The Machines That Seem To Understand Us

An ongoing theme in my articles has been how interaction with complex modern machines affects the psychological development of human beings.  I have discussed how, for young humans, complex modern machines like video games, computers and smartphones become unconscious models for their behavior patterns.  I have also explored how these complex modern machines mirror young human beings such that they, the young human beings, interpret their own behavior through the machine processes that they experience and with which they create an emotional connection.  More recently, I have discussed how intense interactions with machines lead to a fusion of images of machine and human in the minds of people.  And it seems that more and more scientists and engineers are trying to find new ways to blur the boundaries between human and machine on the path to making the fusion between human and machine complete.  One of the means by which this fusion will be advanced further is emotion recognition technology.

            Scientists are developing the technology by which machine software will be able to “read” human emotions on the basis of vocal expression and human gesture.  Machines talking with humans on the telephone for sales calls will be able to adjust their presentation according to how this software perceives a person’s voice: the inflection, the pitch, the tone, the speed and the volume.  For any human-machine interaction, the main purpose is to make the interaction as smooth, as frictionless as possible.

            The purpose of this more frictionless communication is not just so that people and machines can actively commune.  Rather, emotion recognition technology allows some machines to make ongoing adjustments in their presentation in order to control and manipulate the flow of the conversation.  But there is no doubt that one result of these adjustments is that machines will appear somehow more human to humans.

            With facial expression, other machines are able to read many different points on the face like the corners of the mouth or the curve of the eyebrows.  Notice that this process is done by reading discrete points of the human face.  Here we are again back to defined discrete stimuli.  Humans are reduced to a series of discrete points, because modern complex machines operate on the basis of discrete stimuli.  The continual flow of a facial expression, which is the basis of human intuitive interpretation, is completely lost in this process.  There is a synthetic wholeness to a facial expression which is greater than the sum of its parts.  This wholeness provides for a greater variety of nuance than can be simply reduced to discrete emotional categories like happy, angry, depressed.  It is like the machine is breaking up the human face into pixilated fragments to facilitate interpretation.

            The purpose of visual emotion recognition technology is for the machine to monitor the flow of engagement of a human with other people in a social situation, as, for example, a student in a classroom.  The way the machine does this is by reducing the vast blendable continual emotional range in a person’s facial expression to a discrete finite series of emotional categories.  The machine is programmed to respond according to which emotional categories are activated by its sensors.  But the response is not going to be nearly as subtle, as nuance as that of a human being who responds intuitively to a whole flow of blendable continual emotional social communication.  The machine is responding to categories or to combinations of categories – combinations of emotional pixels.  The machine has a diminished infinity of responses with its limited awareness based on finite discrete categories of emotional signals from humans.  The response of an emotion recognition machine will never be as fine-tuned as the natural response of one human to another.

            Nevertheless, it will have a profound effect on humans, if they have to respond to these machines on an ongoing basis.  The machines will stimulate unconsciously how humans start to configure their emotional responses to other humans.

            In particular, they will start to act as a primary source of mirroring for people.  People will start picking up unconsciously the gross limited patterns of reaction these machines display.  In turn, they will start utilizing these patterns with other people, thus diminishing the quality of the rich vibrant interactions that are so important for making, preserving and receiving meaningful imprints.  Human interactions will increasingly become implicitly more patterned and formulaic.  More based on patterned figure responses in an emotional vacuum.  People will not necessarily be conscious of this shift, but it will make relationships less satisfying and less strongly bonded.

            And as organic connections start to suffer, people will become more remote from one another.  And without the strong organic rejuvenation that comes from them, people will gradually become more machine-like.  And as they become more machine-like as a result of all these intense interactions with machines – machines monitored by emotion recognition software – they will fall into a state of mind where they will be highly susceptible to being controlled and manipulated just like machines.  Rather than having a coherent sense of self, the people who interact regularly with machines monitored by emotion recognition software will develop a fragmented pixilated sense of self.

            More and more technology innovators are focusing on ways to blur the boundaries between machine and human.  More precisely, the focus is on making machines behave more and more like humans.  In the marketplace, we want machines to do more and more of the tasks of humans, because machines are thought to be easier to control and manipulate and they are cheaper to maintain.  But as we work to bring machines up more and more to the level of human behavioral complexity, we start to increasingly bring humans down to the behavioral limitations of machines.  As long as machines work primarily on the basis of discrete stimuli, discrete data, they will never be able to truly imitate the rich behavioral capacity of humans.  For sure, they may develop a greater ability in those areas of behavior that involve solving rich complex puzzles like playing a chess game.  But ordinary daily life cannot be reduced to a puzzle that has to be solved.  Human interactions are too ambiguous and filled with complex ambiguous intentions.  These complex ambiguous intentions are the basis of both comedy and tragedy.  In other words, people don’t always follow a simple straight line from point a to point b in their relationships with other people.  But emotion recognition software tries to reduce the complex vibrancy of human interaction to as much of a straight line as possible.  It tries to make machine interaction with people smooth and frictionless in order to achieve a particular goal.  Emotion recognition technology is simply another example of a technological innovation that will end up sucking the life out of life and converting people into robots.

The topic of this article was suggested by Dr. Jorge Cappon.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Trying To Guarantee The Existence Of Immortality

            One of the themes in my articles has been the human’s awareness of his mortality.  Humans, more than any other organism, have a unique level of consciousness as a result of their superior brain development and a corresponding unique concern about death.  As a defense against death, humans have developed varying theories about the life of the spirit after death.  But because there hasn’t seemed to be any definitive empirical evidence of this immortality that could be discovered while living this life, most people have developed the backup of surrogate immortalities of imprints made on the human field of experience and then preserved, so that they would survive in some form after their corporal deaths.  I have pointed out that developing the technological structures present in our modern technological living environments was a means to lift people somehow above the organic perishability present in traditional living environments, so that they could be in vacuum environments where the human imprint could be more easily protected and preserved.

            Nevertheless, for some people, the symbolic aspects of surrogate immortalities are not enough to satisfy their need for a certain real immortality.  This article is going to deal with two distinct approaches that have been developed for creating some kind of certainty in a real immortality while in our present sensory world.

            For some people, if they themselves are unable to pass over to an afterlife while they are living here on earth, at least perhaps there is a way for them to communicate with people who have already passed over.  People are always trying to communicate with the dead, and they do it through mediums: people who become like empty vessels that dead spirits can use to communicate with other human beings.  Kate and Margaret Fox were two girls in Hydeville, New York, who in 1848 started to become mediums for a spirit who inhabited the house in which they lived with their parents.  The spirit communicated by using knocks in a kind of coded language.  Margaret, the older sister, later admitted that the spirit communication was a fraud and the knockings or rappings were created by her own big toe as well as by the big toe of her sister Kate.  This didn’t stop many people from continuing to believe in the sisters’ supposed spirit communication.  As a matter of fact, it became the basis for a whole new religion called Spiritualism.  The existence of this belief stimulated the activity of many other people who claimed to be mediums.  Many famous people got swept up by Spiritualism.  Arthur Conan Doyle, a man known for writing novels about a meticulous rational detective – Sherlocke Holmes – was a believer in Spiritualism.  And Spiritualism was used not only to communicate with deceased family members, but with famous people from history as well.

            Here was a way for people who weren’t content with surrogate immortalities as a certain continuation in some form of life after death.  For those people who believed and continued to believe even after one of the Fox sisters admitted their communication with the dead was a fraud, the experiences with mediums increased their sense of certainty that there was a spirit life after death, and that one day they too could communicate through mediums with the living from the spirit world.  Through mediums, it was as if people could temporarily jump over into the space where they would be living after they died. 

            Spiritualism represented an apex of activity in something that existed both before and after it was around as a major cultural force.  Today, there is another vehicle for people seeking a form of confirmed real immortality.  I am talking about the fascination with cyborgs – entities that are part human and part robot.  There is a belief that people can go on forever, if only they have parts to replace those parts of their bodies that wear out.  There is a sense of greater durability in parts made of plastic or metal instead of parts made of organic flesh.  And organic flesh replacement parts are much more difficult to find.  With plastic and metal parts, people can replace their decaying body parts, and replace them relatively easily again and again.  In this way, a human organism could theoretically go on forever.  Here the focus of immortality concern moves from a greater connection to the world of immortality in the afterlife, to the creation of a kind of immortality through technology here on earth.  The spirit world was eternal, because it was a vacuum world.  A vacuum world inhabited by vacuumized figures – spirits - that had just enough self-definition to qualify as distinct entities.

            A different approach is the search for a purely material immortality by becoming a seemingly indestructible cyborg.  Indestructible in the sense of somehow maintaining a core psychological human identity in spite of the need for replacement of material parts.  But is this truly possible.  Isn’t part of the foundation of coherent human consciousness based on having a primarily coherent sense of physicality.  I am not talking here about the effects of the isolated knee replacement or heart valve replacement or prosthetic limb.  Rather I am talking about the gradual replacement of many parts of a human body as they wear out.

            And, in particular, what happens when a part of the brain is replaced with a mechanical implant.  Scientists are already working on this to activate parts of a paralyzed person’s body, which seems like a very positive goal.  But brain implants can be used for many purposes.  For instance, not only control and manipulation of a paralyzed person’s limbs by the paralyzed person, but also control and manipulation of one person’s actions by another person.  In a previous article, I argued that the mind was not the same as the brain, and that it was difficult to reduce all mental ideation to the cerebral activity that was observable in scientific experiments.  In other words, there is still a mind-body dichotomy that nobody has been able to effectively resolve philosophically.  That being said, the notion of a cyborg would certainly test the capacity of changes in the brain to affect mental ideation.  Mind and brain are distinct phenomena, but, for sure, they are connected in some way within a person.  I would suggest that replacing parts of a brain would have to impinge on human consciousness.  A person would be mentally conscious of different foreign kinds of processes occurring in his reconstituted brain.  With mechanical parts, there would be more defined discrete stimuli – more discrete data – and fewer organic blendable continual stimuli.  Human consciousness could start perceiving its field of experience through a kind of internal screen with a content of pixelated figures.  With pixilated figures in the cyborg’s field of experience, the world would be fragmented and ungrounded.  And this would leave the cyborg vulnerable to control by people with more coherent wills.  The cyborg could be subject to being programmed like a robot to perform actions that the human side would not necessarily choose to do.

            So the cyborg would lose the coherent consciousness of a fully organic human being thinking and acting as an independent agent.  The price of this kind of flow of immortal material continuity in this world is the loss of the coherent reflexive awareness that triggered the search for immortality in this world.  The price of being this kind of entity – a cyborg – is a kind of living death.

            There is a Russian multimillionaire named Dmitry Itskov who sees the concept of cyborg differently.  He wants to make a digital copy of a person’s consciousness and personality and upload it to an avatar that could go on for thousands of years.  This notion really begs the question of the mind-body dichotomy, but more than that, if by some chance it were workable, it would mean detaching a person’s mind completely from its organic grounding.  It is truly a way to dehumanize a human in attempting to make him immortal.

            This article has dealt with two different attempts to find confirmation of human immortality.  One attempt has tried to find certainty of spiritual immortality in life after death.  The other attempts to create a kind of material and psychological immortality in this world.  In the first attempt, people have used belief over evidence to affirm that which cannot really be proved in this world.  The second attempt has yet to be fully actualized, but, should it succeed, it would offer life without flavor, without vibrancy, without immediacy, without meaningful engagement in the external world.  The human race has yet to demonstrate that the existence of a meaningful immortality is possible in this world.

(c) 2013 Laurence Mesirow

The Zombie World of Night Texting

            In our modern technological society, many office workers are expected to be on call 24/7.  This is one of the unfortunate consequences of owning cell phones.  However, it is one thing for a person to be obligated to be constantly attached to his phone.  It is quite another for a person to be voluntarily attached to his phone.  In this case, I am talking about people who engage in night texting.  These are people who go to sleep at night with their cell phones next to them.  And this is not just a situation where a person wants to be always available should his friends or family want to reach him.  These are people who actively text while they are asleep.  I imagine that the stimulation of engaging in a vocal phone conversation might be so strong that it would actually wake the person up.

            But not texting.  People seem to be able to text while they are in some sort of sleep state.  Sometimes the texts make sense, sometimes they don’t make sense.  Sometimes the texts, perhaps coming from unconscious thoughts and feelings, can be potentially embarrassing.  But this doesn’t discourage the night texts.  The kind of person who night texts wants to always remain connected.  For a person who feels like a free-floating figure in an experiential vacuum with little meaningful real grounding in his life, the text connection world provides an ongoing surrogate social grounding to protect him from becoming too numb and from psychologically falling apart in the vacuum.

            Nevertheless, there are real consequences to such 24 hour text availability.  In particular, it is an ongoing disturber of sleep.  Scientists don’t seem to have any definitive scientific ideas about what sleep does for us, even though they seem to feel that sleep is very important to our lives.  I would like to discuss sleep from the point of view of my social philosophy model, which, in this case, uses some psychoanalytic categories, but not in the customary way.  Sleep is the deepest form of psychological grounding.  Not only does sleep allow us to physically rejuvenate, but it allows us to put the different pieces of our experiential world together through the creation of grounded connections.  This, in particular, is what dream sleep does, during which time we are living in our unconscious.  Dreams allow us to put some kind of coherence to the narrative of our lives and, in so doing, to bring coherence to our senses of self.  And with a more coherent sense of self, when we awake, we are more alive, more vibrant.

            There are people who see similarities between sleep and death and they experience sleep as a temporary death, a temporary loss of consciousness.  But as we can see, sleep is not no consciousness, but a different level of consciousness in which a person is still very much alive.  Death is no consciousness, an absence of consciousness.  We can postulate the existence of a surviving soul, even though there is no sure way of proving it exists in this world.  But even if the soul exists and does survive after death, the person as a whole animate organism is permanently without consciousness.  We can say that death is the deepest form of a psychological vacuum, just as sleep is the deepest form of psychological grounding.  However, when both psychological vacuum and psychological grounding mix with different psychological figures – different defined figures and ideas – they both participate in different levels of consciousness in a fully alive human being.  

In unconsciousness, a person’s field of experience is that of barely differentiated figures totally submerged in a field of grounding.  By transforming the defined figures of our conscious wakefulness into those barely differentiated figures in dreams, we are thus able to experience more coherence in actions and our sense of self when we wake up.  In preconsciousness, when a person is daydreaming and minimally aware of his surroundings, a person’s mental state is only partially differentiated figures of images and ideas still partially embedded in grounding.  Again, preconsciousness allows us to do some integration of the pieces of our experiences while still being awake.  In consciousness, the ideas and images are more fully defined and stand apart from the mental grounding in a largely vacuum mental state.  But the grounding is still important to give the psychological figures a sense of position and stability.  It is the grounding that gives thoughts a basic coherent relatedness, independent of logical figure connections, and allows the thoughts to be used for coherent strategies by a person’s will.  Internal grounding helps to give a person’s mind a sense of independent agency in a field of primary experience.

And this is why a good night of sleep is so important.  It rejuvenates a person and allows him to act with more coherence and more direction, to be more assertive in his daily tasks.

So what happens to a person’s mental state when he spends much of the night writing and sending texts as well as receiving texts?  The person does not get to immerse in the psychological grounding that allows him to be rejuvenated.  The person does not get to experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the kind of sleep in which he can temporarily live in an experiential field of dreams.  The person does not get to reground himself and to put the fragments of his figure sense of self together again.  The person wakes up tired and numb.  He wakes up as a series of fragments of self, floating in an internal experiential vacuum.   

       

Night texting hasn’t been around that long, but I would speculate that in a long enough period of time, deprived of REM sleep, the person slides into becoming like a self-less will-less zombie.  Like a robot.  A person who mentally fuses with the cell phone machine from which he is unable to separate.  Such a person will have a weakened will and a weakened sense of self.  Without psychological coherence, the person will become susceptible to being controlled and manipulated just like a zombie.

I guess eventually this will serve the interests of certain powerful economic forces well.  The mental state of the zombie will implement well the formal economic state of robitude, the modern economic answer to the servitude that has existed in certain more traditional hierarchical societies.  As a zombie, a worker will be more placid and malleable, maybe not always as fully productive, but certainly less rebellious.     

                          

This gets back to the important question of why do so many people today feel the need to stay connected to other people through modern consumer technology 24/7.  Why do so many people have difficulty today being alone with themselves?  Perhaps, it is because with the lack of organic grounding in their modern technological living environments, people already suffer from lack of psychological coherence even before adding the element of night texting.  And night texting appears as a sort of distorted mechanical communion with other people to compensate for the lack of primary experience organic communion in most people’s everyday lives.  The paradox is that as people strive for some connection to other people through night texting, they are actually creating conditions, through lack of sleep and resulting lack of organic coherence, that make their psychological condition even worse.  The cure becomes a part of the problem.

People have to find a non-technological solution to their lack of organic connection to others.  Just as people are told to avoid caffeine (which can create an overstimulating experiential tension pocket) before they go to sleep at night, they should also avoid excessive involvement with modern consumer technology and have more face-to-face contact with live people during the evening.  As much as possible.  Less involvement with modern consumer technology during the waking hours will diminish the perverted need to stay involved with modern consumer technology even during sleep at night.  And then society won’t have to worry about creating new generations of techno-zombies.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow