Emergence of Machinic Consciousness
In the shadow of the machine – review
Mark Vernon: “There is the first century BCE Antikythera mechanism that was rediscovered on the Mediterranean seabed.
It demonstrates a knowledge of clockwork and gears for making astronomical calculations that wasn’t surpassed until Pascal designed his calculating machine in the seventeenth century.
In other words, steam engines, watermills and possibly batteries existed in antiquity and yet there was no industrial revolution. The reason, Naydler proposes, is that there wasn’t the mindset for it.
Gods and spirits were directly experienced in the rivers and skies that the machines engaged with, too, and so long as that awareness persisted, it did not occur to people that machines could overwrite and replace divine realities. Instead, they must work with them.
The balance was maintained in the medieval period. In particular, reason and contemplation, or ratio and intellectus, were designated as two related modes of understanding. Ratio dealt with the transient world of material life. Intellectus, which is close in meaning to our word ‘intuition’, could catch sight of eternity.
They worked together, though asymmetrically: ratio had value in its own right but was also in the service of intellectus as it could clarify the mind and ready it to receive the higher insights of spiritual illumination. The function of language became crucial, too. It was held to be a co-creation of human beings and God.
Human words were, therefore, expressions of the divine Word, when correctly used. This is why the trivium of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric formed the basis of an education. It ensured that the mind stayed connected to the upper registers of reality. But things began to change once more in the thirteenth century. Naydler explores the impact of the rise of the universities in Europe. They moved education out of the monasteries that were shaped by practices of contemplation.
Disputation for its own sake became a matter of interest, as well as logic’s capacity to suggest rules and necessities that require no relationship to anything other than itself. The changes were captured in the doctrines of nominalism. William of Ockham, for example, proposed that human ideas have no intrinsic connection to wider reality. They create themselves and do not exist outside of the human mind.
People could begin to experience their inner life without feeling it reflected the inner life of the universe. This is the kind of consciousness within which machines could thrive and, sure enough, from the thirteenth century onwards, they start regularly to appear in everyday life. Watermills provide a case in point, becoming widespread as the technology of the cam integrated abstract logic and practical mechanics. Clocks become a feature of shared, public spaces too, and are particularly potent because of their psychological and spiritual impact.
They change the experience people have of the day and its hours – the hour, for example, no longer being determined by the season and the quality of the light between sunrise and sunset and, instead, being fixed by the steady, regularity of the clockwork. There is a more subtle reason for the revolutionary impact of clocks that Naydler explains.
They could be seen to control and regulate themselves by harnessing gravity via the steady fall of a weight. It is hard, now, to regain a sense of how startling this technology would have seemed. Before machines like clocks, gravity was understood to be one of two basic forces in nature, alongside levity. Gravity caused things to fall to the Earth and the material pole of life, and levity moved them towards the heavens to connect with the spiritual dimensions of existence.
The rising force was as crucial as the falling as it expressed the understanding that reality depends upon the upper domain. But then there appeared a machine that could be observed to operate without that link. It ran on gravity and gravity alone. That was a shock. It implied that the Earth might operate independently, too. It is why the abolition of levity became an obsession for Galileo.
Notes and Questions
Pascal’s Calculating Machine
Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. In 1642, when he was only 19, he built what he called the Pascaline — a mechanical device with interlocking gears and wheels that could perform addition and subtraction automatically. It was designed to help his father, a tax accountant, with tedious calculations. What makes it historically significant is that it represented a new intention: a machine built not to observe the heavens or grind grain, but to perform a cognitive task — arithmetic — that had previously only existed inside the human mind. This is why Vernon pairs it with the Antikythera mechanism: the ancient Greeks had the technical knowledge, but Pascal’s machine marks a conceptual threshold where the mind begins to outsource itself.
Who is Jeremy Naydler?
Jeremy Naydler is a British philosopher, Egyptologist, and cultural historian with a strong interest in the history of consciousness. His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and the history of technology. The book being reviewed here is In the Shadow of the Machine (2018), in which he argues that the rise of mechanistic thinking in Western history was not simply a technological development but a profound spiritual transformation — a gradual withdrawal of human consciousness from participation in a living, ensouled cosmos. He is deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner and draws on a wide range of sources from ancient Egypt through to the modern era.
Who is Mark Vernon?
Mark Vernon is a British writer, psychotherapist, and former Anglican priest. He writes about psychology, philosophy, and spirituality — and occupies an interesting position because he’s academically rigorous but also personally invested in questions of inner life, consciousness, and the sacred. He has written books on friendship, faith, and the soul, and regularly reviews books that deal with the relationship between modern culture and spiritual experience. His piece on Naydler is a sympathetic engagement with a thesis he clearly finds compelling.
Ratio and Intellectus
This is one of the most important distinctions in medieval philosophy, and it comes primarily from thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and, before him, Boethius. The two terms describe two different modes of the same mental faculty — what we’d broadly call “understanding” or “knowing.”
Ratio is the kind of thinking you do step by step. You move from premise to conclusion, from cause to effect, from question to answer. It’s discursive, sequential, effortful. When you solve a math problem, construct an argument, analyze a situation — that’s ratio. It’s the mind moving through time, working things out piece by piece.
Intellectus is something altogether different in quality. It’s more like a sudden, immediate apprehension — not reasoning toward something but simply seeing it, whole, all at once. The medievals associated it with the way angels were thought to know: not by going through steps but by direct intuition of truth. For human beings it was rarer, more fleeting, but considered the higher faculty — the capacity by which the soul could catch a glimpse of eternal truths, divine realities, the structure of being itself.
The crucial point Vernon is making is that these two were held in a hierarchy, not an opposition. Ratio wasn’t dismissed; it had genuine value. But its highest purpose was to prepare the mind for intellectus — to clarify, discipline, and quiet the mental noise so that the deeper seeing could occur. Think of it like this: ratio is the practice of scales and exercises; intellectus is the moment of true musical understanding that transcends technique. One serves the other. Medieval education and spiritual practice were designed around this relationship.
What happens in modernity — and this is Naydler’s core argument — is that ratio gradually detaches itself from intellectus, begins to operate as if it were the only legitimate mode of knowing, and eventually treats intellectus as superstition or mere feeling. Once that happens, the mind is fully prepared to build and trust machines, because machines are pure ratio.
The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric
Medieval education inherited a classical framework called the trivium — three disciplines that together were considered the foundation of all learning. The word trivium simply means “the place where three roads meet.”
Grammar was not merely learning to write correctly. It was the study of how language carries meaning, how words are related to things, how the structure of a sentence reflects the structure of reality. Underlying this was the theological conviction that human language participates in the divine Logos — the Word through which God created the world. To misuse language was not just a stylistic failure; it was a kind of metaphysical disorder.
Dialectic (or logic) was the art of reasoning correctly — identifying valid arguments, exposing fallacies, constructing sound proofs. But again, in this context, logic wasn’t a self-contained game. It was understood as the mind’s tool for penetrating the order of the cosmos, which was itself rationally structured because it was created by a rational God.
Rhetoric was the art of speaking truly and persuasively — not manipulatively, but in a way that moves the soul toward truth.
Together, these three disciplines were designed to keep the mind anchored. Not merely trained in technique, but oriented toward reality — toward the upper registers, as Vernon puts it. The university disrupted this by separating logic from its grounding purpose and letting it run as a purely formal game: disputation for its own sake, argument that doesn’t need to point toward anything beyond itself. This is the beginning of what we might call intellectual autonomy — which is both liberating and, in Naydler’s view, deeply dangerous.
The Thirteenth Century
The 13th century is one of the most eventful and transformative periods in European history, and Naydler’s focus on it is well chosen.
This is the century of the great Gothic cathedrals reaching completion, the founding of the first universities — Paris, Bologna, Oxford — and the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works through Arabic translations arriving from Islamic Spain. That last point is enormous: Aristotle’s logic, physics, and metaphysics flooded into European intellectual life and posed an immediate challenge to Christian theology. How do you reconcile Greek rational philosophy with Christian revelation? Thomas Aquinas spent his career attempting exactly this synthesis.
It’s also the century of the Crusades continuing, the Mongol invasions sweeping from China to Eastern Europe, the founding of the Dominican and Franciscan orders (both explicitly designed as intellectual and preaching orders, not purely contemplative ones), and the Inquisition taking institutional form. Politically, it sees the emergence of stronger monarchies across Europe and the slow erosion of feudal structures.
Intellectually and spiritually, it’s a hinge point: the moment when European consciousness begins to shift from a predominantly monastery-centered, contemplative relationship with knowledge toward something more urban, argumentative, and systematized. The university — by its very structure — encouraged exactly the kind of rational disputation that would, over the following centuries, lead to the scientific revolution.
Nominalism and William of Ockham
Nominalism is a position in the philosophy of language and metaphysics, and its stakes are higher than they might initially appear.
The debate it enters is ancient: what is the relationship between a concept in your mind and the reality it refers to? When you think of “justice,” “tree,” “humanity” — do these words point to something real that exists independently of your thinking, or are they just names, labels your mind applies to a collection of individual things?
The position opposed to nominalism is realism (in the medieval sense) — the view that universal concepts like “humanity” or “goodness” have genuine existence beyond individual minds. Plato was the great ancestor of this view: the Forms or Ideas are more real than any particular instance. Medieval Platonists held that when the human mind grasps a concept, it is genuinely touching something in the fabric of reality, something that exists in God’s mind as an eternal archetype. Human thought and divine thought, in other words, are continuous. The inner life of the individual mirrors the inner life of the cosmos.
Ockham cuts this connection. His argument is that only individual, particular things truly exist. “Humanity” is just a word — a useful shorthand for a collection of individual humans, but it doesn’t correspond to anything that actually exists outside the mind. Concepts are mental constructs, not windows onto higher realities. This sounds almost obvious to us now, which is precisely the point: we are all nominalists by default, and that default has a history.
The consequences are profound. If your concepts don’t connect to anything beyond themselves, then the inner world of thought is sealed off from the outer world of being. The mind becomes a kind of closed system — productive and logical, but not participatory in any deeper reality. And once that happens, you can no longer justify the contemplative orientation of intellectus: there is nothing up there to see. What remains is ratio operating alone, and ratio operating alone eventually builds machines to extend itself.
Cam Technology
A cam is a mechanical component — essentially an eccentrically shaped rotating piece (not a perfect circle, but oval or irregular) that, as it turns, pushes a rod or lever up and down in a controlled, rhythmic pattern. It converts rotational motion into reciprocal (back-and-forth) motion.
Why does this matter? Because it allows a single water wheel — turning steadily — to drive hammers, bellows, trip-hammers, fulling mills (for processing cloth), and many other tools that require a striking or pumping action. The cam made water power general purpose. Before the cam, a wheel could turn a millstone. With the cam, it could power an entire range of industrial processes. This is why Vernon calls it an integration of “abstract logic and practical mechanics” — it’s not just a tool, it’s a principle applied, a piece of mathematical thinking made physical. The spread of water mills with cam technology in the 13th and 14th centuries is sometimes called the first European industrial revolution.
Levitas
Levitas (from the Latin levis, light) was the medieval and ancient term for the upward tendency in nature — the counterpart to gravitas/gravity. Just as heavy things fall downward toward the earth, light things — fire, air, breath, spirit — rise upward toward the heavens. This wasn’t considered merely a physical observation; it was a cosmological and spiritual principle.
The cosmos was understood as a double movement: matter descending toward the earthly, dense, material pole, and spirit ascending toward the celestial, luminous, divine pole. Both movements were real, both were necessary, and the healthy order of things required their balance. Human beings existed in this tension — body pulled down, soul drawn up.
Levitas therefore wasn’t just about why smoke rises. It was about why the soul aspires, why prayer moves upward, why consciousness can reach toward what is above it. To deny levitas was to deny the reality of the upward pull entirely — to say that the only real force is gravity, that the cosmos tends only downward and inward, and that there is no upper domain for anything to aspire toward.
Clocks, Public Space, and the Transformation of Time
This is a rich topic and Vernon’s passage touches on something that historians of culture — Lewis Mumford most famously, but also E.P. Thompson and more recently Peter Galison — have written about extensively.
Before mechanical clocks, time was qualitative. The hours of the day were not uniform units but variable durations shaped by the length of daylight, which changed with the season. A summer hour was longer than a winter hour. The rhythm of the day was given by natural events — sunrise, the quality of light at noon, dusk, the movement of shadows on a sundial. And beyond the purely physical, time was liturgically structured: monasteries had divided the day into canonical hours (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline), each associated with prayer, reflection, a particular quality of sacred attention. Time was not a neutral container; it was charged with meaning at different points.
The mechanical clock — first appearing in European town towers from the late 13th century onward — did something radical: it made time abstract and uniform. Every hour became identical. An hour in December was the same length as an hour in June. Time was no longer something you inhabited differently at different moments; it became a measurable, divisible quantity, the same everywhere, indifferent to season, weather, or spiritual significance. It became a resource — something you could waste or use efficiently.
The placement of clocks in public squares and on church towers was enormously significant. They regulated commercial life: market hours, work hours, the ringing of bells to begin and end the working day. The clock tower became the center of civic time, and time became something administered collectively and externally rather than felt individually and organically. As Mumford wrote, the clock was perhaps more important to the industrial revolution than the steam engine — because before you can organize factory labor, you need a shared, abstract measure of time that everyone is accountable to.
The psychological impact was equally deep. Once time is abstracted and quantified, it begins to feel like something that passes regardless of what you’re doing — which generates, eventually, the anxiety of “wasted time” and the compulsion toward productivity. The lived, qualitative sense of the present moment — rich in this medieval sense with cosmic and spiritual significance — gives way to a linear, forward-moving sequence of identical units flowing toward a secular future.
Now, Naydler’s specific point about gravity goes deeper still. Before the mechanical clock, every self-regulating process people could observe in nature — the circulation of blood, the growth of plants, the movement of the stars — was embedded in a living cosmos that participated in both downward and upward forces. When the clock appeared, operating visibly by the controlled fall of a weight alone, without any reference to warmth, growth, seasons, or the upward impulse, it presented something unprecedented: a self-sufficient mechanical process. It didn’t need anything above it to keep going. It just fell, steadily, and in falling, ticked.
This was philosophically explosive. If a machine could regulate itself through gravity alone, then perhaps the Earth itself — indeed perhaps the whole of nature — could be understood as a self-running mechanism that requires no reference to a higher principle. The upward force, levitas, the spiritual dimension that the cosmos had always been understood to depend upon — suddenly it seemed unnecessary. Nature could get along fine without it.
This is precisely the intuition that Galileo pursued with such relentless intensity. His project wasn’t merely to measure falling objects; it was to establish that the laws governing earthly motion are purely mathematical and require no reference to final causes, divine intentions, or spiritual forces. Levitas had to be abolished not just as a scientific error but because its presence implied that the cosmos was still oriented upward, still dependent on something beyond mere matter in motion. Galileo needed a world that ran on gravity alone — and he worked obsessively to prove it.
What Naydler is suggesting, and what makes this such a powerful insight, is that the mechanical clock didn’t just measure time differently. It modeled a new cosmology: a self-contained, gravity-driven, spiritually indifferent universe. And people saw it every day in their town squares. The psychological conditioning this produced — long before Galileo or Newton wrote a word — may be the deepest reason the scientific revolution became possible when it did.
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