Are People Machines?

This is an imagined conversation between Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), George I. Gurdjieff (1866 to 1877–1949), and Norm Hirst (1932-2012).

The conversation is based on quotes from Peter D. Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, and the Autognomics website.

PO: Once I was talking with Gurdjieff… I was speaking…about the terrifying mechanization that was being developed in the big European cities… “People are turning into machines,” I said.

GG: “Yes,…that is true, but only partly true. …the mechanization you speak of is not at all dangerous. … Have you ever thought about the fact that all people themselves are machines?”

NH: “There is a distinction between being autonomic, obeying self-law, and allonomic, obeying some other’s law. Machines are allonomic, they obey the laws built in by external agencies. Organisms are autonomic, there is no way for any other to build in the internal laws of a living entity.”

GG: “All the people you see, all the people you know, all the people you may get to know, are machines, actual machines working solely under the power of external influences…”

NH: “We have been led astray by our experience of obedient things. In dealing with living autonomic self-acting entities it may come as a surprise that they do what they want with no thought of obedience.”

PO: “I thought it rather strange that…[GG] should be so insistent on this point. … I had never liked…short and all-embracing metaphors. They always omitted points of difference. I…had always maintained differences were the most important thing and that in order to understand things it was first necessary to see the points in which they differed.