the software revelation

Why read this book? This book is about software. It’s also about something more. Humankind has always grappled with this something more, which for our purposes we’ll call the “transcendent.” Prophets and poets have tried to describe it. Temples have been built to exalt it. Art has been created to express it. And we’ve all experienced it – whether in a heart-stopping sunset or in the simple delight of being with a loved one. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution and a European intellectual movement known as “The Enlightenment,” however, a kind of metaphysical schizophrenia has impaired our engagement with the transcendent. That’s because we’ve come to view the transcendent as though it were an entirely separate realm from what we’ll call the “tangible.” The tangible realm encompasses the physical universe and our physical selves. It’s the realm we learn about through direct observation and scientific experimentation. The marvelous results of the empirical methods we employ to explore this realm include our abilities to cure diseases, to chart the stars, and to conveniently zap frozen cheeseburgers in our microwaves. Meanwhile, we’ve exiled the transcendent to another realm. This is the realm where we engage with matters such as love, goodness, evil, beauty, justice, and our sense of place in the cosmos. These transcendent matters don’t readily yield themselves to the empirical knowledge-gathering methods we apply to the tangible – yet they are nonetheless quite real and quite integral to our lived experience. The transcendent may resist quantitative measurement in our labs and observation through our telescopes, but it persists in our consciousness as it continues to inspire us, befuddle us, and pique our curiosity. Because our engagements with the tangible and the transcendent have diverged so much over the centuries, we’ve developed a bad habit of applying quite different vocabularies to them – granting one the exclusive right to be deemed “rational” and “objective,” while dismissing the other as merely a matter of personal faith or opinion. This metaphysical schizophrenia – formally referred to as “dualism” – stigmatizes the transcendent as somehow immune to reason, while at the same time tempting us to overestimate our capacity to fully grasp the deeper, more intransigent mysteries of the tangible. This book offers a possible way out of our metaphysically schizophrenic dualism and the various ailments of narrative we tend to suffer as a result. Muons and music, after all, inhabit a single shared cosmos. So in the following pages, we’ll try to uniformly apply our rational capacities to both the tangible and the transcendent. More specifically, we’ll take advantage of the phenomenon of software – a phenomenon that has so recently and so quickly become so pervasively present in our lives – to consider: Whether there can be observable agency (that is, the ability to participate in causation) without an inherently observable agent. Whether the attributes of software’s agency – including abstraction, instantiation, relationality, “chunking,” and functional narrative – reveal anything about the cosmos more generally. Whether the agency and identity of entities are based more on the relationships between them than on any attributes inherent in entities themselves. Whether the relationship-centricity that software reveals can help us better understand the world in some new, useful, and unified way. If you avidly embrace the transcendent, this book may help you better ground your beliefs in reason. If you generally shy away from anything that smacks of transcendence, on the other hand, this book may open you to the possibility that human knowledge is not strictly bounded by the limits of the scientific method – and that rational investigation of the transcendent is in fact essential to any coherent understanding of our universe and ourselves. Regardless of your current views, I hope you find the ideas here helpful and thought-provoking. There is much that software can reveal to us. This is my attempt to share some of those revelations with you. Enjoy!