IN THE SHADOW OF THE MACHINE

This is a brilliant and penetrating study of the prehistory of the computer in relation to the evolution of human consciousness, drawing on many primary sources and illustrated with diagrams and photos to support the overall argument. In the light of our deep reliance on digital technology, Jeremy asks about the philosophical and spiritual significance of this dependence in terms of our relationship to nature and indeed the shape of our very future. Taking this historical view enables readers to understand the gradual mechanisation of the mind and the emergence of what Rupert Sheldrake calls mechanomorphic thinking: we invent machines, then explain ourselves in terms of them.

The book begins with an exposition of participative consciousness in the ancient world, where humans not only did not feel themselves separate from nature, but also understood its significance from within. He discusses ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia before moving on to Greece where the centre of gravity begins to move from the poet to the philosopher, from imagination to logic, with the early example of Odysseus as clever, guileful and even instrumental in his approach. There is a distrust of the misuse of logic and rhetoric if it is not used in the service of spiritual insight.

This brings in a major theme of the book, namely the functions of noesis or gnosis compared with dianoia or ratio as analytical reasoning. The nous - later intellectus, or the intellect - is the higher or deeper intelligence and contemplative faculty enabling unitive spiritual insight, as also highlighted in my review of The Scientist and the Saint below. Even for Aristotle, the nous is oriented towards Being as an expression of 'something within them that is divine' (p. 40). This domain was one of spiritual light and was familiar to Plotinus as well as mediaeval mystics. Crucially, for Plotinus, Jeremy explains that 'the spiritual light is also the medium of contemplative thought, by which we come to know' - hence 'human knowing arises through participation in this formative, creative and intrinsically moral principle of light'. Gradually, this spiritual understanding of light was lost and reality came to be conceived of in outer, material and mechanical terms associated with the emergence of an objectifying and detached awareness prioritising rationality over feeling. In this respect, the abolition of monasteries with their contemplative orientation was hugely significant.

Jeremy goes into this process in considerable detail, including the gradual ascendancy of dialectic over grammar, of logic over language, along with the rise of nominalism – he characterises the thought patterns of formal logic as intrinsically mechanical and illustrated through the development of the camshaft. The mechanical clock enables time to be measured and represents a gradual shift away from qualitative to quantitative approaches culminating in the work of Descartes and Galileo where the quantitative assumes epistemological and ontological priority with the widely accepted distinction between primary and secondary qualities – the first measurable and objective while the second merely subjective, also corresponding to the ancient distinction between knowledge and opinion. Significantly, secondary qualities also include consciousness. The 17th-century scientific revolution sees the establishment of scientific academies and a shift of epistemological authority away from the Church to empirical science.

The role of Francis Bacon is discussed at length in terms of the mechanisation of the process of thinking resulting in the automation of logic and an attitude of control and exploitation of nature. Jeremy sees the idea that the human mind can be disciplined to operate like a machine as the seed idea of the computer corresponding to a reimagining of the human being in the image of the machine. One of the most fascinating passages is his discussion of Bacon's invention of the binary code with different combinations of the letters a and b. Here there is no mention of his leading role in Elizabethan Rosicrucianism nor of the different kind of concealment represented by his possible involvement in the authorship of the Shakespeare plays. It is true, however, that his primary influence has been on the development of scientific thinking, and in this respect there is an interesting comparison with Newton, whose alchemical and theological writings were neglected until comparatively recently. Cultural influence is often shaped by social and historical factors and trends.

The invention of the vacuum as a break in the natural order was highly significant, and the relevant experiments are described – as is also the case with electricity later in the book. Although Pascal invented the first calculator in 1642, he did not equate calculation with reason and thinking, as did other later thinkers. Jeremy describes the work of Leibniz in the development of thinking machines and programming language in the light of what he calls the myth of Binarius. The publication of La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine in 1749 continued the development of the idea of the human being as a mechanism, then the Industrial Revolution showed how men could be enslaved by their machines. The book continues with an exploration of the loom and the punch card, and the role of Charles Babbage in developing his Analytical Engine where he asserted that 'the whole of the development and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery' (p. 218). Hence mental operations are conceived as merely operations of matter - one can readily appreciate how this thinking has been extended by computers and artificial intelligence; all that was missing for Babbage was electrical circuits. Interestingly, Jeremy discusses electricity as the pseudo-life principle of mechanistic philosophy.

The process continues with the decomposition of language and the constriction of thought processes in an electrification of thinking mediated by the work of many 19th-century scientists; also by Frege's development of symbolic logic where language is stripped down and dehumanised and the emphasis is the underlying logical form rather than content as such. Programming languages derived from symbolic logic are 'cast adrift from living human language and bound into a binary code' (p. 258). There is no room for ambiguity or indeed subtlety. It is here as well as at other points in the argument that it would have been useful to draw on the cultural analysis of the role of the right and left brain hemispheres set out in Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. The analysis in the two books has much in common, and I think Jeremy's narrative could have been enhanced by including this perspective – Iain would see the mechanisation of the mind as the triumph of left hemisphere thinking leading to an imbalance in our culture, a conclusion with which Jeremy would doubtless agree. A quote from Maxwell (p. 270) exemplifies left hemisphere expression when he writes that 'the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers' - this is fine as far as it goes but not if it claims to be a complete account of reality in terms of equations.

In his final chapter, Jeremy reflects on a possible metaphysical or qualitative perspective on electricity involving the deeper intelligence or intellect. It is interesting to reflect that the last 40 years of near death experiences and the work of people like Sir Alister Hardy following up on William James have exposed us to accounts of immediate encounters with spiritual light and love, which experiencers insist carries a greater sense of reality and normal sensory experience. This challenges us to accept this insight as genuine contemplative knowledge, as spiritual traditions have always maintained. As Jeremy writes, this light reflects divine goodness and has a distinctive moral quality.

He sees a parallel between the sages of mediaeval Europe recognising the affinity between the inner nature of light and the contemplative thinking of the intellectus, and the discovery by modern rationalists of a similar affinity between electricity and a logical analysis of the ratio. This latter faculty enabled us to penetrate subnature, but it is now imperative that we recover and live from this deeper intelligence or intellect as primary: 'a deeper, wiser, contemplative intelligence must be present alongside logical thought processes and must act as their guide, for it alone recalls us to ourselves, and to our freedom' (p. 287). As Jeremy rightly remarks, a truly human future depends on this, and his book is a spiritual beacon reminding us that our essence transcends the material and the mechanical.