Introduction
The question of uniformity of matter has been explored through various perspectives in the philosophical dimension. A naturalist position may be a good option on which an emphasis can be made within the scope of the issue. Joseph Krutch, being a significant representative of naturalists, advocated the necessity to understand the importance of difference and interconnection between living and non-living matter in his The Colloid and the Crystal. It is likely that his vision was considerably affected by the development and implications of defining technologies of the time. The paper will discuss the approach according to which human behavior can be associated with the technological framework, appealing to Krutch’s vision and the related studies.
Joseph Krutch’s Ideas
Krutch’s wide expertise in nature is reflected in the first half of The Colloid and the Crystal, which stresses the fact that he belongs to the naturalist philosophy cohort. The desire to scrape his initials in the window panes sprang from his detailed description of the magnificent image made by the environment. It was visible in the window he discovered when he walked down to have his breakfast. Krutch’s first encounter is important to the notion of devastation people carry since birth.
Krutch’s study on animate and inanimate vitality, “things and creatures,” elucidates an existential dilemma by questioning if a human is a creature or a thing or if their life is analogous to that of other flora and fauna. He states that life is anarchic and rebellious, as well as it questions the preservation of the norms that the nonliving accepts without challenge (Krutch 110). The strength of these words may fuel the desire to uncover a curiously designed parallel to human existence. It can be culminated in a view asserting a notion that mankind is nothing more than puppets of the Gods of Life, driving them to their own demise. Existence as it is, for many who desire to think that the transformation is into another kind of life, is incomprehensible.
Krutch’s words poetically represent the naturalist’s ambivalence toward the beautiful but sterile uniformity of inanimate objects, which is presented as “the crystal.” Then, there is the unequivocal preference for the flawed but remarkably diverse matter – “the colloid” – of which humans are a part. Here, it might be assumed that such an approach emerged as a reaction to the exaggerated claims of physicomechanical sciences in the 18th and early 19th centuries (Ciofalo 30). This was even more justifiable in 1950, not long after the mentioned sciences had produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the advanced assembly lines.
Nevertheless, as it can now be seen with greater clarity, the incapacity of these sciences to describe life was owing to the huge inadequacy of accessible physical and mathematical models, on the one hand. On the other hand, there also was a poor understanding of the fundamental essence and functions of life forms (Amestoy 1593). The attempt to comprehend and re-create processes distinctive to life – particularly that most exclusive of the existence activities, self-reproduction – is perhaps the most gap-bridging subject of human inquiry (to the point of being viewed by some as an unwarranted incursion into “forbidden land”).
If one looks with the naked eye at the geometrical, crystal-alike uniformity of artificial devices – for instance, a gear – and seeks its biological counterpart, they make a viewpoint mistake. This will only display colloidal jelly, according to Krutch (113). It is further down, in the sub-micron level, that one should examine, where only an optical microscope may be employed. The bacteria flagellar motors or the perforations of nuclear membranes will be the analogs of the gear. On the other hand, if to zoom right back from these levels to the cell scale, one may travel from this gearbox to the plant and the town.
A crucial idea here is that any genuine attempt to replicate important aspects of life in artificial devices will fail unless it is prepared to deal with this level of complexity, which should be considered required rather than optional. The analysis of human behavior in mechanical terms does not turn a man into a machine. Theorists of behavior described people as a two-stroke automaton, which is similar to how a machine was envisioned in the nineteenth century, but there has been a long way since then. A person can be considered a machine in the sense that they are complicated systems with predictable behavior patterns but remarkable complexity, as was mentioned above. Perhaps, in time, robots will be able to replicate the capacity to adjust to reinforcement contingents, but until that time comes, a biological system that is copied in one aspect will stay unique in others.
Then, one does not encourage people to utilize machines in order to convert them become machines. Some devices necessitate repetitive and tedious activity, which individuals want to avoid whenever possible, but others considerably improve our efficiency in dealing with the outside world. A person may react to extremely small items with the optical microscope and huge ones with radio telescopes, which may appear inhuman to those who just use their eyes. A person with the accuracy of a micromanipulator or the range and strength of a space rocket can affect the world, yet his conduct may appear unnatural to people who rely simply on muscle contractions.
People keep track of their actions in books and other forms of media, and utilizing those records might appear unnatural to others who can only rely on what they have learned. Humans define complicated circumstances in the form of rules, including rules for the usage of rules, and input them into communication devices that “think” at a pace that appears entirely inhuman to a thinker without such systems. All of this is done with the assistance of technology, and they would be less than human if they did not. Before the introduction of these gadgets, what we now consider machine-like behavior was considerably more widespread. Examples would be a slave in a cotton field, a student being trained by a teacher – they were “machine-like” people.
Machines are taking over jobs that people used to do, and this has major societal implications. Machines will take over more and more human duties as technology improves, but only to a point. We create devices that lessen the negative aspects of our environment (such as arduous work) while increasing positive rewards. That is why we develop them; otherwise, we would be denying ourselves of reinforcements by creating robots that are themselves reinforced by these effects. It will be through chance, not design if the machines that man produces render him utterly obsolete.
Conclusion
To conclude, the above discussion was dedicated to the idea of perceiving human behavior from the so-called technological perspective, appealing to Krutch’s naturalistic vision of matter. It was found that the association between people’s choices and machine algorithms can be established only through the prism of admitting the notion of naturalistic complexity. Such an approach demonstrates the thin thread that connects sciences of the whole spectrum – both the humanitarian and natural ones.
Works Cited
Amestoy, Jeffrey. “Uncommon Humanity: Reflections of Judging in a Post-Human Era.” New York University Law Review, vol. 78., no. 5, 2003, pp. 1581–1595.
Ciofalo, Michele. “Green Grass, Red Blood, Blueprint: Reflections on Life, Self-replication, and Evolution.” Design and Information in Biology: From Molecules to Systems, edited by Jack Bryant, Marie Atherton, and Andrew Collins, 2007, pp. 29–96.
Krutch, Joseph. “The Colloid and the Crystal.” William Sloane Associates, 1953, pp. 110-133.