The
main focus of this column has been the effects of modern technology on living
environments and on humans and their behavior.
My purpose has been to show how increasingly people are no longer simply
the masters of their technology, but are now gradually becoming a part of it,
becoming more and more robotic. This
presupposes a superior complex human mental capacity and mental functioning
that ongoing exposure to modern complex technology can subtly reconfigure. The technology is created as an extension of
humans, and humans end up increasingly becoming an extension of their
technology.
But
now more and more effort is being put into creating technology that impacts the
behavior of animals that are mentally not as complex, not as intelligent as
humans. Obviously, these animals have no
say, no choice with regard to their interactions with this technology. Humans make the choices for them. And not being able to easily get into the
head of a dog, for instance, that experiences some of the new technology, makes
the need for speculation even greater than when dealing with humans. Nevertheless, I think that much can be
learned by trying to imagine how dogs, the beloved loyal pets of humans,
experience some of the new technology being put in their life paths, and that
much of what we can perceive in dogs can have an application to our
explorations of the behavior of humans within their technological surroundings.
In an
article that appeared towards the beginning of this column, “Animals, Humans
and Robots” (12/12/07), I discussed what I perceived as the operations of the
minds of animals. Basically, I
postulated that their minds operated on the basis of “a relatively few
instinctual determinate discrete stimuli and a lot of intermingled
indeterminate continual stimuli that produce gross responses.” I pointed out that “Domesticated animals
operate on the basis of more discrete stimuli than their wild relatives as a
result of human training” But here the emphasis has to be on human training
with humans naturally being physically present to train the animals. Also we are assuming that the animals are
being trained either on a farm or ranch, on a lawn or in a home. In other words, in a living environment where
the animals feel somewhat sensorily grounded.
This is very different from the highly focused discrete stimuli that
rats receive in a maze in a lab experiment, where the only grounding that the
rats experience is the surrogate grounding that they experience from the treats
they obtain as a result of performing certain discrete tasks in a proper way.
Nowadays,
there is a more subtle way of taking aspects of grounding away from a
domesticated animal in the process of focusing his attention for training
purposes. The animal is kept grounded in
his actual living environment, but the presence of his trainer, which usually
means his owner, is mediated by modern technology. A person is able to dispense treats through a
device that is connected to a computer.
The person can watch his dog through a camera and communicate with him
through two-way audio. With one device,
Furbo, the treats are randomly tossed to allow the dog to play a remote game of
fetch. Another product of this nature,
iCPooch, has a way of connecting up a smartphone or tablet to the device so that
the dog can see its owner in a video call.
Anyway, treats can be dispensed to reward good behavior in a special
tray. iCPooch is still in a prototype stage, but it obviously represents an
attempt to provide greater intimacy remotely to your dog. Just as in their relationships with other
humans, people are trying harder and harder to have a good remote connection
with their animals. The question is if
animals will adjust as easily to spending so much time interacting with their
owners in a phone reality or a screen reality.
I
would tend to think that it would be in the long run significantly more
difficult for dogs than it is for humans.
Not that dogs won’t be able to adjust on some level. But it would definitely represent a greater
detachment from the configuration of stimuli to which they are accustomed and
even built for. Dogs tend to experience
the world much more in terms of flowing blendable continual stimuli than do
humans. This means not only experiencing
the world as a more coherent unit, but also being attuned to a form of
sensation – smell – that is much more immediate and with a tendency to blur
together with the organism experiencing the smell. Yes, dogs have a much stronger sense of smell
than humans. Dogs have hundreds of
millions of olfactory receptors in their noses compared to a few million for
humans. And one might say that because
the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to smell is forty times larger than
the equivalent part in humans, that the dog’s brain is able to turn smells into
defined figures much easier than the human brain. Think of the dogs that are trained to sniff
out drugs at airports. But because
smells are based on chemicals that can mix with other chemicals in the air and
that exist, to some extent, independent of solid bounded physical figures,
smells make for much less stable figures than sights. Smells dissipate into the world as flowing
blendable continual stimuli unlike solid visible objects or landscapes.
Furthermore,
dogs tend to respond globally to the situations that they experience. Happiness, fear, anger, sadness. And they have a way of sensing the emotional
states of people. In general, it could
be stated that although dogs experience many more different kinds of smells
than humans, because odors and aromas are not sharply defined discrete stimuli
the way visual stimuli are, the smells and the audio and visual stimuli all
tend to blur at the borders to become a more coherent field of experience than
humans would experience. This is reinforced
by the fact that dogs simply don’t perceive detail or color very well in their
visual surroundings. It would be almost as if the whole world was one collage
of overlapping sensory pieces that blur together. In other words, compartmentalization of the
sensory world would not be quite as easy for dogs as it is for humans who have
a strong visual sense and a strong control exerted by their cognitive
faculties.
Now
dogs do have a strong sense of hearing and can hear frequencies of sound that
humans can’t. From that point of view, a
conversation over two-way audio and over Facebook would seemingly be an
acceptable form of communication from a dog’s point of view. And it also should make for a more adequate
form of life experience for the dog. But
the problem is that two-way audio and Facebook are intrinsically compartmentalized
disconnected ungrounded forms of life experience. Of course, so is television, and some dogs do
seem to remain hypnotized to the shifting moving images they see on the television
screen. But there is no emotional
pressure on them to interpret what they see, because the narrative in front of
them doesn’t involve the participation of their owner or owners. Obviously, it is important for the dogs to be
able to interpret and understand their owners, because in their way of
thinking, understanding their owners’ behavior and communication is essential
to smooth interaction and to their survival.
And
one thing that is definitely missing from both two-way audio and Facebook is,
of course, a use of the sense of smell.
Dogs can pick up a lot about people by how they smell. And that aspect of their owners’ sensory
presence is eliminated with these technological devices. In a sense, it means that the dogs can’t feel
fully stimulated to life by the sensory presentation of their owners through
these modern devices. And this sensorily
deficient presentation of their owners blurs together in the minds of dogs with
the real life presence of their owners when the owners are around. In this way, in a sense, somehow the owners
are no longer going to seem as fully real to their dogs. The technology mediates by shutting off smell
and thus, a total sensory experience of owners, so that the owners will seem
more ghostlike and less compelling in their direct impact when they are
actually physically present..
In
truth, in order to preserve a strong compelling image of owners, it may be
better for dogs to be left by themselves when they are by themselves, and to be
able to preserve a memory of their owners from those times when the owners are
actually fully present. So that the dogs
know that when their owners are present, they are fully sensorily present. The technology that is supposed to make the
dogs less lonely and more trainable from a distance may end up making the dogs
more lonely and making the dogs feel a weaker total bond to their owners, and
therefore, less likely to listen to their owners for training purposes.
And
although humans don’t rely so much on smell for connecting with other people
(although more than most humans think), this situation with dogs and owners may
have a parallel in the relationship of modern children with their parents. The development of weaker connections between
children and parents as a result of increasing connections built around phone
calls, texting, and skyping can be considered a partial explanation of why
children today are so rebellious and, in many cases, self-destructive and
suicidal. There is no substitute for
organic grounding and for love, no substitute for a parent being fully
physically present with his child. And
anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling himself.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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