Is the concept of humans being machines made of matter, instincts, and laws of nature true?

Is the concept of humans being machines made of matter, instincts, and laws of nature true?

[ 5/April/24 ]

Depends how deeply you understand the notions of “machine”, “matter”, “instincts”, “laws of nature” and “true”.

If any of those things have hard boundaries, then probably not.

If you think anything can be known with absolute certainty, then you really haven’t spent enough time in either mathematics or physics.

As one simple example, the idea of Pi (the relationship of the diameter to the circumference of a circle in flat Euclidean space) is common in many equations relating to reality, yet Pi is one of an infinite class or irrational numbers that may not be computed accurately, but may only be approximated. Thus any computation involving any such number has uncertainties by definition.

Physics has the idea of Heisenberg uncertainty (among many other similar ideas) which states that the position and momentum of a particle may not be known simultaneously with accuracy beyond the Planck limit.

Newton thought of reality in terms of fixed and immutable laws, but Einstein demonstrated that Newton’s laws were useful approximation in certain contexts, but failed in other contexts.

I strongly suspect that all “laws” have this aspect, of being contextually useful approximations, rather than anything fundamentally “True” in all contexts. Reality does seem to contain fundamental uncertainties, but can in some contexts closely approach certainty. Complexity such as we are can only exist in contexts that do allow close approximations to certainty.

When one looks deeply into biology, into evolution, then it becomes clear that the sort of machines that we are, are in part dependent upon reasonable approximations to classical laws, and in part embody fundamental uncertainty. Only in such a deeply complex context is it possible to have both complexity and reasonable degrees of freedom; and we do clearly appear to have both.

The tendency of evolution to punish the slow much more harshly than the slightly inaccurate has given our neural networks strong biases to prefer simple certainty, and many of those biases are subconscious, and produce our experiences of reality as being much more simple and certain than it actually is. Thus we are all biased to be blind to the depths of complexity and uncertainty around and within us; and few are able to see it clearly.

Thus many look for simple answers where they cannot possibly exist, where the reality is deeply more complex and nuanced and fundamentally uncertain.