Darwin Among the Machines (2 page)

“N
ature (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,” wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) on the first page of his
Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill
, published to great disturbance in 1651. “For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in the 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?”
¹
Hobbes believed that the human commonwealth, given substance by the power of its institutions and the ingenuity of its machines, would coalesce to form that Leviathan described in the Old Testament, when the Lord, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, had warned, “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.”

Three centuries after Hobbes, automata are multiplying with an agility that no vision formed in the seventeenth century could have foretold. Artificial intelligence flickers on the desktop and artificial life has become a respectable pursuit. But the artificial life and artificial intelligence that so animated Hobbes's outlook on the world was not the discrete, autonomous mechanical intelligence conceived by the architects of digital processing in the twentieth century. Hobbes's Leviathan was a diffuse, distributed, artificial organism more characteristic of the technologies and computational architectures approaching with the arrival of the twenty-first.

“What is the
Heart
, but a
Spring
; and the
Nerves
, but so many
Strings
; and the
Joynts
, but so many
Wheeles
, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?” asked Hobbes. “
Art
goes yet further, imitating that rationall and most excellent worke of Nature,
Man
. For by Art is created that great L
EVIATHAN
called a C
OMMON-WEALTH
. . . which is but an Artificiall Man.”
²
Despite his reasoned arguments Hobbes was variously condemned by the monarchy, the Parliament, the universities, and the church. Hobbes saw human society as a self-organizing system, possessed of a life and intelligence of its own. Power was vested by mutual consensus, but not by divine right, in the hands of an assembly or a king. Loyalty was useful but need not be absolute. This ambivalence was viewed with suspicion from both sides. “Mr. Hobbs defyeth the whole host of learned men,” and was “dangerous to both Government and Religion,” warned Alexander Ross in
Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook
,
³
the first of a series of attacks that culminated with the citing by the House of Commons of Hobbes's blasphemies as a probable cause of the great fire and plague of 1666. Although threats against Hobbes were never executed, he destroyed his more incriminating manuscripts, fearing the worst. In his
Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, and the Punishment Thereof
, written in 1668, Hobbes maintained that his ideas did not fit the existing definition of heresy and accusations against him were unjust; in any event, he argued, there was no legal authority for burning heretics at the stake. Nonetheless, after Hobbes was safely dead, a decree by the University of Oxford in 1683 recommended that
Leviathan
, among other “Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines,” be burned.
⁴

Hobbes's blasphemy was his vision of a diffuse intelligence that was neither the supreme intelligence of God nor the individual intelligence of the human mind. Leviathan was a collective organism, transcending the individual beings and institutional organs of which it was composed. Human society, taken as a whole, constituted a new form of life, explained Hobbes, “in which, the
Soveraignty
is an Artificiall
Soul
, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The
Magistrates
, and other
Officiers
of Judicature and Execution, Artificiall
Joynts; Reward
and
Punishment
(by which fastned to the seate of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the
Nerves
, that do the same in the body Naturall; The
Wealth
and
Riches
of all the particular members, are the
Strength; Salus Populi
(the
peoples safety
) its
Businesse; Counsellors
, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the
Memory; Equity
and
Lawes
, an artificiall
Reason
and
Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse
; and
Civill war, Death
.”
⁵

Hobbes sought not to diminish the intelligence of any existing being, human or divine, but rather to discover evidence of intelligence in the vacuum that supposedly intervened. As he argued against the physical vacuum demonstrated by the air pump of Robert Boyle, so he argued against the metaphysical vacuum that separated God from man. Hobbes hinted at a science of complex systems as comprehensive (and potentially heretical) as the two new sciences by which Galileo, befriended by Hobbes in 1636, had revealed the relative motion of all things. Hobbes's shortcomings as a mathematician, ridiculed by other natural philosophers, were outweighed by his facility with words. His ambition—when not distracted by civil war, the Restoration, or other social upheavals of the time—was to construct a consistent and purely materialistic natural philosophy of mind. “Motion produceth nothing but motion,” he argued.
⁶
“And consequently every part of the Universe, is Body, and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it, is
Nothing
.”
⁷
His analysis revealed deep-seated contradictions within the doctrines of the church. “Wee are told, there be in the world certaine Essences separated from Bodies, which they call
Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes:
For the Interpretation of which
Jargon
, there is need of somewhat more than ordinary attention. . . . Being once fallen into this Error of
Separated Essences
, they are thereby necessarily involved in many other absurdities that follow it. . . . Can any man think that God is served with such absurdities?”
⁸

Hobbes protested strongly against the metaphysics of René Descartes (1596–1650). His objections, along with a terse response, were
published in 1641 as an appendix to Descartes's
Meditationes de prima philosophia
, translated into English as
Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein it is Proved that there is a God. And that Mans Mind is really distinct from his Body
. “The question may be put
infinitely
, how do you
know
that you
know
, that you
know
, that you
know?
&c,” argued Hobbes. “Wherefore . . . we cannot separate
thought
from
thinking matter
, it seems rather to follow, that a
thinking thing
is
material
, than that 'tis
immaterial
.”
⁹
Hobbes countered all the arguments that would reappear much later as arguments against the possibility of mind among machines. “
Ratiocination
will depend on
Words, Words
on
Imagination
, and perhaps
Imagination
as also
Sense
on the
Motion
of
Corporeal Parts
; and so the
Mind
shall be nothing but
Motions
in some Parts of an
Organical Body
,” he explained, treading dangerously close to heresy, though failing to dissuade Descartes.
¹⁰

In suggesting, as Alexander Ross put it, “that our natural reason is the word of God” and that “it was a winde, not the holy spirit which in the Creation moved on the waters,”
¹¹
Hobbes raised an upheaval that reverberated for three hundred years. The seeds of the Darwinian revolution, with all its ensuing controversies, were sown by Hobbes. The precedent for Bishop Samuel Wilberforce versus Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin in 1860 was set in 1658 by Bishop John Bramhall versus Thomas Hobbes, launched with a sweeping salvo titled
The Catching of the Leviathan, or the Great Whale, Demonstrating out of Mr. Hobbs his own Works, That no man who is thoroughly an Hobbist, can be a good Christian, or a Good Common-wealths man, or reconcile himself to himself, Because his Principles are not only destructive to all Religion but to all Societies; extinguishing the Relation between Prince and Subject, Parent and Child, Master and Servant, Husband and Wife; and abound with palpable contradictions
.

Hobbes bore these attacks without flinching and made few concessions to the authorities of his time. He was famous for his irreverences, including an opinion that “the Episcopalians ridiculed the Puritans, and the Puritans the Episcopalians; but . . . the Wise ridiculed both alike.”
¹²
Charles II, then the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, had been tutored by Hobbes while exiled in Paris in 1646; with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 he invited Hobbes into his court. The king awarded Hobbes a small pension and gave him a measure of protection against his enemies, describing him as “a bear, against whom the Church played their young dogs, in order to exercise them.”
¹³
The insults against Hobbes grew bolder on his death, such as the anonymous
Dialogues of the Living and the Dead
, which appeared in 1699, satirizing Hobbes as “a parcel of atoms
jumbled together by chance.” Hobbes had prepared for a protracted battle, leveling his own broadsides at his opponents, epitomized by his
Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, & Religion, of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, written by himself, by way of a Letter to a Learned Person
, in which he asked: “What kind of Attribute I pray you is
immaterial
, or
incorporeal
substance? Where do you find it in the Scripture? Whence came it hither, but from
Plato
and
Aristotle
, Heathens, who mistook those thin Inhabitants of the Brain they see in sleep, for so many
incorporeal
men; and yet allow them motion, which is proper only to things
corporeal?
Do you think it an honour to God to be one of these?”
¹⁴

Hobbes advocated neither the pantheism of the ancients- nor the atheism of which he was accused. He believed life and mind to be natural consequences of matter when suitably arranged; God to be a corporeal being, of perhaps infinitely higher mental order but composed of substance nonetheless; and damnation, to those so afflicted, a temporary state. The eloquence of his arguments wounded his critics deeply, whereas Hobbes suffered only superficially from the charges of heresy and promises of eternal hellfire pressed against him in response. “In writing books just as in real life,” he wrote to Cosimo de' Medici in 1669, “enemies are more useful than friends.”
¹⁵
Leviathan
circulated widely, reprinted by underground or offshore press. “To my bookseller's, for ‘Hobbs's Leviathan,'” noted Samuel Pepys in 1668, “which is now mightily called for; and what was heretofore sold for 8
s
. I now give 24
s
. at the second hand, and is sold for 30
s
., it being a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.”
¹⁶

Hobbes was a lifelong pacifist, a disposition he attributed to a premature birth precipitated by anxiety over the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588. He meticulously cultivated new ideas and distilled them into words. “He walked much and contemplated,” wrote his contemporary John Aubrey, “and he had in the head of his Staffe a pen and inke-horn, carried always a Note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted, he presently enterd it into his Booke, or els he should perhaps have lost it.”
¹⁷
He played tennis until the age of seventy-five (“this he did believe would make him live two or three yeares the longer”) and served up a lively game of words until silenced by a peaceful death at the age of ninety-one. “Neither the timorousness of his Nature from his Infancy, nor the decay of his Vital Heat in the extremity of old age,” reported Aubrey, “chilled the briske Fervour and Vigour of his mind, which did wonderfully continue to him to his last.”
¹⁸
His most outspoken critics were among the first to grant his intellect their respect. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer
concluded their exhaustive study of the argument between Hobbes and Robert Boyle with an unambiguous judgment: “Hobbes was right.”
¹⁹
Hobbes's vision was never so much extinguished as transformed.

Two centuries after Hobbes, the French electrodynamicist André-Marie Ampère sought to categorize all branches of human knowledge in his
Essay on the Philosophy of Science, or Analytic exposition of a natural classification of human knowledge
.
²⁰
Reaching the field of political science through territory first explored by Hobbes (who composed
Leviathan
during his exile in Paris, before the French clerical authorities grew agitated by his ideas), Ampère coined a word with a far-reaching destiny:
Cybernétique
. Derived from Greek terminology referring to the steering of a ship, Ampère's
Cybernétique
encompassed that body of theory, complementary to but distinct from the theory of power, concerned with the underlying processes that direct the course of organizations of all kinds. In the second, posthumous volume of Ampère's
Essay
, published by his son in 1843, Ampère explains how he came to recognize a field of knowledge “which I name
Cybernétique
, from the word κυβερνετική, which was applied first, in a restricted sense, to the steering of a vessel, and later acquired, even among the Greeks, a meaning extending to the
art of steering in general
.”
²¹