The Hardware Software Duality

Our age has illuminated the quintessential duality of Mind and Matter in a technology paradigm that is central to modern life.


The modern generation’s experiential grasp of the relationship between Hardware and Software transcends even the most intense philosophical thought on the relationship between Matter and Mind.

Human evolution has up until now coded in the primacy of hardware in our perception. Explore the development of human civilization and you can trace the arc of progress manifested in material progress. The spirit of man, the “software” aspect, if you will, of human evolution has not progressed discernibly. Our faculty for imagination and our capacity for empathy are not any higher than our forefathers. In fact it is argued that the detritus of modern life have put such soft capacities under stress.

However are things changing?

Will the next generation go beyond just realizing that the iTunes and the App Store are way more important determinants of the iPhone experience than the shiny piece of plastic one holds in one’s hand?

Will they extrapolate this realization and explore new paradigms of being based on the premise of the primacy of software?

Just today as I read, fresh off the Amazon Kindle press, Jonathan Alters’ “The Promise”- a scintillating account of Obama’s first fifteen months in office- I realized that perhaps the evolution of man from being a “hardware-oriented” species to a “software-oriented” species is underway. The University of Chicago approached the Obama administration for rights to setting up the Obama Presidential Library and though the administration decided that it was too early to think about such things, Obama did wonder whether there was any need for, as tradition stands, a palatial brick and mortar library. Wouldn’t a site on the Internet do, he averred.

Contrast this with the obsession with campus acreage and square footage of the typical Education Society in India.

Perhaps the evolution of a software-driven species begins with the reaching out of the best of us instead of the tooth-and-claw fight for survival that drives Darwinian evolution.