Contemporary life is deeply reliant on digital technology, and computers have come to dominate nearly every aspect of our culture. What is the philosophical and spiritual significance of this dependence on electronic technology for our relationship to nature and for the future of humanity? Moreover, what processes in human perception and awareness have produced the situation in which we find ourselves? As Jeremy Naydler elucidates in this penetrating study, we cannot understand the emergence of the computer without seeing it within the wider context of the evolution of human consciousness over millennia. He shows how modern consciousness has evolved in conjunction with the development of machines and their increasing shadow. Computers are the product of a long historical development, culminating in the scientific revolution of the seventeenthcentury. During that period the first mechanical calculators were invented, and efforts to create increasingly complex "thinking machines" began in earnest. Nevertheless, the seeds were sown many hundreds of years earlier, deep in antiquity. Naydler paints a vast panorama, depicting human development and the emergence of electronic technology. His painstaking research illumines an urgent question that concerns every living person today: What does it mean to be human, and what, if anything, distinguishes us from machines? C O N T E N T S Preface and Acknowledgments PART ONE: THE ANCIENT WORLD1. Participative Consciousness in Deep Antiquity2. The Gods and Technological Consciousness in the Ancient Near East3. Poets, Visionaries, and the Rise of the Clever Man4. Harnessing Logic to the Pursuit of Truth5. Technology in the Greco-Roman Age6. The Eclipse of the Mystery Knowledge of Electricity PART TWO: THE MIDDLE AGES7. Grammar and Logic in the Middle Ages8. The Logic Machine and the Cam9. The Mechanical Clock and Human Consciousness10. The Quantification of the World11. The Renunciation of the Upper Border PART THREE: THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD12. The Seventeenth-Century Penetration of Subnature13. Francis Bacon's "New Instrument14. The Myth of the Binarius15. The Drive toward Mechanization16. Leibniz: the Quest for an Artificial Language17. The Power of the Electrical Discharge PART FOUR: THE ERA OF THE MACHINE18. The Diaboli