The man machine
Are we merely automatons performing sets of processes and operations?..
I have only read Zarathustra and at the time thought it most poetic and in a sense spiritual [lols], now I see it as something of a mockery of the world dragging it down to its most base and machine like components. I probably still misunderstand him and I am sure I will be put right on that, so let the lesson begin.
Instead of thinking of the world as a confused mass, I think that to some degree we can think of the world as like a room full of people each representing a sphere of thought ~ where the masses fit into one or a multiplicity of such spheres and each may be considered as a force at work in the world. I can happily hop into a body, be its persona, play the part, say the words the character would speak and thence see the perspective, so here I want to get a better understanding of this vast topic so as to understand the person in the room.
From what I gather it all began with this chap; Julien Offray de La Mettrie who wrote a diatribe with the title L’homme machine (Man a Machine ) in 1748.
cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/LaMettrie/Machine/
From that link;
Matter cannot think, this is where materialism falls down, we presume the brain to be like a computer but as we have noted before; information only exists in our minds, one imagines that the pc has masses of info within it but it has none, only a mass of switches going on/off 01, we think the screen we are looking at has physical colour but it has none, ~ I think it plausible that the metaphysical qualia of colour is possibly a shared entity, indeed I doubt if much of what we think is of our minds is. In fact there is not much of the ‘experienced world’ which is me or the material!? [perhaps nothing is of my mind], In which case both the spiritual and personal perspective is lacking along with the material too, perhaps there is a third option and our worlds [personal & material] work according to that, welcome to the universal world to wit both mind and material are servants.
This is what got me thinking about all of this…
I was watching a documentary the other day called ‘Krautrock’ the experimental music scene that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krautrock
To cut a long story short, essentially david bowie visited germany and was much influenced by this collection of individuals who in turn were very or fundamentally even, influenced by Nietzsche’s work.
This becomes apparent when bowie notes in his lyric; ‘we could be heroes* forever and ever*’ where the comparative is that Nietzsche proposes the Übermensch* and an eternal recurrence*. Fundamental to Nietzschean philosophy - if I may, is atheism and an almost automaton like perspective upon us and the world, and we see this reflected in much of the Krautrock scene.
Kraftwerk and tangerine dream wrote music which were often repetitive and mechanistic, with lyrics stating things like; ‘I’m the operator of my pocket calculator’, as if to mock the human condition. Then also with ‘the model’ we get; ‘she’s a model and she’s looking good’ and here the message may be that looking good means nothing when we are automatons. Later we get gary numan [ I am a massive fan] with his dare I say, Nazi-esque look [he is not one of course] comparing humanity to robots in songs like ‘we are glass’ and ‘are friends electric’ [one of the best songs ever Imho]. Equally he contrasts human behaviour with sets of processes and operations in his ‘down in the park’ and ‘cars’ songs, where the melody of the latter is especially mocking. Come to think of it nearly all his music of this period says a similar thing in essence.
It appears that Nietzsche’s work has played out over time in many ways though with some common themes, in fact one must ask exactly how many individuals and bands, how many singles and albums does it take to state what is essentially the same ‘inane’ message! Ok so we are merely automatons performing sets of processes and operations, you could look at life like that, but is this reductionism in the extreme and one which I feel completely misses the point ~ that life is in the experiencing of it not the processes which combine to make it, or is this simply the wrong way to look at life through Nietzsche’s work?
Secondly I may add that our understanding of the brain has changed, we don’t think in binary but instead three-fold, this third option gives us the ability to make decisions even if that sphere is largely causal.
So what do you chaps think of this movement, the music the philosophy and the persona thereof; can automatons be heroes? Is that not a contradiction in the respective meanings, and what really is the point! …Are we merely automatons performing sets of processes and operations?
