21st-century Christian Philosopher

If we try to cram the brain into the mold of a computer, we might forget how rife computers are with design.

Okay, mystic and materialist alike can accept that they are designed. But, that is not precisely what I think I’m writing about. So, I’ll mention waterfalls: Water cascades naturally down rock; somebody seeing the beauty of waterfalls, can design one for their backyard. The natural and the man made waterfalls operate on the same principle. In one case the placement is accidental, in another it has been specifically constructed.

That’s not what I’m talking about: turning accident into design. I’m talking about a computer: designed from the ground up. Electrons and electronic circuits form the bottom most layer that can be considered “accidental” (unless we capitulate and throw the entire human experience into the “accident” bin).

You can create a waterfall in your backyard that does what any waterfall does, only at your specification. But can you build a system of waterfalls so that the system does something marvelous, like perhaps, watering your lawn in the heat of summer? If you could build it, does that consist of what nature “does” with waterfalls.

Waterfalls happen like so: Water rolls down hill to the sea. The cohering force of water actually pulls more water over, as the first falls over the edge. Also, the speed of the current, influenced by the free fall of the water ahead of it, cuts a channel and also forms a vacuum of sorts, influencing more water to follow its path.

Likewise with electronics, all electrical current happens when negatively-charged particles are drawn to areas predominated by positively-charged particles. Conducting electrons through the “sea” of electrons that occurs in metals, also follows nature. Thus getting electricity to flow down a metal object (not so often seen in nature) is a matter of a positively charged “end” which draws the electrons. Of course, this case was seen first with lightning rods long before electronic circuits.

So a computer is a system of electronics in which we exploit the natural patterns of electrons in metal to represent digits and states.

Now, we could object that we can exploit falling water to soak our lawns, so it’s not that much different. But of course, the wetting of lawns with water is rather analog. Applying forces and wetting lawns are things water can do by itself. If this were analogous to the computer, then we would find something elementary about electrons playing tic-tac-toe or painting pretty rectangles for our laying down of thoughts or amusement.

This is kind of like saying, as well, that there is something about wood to be smashed into fibers and knitted into sheets and bleached (perhaps by the sun), and something about wood fibers, that oily goo smeared on it is “meant” to be construed as “meaningful”. (Please remember, when we talk “naturally”, we are invoking the naturalist viewpoint.)

This is what the “Humans as Nature” perspective misses. Now, we can imagine a case where papyrus reeds have fallen over in a clump, dried in the hot sun, bleached, and became trampled on by, say an animal that had stepped in a puddle of bitumen, leaving decipherable marks. And we can imagine that we might have gotten the idea to mark clumps of papyrus with goo for first drawing and then communicating by more abstract shapes for words, and then sounds.

But the marking of papyrus with pigments to indicate a linear sequence of whatever does not occur “naturally”. Incidental, telltale markings by some accidental chain of events might occur without conscious effort. But drawings do not; and simplified drawings as symbols and letters do not. So if this were the case of how man discovered the conjunction of the properties of papyrus, sun, and ink; then it’s much the same as discovering the electrical current. Writing and computing have to do with using these things as a clean slate, in which we can embed meaning.