Take a Pill! Become a Robot!

            Discussions in this column have focused on two distinct influences in the transformation of humans into robots.  First, there is the mirroring and modeling that occurs when people interact with all the complex machines and computers and robots that surround them.  In particular, machines, computers and robots mirror back to people how they are defective in functioning like technology and then people start modeling themselves after the technology in order to overcome the ostensive defects.

            Second, as more and more people start living long enough to have different parts of their body wear out, they start replacing those parts with prosthetic pieces. Prosthetic body parts are also used to replace human body parts that have been damaged or destroyed by accidents or war.   Although, on one level, this represents a promising development in medical treatment, on another level, this represents the beginning of the gradual transformation of humans into cyborgs.  Granted that prostheses perform important services in helping people who have lost certain functioning to be able to develop at least part of that functioning again.  Nevertheless, there is a spillover effect from these prostheses, a blurring of boundaries, that spreads the machine influence from a prosthesis to the rest of the person’s body.  It is not just that the prosthesis becomes integrated into a person’s organic body.  It is also that the whole organic body adapts itself and integrates into the prosthesis.

            One influence I haven’t discussed is the mechanical exoskeleton frame being developed to help paralyzed people to walk.  Again, it performs a very important service, and again, it creates an even greater blurring of boundaries that makes the whole body feel like a machine.

            A really insidious influence of technology over people is the use of pills that indirectly turn people into machines.  Again, the ostensive purposes of these pills are not to robotize humans but to perform important functions for them.  But the way people experience the effects of these pills is inevitably going to change their self-image such that they start to experience themselves more like robots.

            One of these pills is the Proteus pill, so called because a U.S. company, Proteus, is developing it.  The pill contains a microchip.  It is swallowed at the same time that a person takes medication.  The purpose of the pill is to send data from a person’s stomach to a smartphone or a tablet to indicate that he has indeed taken the medicine he is required to take.  Also, the time and date are sent as well.  The way the pill works is that when it hits the stomach, stomach acid activates a sensor which sends information to a patch on the person’s skin, which in turn sends information via a blue tooth to a smartphone or tablet. The target markets for the Proteus pill initially are children and older people, people who may tend to forget if or when they took their medicine.  But other uses are also being considered for this pill including the regulation of different bodily functions like blood pressure.

            So what is wrong with what I’m describing?  After all, the principal purpose of the pill is to help certain groups of people stay healthy and even alive.  Doesn’t this represent a positive development in health care?  Well, yes and no.  To the extent that it transforms a person in his interior into an ongoing source of defined discrete data, the person is turned into a machine.  His flowing continual internal bodily processes are transformed into discrete measurable events that in turn are transformed into discrete data that connect the person with machine systems outside of himself.  The person is subtly transformed into a machine that is being constantly regulated by the caretakers that are monitoring him.

            Eventually, more and more aspects of human physiology may become susceptible to such monitoring and potential regulation.  The people who take this pill will constantly be measured to make sure they are functioning smoothly and correctly.  And they will begin to lose their sense of organic cohesion, as they become broken down experientially into a series of different quantified processes.  Without a sense of organic cohesion, there is a loss of a coherent sense of self in a person and a weakening of the will.  The more that people are being constantly monitored by external caretakers for both voluntary processes like taking pills and involuntary processes like blood pressure, the more they lose their integrity as organisms and their sense of any direct control over their destiny.  People normally maintain a coherent sense of self and a coherent independent will as a result of ongoing continual organic stimuli.  They are not meant to simply comprise a series of fragmented functions and to be an entity that is constantly being monitored so that he can be potentially constantly acted upon.  When children are very young and old people are very senile, there is less concern about a coherent sense of self or a strong independent will.  So caretakers can monitor the taking of pills and the bodily functions in less physically intrusive ways, because they are with the patients all the time.  And for older children and for more cognitively aware older people, such constant monitoring through the Proteus pill will diminish the predisposition to function more independently.  It will diminish personal responsibility and personal growth in older children.  They will be under a constant cloud of a lack of independence.  And for more cognitively aware older people, loss of responsibility could actually trigger a gradual loss in their independent functioning in daily life.

            Aware children and aware older people need a narrative in their lives.  What can keep them alive is not only their medications, but also taking some responsibility and absorbing the risks involved with making sure they take their medications on schedule.  Also, the awareness that internalized microchips are allowing external caretakers to constantly monitor bodily function so that the patient can be constantly tinkered with like an old jalopy is going to weaken the patient’s self-image and his independent will, as he becomes as much an entity that is acted upon as an entity that is an assertive actor.  As a patient’s sense of self and independent will become weaker, his overall life force will weaken and his overall capacity to stay healthy and to stay alive will weaken.

            Another pill with a microchip is a password pill being developed by Motorola.  This pill is potentially for everyone.  A person swallows this pill and the stomach acid activates a chip to turn on a computer and other digital devices.  In other words, the stomach acid acting on the microchip replaces the use of the password.  It is thought that people can too easily forget their passwords and hackers can too easily discover them.  Evidently, no one can too easily replace the chemical composition of an individual’s stomach acid.  It is said that, in effect, the person becomes his own password.  I think that a person becomes more like a physical mechanism that, once activated by the equivalent of a password in the stomach acid, in turn activates the digital device.  So the microchip, in effect, transforms a human into a machine.

            Here we get back to the answer I gave as to whether the Proteus pill represented a positive development.  I said yes and no.  I would have to give the same response for the Password pill.  Given the fact that digital devices play such an important role in modern society, it is nice to think that we could develop an effective solution with regard to forgetfulness, on the one hand, and hackers in connection to passwords on the other.  The solution is the discrete focused activity of stomach acid acting on a microchip in a person’ stomach.  The side effect is the blendable continual experience a person has of becoming machine-like.  A person’s grounding as an organism, rooted in the blendable flowing continual processes of nature is disrupted.  This will lead to a subtle disruption and breakdown in his coherent sense of self and his independent will.  His conscious mind and his directed willful activity won’t be in control of the solution to his problem of protected passwords.  The microchip he swallows will be in control.  The person blurs with the digital devices he is using.  He becomes part of the digital technological system he is engaging.

            In general, there is a pattern to modern technological solutions.  A human action precipitates a technological event or a series of technological events and this creates an atmosphere in which a person experiences a disruption of his grounding in the world.  This disruption, in turn requires a reconfiguration of the person to become numb and hardened – like a machine – in order that he can survive the sensory distortion in which he is placed.  Then the person starts to identify with the device or devices with which he is interacting.  He blurs together with the device or devices.

            This pattern will become particularly apparent when a person swallows a pill and becomes the equivalent of a mechanical switch.  There is a price to be paid for the conveniences which these pills offer.  And the price can affect the very essence of who we are as humans.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Trying To Replace Animals With Robots

            What happens when an animal species, that is crucial to the proper functioning of the ecosystems in which we live, starts to die off?  It creates a major threat to the food chain in which we participate for our survival.  The die-off under consideration here is of bees.  The gradual loss of bees endangers the pollination of crops.

            Humans are looking to establish what is causing this die-off.  The most popular theory lately states that a group of deadly pesticides called neonics are killing off the bees.  Another theory has proposed that the cause is the destruction of biodiversity in many living environments leading to a poor diet for the bees.  Both of these causes are based on environmental degradation created by humans. Other additional causes have been suggested such as infections from two different kinds of mites, viruses and fungus. Whatever the reason, there is still a high probability that humans are directly or indirectly involved as a result of changes they have created in the living environment.

            Humans have caused the destruction of other animal species like the dodo bird, but none of these species was crucial to human survival the way that bees are.  Obviously, the loss of organic grounding in many different ways appears to be affecting bees more than many other species.   Not only are bees dying off in large quantities, but colonies of bees are experiencing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), where the worker bees from the bee colony just suddenly vanish.  It’s scary.   Humans, who are not yet experiencing an unexplained mass die-off, have to find some solution to the ecological gap created by the loss of bees. 

            And a solution is being created: robot bees.  We are now at the point in robotics where we can approximate the functions of a primitive animal and create a flying robot that can act independently enough to pollinate plants.  If we succeed in this, we will have solved the main operational problem of the loss of bees.  And if we succeed in this, we will have a model for dealing with the potential loss of other animal species that disappear as a direct or indirect result of human activities.

            But this is the point where we have to ask whether something irreplaceable is being lost, as we substitute robot bees for animal bees.  Are animal bees necessary for other things besides their defined discrete function of pollination?  If we reduce animal bees to one instrumental function, we are reducing them to being robots.  As important as pollination is, we also need our organic relationship to bees.  And with robot bees, there is no capacity to make, preserve or receive organic imprints.  This is because robot bees deal with defined discrete machine stimuli, not organic blendable flowing continual stimuli.  Their stimuli are built on digital combinations of 1 and 0.  Robot bees will not have the capacity with their presence to create flowing continual experience for other animals.  They just have the capacity to create remote isolated discrete events like the pollination of plants.

            With the loss of each new species to environmental degradation, to the loss of organic grounding, we lose one more unique source of organic imprints.  Each loss of species lessens the total vibrancy of our life experience.

            As we lose sources of organic stimuli from disappearing animals like bees, we gradually slide more into a numbing experiential vacuum.  And as we lose sources of organic imprints, we lose the stimulation we need to turn us on to make our own organic imprints.  We lose our capacity to make and preserve our own organic imprints and, thus, to prepare for death.

            Yes, lots of species have been lost to nonhuman causes in the past.  Natural catastrophes, cosmological events like meteorites hitting the earth, and periods of vast climate change (before humans) have all wiped out many species of dinosaurs.  But these are animals of the past.  Humans never had an ecological connection or an experiential connection with dinosaurs apart from their bones.  Early humans did hunt animals like the mammoth and the mastodon, and probably contributed to their extinction along with climate change.  But when these latter animals became extinct, evolution provided other sources of prey for food, other sources of organic experience for humans.  Evolution is not going to be able to work effectively enough to replace bees or other animal species that may be destroyed in today’s technology-controlled world in such a way that we can find new quick organic sources for both their ecological and their experiential functions.

            On the one hand, I certainly support attempts to find new ways to pollinate crops, if bees are dying off.  It is natural for humans to think of methods that imitate what bees do in order to carry out this process.  However, I am concerned that creating robot bees to do the work of animal bees sets a dangerous precedent.  It can lull people into not worrying quite as much as they should every time a species starts dying off.  After all, people will think they can always turn to technology to create a backup, should a particular species be important to the dynamics of an ecosystem.  This will make people less careful about the introduction of new chemicals or new technological processes to the living environment.

            It will also lead to even more blurring in people’s minds between their senses of self as humans, on the one hand, and the body of processes that make up machine activity, on the other.  Rather than missing the organic experience benefits of being around animal bees, humans will slide more and more into an identification with the wired mechanical complexity of robot bees.  The efficiency of robot bees will mirror efficiency behavior in humans and will be one more component in the network of complex modern machinery to further stimulate efficient robotic behavior in human activity.

            Yes, I know that animal bees sting and robot bees don’t.  Lions and tigers are dangerous, and we don’t want to get rid of them.  They are beautiful animals.  And there are many positive sensory aspects to animal bees as well.  The buzzing of animal bees is part of the music of warm weather in many parts of the world.  And animal bees make honey and robot bees don’t.  They are the only animal that I know of that is capable of bringing sweetness to human life that way.  Finally, animal bees are visually attractive insects that bring color to our flower gardens.  So they add to the positive organic sensory experience of the world by people in multiple ways.

            The dying-off of animal bees is only a partly replaceable loss.  If modern technological society does start using robot bees to replace them, we cannot let that in any way reduce the enormity of the experiential loss in our lives.  Animals are not only sources of function.  They are sources of sensory experience.  And our experience of animals in turn stimulates a sense of organic humanity in each of us.

            By the way, the engineers who are creating robot bees are giving them other functions besides that of pollinating crops.  The robot bees are going to be used for search and rescue missions and for military surveillance among other tasks.  With these additional uses, it is not as if the robot bees are going to be used only as a basic organic replacement for a gap in our ecosystems.  With their disconnected diverse activities, the robot bees are going to act like and be machines whose intrinsic worth is based on a bundle of non-related specific functions.  This is very distinct from animal bees whose worth is based on a cohesive organic identity within an ecosystem.  Getting back to the mind/body dichotomy that I discussed in a previous article, there is something in all organisms, some sentient activity, if not a true consciousness, that allows that organism to leave an organic imprint that is different from a mechanical physical mark.  This sentient activity is built on organic blendable continual stimuli which robot bees won’t have.  Robot bees are built exclusively on the defined discrete stimuli of digital processes.

            If we can’t save the animal bees, and robot bees are the only option for pollinating crops, so be it.  But let us not get smug that we are truly replacing animal bees.  There is a German company called Festo that makes robotic models of many different animals.  If all the sub-human animals on the earth were wiped out and replace with robots, humans would truly be very lonely organisms in a vast vacuum living environment.

The topic for this article was suggested by Chuck Freilich

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

The Danger From Surfing The Internet

            Surfing the Internet has become an increasingly popular activity all over the world.  And as the Internet has become increasingly portable – first through laptops and then through smartphones and tablets, it means that one can engage in this activity almost anywhere one goes.  But according to a recent article in the Washington Post by Michael Rosenwald on April 6, such accessibility has come with a hidden unforeseen cost.  As our brains become reconfigured to quickly scan endless quantities of data, we are losing our capacity to sustain our focus for reading books.  It seems that we are constantly looking for key words and key phrases and feeling a desire to skip around, just as we do with short Internet passages.

            This by itself is cause for alarm.  It means we are losing our capacity to read complex sentences and follow complex narratives and complex lines of thought.  Our minds are geared to lots of free-floating figures in the form of data and are becoming incapable of grounding themselves in a coherent body of images, thoughts, and ideas.  We are increasingly only capable of absorbing defined discrete stimuli that come from our machines and our technological environments, and we are becoming incapable of absorbing the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the result of more grounded natural environments.  Yet books are important repositories of the ideational content of human civilization.  Without our being connected properly to books, we lose an important component of what has made us human, since the printing press made books available to large numbers of people.

            Michael Rosenwald is optimist that humans can train themselves to be biliterate – equally capable of absorbing computer data and the coherent content of books.  I am not so sure.  When I was studying classical and flamenco guitar, my teacher explained to me that each of these styles required very distinct muscle development in the fingers of the right hand.  To be good at classical meant developing muscles that impeded agility in flamenco and vice versa.  They were not compatible with one another.  In my opinion, the same is true for Internet scanning and book reading.  They are incompatible styles for absorbing written material.  And the more we become configured for Internet scanning, the more we lose an important essential part of our human capacities.

            Actually what we lose goes beyond our style of reading.  The reconfiguring of our brain for Internet scanning actually extends its influence into other areas of life as well.  Internet scanning predisposes us to shallow-bonded connections of all sorts with the world.  We search out those phenomena in the world that are most like computer data – free-floating figures surrounded by a vacuum.  It means shallow-bonded connections in work, where employer and employee agree to relatively short-term contracts of commitment.  Reconfigured brain development leads to an enormous influence on the way we have sexual experiences today within the customary behavior of hooking up with someone.  In previous articles, I have discussed how people since the beginning of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s have used sexual experiences with a series of bodies as a vehicle for getting the variety of sensation that was formerly obtainable living in more traditional organic living environments.  In other words, a number of different sexual bodies acted as a substitute for living close to a forest, a mountain, a jungle, or a desert and living in a quaint village or town with quaint textured sculptural architecture.

            The computer has added another element to this equation.  By becoming configured to only be able to absorb, on one level, the discrete stimuli from the free-floating figures of data, yet still in need, on another level, of the grounded organic stimuli of nature and natural phenomena, our computerized minds translate the flowing blendable organic continual stimuli of a sexual body and a sexual experience into the defined momentary discrete stimulus of a computer datum.  You hook up with another person for a moment, satisfy yourself in the relatively fleeting moment and then separate.  The new computerized way of thinking acts as a mold for absorbing something as apparently different from a datum as a sexual experience.  The sexual experience is completed and then the person is back in an emotional vacuum again, free of commitments.  The connection is a shallow-bonded clip-on connection between two highly figurized people who are increasingly incapable of grounded deep-bonded relationships.

            In truth, Internet surfing teaches us an approach to living that involves our constantly scanning life while making few deep-bonded grounded connections to anyone and anything.  Through Internet surfing, we learn how to obtain fast shallow ingestions of stimuli from all aspects of daily life.  In other words, we start living a MacLife situation.  And just like too much fast food is harmful for your physical health, so too much fast shallow life stimuli can be harmful for your mental health.

            We could say that Internet surfing is profoundly interfering with the most fundamental way we have had traditionally to connect to the world by making, preserving and receiving organic imprints.  We make and receive fast shallow markings that don’t stimulate us to life very much in a way that we can properly absorb.  Nor are these markings easily preservable in our lives or in the lives of the people around us.  We are impeded in our needs to feel fully alive and to prepare for death through the surrogate immortality of preserved organic imprints.

            Now obviously there is some writing based on deep thinking on the Internet.  Writing for which one mentally has to slow down in order to obtain any benefit from it.  The concern is that a lot of time spent surfing the net can affect our capacity to properly absorb these deeper articles.

            The solution is simple.  Or maybe not so simple.  One has to stop playing the game of searching the Internet with no serious purpose in mind.  One has to break one’s addiction to the Internet.  It’s going to be difficult just like withdrawing from addictions to alcohol, drugs or gambling.  But life will become so much more rich and vibrant and meaningful.  This includes love and work and relationships of all kinds.  Very simply, life will be so much more full of life.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Living Inside Of A Video Game

            In its growing diversification, consumer technology is extending itself into our lives in more and more ways.  A new device created by the Israeli company Oculus, a company that now belongs to Facebook, is going to totally transform the world of video gaming.  It is a wearable computer device called the Rift, and you put it over the head.  You put on the device and you enter a world of virtual reality.  Now there are many potential uses for this device, but one that will be of major importance will be that of allowing a person to actually experience living within a video game.  Not watching it from the outside and manipulating it from outside, but actually being a part of it.

            Gamers will, of course, love this.  They will be able to have a visceral experience of the game in which they are participating.  It will be qualitatively different from anything they have done in the past.  It will provide an incredibly heightened level of excitement, an incredible rush.

            It will also have some incredibly dangerous side effects.  Virtual reality starts out being a distinct compartment within human experience.  But just as people start blending together with computers and robots as they enter the world of experience of these machines, so the borders that exist between virtual reality, on the one hand, and the primary experience of the real world, on the other, will start to blur.

            Video games are already an addiction for many young people.  Imagine how much more of an addiction will be created by a game in which one temporarily has no experience of any world of experience outside of virtual reality.  And video games can be so exciting.  By contrast, for most people in modern technological society, life in the primary experience world has become pretty bland, predictable, pedestrian and mundane.  So if borders blur between virtual reality and the primary experience world, the direction of the blending is going to be from the virtual reality to the primary experience world, infusing the latter with traits of the former.

            This means that everyday life in primary experience becomes infused with traits of the video game.  Unlike everyday life, a game is built on defined discrete rules.  One’s actions in a game have very precise parameters within which they can operate.  Because there are defined actions or moves for playing a game, we can say that there is a delimited infinity of possible actions or moves in a game, unlike life in the world of primary experience where there is a flowing nondelimited infinity of possible actions or moves.  Returning to the discussions I have had of different kinds of infinity, we can say that the infinity of actions or moves in a game corresponds to the infinity of whole numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. – both positive and negative).  And the infinity of actions or moves in life in general more closely corresponds to the infinity of the number of points on a line.  Infinity theory in math teaches that the number of points on a line is greater than the number of whole numbers.

            So, to the extent that the virtual reality game could infuse our daily lives in the real world, it could gradually mold our responses in life to be like game responses and create a diminished infinity of response possibilities.  The focus would be more on black and white moves and actions rather than moves and actions based on a nondelimited infinity of shadings and nuances.  The focus will be more on a delimited infinity of defined discrete actions and moves that follow one another rather than a nondelimited infinity of blendable continual moves that flow into one another.

            Furthermore, a game model for life presupposes a person moving through life with a series of tactics and strategies for always winning.  Such a life posture is not conducive to a person actually bonding with other humans.

            Finally, playing in a game does not leave strong imprints on the surface of a field of experience in the way that making a baby, building a business, planting a tree, painting a picture or writing a book does.  Yes, in formal competitions, trophies are won and records are created, but such imprints are not left in ordinary private games.  And in video games, which people frequently play by themselves, there is not even the fleeting imprint that results from defeating an opponent.  Recording a new high score on the video game itself is more like an impersonal mark than an imprint.  There is no organic surface in cyberspace that can act as a template for making strong imprints.  And if a person is immersed in video games, he doesn’t have much time to make and preserve meaningful imprints to create a meaningful surrogate immortality and prepare for death.

            It is not just video games  for which the Rift can be used in human life applications.  One category of uses is the creation of a virtual representation of a task situation, so that a person can practice a task without making mistakes that could lead to serious consequences.  One example of this is a doctor performing virtual operations before actually operating on a patient.  In other words, supposedly the doctor would be able to perfect his technique without injuring or killing his patient.

            But there may be a problem here. Because of the lack of grounding in a material world, virtual reality is based in an experiential vacuum.  Experiential vacuums as a substrate create numbness in people, even when there is a lot of exciting dynamic surface activity occurring as in rock concerts.  The overstimulation of the rock concerts is a layer of experience that exists over the understimulation of an experiential vacuum from the lack of grounding of young people in modern life.  By the same token, underneath the excitement based on doing a highly skilled risky activity in virtual reality, there is a substrate of numbness living within the virtual reality.  Living a lot in virtual reality while practicing a virtual operation will make a doctor increasingly numb.  And the vacuum base of virtual reality will blur into real time performance.  Rather than preparing a doctor in a safe environment, virtual operations could increase the doctor’s state of numbness even in the material world and cause him to feel understimulated while carrying over the state of experience he had in virtual reality.  In other words, mistakes can be made from numbness rather than from the anxiety resulting from practice in real-life performance.  Or, by contrast, performing the operation in real life could seem very overstimulating in comparison to the practice that occurred in virtual reality.  After practicing in virtual reality, practicing in the material world could generate even more anxiety, more nervousness than if the person had started practicing the operation right away in the material world through primary experience.

            Another possible task situation is when a student driver is taught how to parallel park a car in virtual reality before actually doing it in a car.  Such a situation creates similar difficulties to a doctor operating on a patient.  A student driver could carry over the state of numbness that he feels when he practices parallel parking in virtual reality and be more prone to making mistakes as a result.  Or the student driver could be overstimulated by actually having to parallel park in the real world, and increased anxiety and nervousness, as a result, could lead again to being more prone to mistakes.

Finally, another application being conjectured is to be able to talk in the same room with someone who is actually far away.  Here we have similar problems to those created by Skype, only more so.  Talking with a three-dimensional image of someone is not the same as talking to someone in the flesh.  It is a numbing vacuumized experience that will spill over into human interactions in the real world of primary experience.  And again, it will numb encounters with real life people, so that bonds that are formed will be more shallow and tenuous.  Or else it will make encounters with real life people seem overstimulating and anxiety-producing, and induce a person to withdraw from such relationships.  Either way, it will make it more difficult for a person to sustain deep-bonded relationships in the real world of primary experience.

            The point is that virtual reality is not a safe neutral environment.  It is a sensorily distorted environment that, as a result of the experiential vacuum it creates for humans, also creates new and different dangers for humans.

            These dangers must be fully considered, before people start to eagerly embrace the idea of getting involved in all the different possible applications available in this exotic new world of experience.  People need organic friction to feel fully alive, something they are not going to get in virtual reality and its vacuumized world.  Virtual reality will lead to virtual life.

 

© 2014 Laurence Mesirow

The Positive Effects Of Friction In Our Lives

            Efficiency is based on the notion that if you have to do something, you might as well find a way of doing it in the quickest most frictionless way possible.  On one level, it means you end up having more time and energy to do the other things you have to do.  Within a business context, savings in time and energy means savings in money.  Less fuel is used and machines and humans have time to do more tasks.  Modern industries are always looking for new ways to increase efficiency.  It is a virtue that is enshrined in the modern work ethic.

            Nevertheless, something is gained and something is lost with our modern focus on efficiency.  What is lost is perhaps not always immediately obvious.  We can perhaps explore more fully what is lost when we look at pre-industrial traditional society.  There, people do not always look to perform their actions in the most efficient way.

            In most traditional societies, people do not tend to break up their actions a lot into isolated defined discrete steps.  There is not a science to getting an action precisely right.  Instead actions are performed as an organic continual flow.  Traditional society actions are coherent, and there is an art to performing an action with style.  It is not simply a matter of doing something right to achieve a particular goal at the end.  The whole action performed as a flowing continual cohesive unity is a goal in and of itself.  There is an art to fishing, an art to hunting, an art to gardening and to planting crops, an art to making implements and other necessary accessories of life.

            In a modern mechanical action, the focus is on the mark left on the world at the end of the action in the form of a discrete product or service.  In a traditional organic action, the focus is on the imprint left on a person’s field of experience throughout the whole course of the action.  The journey of the action is as important as the destination in terms of human validation.  When one is looking for efficiency in actions, the journey of the action is of secondary importance and the only source of human validation is the quality of the mark at the destination of the mechanical action, the quality of the product or service. 

     

            There is something else that distinguishes the actions of traditional people from modern efficient actions.  A traditional action is actually several different actions with several different ends.  There is the ostensive dominant sub-action within the action.  The sub-action which triggered the action process in the first place.  A group of men decide to go hunting for game to bring their tribe some meat.  Going hunting for meat is the dominant sub-action for each man in the group. However, interspersed with going on the hunt is the need for socialization.  While on their way to the hunting ground, the hunters talk, making and receiving imprints from each other in the conversation.  On a larger level, there is rooting themselves in the camaraderie of a group, feeling grounded in a segment of the larger group of their village.  The hunt will create a preserved memory imprint in the mind of all the hunters, a memory that will be discussed after the hunting action is done.

            On the way to the hunt, prayers or offerings can be made to the gods in order to have a good hunt.  Each hunt is not just an attempt to find food.  It creates a disturbance in the activity of the cosmos which must be dealt with properly.  If not, the hunt will not be successful.  The hunt makes and preserves a larger cosmological imprint than simply killing an animal or animals.  It affects the balance of nature; it creates a shift within the hunters’ field of experience.

            Hunting is in and of itself not necessarily an efficient way of obtaining meat.  An animal has to be followed patiently for a period of time, before the hunters are in a position to kill the animal.  And sometimes, the animal escapes.  Hunting is a true test of skill for each of the hunters.  It becomes a way of validating himself as an adult male member of his tribe and as a provider for his family.  Hunting for meat requires skill, patience and care more than efficiency.

            Hunting not only leads to the defined discrete survival of people as figure biological organisms.  It leads to the more nebulous flowing continual survival through grounded group interaction and to the internal flowing continual psychological survival through a successful demonstration of the art of using hunting implements and to the larger external flowing continual cosmological survival through an embracing grounded integration in the larger scheme of nature and the spirit world.  Efficiency strips an action of any other meaning other than arriving at a focused goal.  Efficiency turns an action into a temporally-defined figure floating in a vacuum.

            The point is that a lived life is more than constantly taking the straightest path from point a to point b.  And yet that is what a machine does.  But a machine does not have to satisfy a need to feel alive.  Even a complex robot cannot be construed to have an organic cohesive consciousness the way a human would have.  All of the many different operations to move a robot in different ways or to make it analyze or speak do not add up to consciousness.

            And frankly, the quick frictionless movements of efficiency are not very stimulating for a human.  A person loses his connection to himself, to the people around him and to his living environment, when he is at his most efficient.  He doesn’t feel the stimulation of the journey of the action flowing within him.

            Put another way, what point is there for a person to reach a destination, if he is unable to experience reaching the destination.  And he is not likely to experience reaching the destination, if he is unable to experience the journey that takes him to the destination.  A person has to be able to experience where he has been – his temporal grounding – in order to fully experience where he is arriving.  Making and preserving organic imprints is a flowing process, not simply disconnected points in time.

            But, some will say, we are living in a modern technological society built on machines and computers and robots, and we can’t simply get rid of them, or we will have a complete societal breakdown.  And we need the efficiency built on this modern infrastructure, or our society will become dysfunctional.

            My answer is that I am not trying to get rid of this machine infrastructure, but to minimize its influence, particularly among those people who are beginning to feel bothered by modern technology’s pervasive influence.  If people can understand that there is more that is potentially available in the journey of a human action than simply the possibility of attaining an end goal efficiently, they will become less obsessed with efficiency.  They will start focusing on psychological, social, environmental and cosmological grounding; creating good flowing complex actions; making, preserving and receiving good organic imprints; having rich vibrant experiences and ultimately preparing for death.  And focusing on these ideas will prevent people from sliding into machinehood or computerhood or robothood.  Too much efficiency diminishes our capacity for human experience. Too much efficiency very simply diminishes our capacity to be human.

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow