AutoMata Héctor

I took this classic 1925 essay by Bertrand Russell as a blueprint for a not-so-short manifesto and introduction to AutóMata. The order of some sections has been switched around a bit, and I made no effort to emulate any of Russell’s original points or arguments; I just used the section headlines as writing prompts. I do not intend to flesh out all the arguments in this piece, so some of it may come out as somewhat aphoristic or glib. I’ll do deep dives on the reasoning for my positions eventually—that’s what this space will be for.
Nature and Man
I should begin by specifying that I’m not only a physicist but a physicalist and, as far as I can remember, always have been. For now I will leave the arguments for physicalism for another time and skip directly to state its conclusion: there is no such thing as a non-physical entity, and indeed there can’t be, because the notion of a non-physical entity is gibberish. Sometimes this view is also known as naturalism or materialism. I find the choice of nomenclature to be a matter of what one wants to emphasize. Physicalism will be a common theme throughout this article (and the whole of AutóMata), and many of my views on different topics follow from it. I consider the supernatural to be not only inexistent, but also incoherent—hence it cannot exist. Also, I don’t think concepts or abstractions exist in the same way as fundamental particles, apart from the trivial sense that they reside in physical brains. I have always been an atheist as far as I can remember, though I did not associate it with materialism explicitly until adulthood.
As shortcuts of language, it is sometimes practical to use abstractions or stories to help us make sense of the world and our place in it. But these are only practical shorthands for the real stuff that exists and of which everything is made of: fundamental particles living in spacetime. This way of thinking about things is commonly known as physical reductionism. Many people speak of reductionism with derision, but I have found that even the ones worth taking seriously do so only with arguments from semantics or practicality, not soundness, and certainly not evidence. They mistake certain derivations or calculations from fundamental objects and their interactions being intractable or impractical with their being untrue. Whatever else may be considered to exist is only a convenient shorthand for the underlying fundamental physics.
One of these shorthands is ‘humanity’, itself a particular case of another larger category known as ‘life’. Under physicalism, there is no escape from the conclusion that life, and therefore humanity, is a collection of different kinds of self-replicating mechanisms—we are meat robots, as I’ve seen said in some places (the title of this publication is a play on this conclusion and my last name). This is in no way belittling—what matter can do is amazing! No myth, ancient or modern, could have imagined what we now know matter can do. Given enough time and a suitable source of constant energy, it can create flowers, whales, humans, cathedrals, pyramids and, most wondrous of all, knowledge about those things and many more. The way Carl Sagan once put it is that “we are of the Cosmos”, a way for it to know and understand itself. This view of what we are in the grand scheme of things is open-ended, full of endless puzzles, problems and possibilities, and I find it wonderful.
Every time we have made headway in understanding how the world works, we have done it by moving away from the supernatural and towards the natural—there is not a single exception in all of history. Gods and spirits become ever more irrelevant, and their retreat reveals a multi-layered web of mechanisms, from microscopic to cosmological, far more elegant and subtle than any ancient or modern superstition. We humans have a wonderful opportunity, now that we’re here, to discover and understand ever more and more of it.
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