A Morality for Humans in a Field of Robots

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Moral Consequences of Television, Video Games and Smartphones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Maintaining Our Humanity In A Technological World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Recreation For Robots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


c  2012  Laurence Mesirow

Can Robots Become Human?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

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