Friday, April 21, 2006

Equivocation alert ...

Arts & Letters Daily links to Alphabets are as simple as... in The Telegraph and alludes to this passage: "... the reason the letters of the alphabet are shaped as they are is to be in harmony with the mental machinery we have evolved to analyse the patterns of the natural world, not for ease of writing, said Dr Changizi."
But I have no mental machinery. I am not a machine. I am an organism. Organisms are not machines. If you want to draw an analogy between an organism and a machine, fine, though to what purpose remains unclear to me. All machines I know of are designed and constructed by those organisms known as human beings. I know of no organisms designed or constructed by anybody - at least not in the sense that machines are.

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