Metaphors matter. They matter a lot, shaping not only the way we communicate but also how we think, feel, and even behave. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explained this well in their now classic work, Metaphors We Live By. Their premier example in that book analyzed how the concept "argument" becomes colored by its close association with the metaphor "war." Thus "argument is war." Here are some of the expressions they found that structure how we think about an argument as a war:

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticisms were right on target.

He shot down all my arguments.

Essentially, Lakoff and Johnson contend that metaphors impact the way we experience and understand  the associated concepts, so that in the case of argument, for example, we in part understand, act, and talk about it in terms of war. It's not a dance. It's not a writing process. It's a battle.

The widespread use of the metaphor of the computer to describe the workings of the human brain today has a similar effect. By using such an analogy, people are accepting the implications that the human brain is simply a logical device. This leads to such statements and by implications activities as the following:

IBM's Blue Brain Project is attempting to reverse-engineer the human brain.

Modern architectural design acknowledges that how buildings are structured influences how people interface.

The position of department head requires an expert multitasker capable of processing multiple projects at any given time.

His behavior does not compute.

Human beings do possess logical functions. But the danger with using the digital computer, which runs algorithms based on IF, THEN, ELSE, and COPY logical gates, as a metaphor for the brain is what it leaves out: messy feelings, ambiguous behaviors, irrational thoughts, and the natural ebb and flow of memories. It also leaves out the influences of our subconscious--and the rest of our physical, organic bodies--on how we think, act, and make decisions. Thinking of the brain as a computer addresses very little about what it feels like to be a human being, very little about what it feels like to be alive.

In The Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford argued that far too much emphasis has been placed on distinguishing humans from animals because of our tool-making capacities. He wrote that there was nothing uniquely human in our tool-making. After all, apes use tools. Rather it was the human mind "based on the fullest use of all his bodily organs" and that mind's capacity to create language and use symbols that allowed human beings to build social organizations, civilizations, that distinguish us from other animals. It was through symbols and language that humans rose above a purely animal state. But the ability to create symbols, to be conscious of life and death, of past and future, of tears and hopes, distinguishes humans from other animals far more than any tool-making capability. "The burial of the body tells us more about man's nature than would the tool that dug the grave."

If we continue to distinguish human beings from other animals along the lines of tool-making, Mumford believed, the trajectory would be quite dire:

"In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man to technics, our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat."

So we need to be careful about using the metaphor of the computer, our most modern of tools, to describe our minds and what it means to be a human being.

Ray Kurzweil incessantly dreams of the future. And it's a future he describes as a "human-machine civilization." In How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil looks forward to a time when technology will have advanced to where it will be possible to gradually replace all the parts of the body and brain with nonbiological parts. And he claims that it will not change people's identities any more than the natural, gradual replacement of the cells in our body does now. All this will come about after scientists and engineers, who are currently working on brain models in many different organizations and areas of the world, succeed in creating a complete model of the human brain. Kurzweil contends that the neocortex functions hierarchically and that it works according to pattern recognition. Therefore, he argues, it is possible to write algorithms that will  simulate how the brain actually works. That, in combination with increasing miniaturization, will make such substitution of nonbiological components possible by the 2030s.

That the human brain is akin to a digital computer is still a big and a very contentious issue in neuroscience and cognitive psychology circles. In the January issue of Scientific American, Yale professor of psychology John Bargh summarizes some of the latest thinking about this problem. Specifically he addresses the major role of the unconscious in how people make decisions, how they behave in various situations, and how they perceive themselves and the world around them. There is a complex dynamic between ourcontrolled conscious thought processes and the unconscious, often automatic, processes of which we are not aware. Nobelist Daniel Kahneman explained this phenomenon in Thinking Fast and Slow. Automatic thought processes happen quickly and do not include planning or deliberation.

Even Daniel Dennett, an eminent philosopher and cognitive scientist who has long held that neurons functioned as simple on-off switches that make them a logical switch similar to a digital bit, has recently changed his mind about the analogy of the human mind to a computer: "We're beginning to come to grips with the idea," he says in a recent Edge talk, "that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order,  . . . In fact, it's much more like anarchy. . . ."  Yet even with this concession Dennett is still inclined to use the computer as a metaphor for the human brain. This leads him to make a curious statement, one which actually begs the question: "The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer you're used to. It's not your desktop or your laptop at all."

By his own admission, Dennett's talk is highly speculative: "I'd be thrilled if 20 percent of it was right." What I think he means is that the brain is like a computer that is far more complex than existing machines but that it also has intention. The neurons are "selfish," and they are more like agents than computer instructions, which in turn are more like slaves. "You don't have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn't want to do." Computers, on  the other hand, are made up of "mindless little robotic slave prisoners." So I'm not sure how helpful it is for Dennett to think of the brain as a computer at all. And Dennett's views on neurons and agents, combined with the more recent thinking about the impact of the unconscious on conscious thought, lead me to conclude that Ray Kurzweil's dream of someday replacing the human brain with robotic switches is just that: a dream.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I  don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an  experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we  actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about,  and that’s what these clues in myths help us to find within ourselves. . . .   Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.   . . . We need myths [today] that will identify the individual not with is  local group but with the planet.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For many today, the Internet seems to be a powerful presence. Why does it have such a deep resonance within our imaginations? How has it become so central to our contemporary life? And what does that say about the lives we live and our values? People find the phenomenon of the Web full of possibilities. Many believe that there’s something magical in its very existence and that it offers access to knowledge and powerful modes of communication that are fundamentally different from what we have had in the past. There is also the pervading sense that the Internet is changing us, both individually and communally, in very important ways. 

One way of understanding the role of the Internet in our culture is to consider it as a metaphor and potentially part of a mythology that expresses some essence of what it means to be alive today. Many envision the Internet as an ever-expanding, boundless entity with near-infinite connections both to other people and to sources of knowledge. And this powerful pull of the Internet seems to me to come from its similarities both to our sense of our
outer world—that ever-expanding universe of which we are such a minute part—and to our inner world—the endless depth of our own psyche, imagination, and unconscious with its potential links to communal metaphors and myths. Both these worlds, the outer and the inner, are ineffable, boundless, and to a certain
extent mysterious, unknowable. 

The Internet shares these characteristics and hence seems to offer a similar potential for knowledge, insight, even adventure. It’s cyberspace, after all, a place for journeys. One clicks on an icon (our computers do have their own “iconographies,” just as mythologies do). Microsoft Windows offers users an “Explorer” program to cross the threshold into the vast and unknown space called the Internet. The potential seen in the boundless, gargantuan phenomenon of the Web leads many people to make large claims: Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired,
calls the Internet a “planetary computer,” a “global computer,” and even a “large-scale sentience” with a distributed and vast intelligence that grows “smarter” by the second as millions of users provide evermore information merely
by clicking on a specific website because, in so doing, they indicate their preferences, their interests.

Is there transcendence here, one might ask, the kind of move beyond our ordinary life toward the ultimate mystery of the universe and the source of life itself? Kevin Kelly and others seem to think this is possible, that there is the promise of ultimate knowledge, the unknowable, in the Internet: “Currently,” he writes in What Technology Wants, “we are prejudiced against machines, because all the machines we have met so far have  been uninteresting. As they gain in sentience, that won’t be true,” Kelly writes. “What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather in the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. . . The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job  is to invent a million or a billion varieties of  comprehension.”

Much hinges on what Kelly means by technium, a word he coined because he found that “culture” was too “small” and does not for him convey a sense of “self-propelling momentum.” (I would point out that the word "culture" is also associated with organic growth.) Kelly reaches towards a new kind of mystical sense in defining his technium: it is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” And this is not just
hardware and software, but all “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations” along with this impulse (and here he quite anthropomorphizes technology) of essentially “what technology wants,” which is to generate more technology, more inventions, more connections. For Kelly, as for many enthusiasts of the Internet, the “technium” seems to be alive. But is it? And is it truly self-organizing, or is it just some version of Larry Paige
 standing behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz?

But the real question at the end of the day about what this technology “wants” is: does it have any place left for humanity and the spiritual potential that Joseph Campbell alludes to when he talks about the myths human beings create out of their own dreams, their own imaginations, their own psyches. Or is this new myth a myth of the machine as an all-knowing  and all-powerful deity—in short, a god? Or maybe it’s just all that smoke and mirrors, concocting something rather more illusory than elusive.