After too long on the computer, my brain begins to act like the operating system. It freezes up, gives me error messages that make no sense, and strays off to places I had no intention of visiting. It becomes as unstable as Vista, as slow as my vintage PC.
The best remedy is to stop and seek the solace of the forests—the natural, beautiful antithesis of the artificial technical world. Or so it seems. But when I step out into the trees to regain balance, I immediately run into… the original World Wide Web.
Spiders are as profuse as wandering thoughts here. They each have their little web sites wherever I walk, hoping to snare the time and life of random passers-by. I have to brush web designers out of my face at every step. Their creations distract me from what I really came to experience. There may even be viruses contained in their bite. In other words, it’s exactly the same as online.
The convergence of the wild and electronic fascinates me. The more complex our designed systems become, the more organic and life-like their properties. We haven’t yet truly created artificial intelligence—and our natural intelligence is debatable—but the converging patterns confirm that everything we do remains a part of nature.
My crashing mind thus wonders: Is how the organic rises out of the technical parallel to how earthly life rose out of molten rock and other supposedly lifeless elements? Are we subconsciously repeating the steps of evolution and creation? As we continue to unleash technical genius upon the world without the ability to conceive of its results, will our systems develop truly independent life? Is this repetition too, and was all of life therefore a complete surprise to God? And if software replicates life, is it possible that humanity was designed by a committee whose primary desire was a paycheck? That would explain a lot.
I don’t know, though. I can’t see clearly enough with all these webs in my face. And the spiders’ FAQ lists don’t answer my wild questions. Such lists rarely do.
