Hardware and Software

February 21, 2008

Thinking through the relationship of culture and human nature, I find myself slipping into a computer analogy: the mind represents hardware while culture is software downloaded onto the mind. This manages to preserve both "psychic unity" and immense human variation. The notion that culture can be seen as a form of "software" is backed up at various points by Clifford Geertz in his essay "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man":

...culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters—as has, by an large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call "programs")—for the governing of behavior. [44]

Just a few pages later he writes: "By submitting himself to governance by symbolically mediated programs for producing artifacts..." [48]. That is not too bad considering Geertz is writing this in 1966! The metaphor of software has obviously only gained further traction in the intervening years.

I use this software metaphor in my introduction to religious studies class.. pointing out how religious responses to the world may be based in hardwired human propensities, but since religion is expressed in thousands of different ways, it is a component of our software package. (The way religion has come to be a "part" of our software instead of the software itself is a fascinating question. For an ancient Egyptian, with no word for "religion," it would be exceedingly difficult to separate culture from religion.. while for a modern American it would seem that there is a broadly shared culture into which religion can be nicely fit.)

My reading of The Agile Gene by Matt Ridley has made me re-think this metaphor a bit. The key point of the metaphor is that software and hardware always remain essentially separate. You can delete the software and have a hardware system upon which it would be possible to download something else. But it seems to be an important point to say that this is not the way it works with humans: we cannot possibly imagine erasing culture and then getting a second cultural download. At the earliest age hardware and software are growing together. Our synapses and mental wiring has been formed by the ideas, object relationships, and emotional situations we have confronted. This is a process that never really ends, but which leaves culture and mind bound together.

This is a topic that I get to think about every day has I watch Aurora grow. I don't have the temerity or expertise to do experiments.. or even take systematic notes (I prefer just watching things happen). Still, I wonder what are the things that shape Aurora's view of the world? Often we hold her and walk her through the house.. and that system of the house must come to mean something to her. She would understand space differently if she had grown up in a mansion or in a teepee. The music I listen to with her (Raffi and Beach Boys) must imprint chords and modal relationships on her. The way Emily and I interact sets a pattern of expectations. Even the use of shelves and boxes must order the way her mind works. The point is that the sum of these things are more than software: they are writing their own biologically firm set of connections into her mind. Being raised somewhere else in the world would have led to a different set of connections.