ABSTRACT
The wider technological history of the computer, according to Arnold Borst, embraces the sundial, the waterclock, the computus (or calendrical calculation), the astrolabe, the mechanical clock, and Leibnitz’s calculating machine; ‘with all of these’ writes Borst ‘the computer shares the rationality of an instrument that helps humans to understand their world’.2 The book, too, once seemed to help humans to understand their world; and yet, once books had begun to multiply, that world began to appear more uncertain, more unknowable, than ever. The paradox is perfectly expressed in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), a text designed to banish uncertainty, and to fight a rearguard action on behalf of an older, pre-Gutenberg, view of nature. By the time Milton came to write his justification of the ways of God to Man, the printing press had been in existence for nearly 200 years. Imagining, though, a world without books, without history, and without technology, Milton’s pre-
Lapsarian Adam gazes heavenwards, and is filled with doubt and confusion: ‘Something yet of Doubt remains’ Adam suggests, hesitatingly, of the angel Raphael at the opening to Book VIII of Paradise Lost ‘which only thy solution can resolve’.3 Adam has begun to ‘compute’ (the term is bestowed on him by Milton) the relative ‘magnitudes’ of earth and the stars; more than this he has begun an enquiry into space, distance, speed, movement: the objects of attention, now, of the modern super-computer. Raphael, Adam’s divine interlocutor, is no IBM, and his answers to Adam’s queries on celestial motion are equally confused and contradictory, hearkening back (as has often been pointed out) to a world view which would have been recognized by Dante or by Aquinas, rather than by Milton’s actual contemporaries, the virtuosi of the Royal Society or the members of other scientific institutions which were now appearing throughout Europe.4 For Raphael, the world, the heavens, and God are too complex for human reason to unravel. ‘Think only what concerns thee and thy being;/Dream not of other worlds’ Adam is advised. In fact by the time the second edition of Milton’s poem was published in 1674, Pascal, Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibnitz had already begun to make Raphael’s advice seem positively antiquarian. Yet, in seeking to compute the structure of the heavens, and in turning outside himself for a solution to the divine equations that he has begun to sense inform the world which he inhabits, Milton’s Adam may seem perversely modern. Adam knows the world to be complex, and he knows, too, that unaided human reason will not unravel that complexity. Some assistance was needed, something more than unaided human reason could afford. Raphael is all that Adam has to assist his intellect, but such was not the case in the world outside the pages of Paradise Lost. It is not widely known that computers, considered as mechanical contrivances operating according to mathematical precepts and capable of performing simple numerical calculations, actually pre-dated Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is not to doubt the importance of the much older abacus, or the astrolabe to the history of computing. But Pascal’s adding machine of 1642 is probably the ancestor of the modern computer. At almost the same time that this primitive machine made its first, fleeting appearance (the single surviving specimen of Pascal’s machine was lost until 1879), the theoretical foundation stone for building a computer was being laid by Descartes. That foundation relied not on an enquiry into mathematics or mechanics, but into what it was to be human. It was only through knowing how the human creature operated that the pathway towards creating the computer would lie open. In 1641 Descartes offered the conclusion, in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy that ‘I am, then, in the strict sense only, a thing that thinks’.5 To conclude that one is a thinking thing, rather than a spark of the divine creator, is to begin to deploy reason in ways very different from those counselled by Milton’s Raphael. Descartes’ view of the matter was not, however, that the human being was therefore indistinguishable from the machine. Far from it, for the machine would probably lack the universal ‘instrument’ of reason.
