Becoming A Ghost Of Oneself Through Technology

            One of the newest technological rages today is Pokemon-Go.  Young people use the GPS on their smartphones to go out into the external world to find virtual creatures called Pokemon that they capture, train and then send to battle the Pokemon of other trainers.  It would appear that it is the modern world’s answer to an exciting adventure in a living environment that is making life increasingly routinized for the vast majority of people.   Routine from pre-kindergarten to college and graduate school is primarily what gets people good jobs.  Yes, it is nice for a student to have an unusual hobby or a year abroad in college, as long as the hobby and the time abroad don’t represent too significant a chunk of the student’s time, energy, or state of mind.

            A Pokemon represents adventure without risk.  The trainer himself is not in battle nor is an animal he cherishes.  Rather, it is a virtual entity that exists but doesn’t really exist.  There is no possible organic perishability if something happens that the Pokemon loses in battle.  There is no organic perishability, and, by the same token, there are no organic imprints made and preserved on the surfaces of the person’s field of experience in the external world.  The whole narrative of the Pokemon adventure is a ghostly vacuumized adventure that numbs the person as he participates, because he is immersed in virtual reality.  This is different from a true adventure in external world reality, which causes a person to feel vibrantly alive and leads to meaningful organic imprints which can be preserved in the memories of the people that surround the adventurer or even sometimes in artifacts like documents and books.

            To the extent that a person gets pulled into a vacuumized adventure with Pokemon, to that extent the person gradually and subtly becomes vacuumized himself.  There is already another technology-generated situation where a person becomes a vacuumized entity.  This is when a person translates himself into an avatar for purposes of getting involved with computer games or Internet forums.  The avatar is the computer user’s virtual representation for purposes of his participation in different cyber-processes.  But as the computer user uses his avatar, he subtly becomes influence by it as he would by any complex behavioral entity.  The avatar mirrors him and becomes a model for him, and slowly but surely the person becomes avatarized.   He becomes vacuumized, which means he becomes very susceptible to the influence of entropic disintegration, which, in turn, is a natural force that exists in a vacuum.

            Even though the user is operating openly without an avatar when he plays Pokemon-Go, an avatar-like presence becomes more and more implicit in his persona, as he starts getting more and more involved with the capturing and training of Pokemon and with the battles that come afterwards.

            So here is another symbolic model of technological transformation that is somewhat distinct from that of robotic transformation.  Experientially, a robot is an overly defined figure made of hard unyielding metal or synthetic materials that definitely has a strong critical mass in external world reality.  As a machine, a robot is incapable of bonding with other robots or with humans, for that matter.  It behaves by following a series of defined discrete processes, but these processes are not directed by a coherent sense of self or a coherent consciousness.  A robot does not make, receive, or preserve organic imprints that are recorded as meaningful impresses on the external world in such a way that they become a part of other people’s memories.  It does however leave discrete marks on the world, marks that are not recorded in memories as purposeful preserved imprints, because they are not the products of coherent senses of self or coherent consciousnesses.  The only possible exception here is the meaningful impress of a robot or a machine winning a sophisticated game like chess against a human.  And here, the robot does not receive an imprint of winning the game as something to be happy about.  It is more like the victory of the robot or machine winning is something that disrupts the flow of meaningful imprints among humans.

            Now an avatar is also a defined discrete figure, but one that not only lacks grounding, but also substance and mass as well.  An avatar is a vacuumized figure that exists in screen reality and virtual reality but has no existence in the external world reality in which humans normally inhabit.  To the extent that a human becomes avatarized, he psychologically begins to lose his connection to external world reality.  It is as if he starts to die to external world reality.

            Becoming avatarized does not require actually using an avatar in screen reality on the computer or in virtual reality.  One can become psychologically a vacuumized figure, by simply dwelling in screen reality or virtual reality for too much of one’s waking time.

            So how does avatarization manifest itself in human behavior.  In general, it means being pulled more and more into a vacuum state psychologically and being subject to the entropic forces that are an essential part of any vacuum.  In the physical world, entropy means the random distribution of atoms in a vacuum.  In the mental world, entropy means the disintegration of one’s sense of self.  It means crumbling apart into nothingness.  There are many different ways that this entropy-influenced behavior displays itself.  It is not uncommon today for a worker in a wage-based job to suddenly not come into his job and to disappear.  Actually, people disappear from many different situations today.  Two people have been dating for a while, and suddenly one of them disappears from the relationship.  Or one day, a husband or wife, father or mother leaves the house and doesn’t come home.  In spite of family responsibilities, the person simply vanishes.  Some entropy-influenced behavior can result in the people around the agent of the behavior being affected more directly by the entropy as well.  The victims of the modern mass murderers. These murderers commit their crimes out of their numbness and usually die at the hands of police or soldiers, assuming that they don’t die from suicide bombs.

            People try to control their numbness, their disappearing into nothingness, by smoking pot and doing yoga and meditation.  All these are activities that cause a temporary but controlled diminishing of one’s sense of self.  By doing this, people are basically using a means to control the rate of crumbling from entropy, when one feels oneself blurring into the images of screen reality and increasingly now virtual reality and becoming what would now be described as an avatar.

            In general, to develop the lightness of being that comes with becoming an avatar leads to floating away from connection to situations through commitments.  It is as if a person literally loses touch with the world, as he becomes vacuumized and numb.  The person loses his sense of substance, of mass, of gravity.  This isn’t something that happens all at once.  But the situations I described are indicators of the changes that are taking place as a result of gradual human identification with a mass-less, substance-less entity.  This is why interacting so much with Pokemon is such a stealthily dangerous enterprise.  We gradually become avatar-like in order to truly enter the world of Pokemon and to take them seriously.  And this is so relatively easy, because the boundaries between virtual reality and external world reality are so totally blurred in dealing with Pokemon.  In developing an avatar mentality, we practically slide into virtual reality from our external world reality.  And then we become like the entities that we use and manipulate.  And, in the process, we lose some of our humanity.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow 

Why It’s Not So Great To Become A Robot

            Implicit in this column is not only the idea that people are gradually becoming robots, but also, that it is not a good thing that they become robots.  There has been some discussion about the problems related to this transformation, but I thought it might be good to dedicate a column to the negatives involved.

            What are some of the things that are missing in a robot’s existence?  For one thing, a robot is activated by a series of discrete data, signals, stimuli, that are not held together by a coherent sense of self.  As has been previously discussed, it is the flowing blendable continual stimuli that provide the glue that keep the sentient being that we call a human together.  Without these flowing blendable continual stimuli, a person cannot feel together enough, not only to have a coherent sense of self, but also to have the coherent perception and awareness of himself and of the external world that we call consciousness.  A person needs a coherent sense of himself to feel himself as a together entity.  Ideally a person also has self-definition, so that he can experience himself as having boundaries that separate him from other human beings as well as from the whole external world.  But to feel himself as indivisible from within, a person needs a coherent sense of self and, by extension, a coherent consciousness.

            This consciousness cannot be reduced to a series of stimuli and responses for the purpose of a scientific experiment.  That would also reduce the person’s sense of self to the manner in which it would be defined and circumscribed for the purpose of the experiment.  Consciousness is based on a flow of stimuli leading to a flow of perceptions leading to a flow of participation, none of which can be properly accessed within the limitations of a scientific experiment.  Even now, I am limiting consciousness with this description.  Consciousness also includes so many different mental processes that mediate not only between stimuli and responses, but also  between stimuli and perceptions.  It is the way we interpret what we perceive.

            This grounded mental activity is limited to animals, reaching its apogee with humans.  No matter how scientists and engineers try to approximate consciousness in the machines and robots they create, they have to break down the so-called mental activity they create into component parts, and, at the smallest level, defined discrete digital parts. Scientists and engineers cannot recreate the flows of blendable continual mental activity on which consciousness is based.

            Both a coherent sense of self and a coherent consciousness are essential to feeling vibrantly alive.  By feeling vibrantly alive I am not talking necessarily about experiencing things that make a person feel happy.  Rather, I am talking about the capacity to fully experience whatever one feels.  If one becomes numb and jaded from the sensory distortion of modern technological society, one’s sense of self and one’s consciousness are broken up, fragmented.  This, in turn, affects one’s capacity to feel fully present in one’s life.

            Without being fully present, it is not only difficult to make and receive the organic imprints that are necessary to feel alive.  It also means that life becomes a series of more distinct mediated experiences that lack the full flavor to make life feel more meaningful.  It is as if one were almost going along sliding off the surface of life, not feeling fully connected to anything, not feeling fully grounded in one’s living environment.

            Surrounded by lots of technological devices and immersed in a highly technologized living environment, there is no question that the intensity, the passion, the flavor have all diminished considerably for the average person moving through the events and the experiences of his daily life.  One often hears the expressions “I’m not really living.” Or “I haven’t really lived.”  It is quite possible that people who feel they haven’t really lived or they aren’t really living may very well be some of the people who are most obsessed with the idea of death.  If you feel you aren’t really living or you haven’t really lived, perhaps it makes you want to keep hanging onto life in the hopes of finding a way of pulling yourself out of numbness, so that you can start to really live before you die and, hopefully prepare for death in a proper way.

            I am sure there are some people who doubt not only that humans are gradually becoming robotized, but that the quality of life as it is lived and felt today is diminishing.  Such people want measurement and statistics and concrete evidence.  But a major point of this column is that many significant criteria for assessing quality of life are intangible and aren’t accessible to measurement and statistics.  And yet the decline in marriage and family and the growth of drug dependency and mental illness certainly seem to indicate that we have some big problems facing us.

            Perhaps the most important one is that robotization leads to weaker bonds between people and this threatens the whole flow of the human race from generation to generation.  Yes, climate change and environmental degradation are very important elements in the crisis humans face today.  My point is that healthy natural environments are important not only for keeping people physically alive.  They are also essential for keeping people psychologically alive, experientially alive.  Alive as organisms.  Alive as life.

            Talking about what allows people to feel fully alive means talking in terms of the way people experience flowing blendable continual stimuli, which are not susceptible to measurement or discrete definition and for which one has to use imprecise blurry language.  This is why I have always taken a philosophical approach to the subjects of sensory distortion and robotization, rather than an approach related to sociology, for example, which is focused on the defined discrete stimuli of statistics.

            Blurry intangible stimuli are not something that can easily be processed by a robot.  A robot would be forced to attempt to convert such stimuli into defined discrete measurable stimuli.  And yet a full experience of life is not something that can be done on the basis of defined discrete measurable stimuli alone.  Such stimuli do not provide the basis for strong organic bonds with other people or for strong organic grounding in one’s living environment.  In other words, a robot is not capable of experiencing the kind of stimuli that are necessary for feeling fully conscious and fully activated as an organism.  A robot is a machine that lacks free flowing consciousness, a sense of feeling alive from within, and a capacity to blur together to different degrees with other people and with its living environment for purposes of bonding and grounding.  A person has to give up a lot to become a robot.  So why is it that so many people are voluntarily moving in the direction of taking on the attributes of a robot?

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

The Sanitized World Of Virtual Art

The extent of applications of technology in our modern world seems to have no bounds.  One particularly interesting group of applications deals with the ability to create within a virtual world of experience.  Sound Stage is a program which allows a person to set up a virtual music studio for creating music without the expense or, for that matter, the clutter of real solid equipment and instruments.  In terms of the technology, only one piece of hardware is required.  Tilt Brush is a 3D painting program that allows a person to paint in virtual reality.  And what Tilt Brush is for painting, Medium is for sculpting.  It allows a person to manipulate a virtual object and to shape it as if it were made of real matter.  Whereas Sound Stage avoids clutter, Tilt Brush and Medium avoid material waste products and the messes made from them.  Clutter, waste products, messes – sounds like things that we all would like to avoid in our lives.  Most people have an inherent dislike of the disorder and chaos that clutter, waste products and messes generate.  There are people today whose job it is to go around to other people’s homes to help them sort out the messes and clutter that have developed from the agglomeration of their possessions.  Get rid of the possessions that aren’t really needed or desired and put some order in the possessions that remain.  Clutter and mess are dirty words (no play on words intended) to people who think like this.

            However, for many creative people, a certain amount of mess or clutter in their lives may not only be normal for them, but may even be more comfortable for them.  Mess and clutter provide a kind of environmental grounding for them.  The different things and materials that eventually form a perceptual blur in their residences and studios, create a kind of reassuring organic connection for them.  Seeing the mingling of different materials and things acts as an unconscious stimulus for different creative connections in their minds leading to the further development of components and aspects of works of art.

            Far fewer of these implicit organic connections appear in habitations and workplaces where everything is very neat and orderly.  Things and materials in such environments can be experienced as clumping together in fully defined discrete free-floating figures that float in the sterile empty vacuum spaces in which they exist.  Implicit creative connections are not as easily made in such formalized environments that contain relatively few overlapping phenomena.  Placed in a different perspective, messy cluttered habitations are conducive to acting as templates for creative connections in the minds of creative people.

            And messy cluttered environments may not just be good for artists.  There are many articles that show that messy desks are associated with innovative people in whatever field is considered.  For such people, messy desks can be both a source of comforting grounding and of organic stimulation.  In contrast, a neat orderly desk and living environment may be conducive to thinking in neat orderly practical ways.  Finding the shortest, most efficient, defined discrete pathway to solving a problem.  In other words, conventional solutions to conventionally defined problems.  The difficulty with this approach is that many problems in work and in life look simple on the surface but, in reality, have many complex aspects with which to deal.  Complex problems are usually uniquely complex, having a special combination of problematic factors.  Such problems cannot be solved by an approach of finding the shortest distance between two points.  They often require creative innovative intuitive solutions that have more indirect, even convoluted, pathways.  They often require creative thinkers who work well in more messy cluttered environments.

            Which brings us back to possible problems with the process of creating within virtual environments.  All the virtual applications that we talked about at the beginning of this article don’t have mess or clutter in using them.  Sound Stage is free of the clutter that comes from equipment and instruments lying around.  In Tilt Brush, it would be a freedom from the mess that comes with paint that is used on palettes but also that can get on everything: on clothing, furniture, and floors.  Also no more clutter from paints, brushes, and canvasses lying around.  In Medium, it would be the freedom that comes from a lack of all the dust that gets on everything and the discarded pieces of sculpture material that come from creating any sculpture in the real world.  Also no need for the clutter of different sculpture tools.

            I would submit that the clutter and messes just elaborated on actually help a creative person, even while he is in the process of creating his artistic works.  As the work is created, the mess and clutter are created, and they become a kind of encompassing organic grounding, a template that helps to stimulate the ongoing interaction between the artist’s creative tools and the work of art that is being created.

            In other words, it is the contention of this article that a certain amount of mess and clutter actually stimulate creativity.  And when people consider the lack of mess and clutter in Sound Stage and Tilt Brush and Medium as benefits, because then, one supposes, one can create in a totally sanitized vacuumized focused environment with only neat defined discrete phenomena with which to deal, these people have a flawed understanding of creation.  In nature, childbirth is messy.  Planting trees is messy.  Cultivating crops is messy.  Raising animals is messy.  You can’t get away from messes when dealing with creative processes in nature.

            But we must remember that people today are trying to transcend above their organic natures in order to break away from the cycle that includes organic perishability.  As much of an oxymoron as it is, people today are trying to explore paths that lead to the development of robotic creativity.  A creativity that transcends above the arbitrary uncontrollable mingling of different kinds of matter and things that in and of itself represents a kind of primary unfocused creativity.  On the other hand, robotic creativity supposedly allows a person to preserve an imprint in a vacuum, before it has been made with the supportive stimulation of surrounding messes and clutter.  Such creativity produces imprints (audio as well as visual) that are sparse in the kind of flowing continual blendable stimuli that are an essential part of the experiencing of traditional more organic works of art.  Without these stimuli, meaningful connections cannot be formed between the viewers or the audience, on the one hand, and the works of art on the other.

            In today’s world, messes and clutter get a bad rap.  At least in the area of the creative arts, this bad rap is not deserved, and, on the contrary, messes and clutter are an essential element of the whole creative process.

(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Making A Good Impression On The World

One of the most fundamental concepts that has been discussed in this column is that people need organic imprints to feel fully alive and to prepare for death.  An organic imprint need not be a direct physical impression on a surface in the external world.  It can also be a mental impression, an idea or series of ideas that are conveyed sometimes through a physical object – a book, a magazine, a newspaper, and now we have digital books and online magazines and newspapers.  It can also be a mental impression conveyed through speeches, discussions and oral and written agreements and contracts.  It can also be conveyed by different people to one another in everyday human interactions.

            But before a person conveys organic imprints to other people using any of the different methods just discussed, he has to be able to convey imprints to himself.  Unless a person can leave organic imprints of all his actions, thoughts and feelings on himself, he can’t experience them and he can’t feel alive.  A person has to be able to experience making organic imprints on himself, if he is going to be capable of experiencing making organic imprints on other people.  If he can’t experience the effects he has on himself and on other people because he is too numb, then he is merely an automaton or a robot.  Automatons and robots are run by bundles of discrete digital stimuli and don’t have coherent consciousness or a coherent sense of self.  They are lacking in the capacity to absorb or produce flowing continual blendable stimuli that are a fundamental component both of experiencing organic imprints as well as of producing them.

Once it is established that a person is capable of experiencing the organic imprints he leaves on himself and not simply going through the motions of life like an automaton or robot, then it can be assumed that the person is going to make imprints on other people that he is, in turn, capable of experiencing himself.  In most instances, those imprints can be assumed to be imprints that he makes in his everyday encounters with people.  Everything from his appearance to other people, casual conversations, formal meetings, ceremonies, classes, embraces, fights, and sex.  Some of these imprints like casual conversation, embraces, fights and sometimes sex (when it focuses on pleasure) are not imprints that a person consciously makes with thoughts of their being preserved in the future.  Rather, the emphasis is on making imprints on others in such a way that a person can experience himself making imprints on others and thus feel alive.  Others of these imprints like formal meetings, ceremonies, classes and sex (when it focuses on pregnancy) are imprints that are made with a conscious desire to preserve them for the future.  In truth, more casual encounters can become preserved memories in the minds of people who experience them, even though they do not involve imprints that are made to be preserved.  Casual encounters, usually cumulatively, become a preserved memory in the minds of people who experience a series of encounters with a particular person.  The series of encounters become a cumulative preserved memory in the minds of people who survive the person here being considered as a maker of imprints.

So there are different kinds of preserved imprints.  There are imprints that are preserved inadvertently from a person’s casual encounters with others.  Then there are imprints that are preserved as a result of a conscious effort through what should be described as more planned encounters with others.  Some preserved imprints last for just a generation until the last person with preserved memories of a deceased person passes away himself.  Some preserved imprints last longer, maybe even multiple generations.  A pregnancy that leads to an imprint that lasts at least one generation, but that through possible succeeding generations of children can go on more.  A planting of a tree.  A building of a house.  The creation of an enduring business.  In particular, a brand name or branded product that lasts a few generations. 

Some preserved imprints become a part of history.  A famous event such as a general leading his troops into a famous battle.  A whole war.  A revolution.  A peace treaty.  A constitution.  An expedition of exploration.  A scientific discovery.  The breaking of a record in a sports competition.  A famous book – a narrative or a treatise that leaves an indelible memory on a nation or on mankind.  A famous work of art or musical composition.  A play.

But all imprints have certain basic requirements in order to exist.  They all require a coherent organic sense of self on the part of a human who makes one.  And to be properly absorbed, they all require a coherent organic sense of self in a person who receives it and absorbs it.  Even though a flag is left on the moon, it only has meaning as an imprint, because there are humans who know that it’s there.  An archaeological excavation of a civilization is itself an imprint, because humans have rediscovered what had been a dominant previous imprint and have ascribed significance to it.  Without humans being aware of the significance of the excavation, the imprint of the dead civilization has no meaning.

The problem today is not only a lack of physical organic surfaces on which to leave certain kinds of basic organic imprints.  Yes, we live primarily in modern technological living environments with a lot of sensory distortion as a result of the vacuum and tension pocket fields of experience that are created in the physical external world.  But we also are creating another problem as a result of the increasing robotization of human beings.  To the extent that humans are receptive to the mirroring and modeling created by modern technological devices and, in particular, modern consumer technological devices, to that extent they become less and less receptive to the organic imprints that they can leave both on themselves and on others as well as the organic imprints that the people around them are capable of leaving on them.  As a result of becoming increasingly less receptive to imprints, both those they create and those that others create, people today are gradually becoming less and less capable of participating in the two broad purposes of life: feeling fully alive and preparing for death.  As a result of becoming increasingly numbed and jaded from their technological living environments, humans are participating less and less in what has traditionally been the fundamental human enterprises.

            Organic imprints are crucial to all animals, but they are particularly crucial to human beings with their rich variety of life experiences and their capacity to somehow extend their lives over time beyond their death through their surrogate immortalities.  Organic imprints are not only a product that emanates from a more organic coherent sense of self, but they, in turn, activate this sense of self to life.  The sensory distortion of modern technological devices and modern technological living environments disrupt this loop of stimulation and thus gradually weaken the organic sense of self, turning a modern human into a more fragmented brittle entity mentally.  A sense of self that turns into a bundle of overly defined discrete disjointed data.  To the extent that excessive involvement with modern technology leads to the weakening of the organic human sense of self, the weakening of the capacity to feel vibrantly alive and to prepare for death, we can say that this excessive involvement is immoral and something that has to be more effectively studied in order to limit human interaction with this technology.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Behaving Like A Robot With Other People

            In writing about the effects of modern technology on human behavior, there has been a focus in this column on how modern technology directly affects the user.  How does the experience of the configuration of stimuli that emanates from a technological device or a whole technological environment affect how a user thinks, how a user feels and how a user acts.  The focus in the column has been on the sensory distortion generated by the technology and how this, in turn, creates behavioral distortion in the user (what has been called in this column conative acceleration and conative anesthesia) and distortion of the user’s sense of self (the person eventually slides into becoming like a robot).

            But there is another significant dimension to the effects of modern technology on human behavior, and that is how does modern technology influence the users of modern technology to relate to the people around them.  How do people who work with computers all day relate to their spouses and their children?  How do employers relate to their employees and vice versa and how do workers relate to their fellow workers?  How do students relate to their contemporaries and to their parents?  How do students and teachers relate to each other?

            In a previous article, there was a discussion about how crimes took the form of crimes of passion in more traditional pre-industrial societies and crimes of numbness in modern technological societies.  It has been my opinion that our increasingly frictionless modern living environments lead people to enter a frictionless level of numbness in their life experience, which, in turn, leads them to commit crimes to feel alive.  But a hurt against another person or persons doesn’t have to rise to the level of a crime to have a negative effect.

            Perhaps the best way of describing the effects of technology on a user, in order to understand the foundations for what happens in the interactions between users and the people around them, is to think of technology today as a form of addiction.  Particularly movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones and tablets.  If one is going to live in an environment where one is surrounded by the sensory distortion created by technology, at least let a person have some control over it by focusing his attentions on miniature versions of these sensorily distorted environments – namely, the technological devices already enumerated.  And in these miniature worlds, one can balance out the levels of stimulation one receives.  If a person is feeling numb, he can go into his screen reality and watch an action movie on Netflix or listen to some rap music on iTunes.  If a person is feeling overstimulated, he can search the Internet for a new pair of boots or immerse himself in numbing reams of meaningless data.  People today become very immersed in their technology as a means of stabilizing themselves.

            And this is what happens in other addictions.  People try to balance out the imbalance of stimuli inside their heads by using food, alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex.  They go back and forth between states of understimulation and overstimulation, between vacuum states and tension-pocket states.  In truth, a true balance or even an approximate balance is never truly achieved.  And this is why people remain addicted or stuck on these substances and activities.

            The same can be said of the people using technological devices.  Except in these cases, the imbalance is at least partly created by the global modern technological living environments in which the users are living.  The users use technological devices to stimulate their internal living environments – their minds – to balance out the imbalanced stimuli they receive from their external living environments in the external world.

            Ultimately, the only real way to protect against the sensory discomfort created by the sensory distortion of modern technological society is to change one’s sense of self so that one becomes more like the technological devices that one uses.  One becomes like a robot.  One develops a sense of self based on internal mental environments of infinite continuous vacuum stimuli and pockets of defined discrete figure stimuli.  It is like vaccinating oneself against the sensory distortion of modern technological society.  Robots, when they are turned off, keep still in their vacuum, and when they are turned on they move in an overly defined discrete jolty angular way.  And the ongoing interaction with consumer technological devices is a way for a person to continue to stimulate and exercise his robotic nature so that he can continue to feel protected against sensory distortion.

            The configurations of sensorily distorted stimuli lead to configurations of robotic thought patterns in a modern technological user’s mind, which lead to robotic presentations of self and more specifically robotic behavior.  This leads to the people around him experiencing alternately understimulation and overstimulation in his presence.  The user can ignore the people close to him, not spend much time with them, or simply be psychologically not-present when they are present.  He can do most of his communication with these people through the mediated path of their smartphones, computers and tablets.  Or the user can find a way to generate abrasive friction with the people around him.  A user can generate the kind of abrasive disputes that lead to separation from family members, people in the work place, or people in the community.  They can commit crimes of numbness, crimes that pull them out of their numbness in an abrasive jolting way, like robots being turned on.  Chronic modern technology users become increasingly incapable of the kind of organic bonding that is the foundation for stable grounded relationships.

            In particular, modern parents model for their children by being less and less present for their children, both physically and psychologically.  And when they are present, they try to leave their imprints on their children by being controlling and critical.  In many cases, they push their children constantly to achieve and achieve.  From the earliest years.  After all, if the child is busy achieving, he doesn’t have so much time or state of mind to make demands for intimacy and interaction with his parents.  So the child is pushed to do well in pre-school to get in the best elementary school to get into the best high school to get into the best college or university to get into the best graduate school to get the best job.

            The understimulation of not being present much and the overstimulation of being controlling, demanding and critical.  Vacuum and tension pocket.  But people who are pushed to  achieve, who are not at the same time given strong emotional bonding, become robotic.  Children slowly incrementally become configured to become robotic like their parents.  This, in addition to the robotic influences of the children’s own intense involvement with modern consumer technological devices.  So the influences of the robotic parents reinforce the influence of children’s direct involvement with modern machines.                                                          

            There is a strong moral aspect to consider when dealing with the way modern parents bring up their children.  To the extent that these parents impart their robotic attitudes to their children and to the extent that children are given the unlimited opportunity to use modern consumer technological devices, we can say that parents are influencing their children to move away from their organic human essence towards the development of a more robotic sense of self.  Which, in the long run, prevents these children from satisfying their deeper emotional needs.  And leads them to feel hardened and empty.

            To the extent that parents use modern consumer technological devices a lot and live surrounded by an extremely technological environment, to that extent the parents are going to develop behavior and attitudes that are immoral according to the standards just discussed.  This is because a person does have some choice in his degree of involvement with technology, and because parents are hurting their children at an age when the latter are most open and vulnerable to being transformed by the robotic behavior and attitudes of others.

            Now it is not just the influence of parents over children that provides the opportunity for immoral robotic interactions.  As dwellers in modern technological environments, we are all potentially influenced by the robotic technology users that surround us.  At the same time, our own robotic behavior influences others.  So it is not only the modern consumer technological devices that hurt people, but also other people in their roles as robotized modern technology users as well.  And these users have a choice to limit to some extent their addiction, their use of these devices, not only to avoid becoming totally robotized themselves, but to avoid spreading robotizing influences to others.  It’s something for all of us to think about as we engage in our consumer technology activities.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Mapping Out Moral Behavior

            The word map is frequently used when we want to create a visual image of the physical relationship between different phenomena.  When we use it for the environments in which we live, it can be used for everything from the whole world to a neighborhood in a city.  A map can be used to focus on different features like the topography of different geographical entities.  Maps are used in biology as well to diagram different aspects or different features of an animal or human body.  Nowadays, we map out the genes on chromosomes, and we map out the brain, determining which sections of the brain carry out which cerebral functions.  And maps are also used in dealing with our solar system or the universe.

            Within the context of the philosophical model that has been presented in this column, I would like to focus on using the notion of a map in a slightly different context.  It is my contention that morality is not just about moral events: doing moral things and not doing immoral things.  It is not simply about our freely-made moral decisions to do moral things and not do immoral things.  Rather it is also about the influence of our fields of experience, our configurations of stimuli to create different predispositions for different kinds of personally viable and socially viable behavior.  How can we maintain a basic human essence within and sometimes in spite of the surroundings in which we dwell?

            Our evolving modern technological living environments are creating fields of experience, configurations of stimuli that are very different from the fields of experience and configurations of stimuli of the traditional living environments in which traditional moral systems were created.  These fields of experience and configurations of stimuli elicit very different kinds of responses, very different behavior from the kinds of responses and behavior found in more traditional pre-industrial living environments.  So the spectrum of available human responses for treating other people as well as ourselves in a good way is also shifting.  In short, the traditional moral map no longer fits very well the experiential territory of modern humanity.

            Traditional morality is based on developing rules to rise above the grounding of more natural environments, a grounding that has an abundance of flowing blendable continual stimuli that tend to blur into a person and cause him to lose control of his behavior and to undifferentiate into his animal desires such as violence, lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth.  To control these desires, he develops firm defined discrete behavioral boundaries: moral rules that, depending on the person and the situation, proclaim moderation or even abstention.  But extreme animalistic behavior has to be reined in not only because it can hurt oneself and other people, but because it tends to swallow up a person and undifferentiate his sense of self.  And it is the uniqueness of a human sense of self, so much more developed than in other animals, that separates him from other animals and allows him to survive.

            Traditional religions have been developed on the basis of creating rules for stable affirmative behavior among the members of a society.  With the non-measurable non-controllable flowing blendable continual stimuli in traditional more natural environments, people are stimulated to misbehave in relation to the standards of traditional morality.  Using their unique cognitive faculties, people learn how to regulate their behavior and how to hold themselves together.  The map of hypothetical life situations in which people can slide away from their defined human sense of self is laid out in the holy books of traditional religions.  Connected to this map are behavioral answers so that a person doesn’t slide.

            As we move into the era of modern technology, we need different kinds of rules to survive with our human essence intact.  The problem today is no longer as much the danger of undifferentiating into an animal.  Modern technology creates what I have called vacuum and tension-pocket environments: environments of understimulating numbness with pockets of overstimulating jolts to our nervous system.  To live and function in such an environment, there is a tendency to organically unbond from one’s living environment and to function to a great extent as an overly defined figure – a robot.  So in order to restore a human balance, one has to find a way to restore sources of flowing blendable continual stimuli and to reground oneself.  Rather than have a morality that focuses exclusively on preventing animalistic excesses, one has to develop a morality that focuses more on preventing robotic numbness and jadedness.

            From another perspective, the organic surfaces of traditional more natural living environments are fine for making and receiving the organic imprints that allow us to feel alive.  But because of the strong tendency towards organic perishability in those environments, they are not as good for preserving the imprints that are made and, in this way, allowing people to create a surrogate immortality with the imprints they leave and thus prepare for death.  On the other hand, modern technological living environments, existing as they do above and apart from nature, are terrific for preserving imprints.  Notice how many museums are constantly sprouting up today.  But modern technological living environments lack a lot of the organic surfaces necessary for making organic imprints.

            Patterns of experiential surfaces may not be suitable for making precise measured defined visual maps.  But, if nothing else, we can make impressionistic descriptive maps.  Just as impressionistic descriptive maps can also be made of patterns of experiential phenomena and patterns of stimuli.  One might ask what does all this have to do with morality and with ethical decision-making.  The whole point being made here is that people don’t exist as phenomena that are isolated and separate from their surroundings.  People exist within different kinds of living environments that impinge on them in different ways, that influence their behavior in different ways, and that present different kinds of challenges and threats to their human essence.  So sometimes a person’s behavior towards himself and other people is a reflection of what he is experiencing in his living environments.  And sometimes a person’s best behavior towards himself and other people is a behavior that protects both himself and other people from the dangers in the living environment – in particular, the dangers that threaten to attack the integrity of the human sense of self.

            This is why what I am calling moral cartography is so important.  Humans can move among different ecosystems, among different living environments, far more easily than most other animals.  But the fact that they can move among them does not mean that they are immune to the influences of the environment in which they are living.  And profound differences in technology over time can mean that the configurations of behavioral influences from a modern technology-oriented environment can be very different from the influences of a more traditional nature-oriented environment.  And different configurations of behavioral influences can elicit different kinds of harmful behavior that would be considered immoral.

            So in making different descriptive maps of these configurations of behavior influences, we can gain a better understanding of what could be considered immoral in a particular environment, and we can try to develop behavioral responses that can be protective of the human essence both of ourselves and of the people that surround us related to that environment.

            One last point.  Not all of what is considered immoral is going to shift as people move into technologically more advanced living environments.  Fundamental crimes like murder, physical assault, rape and robbery remain the same as immoral actions no matter what the living environment.  Crimes like these symbolize fundamental attacks not only on real live humans but also on the human essence in any living environment.  However, they can be generated by different kinds of patterns, depending on whether they occur in more traditional natural environments (crimes of passion) or modern technological environments (crimes of numbness).  In the first case, a person is swallowed up by his emotions.  In the second case, a person is trying to generate enough emotions to feel alive.

© 2016 Laurence Mesirow

Losing One’s Touch For Touching

            The human sense of touch seems to be under ongoing attack by modern technological innovation.  In some cases, the experience of touching stimuli is reduced as in swiping one’s fingers over or typing on smartphones to perform all kinds of tasks and searches that used to be handled in direct contact with the external world and with books and with magazines.  This use of the smartphone supposedly reduces the exertion of physical and mental effort.  In other cases, touch is eliminated entirely.  Lights turn on when we walk into rooms, particularly public bathrooms, and turn off when we leave them.  This has the purpose of reducing the amount of energy used by making sure that lights are only on when rooms are occupied by people.  Faucets in bathrooms turn on and off as hands approach and then retreat from them.  Here water is saved as a result of preventing people from accidentally leaving faucets turned on.  Finally, toilets flush by themselves.  Ostensively, this is to prevent toilets from continuing to hold waste products left from the people who use the toilets.  In the case of all the devices in the bathroom – lights, faucets and toilets – not having to touch things can be considered to be more sanitary.  And again there is the reduction in the exertion of physical effort.

            Nevertheless, this use of smartphones and sensor technology represents the breaking down of tactile connection with the external world.  More and more, people are being put into a tactile vacuum which becomes an integral part of the total experiential vacuum in which they are immersed while living in modern technological society.  And this of course contributes to the behavior distortion that has been talked about in this column.  There is the conative acceleration, the speeding up of the will, where people try to bust out of a sense of numbness through relentless work, hard fun (kicks) and violence.  This speeded up activity creates increased friction which helps a person to feel alive.  Then there is conative anesthesia where a person tries to withdraw into himself and create his own world of numbness that he can control and manipulate to reduce the harmful effects of a more global numbness from the external world.  Here you have everything from marijuana to meditation to Eastern religion – Western style.

            Both of these behavioral postures can be used (sometimes by the same person) in response to the increasing numbness we feel, as modern technology increasingly separates us from our tactile field of experience.  In an article Gizmag, “Microsoft Research anticipates the future with pre-sensing touchscreen prototype”, we learn that Microsoft has created a technology where the way you hover over a screen with your fingers determines the creation of menus on your screen as well as options for interaction in order to control and manipulate your screen content.  The same can be said for the way you grip a smartphone and with one or both hands. Once you bring up menus or options, you can touch your fingers to the screen as you would normally do to type on or swipe the screen.

            This new hovering aspect of smartphone usage is extremely concerning, because it represents one more level where one’s tactile connection to the external world is mediated by technology.  We have progressed from carving out messages on rock to writing first on papyrus and then on paper, to typing on paper, to typing on a computer, to typing on and swiping a smartphone, to organizing data on a smartphone without touching any physical object.

            And using the way we grip a device to bring up menus means that we are using gross motor actions rather than the fine motor actions of writing or typing or swiping with fingers to control written material.  Gripping can’t possibly provide the same fine-tuned control that these fine motor activities can.  But it obviously seems smooth and comfortable to Microsoft and reduces physical activity with the fingers.  Heaven only knows we mustn’t strain our fingers with too much physical activity.

            We come again to a major overarching purpose of modern technological innovation: get rid of friction.  Breaking down the reasons for this purpose, it can be said that friction creates frustration which threatens one’s sense of empowerment.  Except that, in reality, some friction helps a person feel alive, and a person can’t feel empowered in his life if he feels numb.  Furthermore, unless a person has some obstacles as demonstrated by the friction, he can’t put into practice his sense of empowerment and thus feel for himself, know for himself that he is empowered.

            Also friction creates a sense of general discomfort.  Particularly as a person becomes accustomed to the numbing effects of modern technology, it takes less and less friction to make a person feel uncomfortable.  Except that it is precisely this discomfort from relatively small sources of friction that should act as a danger sign that people are losing an important aspect of their humanity – the ability to engage the external world, and transform it; the ability to make and preserve imprints and feel fully alive in the process, and the ability to prepare for death through the surrogate immortality of these preserved imprints.

            Connected with this sense of general discomfort is a sense that somehow friction, in and of itself, creates a sense of disorder, both within one’s mind and in the external world.  It is true that in the process of trying to transform the world both in ways small and large, breakdowns and disorders occur in our field of experience.  But in changing the world, in recreating the world, there has to be a certain amount of messy creative destruction.  As they say, it goes with the territory.

            For many of us who increasingly can’t tolerate friction, we just sink deeper and deeper into conative anesthesia.  In our numbness, we become intolerant within ourselves of anything that does not represent the most mediated of life narratives – a life narrative mediated by technology.

            It may seem farfetched to impute such a significant influence on human behavior to the technological device that is the subject of this article: the pre-sensing touchscreen.  But the pre-sensing touchscreen is just one of many modern technological devices that are contributing or will contribute to increasing layers of mediation in our field of experience and to the increasing numbness that accompanies this mediation.  All these increasing layers of mediation are making it more and more difficult to get the organic stimulation that humans need to feel alive as fully actualized human beings so that they don’t sink into the living death of robots.  We are becoming what we use.

(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow