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

A World of Robotic Knowledge

I have a friend in Chicago who writes a blog on entertainment in Chicago.  His name is Seth Arkin, his blog is Sethsaith.com, and he recently posted a piece that was ostensibly about whether or not he should cancel his subscription to his hard copy daily newspaper.  I say ostensibly, because initially he explores his concerns about the effects of the digital media on young people today.  One of the effects he discusses is “the erosion of cursory or associative learning due to the simplified processes of finding the specific information one is seeking.”  He gives an example of how, in the old days, if he had had to do a school report, he would have had to ride his bike to the library.  On the way, he might have stopped at a record store or some other store.  When he had gotten to the library, he would have had to pass shelves where he might have seen a book or magazine in which he was interested.  Then when he had gotten to the reference section, he would have looked in the volume of the encyclopedia for the letter with which his subject began.  Seth gives the example of doing a paper on Bach.  So he would have gone through the B volume and perhaps he would have noticed “articles on baseball or ballet or The Beatles or beetles or Barcelona or backgammon or James Baldwin or birds or bees or blues or bebop or something else……”  He would have been distracted from his original subject, but he would have learned something else in the process.

Let us review all the layers of daily experience that Seth points out are lost with using the computer or smart phone for looking up information.  There is the layer of experience of the route to the library.  One loses all the phenomena that are juxtaposed next to the route.  Then there is the layer of experience in the library of all the book shelves passed going to the chosen book or books.  One loses all the books on the shelves that are juxtaposed next to the path to the chosen books.  Then, if the chosen book or books is a volume of an encyclopedia, there is the layer of experience of all the other pages that one can encounter in leafing through the volume to get to the chosen subject.  One loses all the subjects on the pages that are juxtaposed around the page with the chosen subject.

Seth actually left out two important layers of experience that one encounters when one uses books that aren’t volumes of encyclopedias.  First is the layer of experience of all the library cards that are juxtaposed around the card with the listing of a particular book in a card catalog.  In the old days, one used card catalogs for more advance school reports that required using books that weren’t encyclopedia volumes or textbooks.  Second, there is the layer of experience of all the books on related but different subjects that surround the chosen book on its particular shelf.  This is different from the books one randomly notices on other different shelves, as one walks to the shelf with the chosen book.  In the layer of experience of the books on related but different subjects near the chosen book or books, one is liable to find other books with material that can be used for one’s report or essay.  This gives a person a broader grounding in the subject being reported on, and it allows for the material to make a deeper imprint on his mind, one that is likely to be preserved.  One is also likely to receive imprints from the other random books that one passes or that one sees in the card catalog.

Finally, there are the imprints from the layer of experience one passes through in going to and from the library.  Seth stopped at a record store, but it could be a corner drug store or a clothing store or a book store or an art gallery or a park where one stops.  The whole journey to and from the library and to and from the chosen book or books becomes a grounding of continual stimuli that acts as a base for the discrete stimuli of the information of the chosen subject.  By enriching the knowledge experience with primary experience from being in the external world, the information from the chosen book or books is able to leave a more lasting imprint.  And this imprint is surrounded by the information from all the other books, and the information blurs together into continual stimuli that blur together into a base of knowledge that give a person a breadth and depth of learning that he is not going to get using a computer or smart phone to do research.

And this is because a computer makes the journey too easy and too direct to the desired information. By putting in the appropriate key words, one gets directly on Google to the information desired in a matter of seconds.  One gets directly to the discrete stimuli of the desired information without having to pass through any of the layers of continual stimuli through which Seth had to pass in his journey too and from the library.  Rather than getting a broad flow of knowledge to give oneself real learning, on a computer one gets lots of little pin points of information that do not cohere together enough to make a meaningful enduring imprint on the mind.

So students today get little pin points of information to write their reports, but without the grounding, without the context, the information is not as easily retained.  One needs a flow of experience, a flow of continual blending stimuli to hold the discrete stimuli together to make a meaningful enduring imprint.  Without much continual blending stimulation, the pin points of information end up creating a highly attenuated ephemeral mark on the mind.

In general, configurations of stimuli that are preponderately or, at least, dominated by continual stimuli are experiences, while configurations of stimuli that are preponderately or, at least, dominated by discrete stimuli are events.  I am going to start talking about this distinction more in my column, because I think it is an important distinction for understanding human life situations.  In both cases, there is usually a mixture of discrete and continual stimuli.  The difference between experiences and events comes from the difference in the mixture of these two types of stimuli.

When considering the whole process of information retrieval on a computer, the presence of continual stimuli is very minimal.  As a result, we experience the pin points of information as a series of mini-events, much purer in discrete stimuli than what we normally think of as an event.  What we normally think of as an event - a wedding or a presidential inauguration or an act of war - has enough coninual stimuli to make a meaningful imprint.  But the mini-events of computer information retrieval really don’t have enough continual stimuli to make a meaningful imprint.  I am using the word imprint to mean an impression from stimuli that is somehow absorbable by the mind.  This means that the mind can make sense of it and potentially integrate it.  To be capable of being integrated, the stimulus configuration must contain some element of continual stimuli.  A meaningful imprint has a mixture of both discrete and continual stimuli.  However, most people who do informal retrieval from surfing the web are bombarded with many little isolated bits of information, discrete stimuli that leave marks on our mind and that aren’t properly absorbed and that tend not to endure for long.  It is more like information static.  The computer with its vacuumized screen comprises a small vacuum and static world that mimics the vacuum and static situation in our modern technological living environment.

As I pointed out in a previous column, robots are stimulated by the signals of pure discrete stimuli.  No matter how complicated the algorithmic system is that is used to activate the robot, the system still relies on discrete integers and discrete stimuli.  This is the kind of stimulation we are now giving to our students and office workers through computers.  And this is why the experience that my friend Seth had in his journeys to the library seems so very precious now.  Precious because it is vibrant experiences like this one that define and validate our humanity.  But more than that, it is experiences like this that used to form the foundation of people with a good general education and a broad base of knowledge.  Today, students and other people get a lot of their knowledge as computer or smart phone pin points that, without a meaningful grounded context, just don’t stay a part of their life experience for very long.  But why should the pin points be retained, when, if a person forgets something, he can look it up again so easily on his smart phone or computer.  In the old days, if a person forgot a piece of information, he would frequently have to make a time-consuming journey to a library or a book store to look it up again.  It paid to remember more of what one read.  Of course, in truth, a time consuming knowledge journey to a library or a book store wasn’t such an awful thing anyway.  It was one of the vibrant experiences out of which life used to be made.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Robotic Violence

One topic that seems to unite many of the seemingly disparate problems facing human relations today or at any time in history is violence.  People keep dreaming of living in a society free of war and violent crime, but somehow such a society, if it appears at all briefly, doesn’t last very long.  Before I delve further into violence itself, I would like to differentiate it from non-violence within my imprint theory.  A non-violent imprint is an imprint made by an organism on an organic surface that  stimulates the surface to life.  A violent imprint is an imprint made by an organism that hurts the organic surface on which it is made.  Sometimes the difference between these two different types of imprints gets blurred.  One example is when a surgeon has to cut open a patient in order to perform an operation.  The cut has painful or uncomfortable side effects but it will ultimately save or enhance the patient’s life.  Another is when people participate in sadistic or masochistic relationships.  These are relationships where people derive pleasure from giving or receiving pain.  In each of these situations there is a mixture of destructive and constructive aspects to the imprints being made.

Now one of the assumptions that is made about violence is that it is always exclusively directed at some figure: a person, an animal, or even an inanimate object.  How many times have we seen  or heard about a person taking out his anger by throwing a glass or a dish against the wall or the floor?  Our notion of causality assumes that people always act on other discrete figures.  However, sometimes it is the whole living environment itself that can bring on violent reactions, but because it is hard to act out against an environment, another figure - a person or animal or thing - becomes the object of anger.  Anger against the environment can be an element in a violent reaction against an organism, and predispose a person who has a conflict or an annoyance with an organism, to act violent with it.

The key is that different kinds of environments bring out different kinds of violence.  In traditional organic environments, the danger to the person is that of undifferentiating, of losing his self-definition, as the person tends to be enveloped by all the organic stimuli around him.  I said in a previous article that animals strengthen their sense of self through intensely focused attacks on other animals.  But the danger, the enemy, is not simply the other animal.  It is also aspects of the total organic environment.  The animal or the person is also fighting the perishability in the natural environment that leads to undifferentiation of the self.  He does that through hardening the sense of self by focusing on an enemy and aiming aggression towards that enemy.  This is what can be called goal-oriented violence.

In modern technological environments, a different kind of violence arises.  In this case the environmental danger comes from the numbness created by the vacuum living environments that people live and work in.  Vacuum environments create situations of entropy which refers to the random distribution of atoms in a vacuum.  Psychologically, it refers to how people break apart in a vacuum and lose their feeling.  People fight to hold themselves together, to maintain their self-coherence, by striking out in any direction to stimulate themselves to life.  This is where you get all the random acts of violence in modern society, like from the people who go to public places and start shooting whoever is around.  This is what can be called process-oriented violence.  A person strikes out violently simply to feel alive and hold himself together.

People can also lose their feeling and become sensorily disrupted by the tension pockets of overstimulating static that float in the vacuum environment today: the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the honking horns, the belching smoke, the clusters of tall buildings that don’t fit together, the blaring modern music, the crowding from people.  Again, people have to fight to hold themselves together and prevent themselves from crumbling apart through process-oriented aggression.

There are people who seem to feel threatened by both a loss of self-definition and a loss of self-coherence.  These are people who go to public places and shoot both a specific enemy and the random people around them.  This should not be confused with acts of war where an enemy is bombed from the air and innocent people who are close by to the military target get injured or killed as well.  That is called collateral damage.  The principal purpose of traditional military violence is still to target a specific enemy who randomly ends up being surrounded by innocent people or who purposely surrounds himself by innocent people in order not to be hurt.

People thought that, in building modern technological societies, they would create more civilized societies in which violence was eliminated or, at least, significantly diminished.  The idea was that, in separating themselves from the natural environments of wild animals, people would lose their violent tendencies.  We all see now that this isn’t happening.  Violence is simply taking a different form in order to defend a person against the relatively newer dangers of entropy and numbness.

Look at all the cyberaggression that is occurring today.  Hackers try to destroy computers, steal personal identities and reveal secret documents. These people need to hurt others to feel alive and to prevent themselves from crumbling apart.

And look at cyberthreats and cyberteasing that occur among students today.  One can do horrendous things to a student through a few well-placed comments on Facebook.  Cyberviolence can take the form of embarrassing and inappropriate photos placed on social media.

So violence does not go away just because we separate ourselves from the natural environments of wild animals.  And it is highly doubtful that it will ever disappear entirely, because it seems to be a psychologically useful process to jolt a person to life when his sense of self is threatened by elements in his external environment.  In organic environments, the threat is that of being blended back into an undifferentiating organic grounding.  In modern technological environments, it is crumbling apart from the numbing influences of the vacuum aspects of modern living environments and, alternately, the overstimulating jading influences of the free-floating static stimuli in the tension pocket aspects of modern living environments.

And if we want to diminish the appearance of unwanted violence in our living environments, we have to formulate strategies today, just as people used traditional religion to diminish and channel violence in more organic living environments.  Religion developed rituals that helped put people in transcendental states to stand apart from the wild flow of nature, and it created moral rules to help people stand apart from the violence in nature and the potential for violence in themselves.  These rituals and rules became strong psychological figures in people’s minds. With them, people could stand apart from living environments with enveloping grounding that tended to undifferentiate and swallow them up.

Today, however, we have a different set of threats.  We need more blending ground stimulation, not less, to help people feel coherent and, therefore, less in need of process-oriented violence. We need nature, organic art and handicrafts, community, all kinds of primary experience.  We need human bonding, parties, celebrations, adventures, doing things with one’s hands.  We need face-to-face contact between people.  We need opportunities for people to make imprints and hold themselves together without violence.

Humans have created a transcendental technological environment to escape the savagery in nature and have put themselves in a new kind of field of experience that brings out robotic violence.  These complex technological entities that surround us and that are supposed to make our lives easier and open up new worlds, these entities are not always doing things in our best interest.  We must use them with moderation and caution.  And we must keep a certain distance from them, so that they do not influence our behavior too much, and cause us to descend into robotic process-oriented violence.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Brooms and Buttons in Human Life

Freedom is a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  To those who espouse democracy, it means things like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion.  To people on the political right it means freedom to grow business without government regulations, freedom to own guns and freedom of the unborn to be born.  For people on the political left, it means freedom from hunger, freedom from gun violence and freedom of choice with regard to abortion.  In all these cases, the common denominator is an attempt to break away from a situation that is oppressing a person.  The person perceives a particular situation as boxing him in, and he conceives of a solution whereby he pushes the box away either in the form of affirmative expression  (freedom to do something) or in the form of getting out of the box and escaping (freedom from something).

In the affirmative expression solution, a person pushes to make an imprint against a situation created by other people that would prevent him from leaving the imprint.  In the excape solution, a person pushes to avoid receiving an imprint created by other people that a situation is making on him.

In this essay, I would like to explore a situation that is not normally thought of as boxing a person in, and a notion of freedom that is not normally thought about or discussed.  This is because the “box” that is boxing people in within this situation has been growing incrementally and is extremely subtle.  The freedom under considereation here is the freedom to move about freely when we engage the world.  On the surface, this idea may seem like total nonsense.  Nobody is directly controlling the way we move, as we move through the world.  People aren’t on leashes today nor are they kept in cells (unless they are criminals).

But modern technology is creating a situation today that both prevents people from making their own physical imprints on the world through physical movement and that prevents people from escaping the psychological mechanical marks that it leaves on them.  This is because the people who control modern society expect modern technology to be used for fundamental life processes.  Blue collar workers have to use industrial machines.  Students and office workers have to use computers.  Marketers aggressively convince people to use movies, television, computers, video games and smart phones for entertainment and to use complex appliances and other machines for basic household chores and personal care.

Human progress has been gradually configuring our living environments over the last few centuries to shape the way we move and interact with them.  The increasing use of more and more complex machines to accomplish our tasks in the world has had a profound effect on our freedom to make physical imprints.  In traditional societies, our work consisted of routine jobs whether hunting, gardening, raising animals, farming, fixing things with relatively basic tools, or making things like pots, chairs, houses, boats, carriages and clothing.  Because the tools were basic, there was little requirement on the part of humans to make movements in one fixed precise way.  Movement of arms and legs could flow, and the different parts of tasks flowed into one another.  Human movement could range over space in unpredictable ways.  Even routine work could be done somewhat differently from day to day.  There was a certain amount of  freedom in the way we physically engaged the world through our survival activities.  Enough freedom so that there were personal styles of doing things.

As many tasks became increasingly mechanized through the industrial age, people’s encounters with the world through these complex machines began to change as well.  Instead of using flowing continual actions to perform tasks, people were increasingly required to use precise discrete actions, performed sequentially to turn on the machine, activate different functions of a machine, and then turn it off.  This doesn’t mean that in traditional societies, work wasn’t broken into phases involving different actions.  It just means that the phases did not usually have the sharp angular separation from one another as the discrete steps do in modern machine processes.  There are different phases to hunting an animal or baking bread, but the phases flow into each other.  In terms of the transition to more mechanical human movements, there has been, at first, a transitional time when discrete step-by-step actions were mixed with some flowing continual actions.  Cars, vacuum cleaners and electric razors are examples of this mixed dimension machine.

But gradually, there has been a movement to more and more machine actions that are simply based on discrete step-by-step actions.  Some of these actions simply involve pressing a series of buttons as in operating a television.  Some actions involve the use of levers as with some industrial machines.  A lot of these actions are computer-based actions.  We can operate all kinds of processes now through computer keys.  And computer keys represent the ultimate loss of freedom of movement of our body, and particularly of our hands.

Technology is constricting our movements in our daily lives.  By doing this, we are losing the opportunity to unfold a more unique individual sense of self.  It is true that all these modern machines are supposed to make life easier by freeing us from strenuous, time-consuming routine actions.  But those strenuous, time-consuming routine actions allowed us to develop a physical style to our actions and processes which ultimately resulted in a unique physical imprint that we were able to make in supposedly standardized tasks.

Increasingly automated actions lead to freedom from engagement with the world which leads to floating in an experiential vacuum.  Too much freedom from engagement with the external world is not necessarily a good freedom to have.  People become boxed in within their mechanical interactions.  In other words, boxed in does not have to refer to simply being in overly confined spaces.  We can be boxed in through overly restricted movements that prevent our communion with our living environment within a continual flow of space over a continual flow of time.  Free-flowing movement is a major way that we can make meaningful imprints on our field of experience.

At this point, it might be appropriate to redefine a model that I had used in previous articles  for slightly different circumstances than I am talking about here in this article.  The model that I used for dividing up different kinds of stimuli is very appropriate also as a means for understanding different kinds of actions.  A discrete action has a fixed trajectory of movement with a defined beginning and a defined ending.  For example, there is no significant variation in the way a person hits the different letters and numbers on his smart phone.  It is a determinate action.  A continual action has a variable trajectory of movement with a poorly defined beginning and a poorly defined ending.  The back and forth strokes of a broom on a floor blend into each other and, for that reason, do not have a crisp beginning and a crisp ending.  Such an action is an indeterminate action.  Finally a continuous action has a totally random trajectory of movement and has no defined beginning and no ending.  An object that moves in a pure vacuum will keep moving unless a non-vacuum force intervenes to create friction and slow it down, stop it or deflect it.

The gradual technologizing of our living environment has led to a gradual change in the way we act.  Increasingly, human life is shaped by discrete actions, as we use more and more complex machines and computers to control and manipulate the phenomena in our fields of experience.  The number of discrete actions available for using these complex machines is less than the number of continual actions available for using more basic tools like brooms and hammers and forks and knives.  This again requires going back to a previous article where I talk about different kinds of infinities.  Just as the number of points on a line is greater than the number  of discrete numbers, so the number of continual actions doing traditional chores and more basic processes involving tools is greater than the number of discrete actions to perform the movements involved with activating and operating a complex modern  machine like a computer, a television, an industrial machine, or a robot.

On a smart phone, there is no room for deviation in punching in a letter.  Just a slight slip means punching another letter.  By increasingly limiting the actions we use for engaging the world to discrete actions, we are sucking the life out of our physical style of movement.  We are diminishing our capacity to make and receive physical imprints and thus diminishing our capacity to experience our full humanity.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Old Books and Illustrations

I have focused a great deal in my articles on making and preserving imprints, but not that much on receiving imprints.  In truth, making and preserving imprints is inextricably tied up with receiving imprints.  All the imprints that we make are based on the reconfiguration of imprints that we receive, both from our external world of experience and our internal world of experience.  Even the genetic material that we pass on to our child is, in turn, based on a reconfiguration of genetic material that we have received from our parents, who, in turn, received a reconfiguration of genetic material from their parents, etc.

And there is no question but that the best most vibrant experiential imprints that we make are based on the reconfiguring and mixing up of material from rich vibrant imprints that we receive.  These rich vibrant imprints come from different kinds of experiences.  But all these experiences usually have one thing in common.  They are primary experiences with at lease some significant immediate sensory content.  I mention this because the daily flow of experiences people in modern technological societies have today, has an increasingly diminished content of primary experience.

I happen to collect old books from between 1890 and 1940.  Many of the books I collect have beautiful illustrations interspersed throughout the pages as well as on the hard cover.  Some of the books have beautiful borders surrounding the text.  These books have a wonderful smell and feel to them.  They are a pleasure to hold.  Contrast these books with the electronic books that are becoming increasingly popular today.  They all appear on a few relatively  uniform electronic devices.  Such a device has a cold non-organic feel to it and no smell.  There are certainly no illustrations in the text.

Now books are a transitional experience, having some elements of a mediated experience - the text that we translate into thoughts - and some elements of a primary experience - the illustrations, bordering and typeface, the smell and feel of the book.  Yet within a little bit more than a century, books have been transformed into pure mediated experiences - the placement of text behind a screen.  It is a text that has no real corporeal presence in our lives.  Just like the text we receive on computers and smart phones and the images we receive on computers, smart phones, television and movies.

This lack of corporeal presence in modern technological environments was the subject of a conversation I had with my good friend, Dr. Jorge Cappon, the psychoanalyst from Mexico City.  The problems with electronic devices are multiple.  As Dr. Cappon stated, the majority of our contacts with other human beings today are through electronic devices: movies, television, radio, smart phones and computers.  This has to affect the way we learn how to relate to other people.  Dr.  Cappon observed that even when people are with each other, they no longer look directly at each other anymore when they are talking.

I would say that because most of the contacts we have with other people are through electronic devices, we are receiving vacuumized images of the other people, figure images surrounded by and penetrated with an experiential vacuum, figure images that we pick up through the screen or the earpiece.  They are not images you can touch or smell.  They are attenuated images that leave attenuated imprints in our mind.  Because they are attenuated, they are deficient, and we are never totally able to bond with them.  And, in truth, because we are never totally able to bond with these electronic images, most young people today never really learn how to bond with other people.  Think of all the young people who get together and sit there juxtaposed with one another, texting still other people.  Their minds become so configured for the mediated experience provided by all these electrical devices, that they become incapable of the intense multisensory stimulation of immediate primary experience.

And because young people receive mostly these attenuated experiences, these attenuated imprints from other people, they never develop the capacity to effectively make their own imprints on other people.  At a time when modern technology has overcome much of the perishability in nature to allow people multiple methods of preserving imprints, most people today don’t have the ability to make good strong imprints on other people or on other experiential surfaces in their living environments.

On one level, this is why there are so many crumbling relationships today: divorces, child abandonment, parent abandonment, the firing of employees (even long-term ones), moving from job to job and town to town, shifting friendships.  The receptivity to strong organic imprints diminishes as the world increasingly becomes technological surfaces.

The inability to be fully receptive to strong organic imprints, particularly becomes exacerbated as a result of the interactions of stimuli that people receive from different technological phenomena.  I have intimated previously that sometimes the problem is not simply the experience of one technological device, but rather the cumulative effect of all the technological devices we experience - sometimes serially, sometimes simultaneously.  What does it mean to have head phones on while using a computer to read or write something?   What  does it mean to be watching television in the back seat while riding in a car?  What does it mean to go through a whole day in an isolated cubicle in an office and experience everyone as a mediated telephone voice or an e-mail?  And what does it mean to keep accumulating new technological devices through which we receive an increasing amount of our contact not only with other people, but with the world.

Technology interactions can also produce unpredictable negative consequences just like drug interactions.  The more devices that we introduce into our daily lives, the more probable it is that the interactions from all the experiences of the devices will produce negative effects.  We live in a world that requires us to use some modern technological devices for purposes of work and communication.  But this doesn’t mean that we have to purchase every new device that presents us with an improved method for drawing us into an increasingly mediated vacuumized world.  The ideal is to use these devices with caution and moderation.  The person who is forced to sit in front of a computer all day at work, should try to find rich vibrant primary experiences, interacting with other people, or enjoying nature or art, during his off hours.  Just as people need to exercise their bodies, they need to exercise their capacity to engage on an immediate level with the world and to receive the imprints it has to offer.

Children, particularly, who spend their recreational time playing video games, watching cartoons on television, using the computer and texting on their cell phones are going to grow up incapable of tolerating the intensity of the stimuli that come from strong bonded relationships with other people.  Their capacity to receive imprints directly from other people withers.  The technology interaction has the effect of teaching them to respond primarily to discrete mechanical and electrical stimuli.  Children learn to respond to technological markings rather than organic imprints, just like the complex machines and machine components that they are using.

If from a very early age, a child is constantly bombarded with these discrete technological stimuli, how is the child going to learn to really listen when his parent tells him to do something?  As the child grows up and becomes an adult, how will the adult listen when a lover wants a committed relationship?  The person's mind becomes trained to listen to machines rather than the people around him.  And in the same way he receives all these stimuli, all these markings, from machines, he reconfigures them and adds his own markings to respond in a mechanical way.  He has become robotized.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Rituals of Machines

Overpopulation is one of the major consequences of the success of human beings in transcending the perishability that is an intrinsic aspect of more organic natural environments.  Better protection against the elements, better nutrition, and improved treatments of disease have all led to people living longer lives and occupying more and more of our planet’s space.  The best protection against the elements in nature comes in the crowded living environments of modern urban settings.  And yet, these environments are pockets of tenson, bundles of static stimuli that create stress through sensory disruption.  Bundles of tall buildings surrounded by streets and highways that criss-cross the landscape filled with lines of honking, smoke-emitting cars.  On the other hand, the interiors of the tall buildings and the cars protect people from the overstimulation outside by putting people in vacuum spaces.  People bounce back and forth between the overstimulation of the crowded external environments and the understimulation of the vacuum internal spaces.  And the total amount of sensory distortion they experience creates pathological side effects that we have been discussing in these columns.

The overpopulation acts as a limiting factor in terms of the amount that can be done on a large scale to transform living environments back to more organic natural states.  As dangerous as the sensory distortion from modern technological environments is, there is no way that our large population could survive totally apart from this environment in today‘s world.  Modern urban areas allow for concentrations of factories, transportation hubs, office and communication centers, and, in general, easy access to people in a variety of occupations to carry out complex economic transactions.  We need these economic entities to keep all of us alive as long as possible.  Our modern centers of sensory distortion not only protect us against the perishability in nature, they keep us economically alive within the machine processes and rhythms they create.

Granted that computers allow many people to work anywhere.  There are still significant numbers of people who must work in human agglomerations.  And even the fact that some people can work in the increasingly large concentric circles of suburbia and exurbia may mean they escape the intense population densities.  But suburbia and exurbia also have their skyscrapers as well as highways and streets with bumper-to-bumper traffic.  Suburbia and exurbia frequently have block after block of strip malls and enormous regional malls which take people away from the sense of community to be found in organically-evolved town centers.

Some suburbs have row after row of ugly tract housing that create an enormous sensory vacuum.  Some people live in beautiful bedroom suburbs where children grow up totally disconnected from the flow of significant societal activity.  The homes can be in beautiful organic settings, but the families are tucked away totally apart from the flow of human activity in a meaningful town center where significant things happen in which the families can participate.  These beautiful bedroom suburbs, in their strong sense of physical isolation from the flow of life,  create an enormous psychological vacuum environment.

So what is to be done if sensory distortion is practically everywhere.  The first thing to be done is to be aware of it.  By being aware of it, one can recognize it as an issue to be reflected upon and dealt with.  The second thing is to recognize that our involvement in modern technological environments involves moral considerations and moral issues that were not present in ancient times when religious traditions evolved.  In those times, moral doctrines were developed to help separate people morally from other animals by developing cognitive restraints on the excesses of their actions.  Religion taught people how to channel their sexual and aggressive energies in socially non’disruptive ways.  By being aware of their need to transcend the impulsive and instinctive expressions of animals, people occupied a mental space that allowed them to feel somewhat otherworldly or holy.  Their reflexive awareness and their rules of conduct made them totall different from the other complex entities - the animals - in their living environment.  Humans transcended psychologically above the everyday flow of organic processes around them long before they had the technological means to physically separate themselves from these organic environments through the creation of technological environments.  Because their transcendence initially was only psychological, humans still maintained a strong connection for their more mammalian side with the organic landscapes and the more organic architecture and economic processes (hunting, horticulture, agriculture, animal husbandry) that surrounded them.  There was somewhat of a balance between the natural mammalian side and this uniquely human transcendent side. It was a psychological balance that was the foundation of what we think of as a human essence.  It was the balance between these two sides that created the human sense of self.

But gradually over time, first through the industrial revolution and then through the development of computer technology, this balance has shifted.  To understand this shift, it is first necessary to understand the strategies used for human separateness in traditional living environments.  An important example of such a discrete action is a religious ritual.  Religious rituals for people in traditional cultures were extremely focused discrete actions that allowed a person to enter a mental vacuum state where he was totally apart from the continual stimuli he experienced in the daily processes of nature in the traditional living environment he inhabited.  That apartness allowed for the experience of transcendence, where a person could feel temporarily free from the perishability - the rot and decay - that are the other side of the natural growth in more organic environments.  However, in modern technological environments, the danger of  perishability has receded, and as traditional living environments have evolved into modern technological environments, it is possible that the focused ritual processes of religion may be merging into all the other discrete focused actions of the mechanical and electronic processes of the appliances, the cars, the televisions, the computers, the smart phones and, increasingly, the robots that surround people today.  Discrete actions like religious rituals may not be providing as much of a sense of transcendental apartness for people in modern technological environments.  Rituals today might actually lead people to merge experientially even more with all the technological entities that surround them.  And in so doing, some of the balance between different elements that lead to the development of a strong human sense of self is lost.

As a matter of fact, it might be said that modern technological life activity is indirectly trivializing the participation of people in religious ritual.  This is why so many people in modern technological societies feel less of a desire today to participate in religious services.  Why so many people in modern technological societies are keeping the most minimal contact with their traditional religions.  They need a rest from discrete actions and discrete processes.

One might ask how one can speak of the sanctity of religious rituals in the same breath as the everyday human interactions with technology and technological environments.  But seemingly distinct phenomena can come together as a result of growing commonalities.  Just as religious rituals give us a sense of transcendental control over the world through mysterious processes, so the precise interactions with technology also give people a sense of transcendental control over the world through mysterious processes.  How many people really have a feel of how modern machines and computers and cyberspace work and what makes them operate?  The repeated processes in which people participate to activate and run technology are like secular rituals.

The big difference is that working with technology may give a sense of transcendental control in relation to the natural environment, but it certainly does not offer a sense of transcendental apartness from the technological environments in which one is living.  All the other complex entities in modern technological environments - the machines - are involved in transcending above the natural living environments just like humans.  The machines, like the humans, are free-floating figures in a sterile vacuum living environment.  And to the extent that religious rituals put people in vacuumized mental states, they contribute to making people somehow similar operationally at those moments to the complex machines around them. And to the extent that a lot of people in modern technological societies feel overly robotized already, they have been moving away gradually from religious ritual.  It doesn’t mean that people don’t need to find a meaningful way to deal with their animal tendencies.  It just means that, on some level, many of the answers that people are presently getting from aspects of organized religion are no longer as relevant to their lives in modern technological society.  Too many people are falling away from a formal moral path.  Yes, there are some people who have moved to participate in very religious movements, and I would say this constitutes a form of conative acceleration - a form of speeding up of the will and the activity moved forward by it.  It is speeded-up religious activity to block out sensory distortion from the technological environment.

Returning to our original topic, if there is truly a danger of people becoming robotized today, then moral discussions are going to have to deal with what kinds of experiences are necessary to restore a greater sense of humanity in people in spite of the limitations created by overpopulation and sensory  distortion.  We are moving into a psychological realm where very different solutions may be necessary in determining the appropriate strategies for protecting people from the dangers of sensory distortion today.  These dangers are here and they can be ignored only at our peril.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Subject Peoples and Subject Machines

One of the ongoing themes in my writing has been the tendency of complex machines in modern society to have a leaching influence on people.  Obviously, I am using the term metaphorically and not talking about the leaching that occurs in certain chemical processes.  I use the term “leaching” to describe the influence of these complex machines as sources of mirroring and modeling for human beings much like parental figures and totemic animals can be.  The concepts of mirroring and modeling usually refer in psychodynamic psychology to the influence that older more powerful human beings have on younger less powerful and even helpless human beings.  In anthropology, they can be used to refer to the attempts by technologically less-powerful societies to try and make a psychological connection to certain powerful elements in their natural living environment that could be potentially threatening or that could offer them secrets to survival.

Modern humanity supposedly has a certain control over its natural environment as a result of the incredible technological progress it has made over the last few centuries.  Technology has allowed people to transcend above their natural living environment and to transcend above many sources of perishability that occur in more primitive environments.  During these times, the official posture was not to let the psychological influences of perishable phenomena leach into or blend with people’s psyches, but rather that people should stand apart from the things in their environment in order to control and dominate them.  People stood apart from other people, when one group conquered another people and set up a colonial or master-slave relationship with them.  Granted that, as I have said previously, subject peoples did have an influence that leached out to their conquerors.  But for a long time, conquerors made the attempt to maintain a stand-apart relationship in some areas of life with their subject peoples.

The question is at what point do people that are trying to stand apart from the phenomena in their environment, lose control and become more open to mirroring and modeling, to psychological leaching and blending.  It seems to me that people are most predisposed to leaching and blending precisely at that point when they have psychologically cut themselves off from the significant organic surfaces in their field of experience or when there really are too few organic surfaces in their field of experience.  In both situations, a lack of opportunity to commune with grounded surfaces makes people feel starved for grounded surfaces with which to commune.  In the case of colonial or slave societies, the need for some dominant people to maintain brittle boundaries in order to stand apart from the subject people they control, leads to an explosive desire in some of them to break through the boundaries that have been created.  The colonial and slave society master mentality just leads to a person cutting himself off psychologically from too many grounded surfaces in his living environment in order to keep his dominant position.  The enforced psychological distances that are maintained means that the ruling person ends up in a psychological vacuum.  So it is not only the subject people that gets hurt in a colonial situation.

The breaking through the boundaries by the master people can take different forms.  However, it generally means that the master peoples start “going native” and become more like the subject people they rule.  Frequently, it means racially mixing with the subject people,  although in the American South, racially mixing with blacks primarily resulted in the creation of light-skinned slaves, who maybe had a little more power and a little higher status.  Nevertheless, the fact that the white daughters of plantation owners began to pick up the English dialect of the black slaves in the plantation house led to the daughters being sent to boarding schools, where they could learn proper English again.  Some boundaries had to be maintained in order to maintain white domination.  However, an important point is that in a situation like this one, the subject peoples were human beings, who had grounded surfaces and were open to blending with their colonial masters.

A very different situation exists for people living in modern technological societies.  The subject technology - the computers and robots and smart phones and other consumer technological devices - are not organisms and do not have grounded surfaces with which to commune and blend with their human masters.  So any leaching influence of modern machines on human behavior is not done as a result of a predisposition of these machines to blend organically with phenomena in their environment.  The blending is all done by the human masters in their minds.  The machines are not overtly seducing their masters the way a pretty woman from a subject people might in order to gain some power through a connection with the master.

Master people lose control of their capacity to stand apart in a power relationship from a particular complex phenomenon, when the phenomenon has a large enough critical mass in numbers, that it can surround the master people in their field of experience.  Colonial Americans adopted few customs from the Native Americans, because, from the very beginning, the British had brought over their wives.  Therefore, there was little racial mixing with the natives.  Furthermore, the Indians in North and South America died in vast numbers as a result of contact with European diseases.  Nevertheless, there was much more influence from native customs in Spanish, and French colonies, because the men in these colonies tended not to bring their women over to the New World very much initially.  For the Spaniards, their colonies were initially primarily places to exploit natural resources like gold and silver, rather than places to establish permanent self-sustaining settlements. The colonial Portuguese were much more influenced by their African slaves, with whom they mixed a lot, rather than the Native Americans in Brazil.

At any rate, the period of technological transformation is well advanced, and modern people are totally immersed in technologically-based laminated environments and surrounded by machines.  This is a much more extreme situation for brittle boundaries than the situation of colonial and master-slave societies, because it is the environment itself that enforces strong experiential boundaries.  Machines and technological environments cannot naturally open up and develop grounded surfaces, even if  the master people would change their attitudes.  The only literal blending that can be done is through replacement of body parts and the development of cyborgs.  But for most people today, the merging occurs in the mind through the implicit mirroring and modeling that complex machines like computers, smart phones and robots can provide.

What we have with both colonial societies and slave societies on the one hand, and modern technological societies on the other is a situation of a subservient subject phenomenon taking a subtly controlling position over a supposedly master group of people as a result of the latter’s need to make and receive imprints and, in so doing, revitalize itself.  The phenomenon fills a fundamental need that can’t be filled within the normal boundaries of the dominant people.

Some sources of mirroring and modeling remain dominant throughout and overtly controlling throughout their relationships with the people seeking the connection.  But the point I am making is that the sources of mirroring and modeling and leaching and blending do not always have to become dominant and overtly controlling.  Sometimes they can take some control by being simply seductive, and also by providing the possibility of communion and blending in a situation where the dominant people are experiencing overly rigid boundaries.  This is paradoxically true even for sources of mirroring and modeling like modern complex machines: computers, smart phones and robots that have strong figure boundaries themselves.  But with the destruction and displacement of traditional sources of grounding, communing and blending like nature and nature-inspired art, archtecture and artifacts, people psychologically reach out in a communing mode to these modern machines.  These machines are the major complex phenomena in the human living environment today.  But by reaching out to commune with phenomena with such strong boundaries, people open themselves wide psychologically to selfless machines.  In the process, the integrity of the sense of self of these people is greatly damaged.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow