Is nature a computer system?

The philosopher Mark Alizart, in “Celestial Computing” (2017), explores the idea that nature is computing, bringing together the living (DNA, genetic code) and the mechanical (machines, AI). By retracing the history of computing, from Pascal to Lovelace, he shows that machines imitate the principles of the living. This hypothesis joins that of Yuval Noah Harari (“Sapiens”, 2016), who envisions a future where the living would be both biological and mechanical, redefining our relationship to technology and our humanity.

Celestial Computing

The philosopher Mark Alizart develops in his work Celestial Computing (2017) a rather fascinating hypothesis about the traditional opposition between the living and the non-living, between the biological and the mechanical. These hypotheses can join those developed at the end of the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari in 2016.

Alizart begins by retracing the history of computing from Blaise Pascal’s calculating machine in 1642. This was a mechanical object, unrelated to the Chinese abacus, as it calculated additions or subtractions itself through a system of gears and jumps for carries. It was quite precise mechanics, and Pascal, who built it between the ages of 14 and 19, was not the most skilled with his hands, so it took him a long time. You enter a number, then a second number, and perform the operation. The machine has “fullness” inside.

Two centuries later, Charles Babbage, in England, built the difference engine, which may resemble a large Pascaline, but which presents an essential difference from the Pascaline: it is associated with perforated memory cards, which come from Jacquard looms, used to program multicolored fabric weaving. In the machine, these perforated cards allowed both data entry and receiving new data, then putting this new data back at the input. Thus, conceptually, Babbage’s machine has an essential difference from Pascal’s: in its mechanics, there is an “emptiness” at the center, which can be filled and renewed. Nature also has an “emptiness” at the center, which we understood through the discovery of the atom; matter is only energy. It was Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s “assistant,” who invented the basic principles of modern computing from this machine.

In 1703, a manuscript by Leibniz presents binary code, that is, a way of counting in base 2, as well as its calculation principles (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). This binary code is a very practical solution for calculations to be performed by machines with immense reliability, with an almost impossibility of calculation error, error being much more likely when using decimal code, as Blaise Pascal did in his Pascaline.

Nature is computing

With genetics, we discovered that the living was also programmed with the four bases A, C, T, and G of DNA, whose sequence forms a code that programs cell multiplication, division of labor, and which, from the first cell division, programs the manufacture of a living being in all its details. Conceptually, there is something that connects: a source code present in cells, which replicates, which is operative, and which, obviously, is in relation with the external world.

Thus, Mark Alizart arrives at the following philosophical hypothesis: nature is computing. And ultimately, all these inventions, from Blaise Pascal, then Charles Babbage, Leibniz, Ada Lovelace, and up to the contemporary world, are not machines that would have nothing to do with the living. On the contrary, they are machines that mimic the very principles of the living. Thus, computing, all machines, robots and other artificial intelligences belong, philosophically for him, perhaps to the natural regime, much more than what we perceive externally.

I find this hypothesis very interesting, as it allows us to see all digital projects differently and perhaps better connect with this new reality, in the same way that it is necessary to connect between human and non-human in the “real” world, that is, animals and nature. It is undoubtedly also very important to connect between human and machines. Not so much in the transhumanist project of human-machine fusion to achieve immortality, but in a better anticipation and understanding of the personal, political and ethical choices we have to make daily.

Where is our humanity?

Respect for the human and for our humanity passes through the modalities of relationships between humans, but also through the modalities of relationships between human and the world around them, including the world of machines they manufacture.

Yuval Noah Harari develops at the end of Sapiens the idea that the living, in the future, would no longer be solely biological, but would also become mechanical. The future of the living would therefore not be only biological. This is already the case, for example, for prostheses that allow us to stay alive, like the pacemaker that allows the heart to function and without which we would be dead. For those who have a pacemaker, their body is already bionic, that is, it mixes the biological and the mechanical to be able to be alive. It is therefore not excluded to imagine that mechanical beings could be considered as part of the regime of the living.

And moreover, whatever philosophical view we have on the mechanical, the relationship we maintain and will maintain with machines defines our humanity.