You're Much More of a Computer Than a Monkey

Someone hit a goose on the highway just before the turn to the office park where I work. They were probably driving a truck, a mack or a semi or one of those retail behemoths, with a gleaming paint job and headlights that melt bone and a bed that could carry a whole planet’s worth of paired animals. The goose was flattened down the center, a mass of red goo and gray feathers. When I drove home later the corpse was still there.

Geese have built nests around the office, and they come after me when I get too close. I have to watch where I’m going on the walk from my car to the door. They’d kill me or die to protect their babies. They’re aggressive and mean, not at all open to polite discussion, and sometimes I imagine snapping their necks or kicking them with a running start or bringing a baseball bat down on them with an overhead swing.

Fantasies of violence flow through me but the reality of violence makes me want to renounce living. Even a stinking goose with soulless black resin rhinestones for eyes deserves better than dying on a highway, its broken bones and pestled guts spread on bad asphalt under a matt sky, eventually scraped off by roadcrews, washed off by a storm or carried off by some marauding hybrid hyena man. A self-propelled being stopped by an other propelled being, a half ton person in a two ton cab, most likely texting, twiddling radio dials, eating a footlong meatball sub, filming a youtube video on their divorce, or even worse, someone fully alert and present, both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, well-rested, mind clear, pedaling down, leaning into the impact with relish in their hearts.

Irrevocable death, ignominious and gruesome endings all around, routinized. I won’t even feel bad about it soon enough.

That’s the world, the universe, the cosmos, God’s design, chaos; man’s depravity is one toe dipped in the bloodbath. But our culture trains us to *blaring airhorn sound * It’s too late, the culture can’t be fixed because it doesn’t exist, it’s been pulverized, turned into powder and blown into deep space. Culture can no longer explain anything, what anyone thinks and feels and does; culture isn’t a force, an entity, a frame, but a haphazard stab at some determining cause or absent influence. An intuition without a concept or a concept without an intuition. Each person grows their perception in a petri dish, inhales ideas from a mossy shoebox in a closet. How do I know this? I don’t, it’s my best guess, because everyone else’s representation of culture sounds like a peculiar rationalization of grudges, inclinations and aversions, accidental impressions, smells like stewed juices.

The office at 8 in the morning. Missing the sunrise that would set my circadian rhythm. On an alien schedule instead; lurching, drowsing and tossing in accordance with calendars and digital clocks, sparked into undead stumbling by the far-off experiments of megalomaniacal doctors. No one speaks, the only sound is that of typing and clicking, rustling insects. Centipedes and spiders and beetles crawling on keyboards. The fluorescent ceiling stretches on, a desert of bleached sand.

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First, the individual human mind is assumed, then it is compared to a computer, and found similar, identical or different. Speaking of culture, to the extent anything can be said; a shift has occurred; Neo-Darwinism emphasizes algorithmic processes and downgrades biology, nature as embodied and relational, so that now, a naturalized mind, or a mind reduced to natural functions, is likened to a computer, a syntactic operation, instead of a pulpy mirror in the head of a monkey, the purpose of which isn’t to copy information, but to imitate behavior in a social setting, foster and maintain social bonds. Intelligence as individual property, as artifact that can be manufactured, is secondary to its relational and environmental role, as an emergent phenomenon of cooperation and competition.

What I’ve noticed, from my bullfrog’s perspective, is that spiritual or religious man now sweats over his proximity to screens and circuit boards and has forgotten his apish ancestors, his mammalian origins. Even atheistic technophiles aim at reconciling themselves with artificial overlords, not their warm-blooded background. For a great while, the primary threat to man’s transcendent status came from his resemblance to other biological beings. But now, the defense of our special and unique character primarily focuses on machine intelligence, which strongly suggests a change in the basic social composition of present-day civilization, where intelligence is automatically atomized, defined as processing power, and the threat to human self-esteem and uniqueness from less intelligent but empathetic and social animals has been thoroughly repressed because it generates a more unnerving effect and acts as a stark reminder of what has been lost.

Comparisons to computers all depend on opaque and isolated interactions rather than embodied and collectivized mimetic patterns, further reinforcing the assumption that the function of intelligence is to simulate private worlds rather than build and regulate social bodies.

It’s much simpler to distinguish a man from a computer than it is to separate him from a monkey, because his nearness to a monkey presents a strong challenge not only to religious narratives but to the status of intelligence as an artifact, a tool for expressing individual experience rather than a concreted reflection of social and emotional potential. That is to say, there’s no such thing as a mind that could be simulated, because minds emerge as results of organizational complexity in socialized habitats; an individual mind is already a simulation in a larger series of interlocking feedback loops and mirroring sequences.

I suspect once a threshold of complexity is crossed, a reversion occurs, the mimetic habits break down, and intelligence becomes cognitive, isolated, autistic, sensory averse and emotionally stunted, and even where it resists its assimilation to mechanical reproduction, it allies with it in its indifference to biological belonging.