Technology is often conflated with tools, machines, or progress, but these are surface manifestations. The deeper definition is ontological: technology is a realized functional pattern that originated in an intentional mind.
This formulation captures both essence and lineage. A technology must be realized (instantiated in the world), functional (serving a purpose), and mind-born (arising from intentional cognition rather than blind emergence). A rock formation is natural; a hammer is technology. The difference lies not in material, but in mental ancestry.
1. The Line Between Nature and Artifact
Everything realized in the world is either a formation or an artifact:
Formation: A realized pattern not originating in a mind (crystals, DNA, galaxies).
Artifact: A realized pattern that did originate in a mind.
Within artifacts, we can further distinguish by telos—the direction of intent.
2. Instrumental vs. Expressive Telos
Every artifact has function, but not all functions face the same way. Some act outward upon the world; others act inward upon perception.
Instrumentality is about operating on matter, energy, or behavior; expressivity is about operating on meaning, perception, or emotion. Both are causal, but in different spaces.
3. The Parent Class: Artifact
Technology and art share a common ancestor: the artifact.
Artifact: A realized pattern that originated in a mind and serves a telos—either operative (instrumental) or interpretive (expressive).
From this lineage we get:
4. Expression as a Form of Instrumentality
Expression is instrumental, but its instrumentality is semantic rather than physical. A song changes the emotional state of the listener; a speech reshapes beliefs. They act upon minds rather than matter. In that sense, all art is technology of experience—but optimized for resonance rather than control.
Technology operates by altering states of the world; art operates by altering states of interpretation. Both reduce uncertainty, one about how to act, the other about what it means.
5. The Ontology of Realized Patterns
A concise taxonomy emerges:
This hierarchy cleanly divides what is from what was made to be. Technology is not a subset of progress, but of mind-realized pattern.
Technology is thought made persistent—patterns stabilized beyond the mind that conceived them. Every artifact is an externalized hypothesis about how the world can be made to behave.