Augmented Reality

Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles have taken augmented reality (AR) to the next level. Rather than trying to put digital content onto the real world, they convert the real world into digital content and augment that. (This, at least, is my reading of the ‘virtually lag-free’ statement on Apple’s web page.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series occasionally riffs on the potentially dystopian aspects of AR, such as in the episode ‘Men Against Fire‘ and ‘White Christmas‘. But AR has some interesting implications from an ecocyborg perspective.

These googles are effectively augmenting their humans — they, like many everyday IT tools we take for granted — turn us into cyborgs while using them. Critically, however, they are a ‘shortcut’ to ecocyborgs. They can change our perceptions of the environment around us digitally, rather than through engineering. Do ecocyborgs necessarily have to be meat (and/or veg) ware? Must they be entirely physical phenomena, rather than at least partly virtual? By altering how we see the world around us, these kinds of tool might be able to help us live comfortably in spaces we would ‘naturally’ find uncomfortable. It is not so difficult to imagine a company running your habitation telling you to leave your goggles on for ‘the best user experience’…

Much more interesting, however, is that the virtual augmentation of physical space manifests multiple realities. If everyone is wearing goggles, there is no longer a single, common, shared world-out-there to discuss. Instead there are multiple, independently constructed realities — parallel digital overlays on the (single) physical world — that cannot necessarily be unified. Ecocyborgs are the death of nature; augmented reality the death of science. Sort of. You’ll still die if you walk off a physical cliff your goggles have told you is a more pleasing plain. But maybe your grieving friends can use simulations of you to continue to interact with their conceptualizations of you after you are dead. (Another theme explored by Black Mirror.) Perhaps this can be done so seamlessly that they don’t even know you are dead — for them, you are still alive, so long as they keep the goggles on.

The potential of AR is immense — imagine visiting a ruin and being able to see it restored. The meeting use case explored on the Vision Pro website could render travelling for conferences a thing of the past. However, the ability to wilfully alter one’s reality is a power that can easily be misused. Your goggles could, for example, ensure all the people you see are beautiful people — which is the thin end of a potentially very sinister and/or creepy wedge.

A central principle behind the ecocyborg is the coevolution of (post-)humans, (post-)environments and technology. We change our environment, supposedly imposing our will on it — making it more ‘us’ — but forget that changing our environment changes our ‘selves’, which logically and ironically makes us less ‘us’. The self that made the decision to change its environment is not the self that ends up living those changes. Each of these changes is mediated through technology, which also coevolves with humans and their environments in accordance with demand, materials, trade and pollution.

AR allows us to change at least the appearance of our environment with no more physical effort than the click of a button or the swipe of a hand. How will that change us? Will it make us more tolerant of deficiencies in unaugmented reality? Why go to the effort of mowing the lawn when AR can just show you your garden with a mown lawn rather than the ‘unsightly’ long grass? Or will it make us less satisfied with the way things are because AR is always showing us something better? Will we become so attached to AR devices that we wear them habitually, or even start to experience mental or physiological symptoms when the devices are switched off or run out of power? Are there religious uses for AR? Maybe fundamentalists could use AR to show demons and angels fighting over strangers’ souls, or perhaps even censor material around them that is contrary to dogma. Flat earthers can see the world as though it really is flat. Could AR mean the end of the beauty industry? Perhaps we will generate avatars of ourselves for others in AR to see us how we would like to be seen… Will it then be rude — even discriminatory — not to use AR to see people how they want others to see them? And what about the clashes of different people’s augmentations of reality? Will we fight over them? Will we hack others’ ARs to force them to see things our way — or even to see a flat plain when there is a cliff? At a larger scale, will companies pay AR manufacturers to cover up evidence of environmental misdeeds — nobody sees the polluted river unless they take their headset off — by then a sort of ‘red pill‘ experience?

More importantly, does AR mean the ecocyborg is no longer necessary? I think not. The Vision Pro is to sight what the Sony Walkman was to hearing. But humans have many other senses and needs, which ecocyborgs will be required to satisfy: hunger, thirst, thermal comfort and immune system training at a basic level, but also gadgets and the energy to power them, sanitation, circular consumption and distribution of materials, and space to allow free expression.

Habitats for Humans

Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m². Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.

Owning the Ecocyborg

The ownership of natural systems has been the subject of wars for millennia. But these are mere territorial disputes. Ownership of designed ecosystems is a matter of intellectual property rights. Designing an ecosystem that can sustain human life, one in which circularity is maintained, where all waste products are eternally converted into goods, is a significant intellectual challenge that will require a great deal of investment. That investment needs to be protected from freeloaders who would just copy what others have done without making any investment in developing the knowledge to do it. We have already seen this with some of the controversy around GM crops, such as farmers being sued for ‘copying’ seed.

But how might we see this ownership, as inhabitants of an ecocyborg? First, your living space would definitely be leased or rented. This is true for many people anyway, so at face value, no major implications except for those who are used to thinking in terms of home ownership. However, leasehold payments, which are used to keep the grounds attractive, are being exploited by some developers as a revenue stream. You might find you need to be able to continually generate economic value in order to sustain your rent. Life-as-a-Service, which currently is more lifestyle-as-a-service, could become rather more literal, especially if we develop cyborg functionality that allows you to be put into suspended animation, or otherwise shut down and rebooted later, whenever your skills and knowledge are worth paying for.

Building on LaaS as an idea, besides being able to sustain yourself, there is the question of your offspring. If you decide you want children, will you violate the licence terms of your habitation? Perhaps you will need to pay for a habitation upgrade in order to remain on the right side of your contract. The ecocyborg will also need to be able to sustain this additional life. It only has a certain designed carrying capacity, and if this is breached, there will be consequences for other inhabitants. To avoid any awkwardness, maybe the drinking water or food contains contraceptives, and these are switched off once you have the finances in place to support your habitation upgrade.

Third, there would need to be careful agreements about the ways in which you could personalize your space. Perhaps there would be predefined options you would choose from; or maybe some OEM certification process confirming interoperability with your ecocyborg. We already have planning law (in the UK at least) that imposes aesthetic as well as functional constraints on what you can do with your property. But gated communities take things further, with restrictions on plants you can grow, colours you can paint your house, pets you can have, and even leaving your garage door open.

Fourth, there might be constraints on who you have to visit. Our bodies interact constantly with the environment, exchanging chemicals, genetic material and viruses. For example, the food we eat and our gut flora entail a direct exchange of genetic material with our environment. People might even need some sort of modification to their genome to ensure compatibility with the ecocyborg they inhabit, or medication. There could be a need for visitors from ecocyborgs made by different manufacturers than yours to undergo a lengthy decontamination and quarantine process after visiting you.

It is the exchange of material from one ecocyborg to another that I imagine could be the most problematic. Concern about invasive species already imposes constraints on what you can take from one country to another. But rather than being an inconvenience (to humans — for native flora and fauna invasive species are an existential threat) as is the case currently, invasive materials in an ecocyborg could threaten its human life support systems: Did the designers of the ecocyborg consider the possibility of this material being brought into their system? If so, in what volume?

Industries would of course also be interested in knowing each others’ secrets and designs. This is where the exchange of material is so potentially dangerous to intellectual property. A visitor from an ecocyborg on the other side of the world could take material home and allow their ecocyborg manufacturer access to knowledge developed and owned by your manufacturer; and vice versa of course. You might then find there were constraints on where you could go as an inhabitant of your chosen ecocyborg. The ecocyborg might be designed to take steps to defend itself, using enzymes, nanobots, and terminator genes, but these too would be desirable intellectual property for rival ecocyborg manufacturers to try and get hold of.

In short, ecocyborgs are corporate spaces, owned and managed by their manufacturers. Inhabitants of ecocyborgs cannot be the owners in the traditional sense we have today of owning the property you live in and having the right to do what you like with it. In ecocyborgs, property is theft … from the manufacturers.

The Body Ugly

The body is the link between the mind and the environment. From the inside out, it is our ‘user interface’ to the world; from the outside in, it is that part of other people’s environment that they associate with us. A society accustomed to the convenience of designed environments will inevitably have designs on their bodies. Who wants badly-dressed, smelly, overweight, spotty, dandruff-ridden misfits in the perfect, shining, modern architecture we have created for ourselves? Who wants saggy, blemished, mis-shapen lines where smooth, clean contemporary lines belong? Every hair, every wrinkle, every mole, every pimple is like a spot of rust on a steel girder, a patch of lichen on a block of concrete, chewing gum on a granite paving stone, bird shit on a smoked glass window. We do not belong in the perfect environments we create for ourselves. We spoil them by our mere existence in them, just as we spoil the natural environment by building them in the first place.

Our bodies are our ‘original sin’ in the consumerist religion. Never mind the sins of the flesh; the sin is the flesh. We face a choice: either retreat back to the grubby, cockroach and mite-infested holes we call home, and interact with the virtual world through a beautiful avatar, surrounded by festering pizze and flat cola; or do penance for our wretchedness on the operating table and have the ‘confidence’ to venture out into the city. There are few flaws that cannot be fixed. Just like the Christian Church in medieval times, some sins can be forgiven, others are deadly, but for an appropriate fee, forgiveness can be obtained. Each cut of the surgeon’s knife is a mortification, a flagellation to repair our faults. And when the bandages are removed, we are reborn, perfect and sinless (once the swelling and bruising dies down).

For those pilgrims unwilling to undergo the rigours of plastic surgery, there are still options. We can paste over the cracks and blemishes in our skin with any number of unctions; we can perfume ourselves to hide our own foul stench; we can anoint our hair with styling products and our scalp with laboratoire-formulated shampoo to keep on top of the dandruff. Our hair can have a glossy sheen in any colour but grey, our skin can glow, our teeth can be purest white.

We shape the environment, the environment shapes us back.

Ecosystem ‘Services’

The concept of ecosystem services has its origin in the desperation of ecologists to provide some means of expressing the value of ecosystems in the dominant language of the day: that of the marketplace. For some reason the values of such things as flowers, crows, oak trees, marram grass, basking sharks, garden snails and millipedes are not apparent unless they can be expressed in monetary terms capturing the contribution they make to sustaining human existence. Without monetary values thus expressed, they are, in economic terms, ‘externalities‘; things that cannot be factored in to the analysis. The proper way to treat an externality is to acknowledge it, and to include that acknowledgement in the decision-making process. In practice, externalities are simply things to be ignored. Many argue, therefore, that ecosystem services, contingent valuation, and other efforts to express the value of the ecosystem in the language of the market place, are pragmatic approaches that at least prevent these matters being ignored by the “blind leaders of the blind“. Nobody seems to talk of doing a proper job of economic analysis in the first place…

The concept of ecosystem services is, however, a compromise too far. The language of ‘services’ is confused with the consumer culture. It implies we have a choice. We do not. We are not customers of the ecosystems we inhabit (even if we are consumers of it); and if we are not happy with the service provided we have only a limited capacity to move: We cannot currently take our custom to another planet, for example; and even within our home planet, people’s capacity to move may be limited by wealth, health, or institutional barriers such as immigration controls. This monopoly of planet Earth over our location breaks the assumptions of market theory; for now, it is one monopoly we are powerless to prevent. But those with paranoid tendencies might suggest it is no coincidence that the hegemony of the market place is responsible for environmental destruction on a massive scale. How else are we to end the tyranny of Nature’s monopoly?

Services also implies substitutability. Suppose we design a machine that performs an ecosystem service more efficiently than that provided by Nature. As rational consumers we should discard the natural system in favour of the newly invented machine. For example, bees provide a pollination service for a number of crops we consume, including almonds. Latterly, however, this service has become unreliable and inefficient. There is a gap in the market for a more reliable pollinator. Perhaps one day this gap could be filled using advances in nanotechnology. Nanobees would be solar powered robots that would collect pollen, and redistribute it where it is needed. These nanobees could be designed to focus on particular species, so that pollen is used efficiently and sent only where it is useful. The nanobees could perform genetic analysis of the pollen to optimise the flowers it fertilises to deliver a better cropped product to the consumer. The nanobees could also collect nectar and deliver it to a honey manufacturing machine. Plus, nanobees would not sting. With the development of nanobees, no-one need ever depend upon unreliable, inefficient natural bees again. The bee would be irrelevant to human existence; if bees could not make a living for themselves from whatever humans do not need, then they could safely be allowed to go extinct. That is progress.

It is one thing to discard an old car for a new one that is more efficient, or to throw away a phone and replace it with a shinier model with more features. Surely it is a different thing altogether to discard a species in favour of a machine? Clearly there is a moral dimension. Another ‘externality’ then, but one that has in the past enabled us (albeit not without a significant struggle) to legislate against slavery despite enormous economic incentives not to. That said, slavery is still a significant contemporary problem. John O’Neill, now at the University of Manchester, has made a damning critique of contingent valuation, arguing that it is either bribery (if you are paid to compensate you for the loss of an ecosystem amenity), or extortion (if you are asked to pay to stop someone destroying it).

But the moral dimension disappears when all the consumer sees is the (fiscal) price. Suppose nanobees could be mass-produced for a fraction of a penny each. All you will see in the shop is better quality produce at a lower price. Bee-pollinated fruit won’t be as good, and it will cost more. How much more will you be prepared to pay for the poorer quality product just to save the bee? There is the extortion. Not in your face, not backed up with menaces, but side by side on the shelf, passively waiting for you to decide which to buy. Is this scenario so far-fetched? Exactly the same phenomenon occurs today with fair-trade produce (how much more are you prepared to pay to ensure the producer got a fair price?), and similar ‘ethical’ labelling: organic, cruelty-free, labour behind the label; there’s one for every flavour of do-gooder. And if you can’t afford to pay the extra? Thus the marketplace corrupts concern for anything other than money into something bourgeois. Ethics is merely status-signalling.

Ecosystems are not our servants; indeed, given our dependence on them, the relationship should be quite the opposite. The problem comes when we evaluate ecosystems and their constituent parts in terms of the transformations they achieve – their function: the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, sunlight and water; the manufacture of salicylic acid; the pollination of almonds. Function can be seen in quite mathematical terms – the domain of the function is a series of chemicals in particular locations, and any physical resources (sunlight, heat, etc.) before the transformation made by an organism; the range is the same after. The transformation is the mapping the function performs. If we see things purely in terms of functions, we can ask ourselves whether a particular transformation can be achieved in a different way. An ecosystem is thus simply a series of functions that, if it is sustainable, forms, in broad terms, a circle – a loop where the domains of each function in the ecosystem are the ranges of others – for every producer of oxygen, there is a consumer.

The services culture takes this further, attributing human values to functions. These values give purpose to an ecosystem that is otherwise without purpose (simply a self-perpetuating loop that repeats until it can’t). Functions that have high human value are preferred to functions that have low human value. Where humans have the power to interfere, the circle is distorted: the distortion of the circle shows the values, the degree of distortion the power. Hence the forest becomes a field, the meadow a motorway, and the floodplain a housing estate. Ecosystems are circles within circles – each life its own self-replicating loop. What is distorted in the ecosystem is also distorted in the organism, all to reflect human values. So it is that the aurochs becomes the cow, the jungle fowl the broiler chicken, the boar the pig; thus does grass become wheat, rye and oats; and jungle becomes cattle ranch and palm oil plantations. Everything, from individual plants and animals to biomes, is distorted according to its utility. The circle is broken and becomes a line: the line of human progress, leaving in its wake chemicals that are not broken down or used by other parts of the system.

Wasp on a train

A while ago, I was riding in a train between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The interior of the ScotRail class 170 turbostar train is a mass of plastic panelling and nylon seats. There are no windows one can open to let in fresh air, but at one of the stops, while a door was open, a wasp must have been let in. There was nothing inside that could be of interest to the wasp. Sometimes on trains there is the detritus of provisions people have brought with them for the journey and consumed, which might have provided some sustenance, but not, for some reason, in this particular carriage. The wasp buzzed its frustration against the window, doubtless keen to get outside in the countryside that we were speeding through.

Luckily for the wasp, no-one seemed overly perturbed by it. Wasps’ interactions with humans are usually accompanied by a flurry of whirling hands, panicked screaming, and/or a rolled up newspaper. However, either everyone in the carriage was unconcerned by its presence, or they were more afraid of embarrassment than they were of the wasp. The wasp in question was, to be more precise, probably Vespula vulgaris (I am no naturalist, but I imagine this is one of the most common ‘yellowjacket’ (the North American name for this kind of wasp) species in the area). These wasps build intricate paper nests from wood that they gather and chew to make into a pulp. Hearing the quiet “scritch scritch scritch” of a wasp gathering (untreated) wood with its mandibles is, to me, one of the many pleasures of spring and summer.

It is fair, I think, to say that most people regard wasps as pests even in their native habitat in Europe. This, perhaps, is mostly due to their ability to deliver a painful sting when they feel threatened, and their propensity to come into contact with humans because of a shared love of sugar. September in particular, when wasps are a bit groggy from the cold, has always been, to me, a time when wasp stings are more likely. I remember all too clearly trying to avoid them at breaktimes when at school. Picnics were also a time when they made a nuisance of themselves, hovering around the jam sandwiches just as you are about to eat them. Nowadays I mostly meet them at the recycling bins, where they are often to be found around the plastic drinks bottle bin trying to get at the last few drops of drink we leave behind.

However, wasps play a really important role in European ecosystems, and life without them is almost unthinkable. Besides pollinating plants when they visit flowers for nectar, wasps also hunt other insects to feed their young. In turn, wasps themselves are prey to various animals.

Perhaps because everyone on the train ignored the wasp, perhaps because it was so desperate to get out, or perhaps because there was nothing on the train it could use, I was suddenly struck by the fact that it did not belong there. At the same time, all the humans (some of whom were WASPs!), clearly did. If the wasp was incongruous with the train, were the humans in it incongruous with the world outside? Why weren’t we as desperate to get out of this fearful space of blue and white plastic?

A riddle for materialists

Screen shot of the definition of 'machine' from Apple's dictionary app on 9 February 2019. A machine is defined as: 'An apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.'

As scientists, we often look at humans and nature as though they are ‘systems‘. Our descriptions of what we observe are mechanistic: formal, mathematical and algorithmical. We don’t want to invoke concepts, very familiar in other endeavours, that we cannot observe and do not have evidence for, but I expect many of us are not entirely happy seeing ourselves, our friends and family, and the natural world, in purely mechanistic terms.

So, what is something if it is not a machine?

It is easy to confuse the fact that something can be described in mechanistic terms with the belief that the thing being described is a machine. So, just because my digestion, circulatory system, immune system, lymphatic system, musculoskeletal system, nervous system, etc. etc. can be described in purely mechanistic language as the function of interactions among cells, molecules, organs, bones and skin; and even though some of these things can be replaced by actual human-made machines (e.g. heart, kidney, artificial limbs) — I am not ‘just’ a machine. To describe me, you, anyone, and indeed the rest of nature itself, as a machine is, at an emotional level, not doing any of us justice.

How can I assert that I am not a machine without invoking the supernatural? Well, one way of handling that kind of argument is to muck around with the definition. I don’t think I need to do that too much, however (see the screen grab above), if I say that I think a machine is necessarily something that has been designed to perform a particular function. If that’s a reasonable definition, then, as it implies, all machines must have a designer. This messes with the brain a little: describing things as machines, something scientists do to avoid invoking the supernatural, fails precisely because so doing means there must be an intentional designer of some sort (intelligent or otherwise) who needs that function performed. I think it’s a bit weak to say we’ve been ‘designed’ by nature — then we might ask who (or what) designed nature. Besides, nature doesn’t ‘need’ the functions performed by humans — looking at various environmental disasters humans have caused (more than just recently), I often wonder whether, if Nature did have intentionality, she would consider herself better off without us. Be that as it may, it is funny to watch documentaries about biology and ecology and count the number of times the word ‘design’ is used by the narrator or presenter.

If you think about it, the absence of a designer who has a function or purpose for us that we must fulfil is liberating. When I first thought of this, I was somewhat unnerved. I had a Christian upbringing. The absence of any purpose felt worrisome, perhaps because it left responsibility for what I did, and did not, do squarely on my shoulders; rather than allowing myself to duck the responsibility and claim I am just fulfilling a deity’s plan for me (or following my genetic programming, or some hapless victim of my environment). Of course, it also meant I am insignificant — there isn’t a supreme ultimate being that is deeply interested in what I do. Many schools of thought end up ascribing some sort of purpose to our lives. Besides being ‘saved’ or becoming enlightened, or whatever your religion gives as your purpose, biologists tell you you must reproduce, capitalists that you must accumulate wealth, Marxists that you must be socially ‘active’, academics that you must learn things, … How incredibly freeing it is not to have to do all those things!

There is no function or purpose we are ‘intended’ to fulfil, no plan, no destiny, no fate. This, however, does not mean we are inanimate; it does not mean we do not ‘do’ things. The things we do cause changes in the environments we inhabit. These changes can be exploited by ourselves, and by other organisms (especially if they are repeated regularly or at least partially predictably); indeed, many of the changes we cause arise from actions that themselves exploit actions by other organisms. We are part of a vast nexus of interactions, a network of life itself that is able to perpetuate itself without intention, consciousness, direction or purpose. It happens because it happens. It seems like fate, it seems like order, because we only have cognitive machinery to recognize patterns, and language to articulate that regularity. But this network is never at equilibrium, it is permanently changing, adapting, co-adapting. Niches and species emerge and disappear as life evolves.

But if we are not machines, what are we? To some extent, the very fact that this question needs to be asked is an expression of the degree to which we have lost any sense of what we are. To describe us as machines is to see us only in terms of some Platonic ideal human, and our differences from that ideal as deformity or malfunction. Instead of which, we are all unique – most of us are genetically unique; those who are not have slightly different experiences of the world that can change their body chemistry, and even the genes they pass on to their offspring. Biologically (and perhaps epistemologically depending on what you think is important about your identity), all that matters is that we can limp along for long enough to participate in the creation of the next generation. Evolution is a constant process of deformity – we are all ultimately deformed single cells. If there is no function, how can there be malfunction? This is not to say there is no suffering, no disease – quite clearly there are patterns of existence where individuals suffer. Sometimes there are interventions we can make that stop the suffering, sometimes there aren’t. But these interventions are not necessarily about restoring our bodies to some Platonic ideal – instead they are focused on stopping suffering.

There is no blueprint for you, or for me. Even your genes (sometimes metaphorically referred to as your blueprint) are not enough information to replicate you — your experiences of life may have made epigenetic switches turn off or on, and have certainly shaped the neurones in your brain. Instead, we are emergent self-organised systems. We are emergent in that we are the products of millions of years of evolution and co-evolution. We are self-organised in that there is no design for the way we work, and each of us works in individual ways (albeit with significant areas of commonality with other humans, and indeed with other species). We are systems in that the way we work can be described mechanistically. But, if even your twin does not do exactly the same thing as you, how can you be replaced by a machine? We’ve all heard that every snowflake is different, and how we are all different, and how that makes us uniquely precious. In a sense that is true, but not in any way that makes any one of us more special or precious than anyone else. The truth of that statement, however, reflects the importance of seeing ourselves, and the life around us, as more than machines.