Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Machine’ functions as a multi-register term whose meanings range from the psychodynamic (the machine as dream symbol encoding will-power or psychological function) to the epistemological (the machine as the dominant metaphor through which Western science has construed living organisms and even the brain itself). Jung reads machine-imagery in dreams as projections of the dreamer’s own psychic dynamics — instruments of will, amplifiers of power, or faulty apparatuses demanding conscious repair. For McGilchrist, the machine model is the signature pathology of left-hemisphere dominance: ‘neurospeak’ saturated with circuitry, modules, and encoding has colonised biology, producing a fiction that is neither innocuous nor accurate. Thompson’s engagement with Rosen sharpens the theoretical stakes by arguing that organisms, unlike machines, are constituted by circular, self-referential causal loops that resist complete analytical fractionation — a position with roots in Kant’s critique of mechanical analogy for life. Vernant locates the machine within Greek techne-culture as a device that operates by internal mechanism rather than as an extension of the human body. Sardello situates the computer as the ‘culmination of the mechanized world,’ marking a civilisational threshold. Running through all these positions is a shared tension: the machine is indispensable as heuristic yet fundamentally inadequate as ontology for living, conscious, and psychically animated reality.
we should banish from our speech and writing any use of the word ‘machine’ as an explanation or definition of anything that is not a machine. Our understanding of creatures and our use of them are not improved by calling them machines.
McGilchrist argues that the machine metaphor, ubiquitous in neuroscience, actively distorts understanding of living beings and must be consciously abandoned.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Neurospeak is replete with references to ‘wiring’, ‘circuitry’, ‘modules’, ‘switches’, ‘signals’, ‘data banks’, ‘inputs’, ‘outputs’, and to the brain ‘encoding’, ‘computing’, and having ‘mechanisms’ of every conceivable kind.
McGilchrist documents the comprehensive colonisation of brain science by machine language as evidence of left-hemisphere dominance over biological understanding.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
even as a fiction the machine idea does not attain its goal, because … it proves to be inadequate in the face of a large and important section of biological data. It’s not even as though the fiction of the machine is harmless.
McGilchrist, citing von Bertalanffy, contends that the machine model fails both as empirical description and as harmless heuristic, carrying real inhuman consequences for culture.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the machine model is found wanting … It can be seen behind many of the more inhuman consequences of our technological society: our attitudes to both what human life is and to the living world at large.
The machine model is identified as the conceptual root of dehumanising tendencies in technological civilisation, making its critique ethically as well as scientifically urgent.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
All attempts at stretching the machine model in one form or another come down to repeating de La Mettrie’s absurdity, that of a ‘clock that winds itself’. The correct conclusion to draw is not that some watchmaker … did or does wind the machine, but that it is not a machine.
McGilchrist concludes that iterative attempts to save the machine model of life merely reproduce a foundational absurdity, and that the proper inference is ontological: organisms simply are not machines.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The history of biology is, according to Nicholson, ‘littered with memorable examples’. The attempt is reminiscent of an old joke … All attempts at stretching the machine concept beyond breaking point come down to repeating de La Mettrie’s absurdity.
The persistent and failed effort to extend machine terminology to organisms is documented as a recurring pattern throughout biology’s intellectual history.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Rosen presents a rigorous argument for distinguishing between organisms and machines … it is precisely what Maturana and Varela would call the circular and self-referential organization of the living that distinguishes organisms from mechanisms and machines.
Thompson presents Rosen’s formal argument that the self-referential, impredicative organisation of living systems places them categorically beyond what any mechanistic model can fully represent.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the machine helps you to move in a quicker way … He says, ‘To me the meaning of the machine is the increase of human power; the increase of human power in the psychological sphere is the dynamics of our functions, the source, the tool, the instrument by which we increase our will-power.’
Jung’s seminar reveals how a patient’s dream-machine symbolises concentrated psychic will-power, exemplifying the depth-psychological reading of technological imagery as projection of inner dynamics.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis
‘The astonishing plasticity of organisms contrasts with the brittleness of machines’, writes Nicholson, which tend to stop working when their parts break or are damaged.
The structural contrast between organismic plasticity and mechanical brittleness is marshalled as empirical evidence that the machine metaphor fundamentally misrepresents living systems.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
A machine as a whole typically does not adapt in response to parts becoming worn or defective, nor invent a solution at a local level that will further the purpose of the overall machine.
The incapacity of machines for local self-reinvention in service of a holistic purpose distinguishes them from organisms and exposes the inadequacy of mechanistic biology.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
DNA is not ontologically, causally or temporally prior to the cell, nor does it stand over against the cell in any sense … The other possible gambit to save the machine model is really just to reinvent God, put his eyes out, and call him by another name.
McGilchrist argues that attempts to rescue the machine model through genetic determinism collapse on empirical grounds, with the fallback position covertly reintroducing a designer.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The analogy of the world to a watch, which implied the existence somewhere of a watchmaker, was used by the English clergyman William Paley to buttress his argument for a God. Dawkins … used the same analogy to buttress his argument against God.
The watchmaker analogy is shown to serve diametrically opposed theological agendas, revealing that the machine model carries deep metaphysical commitments regardless of the intentions of its users.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient; ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another.
McGilchrist cites clinical phenomenology in which psychiatric patients experience themselves as machines, illustrating how the machine metaphor maps onto states of depersonalisation and loss of vital spontaneity.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
‘I walk like a machine’, says one patient; ‘I’m a psycho-machine’, says another. Equally common is seeing others as not alive.
The self-identification with machine and the perception of others as inert are linked in psychiatric experience, connecting the machine metaphor to the broader depersonalisation of modernity.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the computer is not just another technological device contributing to the mechanization of the world, but is in fact the culmination of the mechanized world, the consummate result of that world, the signal for the end of that world.
Sardello positions the computer as the telos of mechanisation rather than merely its latest tool, heralding a civilisational threshold in the history of soul’s relation to technology.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
There are two machines, two methods. One the girl’s, the other the wife’s. The machine is a psychological factor, a mental machine which
Jung reads competing dream-machines as symbolically encoding distinct psychological orientations or methods, demonstrating the machine’s function as a depth-psychological symbol of psychic operation.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
the tool, when directly manipulated by man, is still an extension of his own organs … Unlike an instrument, it does not have its own time
Vernant distinguishes Greek tools — bodily extensions operating on human time — from machines with internal mechanisms and their own temporal rhythms, tracing the conceptual genealogy of the machine in antiquity.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Mechane still has a meaning close to that of a trick or expedient; it is defined as an ingenious invention that enables a man to extricate himself from an embarrassing situation or aporia and assume the advantage over some natural force that is contrary and superior to him.
Vernant traces the Greek term mechane to its roots in sophistic stratagems and competitive cunning, revealing that ‘machine’ originates in a rhetoric of ingenuity over nature rather than in neutral mechanism.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
His mind and the minds of others were being controlled by an elaborate machine which he called the ‘Air Loom’, manipulated by men with bellows and emitting influencing rays that controlled his every movement.
The paranoid delusion of the ‘Air Loom’ illustrates how the machine concept can become, in psychotic experience, a persecutory apparatus of total external control over the self.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
His mind and the minds of others were being controlled by an elaborate machine which he called the ‘Air Loom’, manipulated by men with bellows and emitting influencing rays that controlled his every movement.
The ‘Air Loom’ delusion represents the machine as an instrument of psychic invasion and bodily domination, linking machine imagery to psychopathological themes of external control and loss of agency.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
In the early days, it was common to refer to these computers as ‘electronic brains,’ or ‘thinking machines.’
The historical identification of early computers as ‘thinking machines’ contextualises the origins of the cognitive machine metaphor that depth-psychologists and phenomenologists would subsequently critique.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside
The point here would not be that autopoietic systems have no mechanistic models, but rather that no mechanistic model could represent all the relevant features of these systems, and hence new sorts of models would need to be developed.
Thompson clarifies that the organism-versus-machine distinction does not deny the utility of mechanical models but rather establishes their principled incompleteness for capturing autopoietic life.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside