The Man/State/Machine

WIP

gist: I suspect that determination of human being terms of man, of ontology in terms of machine, and of community in terms of state are inextricably intertwined. Particular forms such the state-machine, man-machine, and the state as machine, are iterations of this mutual determination. The internal logic of these determinations is that of command/control, impulse/reaction, and of the discrete and orderable sequenced according to manly dictates. It runs through all of modernity (even tho not all enlightenment thinking is thoroughly subordinated to this framing), and it is driving us into madness, xenocide, mono-mania, and other bad stuff.

Who will thrive and predominate in a world thoroughly dominated by the ideology of the man/state/machine? Whoever is most able to embody the qualities of man that enable calculating the state and driving the machine: i.e., fortunate, masculine, technocrats, who can internalize the combinatory problems relevant to tracking the state transitions, who can work the levers effectively, or find clever and self serving ways to throw wrenches into the machine.

The opening passage from Hobbes’ Leviathan:

Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth, or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man

I think the essay would make the case that the origin, essential logic, and ultimate destiny of the the state-machine concept is the subordination of the human being to the man/state/machine.

Turing, in the “Computable Numbers” paper begins his description of the “Computing machines” thus:

We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, …, qR which will e called “m-configurations”.

And immediately preceding, he notes the justification for this comparison:

the justification lies in the fact that the human memory is necessarily limited.

What makes a man/machine fully determinable (fully controlled?)?

If at each stage the motion of a machine is completely determined by the configuration, we shall call the machine an “automatic machine”.

Turing also names another kind of machine, the “choice machine”:

For some purposes we might use machines (choice machines or c-machines) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration … When such a machine reaches one of these ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator. (72)

Hobbes (for whom “Imagination and Memory are but one thing” (89), also maintained the finitude of memory:

Whatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite.

And rendered Imagination as motion from mechanical impact of bodies on sense organs. Reason is the orderly and deterministic sequencing of such impressions in a train, after the impressions have been encoded into words:

When a man Reasoneth, hee does nothing else but conceive a summe totall, from Addition of parcels; or conceive a Remainder, from Subtraction of one summe from another: which (if it be done by Words,) is conceiving of the consequences of the names of all the parts, to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and on epart, to the name of the other part. (110)

…

For Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is, Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.

He casts Science as the knowledge of consequence revealed by this right ordering. (See p. 115) Essential to scientific reasoning is the elimination of ambiguity:

The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.

The destiny of a redemable human being, in Hobbe’s view, is only via the subordination of everything, both human and nature, to the man/state/machine, via linguistic programming (or, as he calls it, “Science”):

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another … is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will