We’re all familiar with the plot device of the self-destruct sequence counting down while our hero / heroine frantically tries to find the kill switch that turns it off. The system — however we choose to describe it — is self-destructing and there’s no switch to turn it off.

BY CHARLES HUGH SMITH ON SUBSTACK / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO CHARLES HUGH SMITH ON SUBSTACK

The idea that Nature is a mechanism has a long history. Many ancient cultures studied the night sky and developed an understanding of astronomical cycles, enabling predictions of events such as eclipses. This regularity naturally encouraged the idea that the rest of Nature also functioned like a mechanism that once understood, could be used to predict future events and outcomes.

The ancients’ sophisticated understanding of astronomical cycles reached its apogee in the Antikythera Mechanism, a “fiendishly complex” device discovered by divers in 1900 in a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The shipwreck dates to around 70 B.C., while researchers believe the device dates to around 200 B.C. Scattered references in ancient texts suggest the device may have been based on the work of Archimedes.

An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets.

The device, about the size of a hefty dictionary, contains dozens of intricate gears that operated various pointers on the front to predict the positions of the sun, moon and planets at a particular time, past or future.

The intricacy of the gearing is unlike any other from the ancient world, and researchers continue to make new discoveries about the device’s predictive capabilities.

The idea that Nature is a mechanism we can understand and exploit to our own benefit became the default model of how the world worked in the 19th century, as discoveries in chemistry and physics unraveled the mysteries of Nature and allowed humanity to engineer machines and new compounds based on the burgeoning knowledge of Nature’s mechanisms.

As our mastery expanded, this notion of Nature Is a Mechanism extended from chemistry and physics into biology and the mind. If we can devise a chemical that eradicates infectious diseases, couldn’t we do the same for cancer? And if we can devise a mechanism–a computing machine–to perform mathematical calculations, then couldn’t we mechanize intelligence?

The idea that Nature Is a Mechanism spread to economics and social sciences, fostering the belief that the economy is a mechanism that we can model and manipulate much like tuning an engine: just as we adjust the air and fuel mixture in an engine, we avoid recessions by tinkering with interest rates and the growth of the money supply.

In the social sciences, this mindset has led to the idea that if we collect enough data and perform rigorous computational analysis of the data, we can predict the outcomes of policy changes in education, housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.

A recent reader comment illustrates how this mindset is taken for granted. In response to a post on the alarming decline in the nutrient content of our food, including micro-nutrients drawn from the soil, the reader suggested that the solution was to simply take a supplement pill containing the trace minerals: the human body is a mechanism, and just as we top off the oil in an engine, all we have to do to achieve peak health is take a pill and the body will automatically uptake the trace minerals.

But this is not at all how the body actually works. The human body is not a mechanism, it’s more akin to a complex ecosystem than a machine. The uptake of micro-nutrients is poorly understood, as the processes involved are complex and interactive. Many studies have found that the vast majority of supplements are worthless; the body isn’t an engine that uptakes the nutrients in a pill the way an engine’s fuel tank is filled.

Absorption of nutrients depends on many complex, interactive systems: the body’s signaling of the need for specific nutrients, the digestion of real food by the microbiome, and the complex nature of real food, as opposed to pills and highly processed foods.

The truth is we have a very limited grasp of the complexities of the microbiome’s connections to our emotional and mental states, the effects of a microbiome starved of fiber and real food, the triggers for endorphins and dopamine that are linked to addiction and cravings, and many other aspects of nutrition, exercise and what we consume.

We prefer simple models for how the world works, and Nature Is a Mechanism is highly attractive because it’s 1) very simple and 2) it encourages us to believe we have god-like powers over Nature once we unravel the mechanisms at work.

We like to believe that we can predict the outcomes of whatever mechanism we’re manipulating, but we don’t understand that the consequences of our assumptions and actions play out far into the future in ways that our Mechanism Mindset cannot foresee.

In the mindset of Humans Are a Mechanism, Too, our bodies are seen as furnaces that burn whatever fuel is tossed into the stomach. But this is not reality; it is a simplistic distortion that generates failure on multiple levels.

We are far from understanding the many consequences of a diet of Ultra-Processed Foods, other than the obvious reality that consuming ultra-processed foods is destructive to our health. Consider this quote about the recent book Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food.

“These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.”

The same basic error infects the mindset of Artificial Intelligence: since Humans Are a mechanism, Too, then our mind / intelligence is also a mechanism that we can model and mechanize.

Consider this thought experiment.

Every computer is fundamentally a series of electronic gates that generate an output from an input. These gates can be understood as a mechanical device, an analog switching mechanism. So theoretically, a machine could be constructed of these analog mechanical switches that performed everything a computer does. This machine would be quite large, but nonetheless it would function just like its electronic cousin.

Now consider that these mechanical switches could be constructed from beer cans, and the entire mechanism driven by large windmills. This machine would perform the exact same functions as a computer running software that we declare is intelligent.

So we are effectively declaring that a large machine of beer cans and windmills is intelligent.

Um, no. And neither is the computer or the software.

The truth is we don’t even understand our own intelligence, and so claiming that a contraption of beer cans and windmills is equal to our own intelligence is absurd.

The human mind is extraordinarily complex, and we have only the vaguest notion of its interconnected workings. Consider this diagram of three networks that have been delineated in the human mind: the Default Mode Network, the Salience network and the Executive Control Network.

Together, these networks play key roles in what’s known as Transcendental Thinking, thinking that goes beyond the moment into the past and future, and evokes powerful emotions and insights.

Transcendent Thinking May Boost Teen Brains.

The simplistic model of Human Intelligence Is a Mechanism, Too holds that rational thought is the core of intelligence, and emotions are not only unnecessary, they inhibit clear thinking.

This turns out to be precisely the opposite of reality: emotions are a core driver of clear thinking. Without emotional intelligence, the rational mind makes fatal errors of judgment, fails to act ethically or advantageously, makes short-sighted decisions and acts irrationally. This was revealed when a human patient had a brain tumor cut out that took away his emotional / social intelligence: the patient “knew the right things and had the necessary memories to guide him, but he was unable to care about the implications of his decisions. The Damasios came to understand that the patient’s emotions were not properly informing his planning and cognition, and his social relationships suffered for it.”

Human intelligence isn’t a mechanism that can be mechanized by a machine, be it of beer cans and windmills or etched silicon wafers.

We are failing, as a species and as a society, because we’re embedded in a completely false and misleading belief about the nature of Nature and ourselves. Nature is not a mechanism, and neither are we.

The System’s Self-Destruct Sequence Cannot Be Turned Off

We’re all familiar with the plot device of the self-destruct sequence counting down while our hero / heroine frantically tries to find the kill switch that turns it off. The system–however we choose to describe it–is self-destructing and there’s no switch to turn it off.

We’re drawn to the notion that cabals and conspiracies are the root source of the system’s ills. If these cabals were exposed and disempowered, then the system would quickly right itself and all would be well again.

Cabals and conspiracies are not the source, they’re a symptom of a deeper, structural self-destruct mechanism, a mechanism we take for granted as the way the world works.

Regardless of ideological label–capitalist, socialist, communist–all systems are markets of some kind with producers, sellers and buyers / consumers. The market may be more or less open, or more or less controlled by the state, warlords or cartels, but in all cases there are producers, sellers and consumers.

In all cases, neither the producer, the seller nor the consumer have any responsibility for the downstream consequences of what’s produced, sold and purchased. Every participant is incentivized to maximize their self-interest without regard for the future consequences of this pursuit of self-interest.

The producer of the plastic bottle has no responsibility for what happens to the bottle after production, the seller has no responsibility for what happens to the bottle after it’s sold, and the consumer who tosses it in the river after consuming the contents has no responsibility for what happens to the bottle once they’re done consuming the product.

The market has no internal, intrinsic responsibility for the consequences of narrow self-interest nor any mechanism that looks beyond the present. The market is blind to future consequences, and imposes no responsibility to do so on any participant.

The only possible result of this system is self-destruction. Consider the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre, the poetic name for a floating mass of plastic and other waste generated by the “growth at any cost” global economy roughly the size of Texas. (See chart below.) This is not the only garbage patch in the planet’s oceans; it’s merely one of the biggest.

Who cares about a floating island of garbage? It’s harmless, right? Indeed. Can the same be said of the “forever” chemicals, the depleted freshwater aquifers, the mountains of electronic and other waste leaking toxic sludge and the rest of the consequences of a system that is blind to everything but “growth at any cost,” self-interest and the eternal Now?

Cabals and conspiracies attract our attention because they are intentionally cloaking the destructive consequences their self-interest is passing on to others. The tobacco cabal worked diligently for decades to obfuscate the deadly consequences of smoking, as the means of maximizing their profits / self-interest.

So let’s identify the cabal that intentionally created the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre to further their self-interest. Do we finger the producers of the 300 million tons of plastics produced annually, or the corporations that sold the 300 million tons of plastics, or the consumers who bought the 300 million tons of plastics?

The waste stream is generated by the system, not a cabal, and the system is constructed of values and what I call the mythology of Progress, a mythology of make-believe and play-acting, in which we watch a video of a group recycling a tiny sliver of the waste generated by global tourism and then declare, “See? Technology is solving the problems created by the system! No worries, it will all get solved by new technologies.”

Absolved by this magical-thinking, we’re free to continue pursuing our part of consequence-free “growth at any cost.” This is the internal logic of the market-system, and it operates the same under any ideological label.

In theory, political rulers are supposed to the future consequences, but rulers only rule by authority granted in the present moment. If their supporters are forced to sacrifice for some distant benefit, they will find someone else to support.

Every civilization that produces “forever” goods ends up creating mountains of waste. Broken pottery shards pile up into artificial hills. But the scale of the modern system is so colossal that the consequences are now planetary, affecting our health and complex systems we don’t fully understand, much less control. The artificial hill of pottery shards is puny and localized; the consequences of our system will bring down the system in ways the system is completely blind to.

Even if technology consolidated the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre at enormous expense, what would we do with the artificial garbage island? And since the system spews out 300 million tons of new plastic every year, a new Great Pacific Garbage Gyre will soon form.

There is no “off” switch on the system’s self-destruct sequence. We’ll only notice, or care, when the system started breaking down under the crushing weight of the consequences that have been piling up and ignored with play-acting solutions such as recycling.