TECHNOSOPHISM
INTRODUCTION:
A deep rift disconnects the human mindset from its surrounding environment. Our capacity to address the world and its inhabitants in a genuine and significant way has been thwarted by distortions of our communicative capacity. Humanity has developed a highly evolved linguistic, cultural and technological milieu that allows us to extend and magnify our influence and apprehension of the world. This augmentation of human capacity, however, has a destructive corollary. Humanity has completely isolated itself from the ground conditions of its biological evolution to such an extent that it is barely able to comprehend the hyperbolic consequences of simple actions on its own constituents or the environment from whence it originated (Earley 359).
Drastic and irrevocable change to our environment can be unleashed by the mindless push of a button. The adoption of technologies that drives their own evolution has created artificial environments that humanity can scarcely assimilate much less ponder. Humanity has evolved out of its natural milieu to inhabit a synthetic one that outpaces humanity’s capacity for adapting to it—absurdly we invite an endless and quickening spiral of innovations to help us adapt to our adaptations!
Humanity inhabits a shrinking frontier—subjugating the natural order and the collective will to a mechanistic way of thinking and being that is antithetical to true human purpose. I characterize this mode of thinking as “technosophism”—a belief that technology is a consequential, necessary and inevitable aspect of human evolution. What is problematic with this way of thinking is the trend towards imputing inherent powers to technology that borders on salvific, technological determinism.
Technologies that initially draw upon natural metaphors for extending human capacity are eventually used as benchmarks with which to reflect back on its creators—using paradigms of mechanical efficiency, consistency and productivity to guage human worth and enslaving the human condition to mechanistic determinants—we are forced now to evolve in accordance with the demands that technology places upon us. In fact our inventions have the habit of removing themselves from the constraints of human determinants much the same way as humans removed themselves from the constraints of their natural environment! The move towards imaging society in a mechanistic framework has been almost exclusively driven by pecuniary interests. The relegation of mechanical function to humans created a basis for class systems and remuneration based on function—not relation (Mumford 342).
True human purpose is revealed more in its responsive, communal relationships and less in its fixed, ideological notions of economic productivity and worth. Processes that facilitate intimate, immediate, embodied and responsive interaction help to engender strong individual and communal identities and relationships; whereas, social/institutional and economic modes of human discourse tend to favour anonymity, disembodiment and isolation. (Pappenheim 189)
The developed world enjoys an unprecedented level of interconnectedness via communication and transportation technologies that has reduced the globe to the equivalent of a virtual living room where the world is literally at our fingertips. Ironically, despite its radical transcendence of time and space, the global living room that we inhabit is populated with members of a dysfunctional family who suffer from what Kevin Vanhoozer, Human Being, Individual and Social, refers to as a “Spiritual autism…a kind of solitary self-confinement that stems from the inability, or the unwillingness, to communicate with others.”
Our facility for communicative agency in the world is being filtered and distorted through tightly controlled media channels that set the benchmarks for personal fulfilment. Our self-image has been branded as deficient—companies offer up savvy products and services as solutions for attaining the desired self that they have deftly and cynically crafted for us.
It can be a capricious world where the self is carelessly whipped from one reality to another by the faddish winds of change—tearing, fracturing and de-centring a self that nurtures its internal metaphors on mediated imagery. Our capacity for real, face-to-face discourse with the rest of humanity has atrophied to an alarming extent. We are increasingly isolated and insulated from the lives and suffering of others and, by wilful subjection and/or feeble apathy, we surrender to what seems inevitable. We have been seduced into an abrogation of moral responsibility to our fellow human beings. We have radically disconnected from the intricate and interrelated web of coexistence.
This disconnection is not surprising given the increasing feeling of alienation that is so prevalent in the modern mindset. Defeatist, fatalistic attitudes have taken root in a world where the individual self has been co-opted as a mere marketing opportunity—a sales/consumption unit whose patterns of behaviour are best influenced by persuasion and manipulation. The self seems impotent and insignificant when contrasted with the sheer scale of humanity and its complex and convoluted bureaucratic systems. (Pappenheim 189)
This impotent and atrophied self is a by-product of what psychoanalysts refer to as “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” and is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as:
“…a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), hypersensitivity to the evaluation of others, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts. People with this disorder have a grandiose sense of self-importance. They tend to exaggerate their accomplishments and talents, and expect to be noticed as “special” even without appropriate achievement…alternates with feelings of special unworthiness…These people are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love, and with chronic feelings of envy for those whom they perceive as being more successful than they are…fantasies frequently substitute for reality…an ambition that cannot be satisfied. Self-esteem is almost invariably very fragile…preoccupied with how well…regarded by others…exhibitionist need for constant attention and admiration…may fish for compliments…In response to criticism may react with rage, shame, or humiliation, but mask these feelings with an aura of cool indifference. Interpersonal relationships are invariably disturbed…lack of empathy.” (Capps )
I believe that technosophism is influential in contributing to this misshaped sense of self in the private (interior) as well as public (exterior) contexts. I will explore the distorting influence that it exerts on the evolution of communicative and inter-relative capacities of humanity.
There is no simple approach that conveniently analyzes and summarises the long and convoluted path of human evolutionary history. By necessity one must balance insights gleaned from history, science, sociology, psychology and theology to build a composite view of our present status. Discrete, quantifiable and easily digestible views of the human condition lend themselves to gross generalizations and caricatures that do more to confound and distort the issues than to elucidate their truths. Language itself is encumbered with its own inherent limitations and biases that demand a critical awareness and openness to exploring the views of reality proffered by various disciplines and points of view.
I will focus on the role of language in the formation of internal and external images of the self. The imaging of external expressions of the self will be considered in the context of the formation of social cohesion through the negotiation of binding symbols of collective representation—otherwise known as culture. I will explore the role of technology in shaping culture and how, if embraced in an inappropriate manner, it leads to aberrations in the social matrix.
Technosophism is a hybrid term that I have employed to explicate a phenomenon that gives rise to distortions in humanity’s approach to negotiating the referents to reality—as mediated both internally and in its external environments. The term implies a synthesis of aspects of technology (vis-à-vis its effect on shaping culture) and sophistic thought with respect to the uncritical perpetuation of dominant metaphors in the guise of truth and knowledge and valuing and selling this “knowledge” as a commodity for personal gain. The terms are inferred from the classical Greek notions put forth in Plato’s Sophist. I will look at how the trend toward technosophism evolved and how it has manifest itself in influencing major epochs in human cognition and social organization.
The Sophist reveals Plato’s deep concern with this distortion of reality alluded to in the previous paragraph. He attributes the proliferation and promotion of this occluded optic to a particular breed of individual whom he refers to as the “Sophist.” Sophists, according to Plato, operate according to an art labelled “techne”—the root of our own word “technology.” This art, Plato divides into two main categories: acquisition and production—two very definitive mercantile qualities.
The modus operandi of the Sophist, according to Plato, is the antithesis of the appropriate address to knowing the world and the truth it reveals. Sophists are characterized as image-makers, mimes, producers of likenesses and deceivers with a marked propensity for pecuniary interests—to such a degree that Plato derides them for their audacity in charging money for teaching what he deems to be false knowledge. Plato has the Stranger proclaim: “…the Sophist possesses a sort of reputed and apparent knowledge on all subjects, but not the reality.” (Plato. ) (223e—233c). Plato likens these “merchants of learning” to demagogues who have seized the will and imagination of their customers (students) for personal gain rather than for the universal edification of the human condition.
Plato asserts that the truth is elusive and difficult to attain, much less sell. Only those propositions that hold up to the most vigorous scrutiny are worthy of considering. Plato insists on purification by refutation as a way of attaining a modest disposition—a way of assuring that pride, or the self-delusion of rectitude, does not cloud one’s judgement.
In Poetics, Plato’s protégé Aristotle enlists dramaturgical analysis to reflect on action predicated on knowledge versus that which is uninformed. This naturally leads to consideration of taking action—addressing the world—using false knowledge as the basis for that action. This sort of well-intentioned action reveals the disparity that often divides initial (good) intent from final (bad) effect. For instance, the choice to use a technology, when misguided and misinformed, can have disastrous consequences (Plato. ) (49—54). Truth, according to Plato, is an embodied, living and creative response to the task of knowing that, in the fullness of time will reveal the underlying reality.
A tempest was brewing in the belly of the Greek collective conscience and writing was at the centre of it all. Writing had made its long (2000 years) circuitous journey from the alluvial plains of Sumeria and—borne on the prow of a Phoenician trading vessel—landed with a resounding crash on Plato’s rocky Hellenic shores. The Greek adoption and adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet was coincident with, and responsible for, the birth of a new cultural value—disembodied, objective, scientific rationalism. This was, according to Eric Havelock :
“…a mental act…’abstraction’; that is, this ‘object’ which the newly self-conscious ‘subject’ has to think about has been literally ‘torn out’ of the epic context and created by an act of intellectual isolation and integration” (Havelock ).
The gods had been torn from the heavens and the quest for divine knowledge and truth was relegated to the observable material realm of humanity. This was the first non-local, non-agential, universal view of the world in human history.
By adopting and adapting the Phoenician writing system, the Greeks were able to develop a fully codified representation of sound that could be disembodied, recorded, transmitted and, when sequenced together, had the uncanny ability to magically reproduce the tongues of distant peoples. This could be likened to the re-unification of the tongues confounded by G-d in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel! The power of these universal symbols to bind disparate peoples across vast distances was an obvious benefit of this system that made a compelling case for its embrace.
The Greeks of Plato’s time preserved their knowledge orally through epic/lyric poetry and dramas. This form of recording and transmitting history was fully embodied and immediately and intimately bound its participants to the task of collective representation—the “common consciousness” (Havelock ).
The writings of the early Greek Philosophers represent a significant historical record that reflects on the difficulties faced in making the transition from one mode of communicating to another. This “break boundary” between oral and literate modes of communication will serve as a fulcrum to leverage comparisons of earlier and later modes of communication and will be referred to when investigating periods of development.
Writing and other technologies possess, as we will see, various capacities for binding space and time (Innis ) but it is the spoken word and the gesture that possesses the power to bind people. Donald Wiebe cites Frederik Barth, Cosmologies in the Making, in defining non-scientific knowledge—oral/aural and mythopoeic knowledge of tribal societies:
“provides a web [my emphasis] of concepts, connections and identities whereby one’s attitude and orientation to the various parts of the world are directed and moulded.” It must be considered as a living and deeply embodied tradition and not “as a set of abstract ideas enshrined in collective representations.” (Wiebe )
Since their beginnings humans have acquired their sense of being by seeing their selves reflected in others. By drawing on cues from the social environment, humans learn how to “become.” A child, in mimicking the gestures and sounds of a parent, negotiates a common thread of communication. Repetitious gestures and utterances that draw out a mirrored response in another communicant provide immense satisfaction to the probing mind and forms the basis for understanding ones cause and effect in the world—that actions produce consequential actions—that they are predicated. Language at this phase is what Northrop Frye would characterize as “immanent” or embodied (Frye ).
Echoing, or mirroring, constitutes a token or “handshake” that verifies the veracity of the connection between communicants. Communicants receive, embody and retransmit utterances and gestures that originated in the internal domains of one another. This transmigration of information constitutes a profound communion where the parties gain validation of their existence by witnessing the reassuring reflections of themselves in the actions of others. This sort of communicative activity radically binds its parties to one another.
On the surface it would seem that the human communicative enterprise, although fully embodied, is inherently mimetic and that, perhaps, the knowledge that Plato espoused was divine and beyond the sphere of human apprehension. The probing nature of the human condition; however, reflects a tension between the need to apprehend new experiences and the need to find reproducible and predictable patterns in these experiences. Understanding an experience in terms of patterns divined in its nature reveals an ultimate understanding of its machinations and confers potency on the knower that allows for predicting the behaviours of particular elements in particular circumstances. This process, however, must continually adapt to changing circumstances and, so, a “fixed” rather than a “responsive” approach would run counter to processes that allowed us to survive and thrive.
Perhaps Plato’s frustration with Sophistic notions of knowledge was rooted less in their mimetic approach and more in its static nature—that it sought nothing new and failed to account for change in a sufficient manner, moreover, it was incapable of transforming itself to adapt to new ways of seeing the world. True cognition requires change or more to the point—being changed. Plato, in his Republic, reflected on the need for new modes of approach to knowing such as the clarity that separating oneself (subject) from involvement with the object of inquiry provided—yet these were mere tools to apprehend greater, non-material, and unchangeable truths that underpinned the universe. The new scientific language was not an end in itself to be slavishly adhered to but a means to reveal these unchangeable “forms” which, unlike the human who is in the process of “becoming” (transformation), simply “is.”
Humans, continually ground themselves in the familiar—leaving a parent’s side—occasionally looking back for reassurance before turning to extend their sphere of existence. This continual referencing of the known and the familiar as a basis for exploring and defining the unknown has a looping back character to it that lies at the very root of cognition. McLuhan revealed that this occurred on the macro-level of culture—new modes of being defined in terms of the old (McLuhan, Fiore and Agel 192-1166). I would suggest that modes of being and knowing are revealed consistently at increasing iterations of complexity. This assertion warrants a closer look.It would be helpful to look at models of communication and characterize them at various levels of complexity to reveal these apparently consistent motifs.
The structure of low-level symbolic language and cognitive processes can be extrapolated into a social context to see how their key themes manifest themselves in these more complex settings. How the structuring and enculturation of these language modes effect the formation of individual and collective senses of identity are worth considering, particularly, with a view to understanding the role that technology plays in this process. I hold that the evolution of cultural/technological responses to knowing and being constitute new environments that, in turn, influence and shape all future discourse.
I contend that culture and technology are manifestations of the same thing—an inventive response of the mind, actualized in concrete symbolic expressions or material form, to exteriorized engagement with the natural order. A more formal definition might be: The extension, augmentation, magnification and/or amplification of an internal state in order to enhance the apprehension of, or the effect upon, external environments and their inhabitants.
The Greek techne, which encompassed art, craft, skill, technique, and profession—belies a proclivity for material representation or imaging, fabrication and hierarchy. The Greek dilemma over representation of internal subjective reality using exteriorized, logically constructed symbolic representations and the dichotomy of mind and matter (subject and object) that it introduced to western thought is a legacy of the adoption of writing—the new, disembodied mode of communication. All communication has an exterior aspect to it but it is significantly different when the message is mediated via a non-living artefact that, after surviving the ravages of time, can be reconstituted in a new time and a new context. This is contrasted with the oral/aural traditions that rely on intergenerational embodiment of messages. Both modes invite significantly different ways of relating to knowledge—one is detached and, literally, “objectified,” whereas the other is embodied and subjective and highly intimate and interpersonal in nature.
To reiterate: the transition from the immediate and intimate modes of acoustic communication into external, disembodied, abstract, imagistic and rigidly “fixed” pictographic/alphabetic modes reveals a trend toward what I call “disembodiment.” Disembodiment constitutes a radical disconnect from the intimate level of communion that embodied living and acoustic and signed communication necessarily requires. It represents the transference of communicative power to an external, material agent and the conferring of innate, powers to these external artefacts. This would inevitably lead to feelings of estrangement and alienation where the relegating of one’s history to the static and lifeless medium of writing was concerned. The worth of the human as a transmitter of divine and practical knowledge would have been called into question in this environment. It is interesting to note that the Hebrew language (devoid of vowel pointers) required a priest, cantor or rabbi to reconstitute it in live oral/aural performance so that its wisdom could be inculcated collectively. The construction of ancient Hebrew lacks the static, objective nature of its Greek contemporary and is replete with dynamic verbs and verbal adjectives and has a conspicuous absence of tenses. It is existential in nature—meant only as an aide in bringing a people together, embodied, in one place, to relive and reincorporate their common notion of self. Greek invited the separation of time and body and context(Frye ).
The Greek Alphabet, like its Sumerian progenitor scripts, helped to promote notions of material significance—separations of object and subject. Class-based systems of social organization arose in this environment and engrained the material, economic, functional and mechanistic view of human purpose that still predominates. The import of this departure from human interest to one of object value cannot be understated.
Social and institutional trends in history, like the adoption of writing, etc., that tend to fix and inflate this notion of material significance in our collective conscious has generated an ever widening chasm between technologically-facilitated humanity and the natural environment. Notions of the self in relation to community have changed in accordance with this trend and our rational, progress-driven, hierarchal and mechanistic modes of social organization have lead to a general social malaise that reflects deep feelings of alienation and isolation on the part of its members—where the techno-cultural milieu that we have created and empowered, slips from our grasp and takes on a life of its own—subjugating the human condition in servitude to its rapacious and exponential growth(McLuhan, Fiore and Agel 192-1166).
Jay Earley’s ecosystem view of social/technological structure graphically demonstrates the need for reintegrating the human enterprise with its natural state. This divorce of modern humanity from early conditions can be attributed to particular historical social developments articulated by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine:
“…our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat.
With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, [echoed in McLuhan’s War and Peace in the Global Village] designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.” (Mumford 342)
Humankind is gregarious by nature and the nature and sum of our individual and collective experiences are paramount in the formation and preservation of a complete historical, existential and future continuum of the human condition. Processes that disrupt this continuum have the effect of fragmenting and distorting humanity’s relationship with itself and its environment. The approach to truth through the attainment of knowledge is, I believe, a process of fundamental transformation undergone by the parties to the event of knowing and processes that tend to fix and institutionalize responses only thwart what should be a dynamic approach to a fluid “object” of inquiry. A tension exists in the human condition between our compulsion to fix, symbolize, stabilize and predict patterned conditions and our need for continual, creative responses to knowing. This, I believe is an inescapable and primary condition of sentience.
I would contend that the structure of language itself is naturally bound to this process of abstract representation and that technologies in the whole are extensions of this motif. Language possesses a natural exteriority of internal representations that are generally flexible in order to accommodate the constant flux of data from the exterior environment. However, when symbols are negotiated and shared, they tend to become fixed, dominant and inflexible metaphorical ideologies. This fixing of point of view, although it engenders a sense of stability, is antithetical to the communicative and creative response that is the raison d’être of language and underscores a trend towards artificially fixing and stabilizing a process that is inherently fluid.
IF THEN ELSE: An Ontological Epistemology.
This relatively simple yet eloquent algorithmic statement of logic can be found in virtually any textbook on programming and/or logic and it embraces the pursuit of cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Its structure and organization, though beguilingly simple, lies at the root of all our probing. As a rhetorical statement it is a call to action with the action being predicated on the outcome of tested conditions. Like water, this organising principle is empowered with choice—an alternative route for action should there be an impediment to its primary course. The outcome of the testing of conditions will be contingent on what the referents are. The output from one test can be used as a referent in future tests such that each successive iteration builds on the results of earlier tests to accrete a history of experience. If one were to map this process it would resemble the ring compositions of Plato, perhaps, or the richly variegated patterns of tree branches probing the air in a random and chaotic, yet highly predictable fashion. From the simplest construction comes an incredibly rich level of diversity. This summation and variegation pattern can best be illustrated in the infinitely rich and diverse patterns generated by the simple algorithmic recursions that generate fractal patterns—their boundaries unpredictable and infinite yet underpinned by a very finite and simplistic determinant that is self referential in nature(Hofstadter ).
It may well be that the massive complexity of human mental processes is merely the iterative effect of multiple simple processes acting upon one another. Given the hierarchical nature of evolved life forms it would seem plausible that the organizing principle is deceptively simple at the core. It might also be wishful thinking that the sum total of our existence could be neatly reduced to a simple mechanistic, strand of logic. What is important to consider is how this process is hierarchical and historic and how it generates successively more complex constructions and, despite the complexity of these meta-constructs, a simple core paradigm is governing their evolution.
The idea that the four, relatively simple base pairs of Adenine, Thiamine, Guanine and Cytosine are the foundation stones of the entire organic genome is an astonishing testimony to the power of this organizing principle. It may seem like a remote aspect to reflect upon when considering mass communications; however, I contend that these meta-structures of human organization merely reflect on a higher order, the organization of progenitor systems. The communicative import of DNA sequencing, coding/decoding and transcripting belies subtler lower-order systems of organization and they, in turn, serve as the basis for higher levels of organization of sentient beings. These beings, in turn form higher order complexes of association (social groupings). These complexes, then, form higher order systems and so on.
This mirroring of an underlying organizing principle is graphically portrayed by C.J. Lumsden (The Alphabet and the Brain : The Lateralization of Writing). He contrasts a continuous string of base pairs with a continuous segment of hieroglyphic text—the higher-level language of the latter reflecting a striking similarity of organization to the underlying genetic code that ultimately governed its structure. Lumsden asserts that genetic underpinning imposes natural predispositions to specific cultural responses—what he refers to as “gene-culture” transmission. In other words, although we synthesize culture, our affinity for specific modes of culture is shaped more by our genetic make-up than by our cultural milieus. This provides data that would corroborate my assertion that meta-level processes such as social organization, reflect lower-order levels of organization
Creation exists as an infinite cluster of relationships—each constituent part contributing the ebb and flow of the universe according to its own capacity. The universe, since its unfolding, has revealed a marked potential for organizing itself into a wide spectrum of sentient, organic forms of increasing complexity—each with an inherent capacity to continually refine and perpetuate variations on their own particular themes of organization.
Our notions of the “self” and “individuality” are conditions that arise from a distortion of the operative reality in the universe. The localization of a being under the aegis of a discrete, concrete taxonomy and linked by linear causal connections is a scientific contrivance that attempts to avoid the infinite regress invited by considering an infinitely and radically interconnected system. By conveniently categorizing and reducing the intractable complexity of an infinite system to discrete local domains (the “efficient cause” of Francis Bacon) enables the study of cause and effect on a very local level. This oversimplification constitutes the dominant material-object view of reality promoted by the modern, western scientific point of view. This perspective has, according to Eric Havelock, evolved as a consequence of the adoption of the Greek phonetic alphabet as a communications technology (Havelock ) and serves to disembody the subject from the realm of the observed.
Like the representation of sounds by the alphabet, scientific abstraction, too, represents a form of “digitization” that clusters an infinite continuum of values into discrete groupings for representation and quantification. Brian Cantwell Smith cites Haugeland’s view that this digitality is “a method for coping with the vagaries and vicissitudes, the noise and drift, of earthly existence.” (Brian Cantwell Smith, “Indiscreet Affairs”).
Sentient systems (humans, larger social groupings in particular), whether considered in isolation or in relation (social/cultural context), appear to possess the capacity for garnering information from their probing in the form of feedback. This “feedback loop” is central to amassing experiential data that, upon compilation and analysis, is used in modifying the nature of all future approaches to probing both the known and the unknown. Furthermore, these systems are able to record and embody these experiences which are then compared, weighted and accreted in a locus of memory (what I would call an “internal schema”) and employed in the mediation and interpretation of all subsequent encounters. This weighting and interpretation is a form of digitizing that reduces the clutter referred to by Haugeland. Only that data which is accorded an appropriate weighting factor is retained for incorporation into the overall schema of memory. Social groupings digitize their collective representations too. Only those aspects of culture that have been negotiated as being the most salient rise to become the dominant and guiding metaphors. For this to happen, however, the collective memory must necessarily be embodied and preserved in language and custom (Havelock ). When digitized in writing, however, the connection to collective memory and tradition is broken—leaving the members of the group alienated from their history. Yates reflects on the myth of Theuth, the inventor of letters:
“…it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.…you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness…. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”
Plato too realized that the new writing required that the past be left in the past and maintained that reliving it from generation to generation seemed to him a colossal waste of psychic energy.
Sentient beings exhibit uncanny plasticity in the construction and maintenance of internal memory schemas. This plasticity provides them with creative and adaptive responses to change. Again, a tension exists between fixing patterns of experience to construct a stable internal representation of the world and the constant reconfiguration of these internal realities to respond to or prototype new methods of engagement. Aristotle alluded to this plasticity when he likened human memory to a tablet of wax onto which our experiences were imprinted. Plato in the Phaedrus reveals memory as an immanent truth to be revealed as opposed to the memory of the Sophists—a mere technique (for sale, incidentally) that could empower—only in the most facetious manner of making an impressive show. The relegation of memory to a specific locus by way of images was merely a trivial mnemotechnic (Yates ).
There is a dynamic refining and re-assertion of the internal schema to adapt to changing data. This “looping” of reference—using the old schema to inform new data—using new data to transform the old is a continuous recursive spiral that lies at the core of current cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. This looping back that is intrinsic to the roots of sentient behaviour are manifest at more complex levels of social/cultural discourse as observed by McLuhan (McLuhan, Fiore and Agel 192-1166) and Whitehead (Whitehead 982-996).
Sentient systems represent a creative, generative, mutative, embodied transmission of a cumulative, historic approach to knowing the universe. Existential data is apprehended by, and accrued to, the sensory apparatus of the knowing system.
Communication between other sentient beings represents a meta-level of cognition whereby an entirely external negotiation of significance must necessarily occur. This externalization requires an exchange of external tokens that satisfy both internal and externally negotiated frameworks of meaning. This occurs at all levels of organization from protean to human.
To illustrate the fully-embodied nature of communicative activity it useful to look at cellular replication. A necessary precondition for the development of sentient beings is a near-compulsion to probe the world beyond its own confines, to use that data to transform itself in some respect and then to pass that information on by embodying these experiences, transcribing them using its own internal mechanisms (RNA) and retransmitting them (replication by DNA synthesis). The exchange of information that occurs in sexual reproduction is a profound example of two systems swapping similar but different data in order to create new, radically different, embodied schemas. Organic evolution, with its continual processes of mutation and selection can be characterized as a multifarious approach to inhabiting, probing and characterizing the unknown—each variant life form generating an unique approach to the task of knowing the unknown and transcribing and transmitting the data of that experience through mechanisms such as DNA.
I have managed to articulate below 11 conditions of sentience, about three of which correspond to a classification of Henry Stapp’s (Stapp ). (I am certain there are others and some may find my categories insufficient):
1) They probe their environments and analyze experiences.
2) They embody or internalize their experiences into a symbolic schema (i.e. the synaptic associations of dendrites in the human cortex).
3) Their schema forms a point of view or perspective that defines their subsequent approach to experiences.
4) Incorporating new data and using it to further refine their internal schemas transform them.
5) They can establish symbolic communications with other sentient beings in order to engage the world on a more complex and cooperative level. They codify their experience in language and seek concordances with other beings and form a collective representation of the communicants’ schemas.
6) They can transmit their embodied history (sexual/asexual reproduction).
7) They affect other beings in the act of probing them.
8) They gain an awareness of their effect on their environment
9) As internal, symbolic schemas (metaphors) mature a strong sense of self develops that, although derived from engagement with the environment, is unique in construction (with respect to type, period, sequence and duration of experience) and stands as a constitutive symbol of that unique engagement or point of view.
10) They have the capacity to negotiate external, symbolic communications with other sentient beings (culture).
11) They possess the capacity to utilize external material objects and systems (technology) to enhance their apprehension of and their effect on the external realm and its constituents.
Alfred North Whitehead, John Von Neumann and Henry Klapp would assert, and I am inclined to agree, that this process of “becoming” that Plato speaks of reveals itself in the very fabric of the universe. They are of the opinion that we are, through our senses, in contact with a system that has existence independent of our thinking of it—it is self contained for thought (Whitehead ); (Havelock ).Their, agreeably later, quantum view of the collapse of the wave function illustrates how, even with two primary entities—perhaps separated by great distance—are mutually transformed from being mere probabilities to being discrete and concrete by the influences mutually exerted on one another.
To conclude, the universe, exhibits a capacity at all levels of organization for reflecting upon (memory) and refining (digitization) itself—it possesses a proclivity for self-knowledge that is used in a context of knowingly and willingly transforming (becoming) itself toward a fulfilment of an unchangeable and inevitable truth (being/form). The universe and its constituent parts are engaged in a dynamic process of transformation and processes that thwart this progression are sophistic in nature.
FROM ACOUSTIC SPACE TO CARTESIAN COORDINATES
Perhaps, a definitive characteristic of creation—homo sapiens in particular—is the dogged refusal to be bound by the limitations of primary conditions. Humans actively seek to transcend the physical limitations imposed upon them by transforming themselves interiorly, exteriorly and extra-exteriorly through culture and technology.
Claude Hagège, in his essay entitled Writing, reflects on its transforming capacity:
“whatever the virtues of spoken language, it is through writing that humanity is best able to express and age-old dream: the dream of a release from nature, from the material tissue, from one’s own constraining existence.” (The Alphabet and the Brain : The Lateralization of Writing).
Early hominids exhibited a marked capacity for constructing internal schemas of their relationships to reality (personality), expressing it exteriorly, negotiating concordances of meaning through repetitive mimicry and committing these transactions to memory. This allowed for the construction of a ritualized cultural environment that bound the participants to a common destiny. These early hominids were able, through language, to act in concert and were the beneficiaries of a competitive advantage in survival.
Mumford points out that only a small portion of the human brain was required for providing the necessities of life and that a great deal of our early development was dedicated to forging concordances of meaning and developing cultural norms. These beings were wholly integrated (Earley 359) with their environment and intimately bound in communicative activity. There developed an acute awareness of cause and effect and the ability of language to influence outcomes of things that lay beyond the internal domain of the subject. This is where the first notion of “extension” comes into being—the technology of speech created an environment that allowed humanity to extend its influence in the wider world.
Through playful experimentation with objects this sense of extension and cause and effect were heightened and tools were born. The ability of a tool to leverage one’s address to the world would, in my estimation, have had the natural consequence of believing that objects possessed magical qualities. This notion of transference of power to material objects is the basis of what is widely referred to as “contagious magic.” (Frazer ). The notion that the force of the will could be augmented or transmitted via an object conferred great power on its owner and that power was surely exercised in situations of conflict where the assertion of power and dominance were motivating factors. I do not mean to imply that humanity had a proclivity for warfare, necessarily, but later developments in imperial cultures, slavery and class distinction testify to this association of tools with dominance.
The evolution of writing and stratified social organization were coincident and served as prerequisites of the mechanistic age that was to follow—that our first machine was, in fact, comprised of highly specialized human cogs set to repetitive tasks whose nature and worth determined their status for life (Mumford 342). The notion of worth was no longer collectively defined as an intrinsic ability of the tribe, it was now defined using an abstract token system of worth. This created a scenario where tribal allegiances were subjugated to the service of a coercive ruling class—a system where the individual was isolated from local communal contexts and artificially bound to the symbols of the emerging system of pecuniary interest and power.
Floyd Hunter provides a contemporary analysis of social structure that shows a remarkable consistency with that elucidated by Mumford for emerging city-states in Mesopotamia:
“Stratification and specialization of the social machine is important to the interest of the leisure class. The ruling elite embody the dreams and aspirations of the lower classes providing a blueprint of habit and custom. The promise of upward mobility entertains the notion that hard work and dedication will derive the benefits enjoyed by the rulers. Affirmation of work and worth is facilitated by the accumulation of material wealth in the form of goods, services and status. Higher status groups tend to be physically separated from lower tier groups propagating an air of mystery and awe in the rank and file and allowing the decision makers to be buffered from the exigencies inflicted upon the lower ranks by their decisions. This degree of material affirmation, the possibility of migration to higher strata, and isolation of the classes is crucial to maintaining the integrity and veracity of the human machine.” (Hunter );(Mumford 342).
Denise Besserat reveals the vulgar origins of early writing as an accounting of possessions. The stratification of society and the valuation of surpluses concentrated in the ruling elite led to a commoditization of human pursuits. What stood in the abstract for the internal worth of a subject were token objects of grain and livestock, etc.. Humanity had equated itself with its possessions rather than its relationships. This sort of function-centred system tended to alienate and isolate group members from their true value as co-contributors to the success of the group. This form of “token worth” was a flagrant assault on human dignity and humanity’s divine purpose. Abraham’s parents were image-makers who fashioned totemic idols for worship. The response to this denigration was the return to the nomadic tribal existence of the Hapiru (Hebrews) with its proscriptions against idolatrous practices (B’resheet 11-12).
It is interesting to note that the tokens were later wrapped in clay envelopes bearing imprints representing the interior contents(Schmandt-Besserat ). This provides an interesting reflection on the perplexing problem of representation of things, such as worth, that make the transition from an internally constructed reality to an exteriorized one that is open to interpretation, negotiation and exploitation.
The construction and branding of these outer envelopes of bulla provides a graphic example of an exterior abstraction or metonymy standing for the content within and the veiled and concealed nature that it assumes. That a name or a mark could stand for the concrete and be manipulated and exchanged as such with mere words (laws and decrees) or numbers (valuation and commerce) was a powerful cultural shift that allowed for rapid population, political, cultural and technological expansion. The mechanistic organization of human capital allowed for unparalleled feats like the construction of granaries, pyramids, temples and so on.
Stripped of local tribal customs this new social grouping raised monuments to stand in silent testimony to their new, mechanistic cultural values. These new forms were of unparalleled magnitude—their sheer scale being an indicator of the burden that they bore—statically and silently exteriorizing the “binding of time” in lieu of the procession of living and embodied traditions of earlier oral societies (Innis ). This objectification and commoditization of the human condition later surfaces as a pivot point for debate by Socrates and Plato when considering the Sophist traditions.
According to Mumford, the formation of the megamachine paved the way for further advancements in technology and culture that were spread throughout the world by the military machine. The great success of writing to bind widely disparate peoples under a universal set of symbols, the ability to disseminate this binding system via increasingly durable and transportable media such as papyrus and codices worked as a cultural accelerant—each new army annexing more distant lands and conforming unique, creative local responses to knowing and being to a fixed dominant mode—techno sophism. The gains reaped by the ruling classes and the monumental achievements in agriculture and expansionism vouchsafed for the efficacy of this form of social engineering.
Technologies dedicated to warfare outpaced those for agriculture in order to satiate aggressive expansion. Cooperative agricultural subsistence, nomadic herding and Hunting and gathering and their typically oral traditions were demonized and characterized as uncivilized in an attempt to justify imposing the dominant culture through coercion and force. This disturbing trend has continued to the present day as we hold literacy up as a dominant ideal—characterizing non-literate, oral peoples as inferior(Vansina ). In order to promote dominant, universal ideologies it was important to level differences and promote similitude (sophism). This digitization of cultural values served to pigeonhole classes of people and set the social agenda to one comprised of relationships built on function and value in a market setting. This was entirely a sophistic market economy.
The formation of standardized consonantal alphabet scripts paralleled and supported these other developments(Innis ). The move to a standard and extremely efficient phonetic system of 22 characters facilitated a significant leap forward in commercial activity with foreign lands where the formula for this form of social organization and communication was sewn.
Monuments, and the technologies that gave rise to them, were held aloft as powerful symbols of progress whose consequences became almost acceptable and inevitable by-products of assimilation. This form of techno sophism was to govern the state of affairs in the world until the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century B.C.E. This makes Greece with its dominant oral culture doubly intriguing. It had taken over 500 years for a sufficient number of its citizens to attain functional literacy. The Greeks were deep thinkers and were highly suspicious of this new technology.
Plato was profoundly aware of the inherent problems of fixing conceptions of “reality” in symbolic form. Their careful reflections on grammar and conundrums such as the The Cretan paradox revealed the logical inconsistencies of using language to represent the known and itself. The requirement for a meta-language to frame a lower-level language was evident and became the basis for the explorations in logic by Kurt Gödel (Incompleteness Theorem) (Hofstadter ).
Plato saw the limitations of writing in recording experiential data and saw the Sophist as a mime who merely propagated oversimplified, fixed notions of knowledge—they lacked the open, responsive and malleable approach that a search for truth required and merely parroted dominant, ideological and historical notions of knowledge (Ong ). Like Plato, logicians such as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel and Douglas Hofstadter have ruminated extensively on the problem of fixed symbolic representations of the world and their inherent limitations that arise as a consequence of their own rigidity. McLuhan, too, revelled in the power of ambiguity in language—its dogged refusal to be bound by constraints.
One of Plato’s responses to this trend of fixing knowledge was the dialectic method of question and answer. This represents and open-ended approach to probing the truth that branches off into a possibly infinite array of sub-inquiries. Reflections on Plato’s approach to true knowledge is brought forth in this passage from Diogenes Laertes, Book III:
“…Plato asserts that the object of sense is that which never abides in quality or quantity, but is ever in flux and change. The assumption is that the things from which you take away number are no longer equal nor determinate, nor have they quantity or quality. These are the things to which becoming always, and being never, belongs.
But the object of thought is something constant from which nothing is subtracted, to which nothing is added. This is the nature of eternal things.”
The static, Homeric myths that, although guaranteed thematic cohesion through its mnemonic structuring (Parry & Lord), suffered local inconsistencies of content throughout the Hellenistic world and irreconcilable differences with the abundance of myths to be found in the greater sphere of contact that Greece had with other cultures. These inconsistencies (Untersteiner) set the stage for the search for universal truth (science). The mythic structuring of Greek thought was at odds with their contemporary experience of their immediate environment and, consequently, was seen to be an inadequate address to knowing and living in the world. The search for the “substance” of things had begun. This would have created an intense focus on using contemporary experience and observation of events in their environs as a method for attaining truth. The Greek phonetic alphabet, as part of that environment would surely have provided the inspiration and the means whereby an elemental, taxonomical, hierarchal and systematized grammar of knowledge would evolve and come to full form in the prosaic style of Aristotle (McLuhan & Innis).
Untersteiner cites Heraclitus’ awareness of the emergence of a new view of humanity—unbound by staid and unresponsive traditions: “Man who is continually being renewed, without ever being himself…mirrors the ultimate essence of things.”
Plato reveals a deep ambivalence with respect to the efficacy of fixing knowledge using the concrete abstractions of the written form and in the Phaedrus, paradoxically, uses writing to criticize itself. He favoured an embodiment of language—the spoken and heard word so common to his debates in the academy:
“There is no writing of mine about, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words …” (Nicholson )
Plato held this foreign script to be a form of techne and regarded it with suspicion when considered as a form of knowledge. Writing and the new outlook it had inspired conferred power upon its possessor, but it seemed that it was of a pecuniary nature more than a straightforward epistemological and ontological one. It could answer to the “what”—not the “why” of things according to Plato.
The Greece of Plato’s time was an intensely local culture that had evolved into small city-states with widely varied customs. Power was a natural corollary to the adoption of writing technology and its widespread adoption would have certainly had political proponents. Its capacity to bind disparate oligarchies and monarchies under one language was clearly evident in the place of its birth. Writing had promoted trends towards codification of laws and edicts and proved efficacious in empire building.
Plato’s dialectic form employs dialogue between interlocutors—dialogue being the pedagogical method to which he ascribed ultimate authority. This interesting experiment in the new medium of writing illustrates how early Greek thinkers were grappling with the limitations of abstract representation. This move toward written dialogue reflects the rich oral/aural theatrical tradition of the Greeks and served as the basis for further experiments in dramaturgical explorations of this emergent literate culture. References to the new writing and its effect on Greek society are often made in Greek drama with the use of satirical analysis as a method for revealing the absurdities that arose from its embrace.
This method of reconstructing “living” communications, I suspect, was an attempt to re-embody language and, perhaps, by placing it in the context of theatre diffuse its import as a concrete signifier of reality. There is a foreboding corollary to this approach however: downgrading the significance of writing would have gone far to diffuse the scepticism that hampered its embrace. Revealing an emergent technology or cultural habit as fallible and prone to satire somehow makes it seem more human—paving the way for its integration into the mainstream.
In connexion with this phenomenon there is a curious trend toward anthropomorphizing technologies through the attribution of human traits to these, otherwise lifeless entities as a way of justifying or relating their use to human endeavours. Plato refers to writing as being the equivalent of a promiscuous daughter in need of the protection of her father—its inability to speak for itself leaves itself open to misinterpretation and abuse.
We see this trend throughout history where human names and attributes are attached to technologies in an attempt to make them more “user-friendly”—an absurd proposition that implies an innate sentience and personality (contagious magic).
Plato felt that writing was an intensely personal pursuit that was unfit for public consumption and he subscribed to the view that true communication must be wholly embodied to the extent that he likened teaching to the sewing of seeds in the souls of his pupils. The Sophists, on the other hand were eager to proliferate the use of this new technology and, to Plato’s dismay, profit from it.
Much debate ensued amongst the rhetoricians over Thucydides’ intent to chronicle in writing the Peloponnesian wars. Lysias, too, was severely criticized for offering speeches for sale—making knowledge a commodity (Nicholson ).
The Roman embrace of this new Greek alphabet and writing technology was augmented with durable, transportable codices, road networks and a highly efficient military organization that allowed them to bind Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor to a singularly Roman reality. Brute force, coercion and expert diplomacy negotiated the terms of this cultural binding and the rapid dissemination of the written word was executed with a clarity and precision that rendered its dominance seemingly inevitable. The struggles of Jewish Nationalists against the assimilating forces of Greek and Roman dominance are variously documented in both the Tanach and the Christian New Testament. The dogged refusal of the Maccabeans to assimilate to the cosmopolitan/oriental Hellenic culture of Antiochus Epiphanes was a clear rejection of this process of “digitization” or flattening of difference and it was a clarion call for the David’s of the world to stand up to the Goliath forces that were shaping the world discourse—it is difficult not to see shades of today’s world in this context.
After the fall of Rome in the fifth century B.C.E. there was a brief respite from domineering centrist forces. The return to local, tribal modes of culture was a response to Roman dominance during the dark ages, but it was short lived. The subsequent formation of feudal communities was driven on warfare innovation (armour) and class structure that was differentiated according to function as well as blood lineage lorded over by a monarch who’s power was predicated on divinely decreed rights (McLuhan, Fiore and Agel 192-1166). This level of organization was relatively parochial in nature and engendered paternalistic bonds of loyalty between ruler and subject—the noblesse oblige. Society was still very stratified; however, the mutual respect that conjoined the parties in this arrangement and its familial character gave each member a profound sense of place and shared purpose
This feudal society served as the ground condition for studies made by Ferdinand Toennies in comparing the effects of rapid urbanization and the industrial revolution on the rise of nation states and social organization. Toennies perceived shifts in organization from a unified, holistic and communal mode (Gemeinschaft) to a fragmented, highly specialized and individualistic mode of cooperation (Gesselschaft) (Pappenheim 189). As social organization dematerialized and rematerialized in rapidly growing urban centres people from vastly different social circumstances were thrown together in these newly contrived industrial environments (cities). Their lack of common frames of reference made for difficult, painful and often violent negotiations of the terms of interaction. Unbound by any existing paradigms they reached back to their stock references from Agricultural feudalism only to find them woefully inadequate for dealing with their present reality. The now spasmodic social matrix saw its members desperately struggle to recapture the spirit of social connectedness that so naturally cohered rural societies. Increasing aberrant trends in social behaviour testified to the brokenness of this new culture. Its members who’s customs were foreign to one another were incapable of forging a collective identity that would morally bind them (Simpson 129). Human worth had been fully denigrated as testified to by deplorable working conditions and rampant poverty and hunger. The human was relegated to a unit of productive capacity—a resource to be exploited and so it was difficult to uphold the notion of valuing the life and worth of a fellow citizen in light of the prevailing reality. This was further compounded by trends toward transcendentalism that placed the human condition and its natural milieu as limited and faulted manifestations of truth and that it was a condition that one was encouraged to extricate themselves from. Belief in a better afterlife promoted an indifference to earthly conditions and a subsequent divorce from responsibility in the fate of an already broken world.
In engineering a response to disturbing trends in social malaise, societies and professions were formed to mimic the paternalistic role of household heads and feudal lords but this was a mere contrivance aimed more at disciplining than transforming the culture—it was sophistic in nature and merely intended to substitute one thing for another in order to support a dominant ideology. The predominant paradigm governing the decision makers was most certainly economic in scope. Factories had to be run, workers had to work—everything that was done was done in the service of the machine and personal gain.
Notions of individualism took root—it seems like an antithetical response to a yearning for connections lost to industrialization; however, it was the final step in removing and isolating us from one another—robbing us of even remote potential for re-forging a new collective identity and generating a new power with a new purpose. Attention was focused inward—it was reflexive not participatory. This had the effect of further isolating constituents and gave rise to forms of infantile narcissism and predatory sociopathies. Public opinion was substituted for public discourse and our views on the world were constricted and moulded to muster assent for the most chilling and inhumane actions that humanity has ever afflicted upon itself.
The rise of print had the effect of accelerating this isolationist and individualist trend. Information on technique proliferated allowing more people to acquire the skills to service the machine and modestly profit from it. Reading and learning became intensely private affairs—lacking a social context and pandering to the satisfaction of individual tastes. Innovation spawned successive imitations of and improvements on human capacity at an exponential rate. The printing press itself was a mechanistic imitation of scribal capacity that reduced the art of the scribe to an inefficient “indulgence” for collectors of unaffordable curios. The value of the word too was reduced to such an extent that those who wrote inflammatory yellow journalism felt unaccountable to society for the turmoil that their words fomented. Freedoms of the press were taken to mean freedom without accountability. The media was seen at the turn of the 19th century not as a voice of the people, nor as a source of information, per se, but as a powerful means for the manipulation of public opinion.
The word was conscripted as an agent of mercantile interest with publishers securing proprietary rights to printed works and profiting from their sale. Professional scribes, too, profited from their compositions and legal professionals gained much from negotiating the nuances of meaning in the evolution of their complex and convoluted language of law. That democratic forces brought literacy to an ever-expanding populace from all social strata was more a function of necessity than egalitarianism. Literacy facilitated book learning that, in turn, allowed for the rapid dissemination and integration of new knowledge designed to service the machine of progress.
Science in the humanist and futurist movements was given full force as the ultimate paradigm for transforming society. The technologies that it generated would pave the way for future progress where, with the power of machines, our lives would be freed of drudgery, fear and insecurity. One human function after another yielded to the silent and indefatigable efficiencies of its machine dopplegänger. The notion that machines could do things better, naturally, gave rise to the notion that to transform oneself one had to become more like a machine. This is the ultimate deceit—the imputation of power and dominance to the machine—subjugation of human need to that of the machine.
What is problematic, in my estimation, is not that technologies influence us, rather, that they have been held up as salvific—that they possess an intrinsic power to transform us. What is neglected in this view is our innate power of choice that has been swayed in favour of forms of technological determinism. Technologically determined notions of the “self” and the “individual” are legacies of thought that serve to distance us from the environment from whence we came. Our inability to reintegrate ourselves with our social and biological environs has had and will continue to have grave consequences for all of creation. These sentiments are echoed in the words of Daniel Chandler, Biases of the Ear and Eye:
“We need to consider the overall ecology of processes of mediation in which our behaviour is not technologically determined but in which we use a medium and can be subtly influenced by our use of it.”
Of particular concern is the accelerant property of culture and technology. Moore’s Law of innovation holds that there is a doubling of capacity every 18 months . This exponential growth far outpaces our capacity for integrating these technologies into our society let alone to reflect on their possible import before their rollout. So much is uncritically released into the public domain, like inflammatory rhetoric, and is unaccountable for the possible serious repercussions of its deployment. Exacerbating this problem is the massive augmentation capacity of technologies that magnify the consequences of our impact such that if a technology is used in an inappropriate manner it can have devastating and irreversible effects. Ironically, if we had the capacity to critically evaluate a particular release of a particular technology it would be obsolete before our deliberations had concluded and so the embrace of progress seems an inevitable response to surviving the complexity of the environments that we have helped to shape. This is a seemingly intractable paradox that begs the old adage: “you can’t live with it…and you can’t live without it.”
I have culled some candid reflections from the internet on the current discourse vis-à-vis adapting to technological change and our relationship to it:
1) “This technology is important, as it brings the capability for counterfeit reality one step closer to the home PC. The architecture can absorb fully the advances of Moores law, and during the next decade will mature to deliver highly accurate renderings of individuals possibly indistinguishable from their real-world prototypes."
"The Counterfeit Reality Ostrich"
by Daryl Plummer
Group Vice President, Gartner Fellow
The Gartner Fellows Weblog, April 28, 2004
http://fellows.blog.gartner.com/weblog/index.php?blogid=8#previous
2) "The future is invisible because our expectations are based on the intuitive linear view, rather than the historical exponential view. When people conceive of the future, they conceive of circumstances made different by the continued progression of the current rate of change. In reality, change is accelerating at an exponential rate. [But] just as Moore's law has demonstrated (a doubling of computer power every 18 months), progress proceeds exponentially. ...Every decade, the time required for progress to necessitate the adoption of a new paradigm is being halved. This means the technological progress experienced in the 21st century will be almost 1,000 times that of the 20th century."
3) "With the discovery of DNA, biology became an information science."
4) "Humans have been transformed into servants of the machines. If you've ever sat through a boring list of voice mail options, you already understand the flaw in making people behave as adjuncts to machines.
As author Michael I. Dertouzos points out you, a noble human being, have been reduced to executive machine-level instructions for a $50 computer. 'Our tolerance of this kind of abuse is reprehensible,' he writes."
5) "Information technology has the incredible potential to serve human needs and help us improve the way we live and work. But to get there we must focus on making our systems profoundly human-centered." From "The Invisible Future" by Peter J. Denning
6) "It was just three years ago, at an industry conference in San Francisco, that a venture capitalist noted that for the very first time, biotech in particular, the field of bioinformatics was beginning to exhibit the kind of technological acceleration until now only found in electronics. And now, when almost no one is looking, here we are: the biotech train is starting to roar down the [exponential] tracks."
7) "...Exponential growth is all-but beyond the capacity of human beings to cope with. For example, it will take generations for us to fully assimilate just what happened in the PC Age from 1984 to 1998. The change Moore's Law produces is so fast, and so sweeping, that it quickly escapes any attempt to control it. Just look at the Internet.
8) Ultimately, the greatest lesson to be learned from the electronics revolution [as applied now to biotech] is that if you hope to have any impact on Moore's Law you'd better do it early, in the firs few generations, before the doubling grains of rice on the chessboard mount up so high that they engulf you. After that, it takes everything you've got just to keep from being buried alive."
From: http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20031027/20031027.htm
The inhuman pace of change coupled with experimentation on the ultimate process of transformation—alteration of the human genome—have frightening and irreparable consequences. This represents a naïve science fetish that, blurred by machine-enhanced rates of progress, has dominated and subverted rational human-centred thought. Themes of inadequacy in relation to machines, isolation, devaluation, disembodiment, transformation, deceit, image, and anxiety pervade the previous quotations. Their sense of urgency, particularly as it pertains to dealing with exponential transformations of the human machine are concerned, is adequately expressed yet unnervingly parochial and nostalgic about the computer trends that predicated trends in biotechnology. There is a tendency to separate them when they are in fact coincident.
This evokes an ancient Jewish folktale about the Golem of Prague:
A rabbi in the Jewish ghetto in Prague was so overwhelmed in relieving the suffering of his charges that he invented an automaton that, when he placed the Shem (name of G-d inscribed on a stone) in its forehead, it set about assisting with laborious chores such as making voluminous quantities of porridge. The Golem had the capacity to bear the likeness of things but never the substance—one could, only in the most vicarious sense, experience the taste of exotic foods and sweets, but could never be nourished by its images and deceptions. A truculent young boy dared enter the rabbi’s quarters on the Sabbath so that he might enjoy all that the Golem could conjure, however, he lacked the knowledge to make it stop and the Golem produced such a prodigious quantity that all of Prague in a sea of porridge!
THE VIEW FROM HERE:
We live in a transition boundary between the isolated, industrial, nation state democracies of the 20th century and the integrated and interconnected matrix of individuals that constitutes the internet and world-wide-web. It is ironic that we are at our most radically disconnected in an age where we are most radically connected.
Fear mongering in the media has helped to breed mistrust and has fuelled a paranoia that has translated into a penchant for retreating to or “cocooning” in the relative safety of a well-fortified home in a well-policed neighbourhood that nostalgically mimics the Rockwellesque values of a bygone era when true communal values cohered people. Religion, once a cornerstone of such communities, lacks credibility in accounting for states of affairs in a rational world and humans in this new environment can only find solace in the belief that their redemption lies in the providence of science and its attendant progress. The singular failure of science and technology to deliver on this front has lead to a significant feelings of alienation. Religion, too, has failed us in many respects. In the mainstream, it has been co-opted by the ideologies of its time and served to promote triumphalistic, relativistic and highly individual interpretations of spirituality that cannot hope to cohere the disparate viewpoints of so many.
To be sure, we are in a lag phase where we are clinging to the cultural flotsam of the past epoch. Like our feudal progenitors who migrated to the newly emerging urban environments of the industrial era, humanity is still clumsily negotiating its current connected electronic environment using old mechanistic and hierarchal paradigms of thought. Our grappling with issues such as identity and ownership show a nostalgic adherence to notions that are clearly not supportable in this newly emerging environment. We attempt to force policing on a realm that has no dimensions and no common referents with which to bind us. It is a dimension that challenges our presumptions about ourselves and others and how we organize ourselves. We must be wary, however, of falling into traps—of imputing characteristics where none are in clear evidence. Current advances in communications technologies have are imposing profound levels of connection on societies built on individualist and isolationist notions of self in relation to others. This has given rise to an acute awareness of our ineptitude when placed in the context of a harmonic and balanced ecosystem. Engendering balance necessarily requires favouring global cooperation and accountability versus unrestricted predatory practices(Mulgan ). A recent phenomenon reveals a curiousity about how far humanity has removed itself from balanced, harmonic and cooperative interaction with its social and biological environs. Reality TV offers a number of “Survivor” challenges where a diverse cluster of individual personalities are brought together into a “Tribal” allegiance and dropped into hinterland areas with a minimum of conveniences available to them. Viewers engage in voyeurism as they witness the participants negotiate their way through shifting alliances and natural deprivations. Its game show format trivializes the value of such activity but it does provide a telling sign of our deep unease about our ability to relate with others and our natural environment.
We have the physical capacity to connect ourselves yet it remains to be seen if we have the capacity to forge viable and sustainable communities. Conversation around web communities could well lead one to presume that, since people meet there, in a sense, then it must constitute a community despite its virtual nature. I would contend that just being present does not confer community status on those present. Only when something is fully embodied, shared and binds the parties to a common destiny and actions predicated on that commonality can one begin to consider it as such.
There is a temptation to confer qualities of the familiar on the unfamiliar in order to demystify it; however, the choice of metaphor may be entirely a convenience that inappropriately conceals the true nature of the new environment. This conferring of “communal” status to events experienced by people online may well be wishful thinking but I cannot help but feel that the ability to artifice a multiplicity of identities or hide behind a veil of anonymity is anathema to genuine communion. The multiple identity nature of the Internet may well be of significant exploratory benefit to the individual, however it may be limited in its ability to cohere many individuals in a more profound sense.
I have interviewed a student extensively on her use of online chat for connecting with friends. This activity led to a serious on-line relationship whose dialogue changed from the ridiculous to the sublime expression for love. But, as she was quick to admit, nothing could substitute for actually meeting with her on-line love and validating his and their existence both individually and conjoined. My intuition tells me that communicative activity must always be validated in an embodied response.
The only projection on this theme that might conjoin aspects of connectedness and embodiment would be if the parties to the online exchange were to exchange mutually developed genetic enhancements by emailing their sequences and having them generated locally using the home molecular biology kits alluded to earlier. This would be constitutive of an embodied form of communication that would closely parallel a sexual exchange of genotypes with the host being the communicants and not a third and separate entity. It seems an outlandish thought yet humans have been aiding and abetting cosmetic transformations in each other’s physiognomies for millennia.
Post-modernism has revealed the failure of science and technology to deliver on its illusory promise of transforming society at large. In light of these failures society has grown increasingly anxious about the inherent flaws of their institutions to the point of being ironic about itself.
This disconnection from the institutional social matrix has had grave consequences for many and has resulted in violently anti-social and aberrant behavioural trends that include anxiety, infantile narcissism, depression and suicide. We have created an illusory material culture where the self is defined in terms of function and pecuniary worth. The by-products of this view are alienation and isolation.
CONCLUSION:
Humans mirror and extend the underlying complex of radical interconnectedness in their construction of “self” in a social framework. We are naturally gregarious and social to such an extent that if we are deprived of rich sensory, psychic and social interaction with the world around us we fail to develop to our fullest potential. Processes or points of view that limit or mediate our level of engagement with the world around us limit our capacity to wholly integrate our activities with our environs.
The need for profound and cathartic experience is difficult, if not impossible in an environment built on ideologies and institutions that promote notions of independent and privately constructed realities. Modes of common discourse forged around synthetic contrivances and symbols that fail to resonate with deeper spiritual and intuitive realities serve to generate violent schisms in the psyche creating a duality where one must choose between accepting the dominant, external and synthetic reality over the internal and intuitive one. The spiritual reality is most cogent in the mythopoeic mode—allowing the participant to share communally in a living tradition history that binds him/her inexorably to a common destiny. This form of “mysticism” is anathema to the discrete, atomistic, deterministic, causally connected realm of science. The Western proclivity for scientific constructs of thought has been the dominant cultural value in forging our definitions of reality.
Aldus Huxley has proposed a model of cognition wherein humans are engaged in a dialectic that conjoins social (external self) and individual (internal self). In this paradigm, humans construct/define their sense/conception of the self as an individual in relation to others in a continual recursive spiral of SENSE—APPREHENSION—PERCEPTION—MEMORY—ANALYSIS—KNOWLEDGE—ACTION. This spiral brings self and others into a state of mutual fruition in the fullness of time: our knowledge informs our perceptions of the world around us and provides the data and the point of view on which subsequent actions are predicated. Human beings have evolved finely tuned feedback mechanisms for framing the cause and effect of our actions, which continually, through the mediation of memory, add to and update our notions of our place and our effect on the world we inhabit.
Society exists at the intersection of the internal and external domains of being. The individual, or “self,” as it probes the external for experiential data, is brought into relationship with that which it encounters via its sensorium. Beings engage in this process in a fully embodied state where the internal construction of meaning and significance of the events from this shared domain of "experience" or "event" gains expression and where external influences are apprehended for interpretation and contingent action. Language is the means whereby sentient beings, party to an event, correlate the concordances of these experiences with their counterparts and negotiate the rhythm of mutual existence—providing a symbolic lexicon of experiential accord that serves as a map to the crossroads of experience.
This map can be sequential (if one is of Western, alphabetic bias) and can serve as the foundation stone of history—an artefact of experience to be given existence in its own right and to be passed down for consideration in posterity—the artefact taken as a tangible substitute for experience—the birth of history and tradition. Here, through a shared, inherently incomplete symbolic language, the self emerges, draws from and contributes to the continuity of this shared historical tradition. We are contingent upon the exigencies of history and its linguistic and social conventions and are consequently shaped by its dominant and prevalent metaphors—effecting the construction of our internal and external realms of existence. A dynamic and constantly evolving interplay or percolation of ideas and symbols between these two realms is constitutive of an integrated and responsive social being. Forces that favour one aspect of this dynamic over the other have the effect of debilitating the fully integrated and responsive social being (self). Fixing notions of the self with respect to symbolic institutions may have the effect of subjugating the notion self to an artificial, mimetically constructed image that is merely a farcical semblance of normative social values, or it may result in an antithetical rebellion that nurtures socio-pathic and narcissistic tendencies that fail to accommodate the reality of inter-relatedness that underpins their being. When the equilibrium between the social self and the individual self is compromised feelings of estrangement dominate the psyche leading to a sense of alienation and isolation.
A move towards integrating all aspects of cognitive conceptions of reality that realize the inherent biases of linear, hierarchal, taxonomic scientific thought and give serious consideration to the roles of myth and belief in informing one’s construction of individual and social self will be of significant worth in a world who’s new environment mirrors the underlying and intractable nature of reality—that being that everything is connected to and influences everything else. Science has limited the infinite regress that this macro-view invites by confining its enquiries to local and “efficient cause” rather than the global, final cause that is the object of philosophy. This view holds up the material, object-level discourse as the only reality—a view that is uncritical of the fact that this represents an unique cultural value with limits and biases. Technology, in general, has been a significant aspect of this material worldview and has been held up as a means whereby we may impassively and objectively observe and quantify the reality that we inhabit.
There are some problems with this notion in that the externalization and mediation of internal states necessarily invites translation. The will, when expressed via external modes often differs widely from the internally conceived idea that is being signified. The communicative aspect of this modality is further limited when bound to specific cultural contexts.
Furthermore, the leveraging of the will via material objects gives rise to the idea that the will or intention of the individual can be translated into and conveyed by this mode. This implies that material objects possess the uncanny ability to hold and or represent the internal domain of the sender and that this medium has the capacity to transmit this message: An arrow shot from a bow in the hands of an enemy may well communicate the hostility of an adversary with chilling efficacy yet, is the arrow head culpable in the act? This efficacy of transmitting internal states to the external realm via material objects cannot be under-estimated; yet, it gives rise to notions of contagious magic (Frazer )—that material objects can contain the will.
It is not difficult to see how easily technology is embraced and personalized and how they become dominant metaphors that help shape what we become. When technology as an extension of who we are becomes a dominant metaphor used in the service of propping up hierarchal institutions and powers, and we accept it as an inevitable consequence of who we are, we have enslaved ourselves to an ideology that neglects our innate capacity for choice and cooperative, creative response. This imagistic notion of technology is a form of idol worship that projects power to the inanimate and forms the basis for what I call “Technosophism.”
The accelerated pace of culture and technology have outstripped our inherent capacity for apprehending the meaning and significance of these changes in our lives and have created an ever-widening chasm between the natural ground conditions of our evolution and our current state (Earley 359). Humanity has disconnected from the process of forging the future and has been left to react in isolation to massive changes that have a seemingly inevitable character. Humanity has surrendered its innate power to negotiate the nature of our engagement with others and enslaved us to an economic, material and hierarchal view of reality where the mere thought of stopping progress would be heresy. That change can happen so quickly and massively begs for critical reflection, yet, the cost to lost production for such an undertaking is considered too prohibitive at this juncture. The economic, not the philosophical or moral paradigm is given ultimacy. These trends require scrutiny given their potential for rendering the human enterprise to being a tragically premature footnote in history.
It should be noted that the tendency to see the wired world as being constitutive of a redress for the ills borne from the industrial era is too simplistic. Wishful thinking will not make the Internet into something that it is not. In fact it is dangerous to confer human-centred images on the Internet before understanding the distorted relationship that we have with technology, in general.
In the time to come there will be, according to McLuhan, a nostalgic switchback to the old ways of engagement that will most likely manifest itself as a dogged insistence on upholding outdated institutions and individualism. These individuals will be inadequate to the task of engaging the world on an equal footing and of seeing themselves and their actions in a broader ecosystem that responds to those actions(Mulgan ). They will marginalize themselves and most likely be ostracized for self-indulgent behaviour. If humanity awakens to its inner potential a new social organization will flower with roots nourished on cooperative, creative collaboration and will understand its cause and effect in the wider ecology from within which it draws its existence.
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