. We’ve discovered that the entire planet exists as a complex, living organism.

All of those discoveries have taught us that Life, and individual lives, are not machine like. We are not like machines. We are not like computers. We are embedded, massively interactive beings, each of us unique and particular, and unpredictable at any detailed level.

I hope, as we go forward, we start to live according to that reality, not the wrong headed machine model, but the flowing, interacting, complex adaptive system one.