Losing One’s True Path with a Global Positioning System

I have written a lot recently about the form that moral rules have to take in contemporary technological society in order to help people maintain their human essence.  I have also written about two ways that moral living environments can be created, in order to protect people from the dangers of technologically-based sensory distortion: through grounded social groups and through grounded mental organic entities like the humanities.  And although some content for what to morally avoid to protect our human essence has been implied by my discussions of the consequences of the use of modern technology, there has been relatively little direct discussion of the ways in which people should limit certain activities in order to maintain an organic human sense of self.

Now that we know that the use of modern technology does have some negative long-term consequences, it is time for individuals to reflect on their own personal uses of modern technology and to minimize use wherever possible.  I don’t have a formula for when to use and when not to use modern technology. I don’t have a formula for which  programs and which apps one should use on one’s computer or smart phone.  I do know that people should stop thinking about always using every available labor-saving device and should stop thinking about always using every major device to create more frictionless mediated communication with other human beings.  And people should start finding ways to make their own life narratives more rich and vibrant with more primary experience, rather than to sit like vegetables in front of movie screens, television screens or computer screens and watch the life narratives of other people.

Labor-saving devices have been created in order to free people from everything from supposedly exhausting back-breaking work to supposedly boring routine chores.  The problem is that traditional work outlets have been an important way we have connected with the external world to make and preserve imprints.  As more and more traditional work outlets have been defined as either exhausting or boring, there have been fewer and fewer channels to make and preserve meaningful imprints on the surfaces of our fields of experience and so to feel fully alive and to prepare for death.  Supposedly labor-saving devices free up time, energy, and state of mind to use in more meaningful work and more meaningful leisure activities.  And yet, for most people, modern technology not only frees up their time, energy and state of mind, but then it superimposes alternate technology-based worlds where people have vegetative mind-numbing work and vegetative spectator leisure activities.  Technology increasingly not only frees people from supposedly exhausting back-breaking work and supposedly boring routine chores, but from all meaningful engagement with the external world.

Modern technology creates effortless communication from a distance through computer e-mails, cell phone calls, texting, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc.  And yet the more people are seduced by modern technology to communicate at a distance, the less likely they are to have meaningful primary experiences that connect them to the external world through bonded human relationships.  It is just not the same to engage in a conversation through text messages as it is through face-to-face conversations.  But as people engage in more and more technological processes through all of their different technological devices, they gradually lose their capacity to feel as stimulated by organic continual stimuli.  People become primed to receive more and more technological discrete stimuli.

In order to retain their human essence, people have got to gradually find the self-discipline to start turning off their televisions, their computers and their smartphones, and to start   using all of these modern technological devices less and less.  People have to stop being more passive spectators of life and have to find ways to engage the world directly.  This means making a point of making time for direct social interaction with people after school and after work.  Ideally, it would mean finding ways of introducing more “face time” into the modern office, so that people don’t have to spend all their time sitting in front of a computer.

And people have to stop finding ways to use more and more apps that put order and predictability in their lives.  With more and more apps, people lose more and more the flavor and the adventure that comes with a more friction-filled life narrative.  Apps remove people from primary experience.  They remove people from the opportunities created by chance or luck.  One app that people love is the Global Positioning System.  With this app, people always know where they are in a geographic sense, and they never have to experience getting lost.  But what is wrong with getting lost?  Then one has to grapple with the problem in the external world.  One has to look at his surroundings and figure out where he is in relation to street signs and landmarks on his route.  Or one can ask directions and perhaps strike up a conversation with some interesting people who can tell him where there is a good restaurant in the neighborhood.  Such experiences leave a meaningful imprint on a person and make his life more rich and vibrant.  Do we always want to make life more simple and streamlined?

If everything is organized for us and done for us by computer programs and by apps, where is the opportunity to receive imprints directly from the external world with its random occurrences that require our spontaneous responses?  How do we get to involve ourselves in situations that allow us to receive and to make the imprints that allow us to feel fully alive?  How do we get to engage our fields of experience in such a way that we can preserve the imprints that we make?

The Global Positioning System gives people predictable security at the price of a loss of adventure, a loss of engagement with the world, and a loss of an opportunity to feel more richly alive.  For those people for whom such losses would be meaningful, now is the time to minimize the use of modern technology to what is necessary for functioning within modern society.  It may not be easy to withdraw from dependencies that have developed, because people have become reconfigured to feel stimulated primarily from the discrete stimuli of technology.  It is like trying to break an addiction.  Modern technology has become, to a great extent, like a drug.  However, unlike a drug, people today are only going to be able to partially withdraw from technology, unless they go and live on a desert island far away from contemporary society.  Modern technology is too much a part of all of our lives.  This partial withdrawal that I am discussing will be difficult.  Nevertheless, the rewards of feeling more fully alive and more fully human will make the painful transition worth it.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Helping to Keep Our Lives Together with Concerts, Plays, and Art Exhibits

As the pressure to be successful in different sectors of technological research and development builds in the United States and other modern industrial countries, the emphasis on producing more and more scientists and engineers becomes an increasingly large factor in the educational strategies of these countries.  More and more money is given to science and engineering  programs in universities, and students are encouraged to enter these programs with the knowledge that lucrative salaries await them upon the termination of their studies.  In the United States, foreign students who finish these programs are frequently encouraged to stay in the States as a result of the good jobs that they are offered.  To those countries that can create large sectors based on new cutting-edge technologies go the economic rewards that come from being able to monetize these creations. And monetizing is the result of being able to legally protect and control these new technologies through patents.  In other words, many strong economies today are, to a significant degree, based on intellectual property and technological know-how.

Yes, there are many countries that are also doing well economically from raw materials.  Particularly oil-producing countries.  But countries can run out of oil.  And  raw materials in general can fluctuate in price considerably, so that plans for economic development can be undermined by falling prices for the raw materials being marketed.

Also, there are other Third World countries that are doing well from cheap manufacturing.  The problem here is that countries compete against one another to see who can offer multinational companies the cheapest wages and the fewest environmental controls.  So workers get paid poorly and the living environment gets poisoned.  And multinationals can suddenly leave one country to go to another country that offers still cheaper wages.  Workers in these situations are extremely vulnerable to market forces.

So an important paradigm for economic strength and stability today in modern societies is high tech.  Modern industrial societies know this and honor those people in the educational community who can advance the aims of modern technology.  Obviously, the people who can utilize the technology for practical economic purposes can potentially reap the greatest rewards.  In general, technological expertise plays an increasingly important role in modern economies.

As a result of this growing emphasis, math and science are being promoted in modern education, while other subjects are diminishing in importance.  American public schools are dropping courses in music and art as a result of the financial crisis.  Universities are cutting classes in various fields of the humanities.  Fewer students do graduate work in the humanities, because there are fewer teaching positions in which to find work after graduation.  There is a general feeling that students should focus on practical professions.  It is these professions that will meet the needs of an economy in serious trouble and that will stimulate the economy back to life.  And although many university students go into business, science and engineering students are the people who can give a country the edge in new profitable industries.

It is not just the educational system where the humanities are in trouble.  Many fine cultural institutions like art museums and symphony orchestras are finding it difficult to survive in the United States, at a time when people are more interested in techno-pop culture than traditional cultural forms.  Sensory distortion has created more and more people who have lost their sensitivity to traditional cultural production in the humanities.  Lower attendance at cultural events means a need for higher ticket prices and greater subsidies.  But many symphony orchestras have disappeared and many art museums have become so expensive they are beyond the reach of many middle class people.  And many people in American government feel that government should have the right to cut funding to those groups in the humanities that don’t reflect their views.

Yet it is precisely when modern industrial countries like the United States are going through so much turmoil as a result of technological change, that some people have to continue to support the humanities as a defense against being robotized.  It is interesting, because the humanities used to represent a refinement of human cultural production that led to a transcendence over being swallowed up by the organic fields of experience in traditional tribal and peasant cultures.  An explosion of production in the humanities was part of the Renaissance that brought Europe out of the Middle Ages.  At that point, the humanities were necessary to help create self-definition in the individual.  Today the humanities are necessary as a surrogate mental organic entity to give people psychological cohesion and organic grounding in an environment of technological sensory distortion.  In particular, we need to preserve the cultural production of people who created, when there was still grounding in more organic living environments.

To a great extent, I have focused in most of my articles on diagnosing the effects of technology on modern living environments and human behavior by breaking down many of the problems I perceive into component parts.  A lot of philosophy as well as social science deals with perceiving phenomena in terms of their analyzed components.

But in order to try and find some solutions today to the problems created by modern technology, we have to fortify and cultivate synthesized organic mental wholes that have been developed in the past, and that today can be used for new purposes in order to keep the human essence alive in humans.  The humanities as a tradition are definitely one of those synthesized organic mental entities that can serve to fortify and cultivate a balanced human essence in people, at a time when there are so many elements in society that are causing us to crumble as organic humans and to become reconstituted as robots or androids.  It is truly ironic that one of the main smartphones today is called an Android.  In our interaction with it, it becomes a vehicle by which we are subly molded to think in sharply discrete robotic categories of thought.

At any rate, many solutions to our problems with technological influence today will come from complex synthetic wholes as opposed to basic analyzed components.  These complex synthetic wholes are not really complete solutions to the fundamental problems today.  They do not actually eliminate the sensory distortion that most people today have to live with in the modern technological environments that predominate as living environments.  But for those people who are stuck in modern technological living environments, creating surrogate living environments for our mental world, that can at least partly occupy our time, energy and state of mind, can act as a means to partly maintain our human balance in the face of so many harmful influences.

So even though modern technological societies de-emphasize the humanities, because the humanities don’t seem relevant to the race for technological and ultimately economic and political dominance, the humanities are, nevertheless, extremely important for psychological survival.  Listening to the present wisdom about what is a more desirable education, which means excluding any significant psychological balance that comes from the humanities, will only put people on the road to robotic transformation.  It is very important that students today be taught to appreciate the art, music, literature, theater, history and philosophy of those times when people were still somewhat more organically grounded in their living environments.  Students can be stimulated by the organic complexity of the synthesized wholes of these works in the humanities, and in so doing, be helped to maintain their own psychological human coherence.

I will continue in this column to analyze the problems that I perceive in today’s modern technological environment, but I am also interested in focusing on what could be designated as surrogate organic solutions to the sensory distortion with which people have to live today.  I am interested in the ways that people can resynthesize a more organic living environment, if nothing else, at least in their minds.  By being able to dwell partly in mental organic grounding, they will be able to survive as balanced humans and continue to be able to make, preserve and receive organic imprints in at least one area of their lives.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

A Morality for Humans in a Field of Robots

Recently, I have discussed the need for developing a morality based on more contextual blendable rules.  Such rules would reflect the need to act in a more organic way as a defense against all the technologically-caused sensory distortion in our living environment and the rapid change over time of our living environment as a result of rapid technological change.  The rapid technological change creates constantly evolving life situations with constantly evolving sensory distortion and a need for constantly evolving postures and rules to deal with these experiences.   The nature of the boundaries of our moral rules and actions are as important as the content.  Today we need more fuzzy boundaries for many of our rules to deal with these evolving life situations in a more flexible way.  These fuzzy boundaries of rules reflect the more fuzzy blendable boundaries we want to promote in ourselves to survive the evolving sensory distortion.  As more fuzzy organic beings, our sense of self is not defined as much by a very specific rigid discrete self-definition, but rather by a more flowing continual self-coherence.  Through our words, our actions, our beings, we need to will a more organic presence for ourselves.  Although we still need some basic well-defined moral rules, too many rigid, discrete, moral rules will cause us to become like all the angular technological machinery that surrounds us with its choppy discrete rhythms and processes.  Within the context of our modern technological living environments, these rigid moral rules would contribute to making us robots.  Again, I want to emphasize that the use of contextual blendable rules does not mean bending or breaking rules in an opportunistic immoral way.  It means the ability to be flexible and to adjust rules to survive rapidly changing and potentially harmful environmental circumstances.

        We need a morality that supports our organic coherence.  This means supporting those situations that create an experiential organic grounding within ourselves.  This means creating more continual blendable situations in our external environment, situations that can exist in spite of all the technological sensory distortion.  Such situations include strong family relationships,  committed sexual relationships, and committed community interactions and activities.  We need people holding together their human essence through continual explorations in all the categories of the humanities, a mental area of creation and intellectual exploration with an emphasis on more intuitive truths that help people to bond with others.


Modern technology puts a wedge between people.  Many of you will ask how that is possible with all the new forms of communication available through technology: e-mails, texting, teleconferencing, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger……..the list just goes on and on.  But all of these are mediated attenuated forms of communication that displace the kind of face-to-face interaction that leads to meaningful organic bonding.  If anything, technological communication reinforces our sense of isolation.  It reinforces the sharp discrete boundaries in us of robots.

So if technology reinforces robotic isolation, we must make moral decisions to reinforce our humanity with surrogate organic grounding.  If the boat of humanity is tipping over to one side as a result of excessive immersion in technological experience, we must make a moral commitment to put weight on the side of the boat where we can get more organic experience in order to keep the boat afloat.

If we can’t have as much organic stimulation in our external physical living environment as we would like, then we must dwell in the organic stimulation we generate amongst ourselves and in the complex mental entities in which we dwell in our heads.  This is a time when most industrial countries are pushing science and engineering as vehicles for giving them power.  Science and engineering are the intellectual careers that are given honor.  There are fewer and fewer courses in the humanities, as careers in the humanities are increasingly considered impractical and irrelevant.  Who has time to read great classics reflectively and to think anymore, when there is so much seductive technological activity at our fingertips.  But the humanities get us in touch with deeper human truths that allow us to connect more deeply with the people around us.  The humanities, which include artistic and philosophical works created in more traditional organic times, are a surrogate mental traditional organic world that can help us to survive sensory distortion from technological living environments.  It becomes a moral decision, in order to maintain our humanity, to spend meaningful time reading serious fiction and essays, looking at and reflecting on serious works of art, and listening to serious music.  This activity creates a protection against the crumbling apart of our sense of self and our consciousness from the isolation we experience as a result of all the technological media that surround us.  Movies, television, computers, smart phones, video games, all put us in a vacuum where we become numb to ourselves.

And when we become numb to our senses of self, we become vulnerable to technological control by other people.  I am afraid that at some point, people in their technological isolation and their robot-like mentalities will lose their independence as organic entities.  Many corporations today treat their workers like robots who have little down time and are on call 24/7.  Where is the moral outcry from traditional sources of moral protection?

In previous articles, I have discussed the concept of a surrogate immortality as a means to have something live on from us, after we die.  The surrogate immortality consists of all the meaningful imprints we have both made and preserved on the surfaces of the field of experience around us: children, businesses, works of art, trees we have planted, buildings we have erected, sporting titles we have won, all the memories we have left in other people’s minds.  Just as we need a surrogate immortality to prepare for death, so we now need surrogate mental organic  entities to create mental living environments where we can feel fully alive as organic human beings.  Yes, some of us live close to patches of nature, and that is wonderful.  However, few people today have intense interactions with organic environments.  Few people feel a part of an organic ecosystem that in turn stimulates them to feel at one with themselves.

So it is my belief that people today have to work at staying organic mammalian human beings and this involves focusing on organic grounded interactions with other people and organic grounded mental interactions with themselves.  The world of the humanities creates a surrogate mental grounded organic entity for us that allows us to stimulate the organic aspects of ourself through the imprints we receive from already created works, through the imprints we can make from the comments we can make on these works in conversations with others and through the works that we are stimulated to create by ourselves.  Immersion in the mental activity generated by the humanities is like doing exercise for the organic aspects of our senses of self.  It is a way of pushing out all the vacuum and static stimuli from our modern technological living environments that increasingly are making people more and more robotized.

The humanities are one very important way of keeping people in a mental state that allows them to defend themselves against their gradual transformation into robots.  The humanities are not a sharply defined place of existence and they involve many different kinds of phenomena.  They are complex, but we need complex mental organic entities to create surrogate mental organic fields of experience for us. These fields of experience can act as surrogate organic grounding and help us fight the effects of sensory distortion in our modern technological living environments.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Moral Consequences of Television, Video Games and Smartphones

In my last article, I started to explore a little the changes in the approach to morality that may have to take place today in order for people to maintain their human essence in the face of modern technological living environments filled with rapid technological change.  There is a basic kind of change that we should consider in order to develop appropriate moral postures for today.  Just as the content in our living environments is dramatically different from the periods of history when most modern religions were created, so we may need some different content in our moral rules today.  There are not too many fully developed analogies from traditional living environments that we can use for developing proper moral postures in order to maintain our humanity in sensorily distorted technological living environments.  There are no fully developed analogies from traditional living environments that we can use for developing proper moral postures to movies, television, radio, computers, smart phones and robots as technological entities.  The revelations from traditional religions proclaim eternal application, but the living environment is the template for human interaction, and different living environments trigger very different kinds of behavior.  Some of the kinds of behavior generated from technological environments have uniquely destructive aspects.  There is a moral dimension to sitting hour after hour in front of a television, if it results in a person’s loss of capacity to be with himself and to develop a rich interior life.  There is a moral dimension to a child sitting hour after hour with a video game, if it means the child never develops an appreciation for reading books and means that the child never develops the capacity for critical thinking.  There is a moral dimension to the extensive use of a smartphone by a teenager, if it results in his loss of capacity to properly develop and maintain face-to-face social relationships.

Modern technology has created life situations that the founders of traditional religions could never have imagined.  Not only do technological environments trigger kinds of behavior, as a result of sensory distortion, that traditional environments never did, but computers, smartphones and robots generate human interactions with them, as a result of unique configurations of stimuli, that are very different from human interactions with other animals, with plants and with geological and climatological phenomena.  And yet we continue to expand the technological environment and to fill it with more and more complex technological entites that are supposed to serve the greater human need.

What are some of the categories of human needs within the greater human need that technology is supposed to serve?  One is to make human life easier, more frictionless, as a part of a greater sense of transcendent control over the living environment.  This means diminishing hard physical work, diminishing drudge housework, and diminishing drudge paper work in an office.  But as more and more categories of human work get taken over by machines, there is less and less experiential connection between people and their living environments.  People end up floating in an experiential vacuum along with all the complex technological entities.  They become numb from the vacuum and jaded from knocking into all the clusters of other free-floating figures in the vacuum.  To survive, they become hardened like a robot.  And that means losing something of their human essence.

So in certain ways, to make life easier is actually to make life as a balanced human more difficult.  And people have to develop moral postures to help them in dealing in small ways with the threats to their humanity.

One category of human needs relates to creating alternate worlds that appear eternal, because they are free from organic perishability.  This includes all the modern consumer technology that gives people a sense of control over their living environment by creating shrunken alternate worlds.  Immersing oneself in the fields of experience created by these technological entities gives one a true sense of being able to live for eternity.  But in living in these alternate worlds, one has less and less time to make and preserve imprints on the surfaces of the primary experience world and so to prepare for death with a proper surrogate immortality.  One lives deluded in a false experiential world of eternity, until one is about to die and he realizes that he has left a minimum of meaningful imprints as a realistic and solid preparation for death.

So in certain ways, to make life seemingly more eternal, actualy makes it more vulnerably mortal.  The eternity on a movie screen, a tv screen, a computer screen and a smartphone screen is an illusion.

Another category of human needs relates to creating medicines through modern technology as well as machines that prolong human life.  This includes medicines that help to keep people alive from chronic health problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, ALS and Alzheimer’s.  It includes machines to keep people alive and functioning like dialysis machines, breathing machines and prosthetic limbs.

This is a very noble category of technology that would appear to have only positive consequences.  However, two concerns must be noted.  Keeping more and more people alive longer and longer means contributing to the overpopulation on our planet that not only puts our planet at risk as a living environment, because of pollution and diminishing non-renewable resources, but that also creates increasing sensory distortion, which reduces the quality of our lives.  Sensory distortion makes it more difficult to make and receive the imprints that help us feel alive as well as to preserve the imprints that help us prepare for death.  It is not only the physical damage to our planet that could make it unlivable.  It is also very much the sensory distortion.

We are in a moral bind.  Certainly doctors and scientists are going to continue to do everything that they can to lengthen human life and to increase the biological quality of human life.  This is based on our fundamental belief in most of the world  in the dignity of each human life.  And yet there is a question of what does it mean to live longer and with continued high functionality, while at the same time living with diminished quality of experience.  And here I am not talking about the diminished quality of experience that comes from limitations imposed by a health problem.  I am talking about the limitations imposed by the diminished quality of experience imposed by the external environment.  When it gets too bad, the sensory distortion can contribute to impoverishing life experience.

This leads us to the possibilities created by the next category of human needs.  There is one category of creating an alternate “eternal” world that would appear to be almost completely positive.  This is the category of space travel both to explore other galaxies and solar systems and perhaps to find other planets to which to move, should the planet earth become too physically damaged, too overpopulated and/or too sensorily distorted.  Space travel could be the key to preserving the human imprint, if not for eternity, at least for as long as our universe exists.

If keeping the human essence alive can be considered an important moral principle, at a time when the destruction of human grounding on the present planet which humans inhabit is a real possibility, then space exploration and travel must be considered a moral use of technology.

However, even within space travel, humans must examine different aspects in order to develop appropriate moral postures.  All this is new.  Analogies from the examples given in traditional religious texts may hold in some cases, but, in other cases, they will be tenuous at best.

It is so important that humans drop their uncritical acceptance of every new technological device or application that comes on the market and start developing new moral criteria for dealing with them.  If anything, some serious critical thinking has to be done on an ongoing basis to deal with the accelerating pace of technological development.  We need people who can understand the nuances and consequences of different technological developments, and who can form appropriate judgments as to the circumstances for the use of a given development in technology, if at all.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Maintaining Our Humanity In A Technological World

I have seen my role in writing this column as someone who is trying to push back a little against an overwhelming tide of transformation of the human living environment  and of the people inhabiting that living environment.  In order to push back, I have made stark contrasts between the more natural organic living environments in which traditional cultures flourished and the modern technological environments, which I perceive as creating terrible sensory distortion.  This sensory distortion has significant ramifications in terms of diffuse discomfort in the fields of experience in which we live and in terms of our own capacity to make meaningful imprints to feel alive and to prepare for death.  It affects our capacity to form a coherent sense of self and to find surfaces in our field of experience on which we can leave imprints.

So I try to push back a little against this rush of change and indirectly hold up a more purely natural life style as a way for people to defend themselves against the harmful effects of this change.  In truth, I know that there were and there are many harmful aspects of living this more natural or traditional life.  If not, why would people have tried to evolve out of it?  I have spoken often of the vulnerability to perishability in such natural environments.  However, because nature is not the major problem today, I have focused more on the dangers of modern technology, particularly because most people take modern technology for granted and look on it anyway as something that is unquestionably positive.

In trying to push back, I have glossed over the fact that we have gradually evolved from more traditional  living environments to modern technological living environments over a long period of time.  I have had discussions with some people who are attuned to my way of  thinking, about whether perhaps there has been a point in time along the flow of technological evolution in different countries when there was a proper or, at least, adequate balance between nature and technology.  A point in time that could be considered an appropriate model for people to look to today as a period when the living environment could have been considered very desirable.

Many Americans consider the 1950’s in the United States to have been such a time of balance.  It was a time when the industrial revolution had reached a point in development where most American lives were made comfortable and secure by technology.  And yet the technology had not so taken over the living environment through the computer revolution as to create an imperfect substitute reality for individuals.  Yes there was radio and television, but there were only a few channels for television.  Popular programs like “I Love Lucy” were almost communal experiences, because everybody watched them at the same time.  The next day, after the airing of a program, people would talk about it, as if they had attended a play together.  Apart from this electronic programming, people lived pretty much in the external sensory world.  They read real hard-copy newspapers and books instead of computer screens or e-books, wrote by hand and by typewriter, and actually talked to each other, rather than on their cell phones, when they were juxtaposed next to each other.

Nevertheless, there was a dark side to the U.S. in the fifties.  Factory work was well-paid, but it required using robotic repetitive motions and breathing the polluted air from waste products and listening to constant loud noises.  Air quality in big cities was bad from automobile exhaust and industrial waste, and some cities like Pittsburgh were under grey skies a lot from this pollution.  Furthermore, all Americans lived under an ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union, and there were bomb shelters everywhere.  School classrooms had drills for what should be done if a nuclear attack should occur.  So technology and the technological living environment impinged strongly on human life even in the fifties.

I am not sure if a perfect balance between a traditional natural living environment and a modern technological environment can ever be found.  I do know that living environments automatically trigger parts of our behavior as a result of our direct responses to configurations of stimuli and as a result of unconscious mirroring and modeling responses based on human reaction to other significant complex phenomena. These other significant complex phenomena include other animals as well as plants, geological and climatological phenomena and modern machines, computers and robots.  And because these configurations of stimuli and significant complex phenomena threaten to create imbalances in us that diminish our humanity, it is up to us as humans to espouse behavior and attitudes that go against the flow of these behavioral triggers sometimes, in order to reassert a balance within us.

In a more traditional organic environment dominated by continual blendable stimuli, humans must espouse a moral code with some strong discrete rules and discrete rituals.  Rules and rituals that are fairly unbending and even absolute in order to give people strong moral definition.  Rules like the Ten Commandments that influence three major religions.

Our modern technological environment is filled with the continuous stimuli from the vacuum base as well as  the discrete stimuli from all the floating disjunctive figure phenomena like modern buildings, all the different manufactured goods and all the technological devices.  All of these together create alternately vacuum and static realities - the understimulation and the overstimulation.  To survive these realities effectively, we must develop a moral code that has more blendable contextual rules.  There are so many new kinds of life situations today that lead to sensory distortion.  Blendable contextual rules give people the opportunity to develop moral postures that allow them to deal with these new life situations, that are constantly evolving as a result of technological change.  These new rules can give people the opportunity to feel a strong moral coherence, a strong moral grounding, in spite of the lack of real grounding and roots in their external world.  Strice discrete rules give definition, but by themselves they don’t support a strong moral human and humane essence.  Too many strict discrete rules in the wrong environment turn people into robots.

And people today are experiencing situations that have never been experienced in human history as a result of technological change.  They are inevitably going to have reactions that seem to break from traditional norms.  Sensory distortion is a powerful force that has not received the attention it deserves.

It is particularly intense because, not only is there the distortion that comes from a technological environment  with configurations of stimuli to which the human nervous system is not accustomed, but there is the distortion that comes simply from the accelerating rate of technological change.  New forms of technology bring new configurations of stimuli, so that humans today constantly have to readjust themselves psychologically in order to be appropriately receptive to the new configurations.  As the situations evolve, so should the reactions.  Constantly new situations create moral questions to which old moral rules are only partly or not at all applicable.

Certainly for survival in a vacuum and static environment,  people have to push back against all the stimuli that trigger reactions of an inflexible robot nature by means of expressing behavior of a more fundamentally organic mammalian nature.  And this means more continual flexible blendable rules that allow for the difficulty of maintaining psychological balance and coherence in such evolving technological environments.  But by talking about continual flexible blendable rules, I am not talking about corrupt rules that allow for selfish exploitative responses.  I am talking about maintaining moral responses in dramatically shifting external circumstances.

And yes the living environment is always a third party in moral questions involving the interactions between two human beings or between two groups of human beings or between a human being and a group of human beings.  This, of course, goes against the whole notion of human transcendence that has been a part of traditional moral systems based on traditional religious beliefs.  With the goal of human transcendence comes the notion that humans are who they are independent of the environments in which they live. It is becoming increasingly clear that technology and technological environments, both directly and indirectly, are creating all kinds of variations on old moral dilemmas as well as totally new moral dilemmas that the traditional moral systems cannot address effectively.  This is why it is important that people start acknowledging that the technology and technological environments that they have created are not simply controllable extensions of them any longer.  Rather, this technology and these technological environments are increasingly independent agents that require appropriate and effective responses on the part of people in order to maintain their psychological survival.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Recreation For Robots

A friend of mine regularly discusses with me the difficulties he has raising his two sons in our modern world.  In particular, he is very frustrated by the fact that his younger son, age 10,  is involved in so many structured recreational activities after school that he doesn’t have time to just be a kid and do activities that he initiates himself.  The structured activities are all organized by adults and, depending on the season, include American football practice, basketball practice, hockey practice, and baseball practice.  The son is on teams controlled by adults that belong to leagues and play regularly scheduled games.  I should tell you my friend is divorced and is not necessarily the person who initiated these activities for his son.

The older son has rebelled against all these adult-controlled activites and has started to spend his free time skateboarding with some of his friends.  A skateboard is like an enormous rollerskate for both feet, a little like a surfboard with wheels.  Skateboarding is a sporting activity that requires skill, but it is a skill that a child acquires on his own.  A child doesn’t have to go to discrete defined practices that begin at a particular time and end at a particular time.  He can skateboard when he wants to and as long as he wants to.  And in learning how to skateboard, the child explores the nature and the limits of the skateboard and the nature and the limits of himself.  And because it is unknown how he would react to skateboarding when he first begins to do it, the whole exploration of the activity is a kind of adventure

        An adventure, in terms of my model, is a human life situation that contains a unique configuration of discrete stimuli and continual stimuli and that requires a unique response from an individual in order to successfully perform a series of discrete and continual actions.  Discrete actions tend to be based on practiced skills while continual actions tend to be based on improvisation.  Stated another way, in an adventure, a person has unique encounters and uses his practiced skills combined with improvisational twists to overcome obstacles presented by the encounters.  Frequently, we tend to think of adventures as being high risk-taking, where a person’s life, health, or fortune or something else that is fundamentally important is on the line.  But for a child, an adventure is a situation where he takes a uniquely configured experience and converts a part of it into a series of activites that he can control.  Steve’s older son converts transporting himself on a skateboard in a park into a series of unique twists and turns and jumps that he can control.  In so doing, he creates an experience that makes a unique imprint on his mind and also activates him into a rich vibrant life experience.

The opportunity for making unique imprints, perhaps on the minds of his team-mates and fans as well as on himself, diminishes in the parent-organized team sports of young people.  Yes, a child develops technical skills in particular sports, but he doesn’t develop the skills that come with creating his own variations on games and negotiating the rules with the other kids in his group.  He is slotted in defined activities with defined rules, defined techniques and defined goals - activities that have been molded by adults.

When I wa a little boy, I grew up in a highrise building in Chicago. During the summer, all of the kids would finish their dinners with their families, and they would come down the elevators and play a game called pinners.  Pinners was a variation on baseball, where you would bounce a ball high up from a ledge of a building, and try to do it in such a way that other players couldn’t catch it.  Different groups of kids had different variations on pinners.  It was a game that adjusted to the different spaces and different surfaces that were available in a living environment.  It was a kind of adventure in which the kids could make up their own variations on the rules and make their own uniquely configured imprints on themselves and on the kids around them.  Although there was a technique to bouncing the ball high and away, no one was there making them practice their discrete techniques over and over, so that they could become discrete sports robots for their parents.

I don’t want to imply that all athletes who master their sport after long training are robots.  But children of ordinary skill who are constantly spending free time, that used to be for fun and reverie, in developing very precise and focused techniques, are children who are being subtly influenced by all the precise, focused, complex, technological entities in their living environments: the televisions and computers and smart phones and video games.

We as human beings are molded by our living environments and, in particular, we are molded by the implements, including the entertainment implements, we use.  Children in highly regulated team sports are, like the parents who regulate the sports, also regulated by the discrete movements and discrete thoughts involved in the interaction with the highly complex entertainment implements that they use.  I know that it seems strange to think of a video game as an implement, but it is a kind of tool used for entertainment.

Anyway, just as modern machines are composed of parts that fit into slots or parts that are held together by screws, so the parts of days of modern humans are slotted together or screwed together in a series of disconnected appointments and meetings.  Or in factory work, the machine operator is turned on when the machine is turned on.  The machine operator is turned off when the machine is turned off.  Or else another shift takes over the machine.  In this case, the whole shift is like a machine part that slots into a day with the machine parts of the other shifts.  And time passes on in the shift in a numbing way.  There are no temporal surfaces on which to leave the imprints of vibrant living: organically flowing activities and reverie.  Work today is overly defined and angular.

There has not only been a loss of adventure for kids like those of my downstairs neighbor.  How can you have adventure in work, when you have to fill out mounds of discrete forms and keep mounds of discrete data for almost every activity in which you engage.  Mounds and mounds of discrete stimuli that suck the life out of every step that an adult person takes in his work.  Every initiative that is taken has to be profusely justified to committees.

It is one thing to have to give up one’s sense of adventure to be a “serious” mature modern adult.  But why must we so over-regulate the free time of kids with slotted sports practices and games, and slotted lessons for music, art, languages, and preparation for exams so that there is never time for idle fun and just dreaming.  Yes it is fine to have lessons in a sport or musical or artistic skill that a child is interested in.  But don’t fill up all of his free time with regulated activities.  My neighbor’s oldest son has the right idea.  Find an activity like skate-boarding that hasn’t been regulated by adults yet.  I had pinners.  It was an imprint that belonged to the kids in my building.

And I had time to dream, to do nothing.  When you are a robot, there are two basic states of existence.  You are turned on and then you are active performing tasks.  Or you are turned off, and then you are lifeless.  Robots don’t engage in reverie.  And they don’t go off by themselves and skateboard or play pinners either.


c  2012  Laurence Mesirow

Can Robots Become Human?

A lot of my writing for these articles is based on a fundamental assumption: the brain and what we call the mind are two different phenomena.  Philosophers have been grappling for centuries with bridging the divide between the world of internal mental experiences and the world of external physical events.  We know about the processes of the brain through external physical events, and we experience the flow of thought in our mind.  However, no one has ever really succeeded  in bridging the divide between these two entities.  Today, scientists are trying to gloss over the distinction between internal mental existence and external cerebral existence as a result of advances in scientific research on the brain.  As a result of this research, scientists feel that they will succeed in showing that the mind can be reduced to being simply an aspect of the brain.  Science today is working very hard to locate where different cerebral activities are in the brain.  Scientists are doing this quite effectively, and when they do it, the mental activity that a person is experiencing somehow becomes less real than the cerebral activity that scientists are able to quantify and measure.  The mental activity is reduced to being simply an external manifestation of the “real” activity which is the cerebral activity.

But to think this way is to distort reality.  Precisely because the activities that scientists are measuring in this situation are quantifiable and measurable, they are composed primarily of discrete stimuli.  These discrete stimuli are configured into very pure events with measurable beginnings, measurable processes, and measurable endings.  Put another way, scientists convert all internal mental activity into cerebral events so that it can be measured.

But life is more than just discrete stimuli and measurable events.  Life is also composed of experiences with rich mixtures of both discrete stimuli and continual stimuli.  Continual stimuli are not measurable, are not controllable, and, therefore, scientists ignore them.  To scientists, the notion of blendable continual stimuli would not make any sense, could not be considered a part of any meaningful reality.  Therefore, what we call experiences are also not a part of any meaningful reality.  Experiences are subjective.  A meaningful reality is an objective reality to scientists.  Therefore, the fact that what a person experiences is not identical to the cerebral activity a scientist is measuring during an experiment is not important.  The real phenomenon for the scientist is the cerebral activity.

However, just because scientists are able to use their knowledge to manipulate cerebral activity in order to create certain experiences in humans, it does not mean that they can recreate the complexity of natural human experiences.

No matter how sophisticated the circuits are for the robots that engineers create, they are still being operated by combinations of discrete integers, of 0’s and 1’s.  And to the extent that some evil genius would want to put microchips into human brains in order to control them, the brains could only be controlled by suppressing the connection with mind activity, by turning the humans into robots.

In truth, the mind-brain dichotomy is a variation of other important dichotomies in the history of philosophy.  All these dichotomies reflect the dichotomy between discrete stimuli and continual stimuli in human existence.  There is the mind-body dichotomy, which philosophers pondered a lot, before there was any extensive scientific knowledge about the brain.  There was the dichotomy of the world of ideas vs. the world of matter.  One famous British philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, an Anglo-Irish philosopher of the eighteenth century, said the world consisted only of ideas and was simply an extension of our minds.  This way of looking at the world had some strange consequences.  If a person looks at a tree in the forest, and then ceases to look at it, and no one else is looking at the tree, the tree ceases to exist.  This philosophical orientation is known as Idealism, and, for most of us, it appears to be a rather exteme position.  But now, with modern science, we are immersed in a different extreme position.  The problem today isn’t with the reality of the tree.  The problem is with the reality of the observer.  The observer, as we think of him being constituted, is not real, because he is really simply a bundle of cerebral and other neurological events.  His experience of himself as a unified coherent entity is simply an unimportant secondary phenomenon, an illusion.  This line of thinking comes from a philosophical orientation known as Materialism, and it also is extreme.

The way to handle the mind/body dichotomy, the soul/body dichotomy, the dichotomy of the world of ideas and the world of matter, and the mind/brain dichotomy has frequently been to say that one side of the dichotomy is somehow more real than the other.  To admit the reality of both sides of the dichotomy is to leave the world untidy, to create too much anxiety and uncertainty for people.

There is a view in Judaism in one of the creation stories in Genesis that tries to get around the divide by saying that God breathed life into the dust of the earth, and this brought the dust to life as a human.  When this happened, the life or spirit could not be separated from the dust or the body.  Nevertheless, this was an idea that developed before we had much exploration or knowledge of cerebral activity, which corresponds to mental activity but is not the same as mental activity.  Interestingly, the mystical traditions of Judaism are much more attuned to an inner/outer distinction.  The distinction for them is between the perishable body and the eternal soul which eventually reunites with God.  Although this theory asserts more than is necessary for our purposes, it does represent an attempt to acknowledge that there is something very different between existence within the mind and existence out in the world.

So for us, where are we to localize the distinction between subjective mental activity and objective cerebral activity.  One place to localize it is in the configuration of stimuli in each kind of activity.  Subjective mental activity creates a coherent field of stimuli dominated by continual stimuli that hold the discrete stimuli together to create a unified experience.  Objective cerebral activity creates a field of defined events dominated by discrete stimuli.  To the extent that science studies these events, they are studied as much as possible in a vacuum.  If these events were surrounded by too many continual stimuli, they would melt into a unified field of experience.  The variable discrete events in a scientific experiment could not be effectively manipulated.  For science to work, these events cannot be unified in the way one has a unified field of experience.

Why am I spending so much time on all of this?  Because the people who build robots want to create robots that are as much like humans as possible.  My feeling is that, as sophisticated as they can be in creating objective cerebral activity, they are never going to recreate the subjective mental activity of organic human beings.  Yes, mental activity and cerebral activity are connected to each other, but they are not the same.  So engineers are going to be able to create sophisticated cartoons of subjective mental activity, just as we ourselves become sophisticated cartoon characters unconsciously modeling ourselves after the robots and the computers and all the complex machine entities that surround us.

Humans will converge with the complex machines that surround them, but they will always be different from these machines because of the rich variety of continual stimuli in their subjective field of experience.  Just as we become cartoon characters, unconsciously modeling ourselves after complex machine entities like robots, engineers are working very hard to create robots that are sophisticated cartoon characters of us.  The question is, when both humans and robots converge in becoming sophisticated cartoon characters, who will be left to watch the cartoons?


c 2012 Laurence Mesirow