Last year I had the pleasure of reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which argues against ideology and for the recognition of an innate and genetically endowed ‘human nature’. Among the areas he explored was our ability to intuitively grasp certain concepts, while others remain abstract.

An example is a googol. Nowadays, googol – as it is pronounced – is synonymous with the search engine, and is a verb (I googled this) and I even an adjective (it’s googable). Originally, the word refereed to a very large number. After thousand (three zeroes), million (six 0s), trillion (9 0s), going up the nomenclature line, you reach a googol, a 1 with one hundred zeroes.

A number so large falls into the category of being abstract, as we cannot even conceptualize a million properly, and a thousand with difficulty. Because in our evolutionary history, we hadn’t the need to distinguish that many things at a time. A herd of grazing animals was maybe the most living things any of our ancestors saw at once, as for most of history the animals outnumbered us, until practically yesterday in the measure of millennia. A herd of animals would have simply been “awesome lot”.

As a species we’ve preferred to invent reasons for our existence. Uncomfortable facing the banal facts, instead we have invested centuries with thoughts that have deluded us into believing in ghosts and spirits and ‘supermen’ in the sky. What we are neglecting, and what we also seem to be incapable of grasping intuitively, is that we are a part of the Universe, and that we are part of the Earth, itself a part of the Universe, and that we are the result of sex which occurred not only between our grandparents but between creatures which lived millions – and billions – of years ago.

We’ve clouded the matter with the poetry of religion, which may teach that we are animated dust, but which is also uncomfortable facing the banal facts of evolution, preferring instead to discredit it as a fantasy. Beyond that, we have to deal with folk who think that panspermia (life coming from some asteroid) would somehow be more amazing than the fact that it sprang up on this stone we call Earth on its own. The Earth, far from being so special, is just a rock fostering many chemical reactions enabled by the presence of a significant amount of oxidized hydrogen. So far that fact seems unique, but it is not unreasonable to think that the universe is teeming with life of a variety we cannot imagine.

At the end of one of the chapters in Pinker’s book, he quotes Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it had nothing but itself to know itself with.

This is an apt summary of what is so strange about our science. That our bodies are the instruments of our brains, by which a brain seeks to understand what it is. Although we are a system of organs and anatomy, it has taken centuries since the invention of the scalpel for us to figure out what we look like on the inside, and even what our brains look like. Accurate anatomy dates to within the past four hundred years, and extremely precise anatomy dates to the 19th Century. And mostly because we deluded ourselves with religious hoopla, afraid that dissecting a corpse would make It and Superman mad.

The brain is an organ capable of processing information revealing it’s own structure, of it which it knows nothing. I find it odd how we are born “knowing” how to use our hands, but not how they function. This seems to be a pattern repeated by the universe at large. The brain’s inherent ignorance about itself is a microcosmic reflection of a Universe which seems to know nothing of itself either. We think this way because we have labeled the universe a thing and as such, consider it inanimate, lifeless, and incapable of thought. However, what is going on between you and I right now except some sub-process of the Universe?

The last time you glanced at Astronomy magazine on the news-shelf, or read an article on cosmology, you participated in an aspect of the Universe seeking knowledge about itself, as it has agents within it seeking that information.

We are those agents – we are the organizers of the Universe’s information, and in many ways, agents for its change. For some reason, the chain of events which began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago has led to reassembly of elements which have propelled themselves with precision across the vastness of space to land on Mars . The 3rd sphere seeks out information on the 4th sphere by way of beings which developed out of its matrix of chemicals a few billion years ago.

So, we have this recurring pattern: the universe organizing information, by way of humans, who do it by way of their brains. And now these brains have developed a new layer in the Universe’s information structure by organizing things using alternating currents of electricity. We are all told by those who developed this technology that the computer is a digital device which runs on a series of 0s and 1s, which represent on/off switches in the micro-circuitry. What this means is that the chips alternate the voltage between high and low. Electronic whispering is precisely that which allows me to type this and for you to read it. And to point out the obvious, my thoughts interact with your thoughts through this negotiation.

Now we have Google, a search engine, seeking to “organize the world’s information” to paraphrase their PR. We cannot know if the Googlebots are conscious, but let’s ask ourselves hypothetically, “what do they think they’re doing?” Do you think they are themselves curious as to why they are compelled to extend themselves through the branches of our communication network? Are they aware that they are a part of another being’s infrastructure? They go here, go there, go back to the Google servers, and collaborate on constructing a database. So much like ourselves and our travel stories and our maps. Essentially, the meaning of a google-bot’s life is to crawl the web and experience it so that it can later be organized – categorized, filed away, assigned i.d. Sound at all familiar?

Sounds like Victorian science to me. Darwin and the Beagle and the trip to the Galapagos, and the return home to the centre of the colonial empire to say, I saw this, and I think this about it and this is the book for the database, no, I mean library.

The flowering of life on Earth may be nothing more than some form of reflection of the masses of files we find on our hardrives. The zebra may be a .dll for something – a segment of code which enables another. We are a program running on the Earth’s Operating System, an .exe file enabled by .dll’s in the flavour of plants and animals by which we manifest an omnivorous nature.

Somehow our chemical composition – the fact that we are made of stuff – does not invalidate our activities, which we have recreated in the immaterial. By organizing electrons we have bypassed the molecular to achieve physical results which resemble our own activities.

Our relationship to the immaterial raises issues of the google-bot’s metaphysics. Do the engineers at Google program their algorithms to send prophet algorithms among them to inspire them to poetry and more accurate results?