Why Organisms Are Not Machines

Marvin Minsky famously said that we are just "computers made of meat." He was wrong.

Hi everyone,

I wandered into this post in my reading of Ian McGilchrist’s two-volume opus, The Matter With Things. Unlike much of what’s published today, McGilchrist’s achievement is at once sweeping, philosophically rich, and detailed and rigorous in his treatment of findings in neuroscience. The entire project feels like something a king would have commissioned the philosopher in court to undertake, to write the definitive account of the nature of things. I love this kind of use of the mind and the pen, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the long journey through, with appendices, 807 pages in Vol. 1, and a daunting 1,375 in Vol. II, not including an 82 page bibliography.

In this post I want to take up this question of whether, as the late MIT professor Marvin Minsky once quipped, we’re just “computers made of meat.” I’ll rely heavily for the summary arguments on McGilchrist’s treatment, and expand his ideas more squarely into the ongoing discussion about the meaning of artificial intelligence. So, let’s begin.

Poking the Eyes Out of the Great Watchmaker

What we might call the “computational metaphor,” or as McGilchrist terms it, the “machine model” of life, has become the de facto position in much of institutional science and among those who see themselves as scientifically educated. The machine model—that life, including us and our minds, can be explained by reference to (admittedly fantastically) complex machinery—has such dominance that it’s surrounded by a kind of religious or ideological fervor. Yet this fervor persists despite the model being manifestly dubious. Ironically, we can tell it’s dubious by looking more closely at the actual nature of living systems. We’ll get to that shortly.

First, though, I want to consider Richard Dawkins and his concept of the “blind watchmaker.” In particular, I want to invite both Dawkins and his skeptics—especially proponents of “intelligent design,” who argue that life shows unmistakable evidence of design, which implies a designer—into this discussion. My goal here isn’t to take sides or defend one position over the other; I’m not a biologist, and any judgment I might offer would be more opinion than expertise.

Instead, my focus is on the dominance of the machine model in both views. As McGilchrist points out, Dawkins’s theory of “selfish genes” replicating themselves effectively borrows the idea of a “watchmaker” from creationists like William Paley, whose famous argument for the existence of God relied on the analogy of a watch requiring a watchmaker. Dawkins’s primary move was to poke the eyes out of Paley’s watchmaker and declare Darwinian evolution the victor over creationism.

But here’s the irony: Dawkins, in doing so, never noticed that he was still using the same conceptual machinery (pun intended). His vision of life remained tethered to the machine model, just as Paley’s had been. The idea of the "watch" as a symbol for life, even if blind or stripped of divine intent, inherently constrains life to the metaphor of a machine.

As McGilchrist aptly observes:

"The other possible gambit to save the machine model is really just to reinvent God, put his eyes out, and call him by another name."

This reflexive adherence to the machine model—whether in the guise of a blind watchmaker or an intelligent designer—should give us pause. It reveals the depth to which this metaphor has infiltrated our thinking about life, regardless of our stance on the origins debate.

Let’s dig deeper.