Learning The Way That Machines Do

            This article focuses on a series of areas in modern technology that are very complex, very sophisticated and very nuanced particularly for a non-technology person like myself.  It is in dealing with an area like this that I sometimes have wondered what a non-technology person like myself is doing writing a column on the effects of modern technology on living environments and human behavior.  But after having given some thought to this question, I have realized that the key word for our purposes here is effects.  I am not so interested in the operations of modern technology, but rather in their impact on human experience and their capacity to transform human behavior and the very nature of the human sense of self.  I don’t have to be an expert on modern technology in order to perceive and understand its effects on me or on others when we are around it.

            And certainly one area of modern technology where its impact is going to be increasingly felt on humans is artificial intelligence.  This is an area of modern technology which literally tries to recreate human intelligence and even improve on it with machines.  Initially, human intelligence techniques were created directly by programmers through a process called hand coding.  In other words, a human or humans were involved all through the development of a process that imitated human intelligence.  Then along came a new subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning where a human, like the grand clockmaker in the deist concept of God, creates an algorithm and generates the data that then allows the machine itself to create the process that imitates human intelligence.  Finally, there is a subset of machine learning called deep learning wherein layers of artificial neural networks are created that imitate the neocortex of the brain and that imitate human intelligence on a higher more complicated level than was possible with previous machine learning.

            There are a lot of people who are really obsessed with playing God and creating their own complex behavior entities just like God supposedly created them, the human creators, as humans.  But will people today truly create machines and robots that are mentally like people? This is an important question because the identity of humans as unique complex behavioral entities is being chipped away at by all the scientists and engineers that are working constantly to improve the performance of machines and robots.  My thought is that as long as these people continue work on stimulating these entities with the defined discrete stimuli of digital signaling, they will never recreate humans.  And this is because science has made the assumption that all stimuli can be successfully converted into controllable measurable defined discrete stimuli for purposes of scientific investigation, the manipulation of humans and for engineering inventions.  As was discussed in many previous articles, there are lots of stimuli in nature with blurry boundaries that flow across parts of our fields of experience.  We don’t experience our primary contacts with the world as filled with the pixilation of defined discrete points.  If anything, when we are relaxed and not focusing, we experience much of our visual field as filled with entities and patches of substance that flow together.  In other words, individual flowing blendable continual stimuli can agglomerate and form larger stimuli.

            It was also discussed previously that, although there is an infinity of defined discrete stimuli, there is a larger infinity of flowing blendable continual stimuli, stimuli that can be vaguely described, but not in a way that easily distinguishes them from one another.  The infinity of defined discrete stimuli is what one would call a kind of delimited infinity, and the infinity of flowing blendable continual stimuli is what would be called a non-delimited infinity.  I am using delimited and non-delimited in a way analogous to the way they are used in math.  In math, an example of the delimited entities discussed in infinity theory is all the discrete numbers and an example of all the non-delimited entities is all the points on a line let’s say going from 0 to 1.  It can be shown through a mathematical proof that there are a greater infinity of points on a line than discrete numbers.  I make the analogy between the mathematical proof on the one hand, and the comparison between defined discrete stimuli and flowing blendable continual stimuli on the other, because both deal both with entities with defined boundaries and entities with blurry boundaries.  It just makes intuitive sense to me that what is true with different kinds of mathematical infinities can shed some light on the spatial categories of human sensory experience.

            In order for humans to create, control and manipulate their own complex behavioral entities, they have to reconfigure their field of experience to highlight data-defined discrete stimuli, which are more controllable because they represent reduced infinities of possible stimuli.  However, at the same time, humans are very limited in their capacity to instill into these entities more nebulous states of mind: creativity, emotions, religiosity, a coherent sense of self.  None of these things can be implanted in complex behavioral entities on the basis of defined discrete stimuli alone.

            Anyway, digital technology, the foundation of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning is built on defined discrete stimuli.  As the digital technology involved in these machine activities becomes more complex, the behavior manifested in these machine activities becomes more and more complex.  Particularly deep learning, which is meant to operate to some extent like the neocortex in the brain, seems to imitate human cerebral activity.  But however complex it becomes, the activity is still going to consist of a series of defined discrete steps similar to the way a machine operates.  It will not be derived from the flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the foundation of a coherent human sense of self.  The activity will never be based on an irreducible organic agency, will never be guided by an irreducible cerebral consciousness, will never be guided towards making, receiving and preserving organic imprints, will never be accompanied by an irreducible experiencing of what is happening and what the machine is participating in, and will never have a coherent reflexive awareness of mortality and a desire to prepare for death through a surrogate immortality based on preserved organic imprints.

            But as particularly deep learning increasingly approximates human activity, people are going to increasingly blur machines and humans in their minds which is going to lead to a diminishing of the appreciation of the uniqueness of humans.  But humans should never be reduced to machines, because, however skilled machines become, even in some cases improving on human skill, there are certain ways that humans will always be so much more than machines, and that is something of which we should never lose sight.

(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow                      

Better Functioning Of The Brain With Electricity

Up until recently, hacking was a term used for the invasion of the internal working space of a computer or some other modern device by certain humans for purposes of control and manipulation. It was done to go against the interests of the owner of the computer.  But now there is a new series of meanings to the word hacking, and it is a series of meanings that has supposedly positive connotations. I’m talking about brain hacking which is used in different ways.  In one sense, it simply refers to the ongoing habit-forming connection that is formed between humans and their smartphones and computers.  This broad connection allows smartphones and computers to impact the very way that people think.  Another meaning refers to a more focused connection between people and a particular device that sends stimuli to the brain to help people learn faster.  Still another device gives people feedback about their brain activity to help people meditate better.

            Depending on where the brain is stimulated by these new devices, one can influence many different mental functions and can even influence emotional states like depression.  I imagine that, if it isn’t already being done, inhibiting stimulation may be used to control manic states in people.  In addition, the effect of this electric brain stimulation can be magnified if we implant receptor chips in the brain.  For sure, people will never ever be the same again, if and when such stimulation becomes commonplace, with or without chips.  Getting ongoing fixes of electrical stimulation to their brains, people should be able to maintain a high level of cognitive performance indefinitely as well as maintain a certain amount of emotional balance.

            Now this stimulation is certainly not experienced as the kind of abrasive jolt that is found in people who undergo electric shock therapy for severe mental illness.  But neither is it a flowing blendable continual stimulus with a gradual cumulative effect that is going to leave the integrity of a person’s sense of self totally intact.  There is something very troubling about such an aggressive focused intervention in the human brain.  Whatever such an intervention might do for specific sectors of the brain and for specific aspects of human thought and emotions, one can definitely be concerned about whether such tinkering will damage the natural coherence of the human sense of self.  It seems to me that there is a parallel between this kind of intervention in human functioning and the effects of the intervention of cosmetic surgery on human physical structure.  Most of the time the effects of cosmetic surgery seem to damage the natural flowing coherence of a person’s physical presentation.  The breasts come out too large; the skin comes out too taut.  The intervention creates a result that seems to be a little out of balance.  In the same way, augmenting cognition or diminishing depression through defined discrete focused streams of electrical stimulation will create an off-balance personality composition or configuration,  where the changed parts of a person’s thinking will no longer exactly fit with the unaffected parts.  This stands in contrast to less interventional approaches like stimulation from enriching life situations in the external world for greater cognitive and emotional awareness as well as healing life situations like good psychotherapy and building healthy support systems for an effective approach to dealing with emotional problems.

And what will prevent such sessions with electric stimulation from becoming habit forming – even an addiction.  “Oh, I need to write a term paper tonight for my class in Shakespeare.  I think I’ll go down to the school laboratory to get some electric stimulation for the part of my brain that deals with analysis and conceptual thinking.  Then my brain will become super-charged, I’ll write a terrific term paper, and I’ll get an A for the course.”  The real question is whether a person receiving this electric stimulation is the same person before and after the stimulation.  We know that the person is going to be significantly affected by the electric stimulation, or else he wouldn’t use it.  But is he also somehow fundamentally changed by allowing such a strong intervention in the very core of who he is?   Will he begin to need it to function properly?  Will he become an electric stimulus addict?  And will the electric stimulation change him in other ways distinct from being addicted.

Will the person become so changed at the core of who he is that his organic imprints are no longer the imprints of who he was before the electric stimulation.  So the original core of who he is will no longer be able to make and preserve his imprints and create a surrogate immortality to prepare for death.

Using another metaphor, becoming super-charged for cognitive activity will give a person a super strong external mental definition, much like steroids build a person up with muscle and give him a strong external physical definition.  But steroids lead to a long-term deterioration of physical health, a loss of physical coherence.  The short term road to body development – steroids – becomes the agent that destroys the long-term state of a person’s physical health.  And what if electrical stimulation leads to a short-term sharpened mental definition from cognitive activity, but leads to a long-term fragmentation of a person’s sense of self.

A dependency on a non-organic source for a person to function well but also a fragmentation of the sense of self.  Is this a trade-off worth having in order to get a mental fix and a heightened mental awareness?  And does one want to depend on electric stimuli to have a sensation of emotional well-being?  Of course, many people already depend on anti-depressant pills to deal with the external symptoms of depression.  But somehow the electric stimuli seem to be even more intensely invasive.  And just as anti-depressants give a person an artificial overly-defined overly-together personality, what will happen with an ongoing use of electric stimulation for this purpose?

The most common usage of hacking has been associated with the unwanted aggressive penetration of our computers by an unfriendly source for purposes related to anything from mischief to crime.  In the most recent usages of hacking, we are penetrating our brain supposedly for friendly supportive purposes.  But what if some of the effects of this penetration are even more destructive to human life than those connected to computer hacking?  What if our human hacking has uncontrollable unforeseeable results that damage our brains, an even more serious concern for humans than the other kind of hacking that damages computers?  This is what we have to concern ourselves with in connection to this latest assault on the coherence of the human sense of self.

© 2017 Laurence Mesirow

           

When Recreation Is No Longer Much Fun

            Modern technology has had a tremendous influence on the world of human recreation, partly as a result of the development of totally new forms of competition, both with others as well as with oneself, in the form of video games.  In addition, modern technology has created electronic versions of games that have existed in some form for centuries.  A good example of the latter is bingo.  Modern technology has created a version where players hold electronic devices that can carry dozens of bingo cards and that automatically mark the appropriate spaces in all the appropriate cards when a bingo number is called.  No need to worry about having gotten distracted and having missed a box on one’s bingo card when a number is called.  The electronic device never gets distracted when the bingo numbers are being called.  And I guess that because bingo is frequently couched as a form of gambling, eliminating as many of the risk factors as is possible may be a relevant factor for people who have what is for them serious money on the line.

            But what does this do to bingo as a game, as a life activity?  Now playing bingo is certainly not one of the most significant ways of making organic imprints on one’s field of experience.  As a form of competition, it is certainly not what would be called a highly skilled game compared to chess, bridge, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, poker, or scrabble.  But it does require a certain skill in being vigilant about the numbers being called and being able to scan one’s card or cards as each number is called, and this tends to bring all the players together emotionally, as they share the surprise and excitement created by the situation.  So traditional bingo can be not only fun but it can be a rich vibrant experience and a contribution to the memories that are formed of a meaningful life narrative, memories that can play a small but useful part in developing a person’s surrogate immortality.

            But with electronic bingo, the major components of human agency being exercised in traditional bingo, those of vigilantly listening for the number called and scanning the bingo cards for a match, are eliminated.  The electronic devices retrieve the numbers being called and automatically match them on the person’s cards.  The gambling aspect is still there.  The suspense and excitement are still present, if only in a more attenuated way.  But in the larger scheme of things, in the larger field of experience of life, one more piece of personal agency in the larger world of human narrative is lost.  And one more small source of organic friction, as an opportunity to test ourselves for being aware and quick, disappears.  And one more source of interactive life is vacuumized and turned into a screen reality activity.

            Supposedly, the reason that so much work activity has been vacuumized by modern technology has been so that we could have the time, energy, and state of mind to immerse ourselves in recreation: a sphere of human activity in which we could focus on having rich vibrant life experiences.  But now, not just bingo, but so many different areas of recreation have been and are being vacuumized.  Many of us spend more time watching life on a screen than we do living life directly under the propulsion of our own volition.  Young kids spend less and less time playing outside and more and more time watching television, playing video games, and interacting with each other on their smartphones.

            Real life is physical movement through time and space with a purpose.  This is what makes for a meaningful human narrative.  To fully be able to experience this movement, there has to be human agency and there has to be friction.  But modern technology is chipping away at both of these.  In the case of electronic bingo, there is a loss of human agency, because it is the electronic device that makes the match between the called number and the bingo cards.  There is a loss of friction, because the person no longer is moving the markers onto his cards and no longer feels anxiety over his responsibility for watching and controlling his cards.  There is still anxiety over the risk involved, if he is gambling on the bingo cards, but the risk is based on forces that are now completely beyond his control.  They are abstract forces.  If he loses, he no longer has to beat himself over the head about what he could have done better.  He can be fatalistic.  It is no longer his personal loss.  Such a loss is not evidence of a deficient organic imprint.  Of course, the loss still creates pain and anguish, because the player is still being hurt.  Only this time it is because of random activities with which he is not directly involved.

            So soon we will get to the point where we have sucked all the personal agency and all the personal organic friction not only out of practically all work activities, but out of all recreational activities as well.  The world will move along around us, and we will just sit there in our numb state watching everything going by.

            To the extent that we go through life stages, this growth can be considered a kind of movement in place.  But if everything becomes free of organic friction, what do we actually experience.  Life becomes a voyage analogous to sliding down a chute.  When you slide down a chute, there is no opportunity to make or receive meaningful organic imprints in connection to the surfaces around you.  And there is no opportunity of, course, to preserve organic imprints, to recreate a surrogate immortality, and to prepare for death.

            In most of my articles, I have balanced my discussions of the understimulation of the vacuum, with explorations of the overstimulation of the abrasive friction caused by the waste products of tension pockets.  I have ignored the influence of these tension pockets in this article, because I wanted to focus on the primary influence of the diminution of organic friction by the electrification of bingo, and the growing appearance of a sensory vacuum for the players, as they have nothing significant to do during the game.

            Playing electronic bingo is just one small piece in the ongoing attempt by creators and promoters of modern technology to chip away at the organic friction that has traditionally been an integrated part of the life narratives of human beings.  Furthermore, this modern version of an old game shows that the proponents of modern technology are out to make not only work more and more frictionless, but recreation as well.  And as all of life increasingly turns into a frictionless vacuum, people in their growing numbness become increasingly like robots, in order to survive the sensory distortion created by a vacuum and the forces of entropy that underlie it.  This is why even a little game like electronic bingo has a significant influence as one small part of an increasingly pernicious technological transformation of our human living environment.

© 2017 Laurence Mesirow

Trump And Evil

            In previous writings, this column has concerned itself with the relationship between evil and the human living environment in which it is found.  It is one of the fundamental ideas of this column that the transformation of living environments by modern technology has led to a transformation in the very nature of human evil.  And it is important to understand this transformation if we are to understand the nature of Donald Trump’s behavior.

            Basically, what is being postulated here is that the presentation of evil in the form of human behavior is intimately connected to the nature of the living environment in which the evil behavior is being presented.  The one commonality between evil in more traditional organic living environments and evil in modern technological living environments is that, in both cases, the person manifesting evil behavior is unable to create enough of a psychological barrier separating him from the basic configuration of stimuli in his living environment in the external world.  As a result, he is overwhelmed by this configuration of stimuli and has to develop strategies of behavior in order to effectively combat it.  This is where the evil behavior comes in.  It allows him to protect his sense of self from the spillover external world stimuli.  It allows him to expel the unwanted stimuli.

            I think this model can be useful, because it takes into consideration both the excessive stressors created by a particular destabilizing configuration of stimuli in the external world as well as the excessive stressors created by structural problems in the minds of certain individuals who are predisposed to mental imbalance, particularly in certain kinds of living environments.

            In most cases, evil in more traditional organic living environments has been caused by an overload of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli in a person’s mind which has, in turn, been generated by a spillover of overwhelming organic flowing blendable continual stimuli from the more natural environment in which the person is living. It is as if the person is trying to defend himself against being swallowed up by an external world of organic stimuli that have been internalized.  To prevent himself from being swallowed up by these organic flowing blendable continual stimuli and losing his sense of self, the person tries to compress them, focus them, and expel them by committing defined discrete crimes full of passion on people outside of himself.  By focusing the emotion on specific objects of hatred, aggression, even revenge, a person can expel the overwhelming emotion without exploding apart.

            Traditional evil allows a person to stand apart from the world he experiences as swallowing him up through his mind.  Everything in this traditional more natural world is experienced as threatening to swallow him up, swallow up his sense of self, flooding him with emotions and impulses and making him like an animal.  In other words, the environment in which he lives undifferentiates him: his physical living environment, his community, his family.  He acts out in a destructive way against even the people closest to him.  He turns on them when he senses their encroaching on his mental space.

            All this is very different from modern technological evil.  In the experiential void of modern life, the sensory vacuum, people use evil to connect to other people to feel alive, not to separate themselves from people as in traditional evil.  To overcome numbness, evil people today connect with the people around them in an aggressive hurtful way.  Modern evil people have no personal barriers against the vacuum that surrounds them.  They become number than more normal people and only by generating hurtful abrasive friction, hurtful tension pocket events, can they feel alive.  Modern evil people commit crimes of numbness which have a very different flavor from the evil acts committed in more natural, more traditional environments.  Previously, I have called crimes committed in more traditional organic environments crimes of passion.  I use the term of crime of passion very differently from the way it has been used in traditional Mediterranean societies.  In the latter, a crime of passion occurs when a person discovers that his lover or spouse is cheating on him, and so the aggrieved person takes revenge on his lover or spouse, or on the secret rival or on both.  I use the term to cover when a person commits any aggressive action against another person that allows him to expel the enveloping explosive organic stimuli that threaten to swallow him up.

            So how does Trump fit into this classification.  At first glance, Trump does seem to be a traditionally evil man with a lot of strong surface emotion, a lot of strong surface passion.  But the fact is that Trump seems to have difficulty focusing on any one object of anger very long.  He just flip-flops all over the place, constantly shifting his focus, trying to shock himself as well as all his followers - the Trumporgs – to life.  He has had so many different public objects of wrath on his Twitter account.  Instead of a mass shooting by a numb lone gunman, Trump commits ongoing mass character assassinations,

            And Trump wants to shake things up in order to feel alive.  In order to leave his own imprints, Trump wants to decrease the cost of health care, even if it means getting rid of benefits for the middle class and the poor.  He wants to get rid of environmental regulation, wants to change the tax code to make things better for the wealthy, wants to shake up trade agreements.  The turmoil created by all his shake-ups creates abrasive friction, situational tension pockets, in the reactions of his fellow Americans which in turn helps him to feel alive.  Those who are for his proposals and those who are against are in constant conflict and are incapable of collaborating or compromising, and he loves it.  And it doesn’t always matter if Trump succeeds in achieving his obvious goals, because just as important, if not more important than achieving the goals, is achieving the process that moves towards those goals.  The turbulent process becomes the solution to his numbness.

            Trump is pathologically numb.  So are his followers, the Trumporgs.  Such people, in order to feel alive, have to tear apart social structure, social institutions, protections and relationships, so that they can feel the rush of ongoing social disorder and even anarchy that result.  And as the social disorder and anarchy are created, Trump can rush in saying he is the only one who can create order, even as he continues to create disorder and anarchy.  So that the need for his authoritarian style of leadership can be ongoing.

            And the disorder and anarchy create suffering, misery and pain.  They are evidence of modern evil as manifested by Trump and the Trumporgs.  And as long as our modern technological living environment continues to create extreme sensory numbness, people like Trump and the Trumporgs will continue to make their appearance.

© 2017 Laurence Mesirow

Controlling Robots With Thoughts

            With the advances in modern technology, all kinds of new connections are being created between humans and robots.  The most ideal one, certainly by the standards of the transhumanists, is to become a cyborg, a human-robot.  But some recent work by researchers at M.I.T. and Boston University is creating a much more subtle bond between these two complex behavioral entities.  Using EEG’s, they are working on ways to have a human be able to correct the actions of a robot by simply thinking the correction that has to be done.  And we’re not even talking about fully conscious thinking, where a person would formally think out what has to be corrected through verbal commands.  We are talking about minimally aware pre-conscious thinking.  This allows for the creation of a seamless interaction between human and robot.  Or more precisely, the robot becomes an extension of the human.

            It would appear that eventually a person will be able to sit in his armchair and even if he is tired, he will be able to think about all the processes of housework and cooking and have those processes carried out by robots, without ever having to tire himself out by thinking about these matters very clearly.  The world of process can go on moving around him, while he just sits in his armchair in a daze.

            But there may be other results from this harnessing of human thought to technological activity.  What if people become impatient with the unpredictable flow of the human narrative.  In normal human narrative, there is frequently an interweaving among the different separate actions being carried out by physically adjacent people, and in this interaction with other people, each person is not only the creator of his own organic imprints, which he leaves on other people as well as on himself, but also the recipient of the organic imprints from the people with whom he is engaged and with whom he is interacting.  With brain-controlled robots, the flow of influence and control is one way.  The imprints a person leaves are clean, defined, discrete imprints, free from the admixture of the recipients imprints on the person while the person is leaving his imprints and thus free from the influence of a recipient’s imprints while the person is leaving his imprints.  Robot process becomes seen as a more effective activity than human narrative in achieving one’s immediate human goals and ultimately one’s long-term life purposes, because, as the agent, a person can control it in a cleaner manner.

            And yet one is not always going to have the opportunity to carry out his life activities free from the participation and even the interference of other human beings.  So some human beings may experience, in their impatience to exert a total control over their field of experience and ultimately their objective external world reality, a blurring in their minds between robots and other humans.  Techniques for brain control over robots may be extended to other humans, particularly with the insertion of little chips in the brains of these humans who can then be controlled like robots.  They can be manipulated to function sort of like servant cyborgs.

            Some people will say that these ideas represent fantastic speculation, but this column has often pointed out that flowing blendable continual mental stimulation cannot be easily contained and that powerful techniques developed in conjunction with modern technology can easily leach out of their original intended purposes into other areas where the techniques can produce great potential harm.  The tendency for modern technological techniques to morph, to mutate, to blur is always present.  As a result, it is very easy to imagine that techniques developed to be used in connection to robots can easily blur into use with the main complex behavioral entity competing with robots – namely human beings.  And the experience of such total control over these organic complex behavioral entities can give humans a feeling of being all powerful like God, and therefore immortal and not subject to the organic perishability to which all human beings, at least at present, must eventually succumb. 

            There is still another danger that we have to worry about as human beings in conjunction with the development of powers in the human brain to directly control robots.  As robots evolve and develop more and more complex internal workings to be able to handle more and more diverse and intricate processes, it might become possible for the robot equivalent of a brain to send back code to human brains to carry out processes or parts of processes in the service of the purposes for which the robot has been programmed.  In other words, the human brain could be leaving itself vulnerable to having roles reversed in relation to the robot or robots that supposedly is or are serving it.  It wouldn’t necessarily require a dominating robot sense of self for this role reversal to occur.  It would simply require that the robot be of sufficient complexity as a behavioral entity to be able to continue with whatever complex activities for which it has been programmed, and to enlist the support of the human to carry out its preprogrammed goals through the pathways that have been established to connect the robot and the human brain.

            Does this also sound fantastic?  There is the notion of the technological singularity that there will come a point soon where technology, evolving faster and faster, will provide the foundation for creating machines that are smarter than humans.  If and when the singularity occurs, it would not be too difficult to imagine opportunities for the master-servant relationship between human and robot to be reversed.  Particularly given the fact that pathways of control between human and robot already exist.  Being aware of this risk, as I assume all scientists today are, why are some of them playing with fire by setting up these pathways between humans and robots?  Are they purposely trying to create the conditions for the enslavement of the human race?

(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow

Cyborgs And Trumporgs

            Several different metaphors have been used to describe Trump in this column.  Here is another one.  There is something about the way that he plows into issues and comes up with incredibly impulsive defined discrete destructive policies that reminds me a little of the kind of rampaging cyborg played by Arnold Schwartzenegger in The Terminator.  And, of course, one of the traits manifested by the terminator was that he was practically indestructible.  Almost nothing really seemed to be able to stop him.

            Trump, on a certain level, also appears to be practically indestructible, certainly quite impervious to criticism.  He answers all policy criticisms and personal attacks with pugnacious tweets.  Almost nothing seems to slow him down.

            Trump is manifesting mental cyborg traits that should have great appeal to transhumanists – those people today who believe in maintaining a material technological life after their organic death.  Strong human consciousness, a sense of self in a machine that can conceivably go on living forever.  To the transhumanist, the organic body is a limiting factor for humans, because it is so very vulnerable to material organic perishability and because it interferes with the creation of a superior state of mind and a superior state of being.

            Some people want to merge with machines in some way and become cyborgs.  Trump supporters want to psychologically merge with Trump and become Trumporgs.  In this way, a new form of transhumanism is being created.  Instead of mechanical implants to make one more machine-like, true believers are opening themselves up to the implants of Trump’s absolutistic authoritarian policies and to his tweets that give the impression that he and his followers will somehow leave permanent absolutistic authoritarian imprints on the field of experience of the external world, permanent imprints that can never be undone and will never be removed.  Trump means to change things in a lasting way, and so do the Trumporgs.

            And there are a lot of robotic qualities about these Trumporgs.  A robot operates in a world where there are defined discrete categories of things that have to be fabricated and manipulated and defined discrete categories of things that have to be discarded and eliminated.  Trumporgs want to fabricate a “pure” American United States, free from the supposedly dangerous influences of all kinds of foreigners and other minorities.  If the foreigners and other minorities can’t be totally expelled, at least some can, and the rest can be contained and isolated by filling them with fear and making them afraid to assert themselves.  Sometimes, the fear is created through the company that Trump keeps.  Having people like Steve Bannon, the alt-right executive chairman of Breitbart News, on his team is in and of itself a kind of coded language that indirectly invites hostile actions like the phone threats to J.C.C.’s and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries.  Don’t modern machines respond to the stimuli of coded signals?  On the other hand, very often hatred has been fanned directly in Trump’s speeches.  His exhortations with regard to Mexico and Muslims.  The Trumporgs are given targets of people that have to be discarded in order to cleanse the U.S. and make it “pure” again.  Make America “pure”, and America and Americans can go on forever.  The phenomena that these Trumporgs have to manipulate are pure defined discrete minority figures, figures that have to go into the bin of the rejects.  No room for ambiguity.  No patience for separating out the minority of minorities in the U.S. who may be terrorists, drug dealers, and other kinds of criminals and dealing with it through traditional legal means.  It’s so much easier, so much simpler to just lump all people in a minority category together.  The enemies have to be discarded, expelled or at least definitively contained with fear.  Officially, of course, it is just the lawbreakers who are targeted.  But there is this atmosphere created by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric of targeted defined discrete prejudice and hate against all members of certain minorities.  It is defined discrete emotion and it ultimately leads to defined discrete simplistic focused solutions.

            Machines are built to complete linear focused defined discrete tasks that are based on defined discrete purposes.  Increasingly, the Trumporgs are reconfiguring themselves to act and think like machines.  As, of course, is Trump.  It is not that this is consciously or purposely happening, but it is happening nevertheless.  It is ironic that Trump was replaced on his show The Apprentice by Arnold Schwartzenegger, who, as was previously pointed out, played the ultimate destructive cyborg in The Terminator.  Machine men are what are needed to bolster and maintain fascist societies.  Trump and the Trumporgs are a natural result of the gradual transformation of human beings stemming from the sensory distortion in modern technological societies.  We thought that the totalitarian traditions manifested by fascist and communist societies in the twentieth century had been laid to rest at least in Western societies.  But now we see that isn’t the case.  Totalitarian societies help to reconfigure people as machines, and this allows many people to function more effectively in modern technological society.

            And yet the cost of becoming a Trumporg or any kind of a dehumanized mechanical org is enormous.  If a person has become numb from living in modern technological society, a healthy response would be to try to find ways of living a more organic natural life with more positive flowing blendable continual stimuli.  An unhealthy response would be to deal with one’s numbness by focusing on coming to life through defined discrete anger and finding a way to deal with that anger by psychologically merging with a leader like Trump and then venting that anger against minorities who can be turned into victims.  Not only different ethnic and religious groups but also LGBTQ groups and women.  And also the press and different politically liberal groups.  And the judiciary.  And President Obama.  There are a lot of different potential targets today for the defined discrete anger of Trump and the Trumporgs.  Targets that act as sources of abrasive static stimuli to Trump and the Trumporgs. These stimuli are jarring to people, overstimulating to people, and ultimately make them more numb than before they were stimulated to vent anger on these targets.  Nevertheless, minorities and other groups and individuals are targets that are good for temporarily pulling the Trumporgs out of the numbness they feel in the experiential void of modern technological society.  Targets that when the Trumporgs blur their individual identities with those of Trump can act as a means of giving them a meaningful life narrative.  What a sad commentary on these people’s lives that they can only come to life through focused hatred.

(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow

Shifting People’s Sense Of Reality To Achieve Political Goals

            Up until relatively recently in history, most people could agree on what constituted a common sense objective reality.  Subjective reality was something else, and certainly each individual permitted to a degree the projection of the sensations and perceptions of his subjective reality to spill over into the mutually accepted objective reality of the people around him.  Subjective reality was filled with the flowing blendable continual stimuli of emotions, which, in turn, influenced the way the world was sensed and perceived.  Certainly objective reality also had plenty of flowing blendable continual stimuli in the form of the blurry melting sensations from nature (so beautifully captured by the French Impressionists), but there were also a lot more defined discrete stimuli that gave the world the firm outlines and boundaries needed to operate within its spaces, and, in particular, needed by individuals to operate in such a way as to maintain the maximum functionality while working with all the other different people living within the world’s confines. 

Since the advent of modern technology, several new kinds of reality have been created, and, as a result, the very way we look at the whole notion of reality in general has changed.  I am thinking here of screen reality, with its sub-categories of movies, television, video games, computers, tablets and smartphones, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality.  Screen reality refers to those versions of reality that have been developed by modern technology to be presented on flat two-dimensional surfaces.  In some manifestations of screen reality, three-dimensional external world reality is compressed onto two-dimensional surfaces.  This is the result of ethereal vacuum stimuli, which are used in screen reality to replace all the space-occupying substance and mass that are found in phenomena in external world objective reality.  This vacuumizing of phenomena gives them almost a ghost-like quality that makes our experience of them very different from the way we experience phenomena in the everyday objective world in which we live and operate.  For one thing, there is just not the same organic bonding with vacuumized phenomena in an electronic picture.  But, in particular, there is this other-worldly quality that comes from an electronic picture.  Like a person could never really cross paths with a screen reality phenomenon.  So screen reality creates a subtle reconfiguration of the way he experiences the world in his field of experience.  Screen reality blurs with external world reality and a generalized detachment of the user occurs as a result of the sensation of flattening and isolating of the world from all the vacuum stimuli that spill out of the screen reality into the external world reality.

            The sense of flattening gets lost in virtual reality but not the sense of isolation.  One is still using seeing as the primary sense of encounter within commercial applications of virtual reality today.  There is still no touching, grasping or holding within these applications of virtual reality, even though phenomena seem more real than they do in screen reality.  But even when researchers discover how to make touch a part of the virtual reality package, it won’t be the same as natural touch, because it will be based on defined discrete digital stimuli rather than flowing blendable continual organic stimuli. It won’t feel the same.  It won’t be bonding to something with substance and mass.  And because one is surrounded by a vacuumized field of experience in virtual reality, one doesn’t have an objective external world reality around the edges of its boundaries  to act as a comparison, as with screen reality, and to give a person a substantive organic anchor in that way. 

            Augmented reality is a reality that combines elements of external world reality and screen reality.  Screen reality sounds, graphics and data are superimposed on top of the direct experience of the external world.  The screen reality aspect is meant to increase one’s understanding and appreciation of the naked external world.  It is as if modern humans are incapable of imparting sufficient meaning themselves to the experience of the external world.

            So here we have all these new kinds of reality to add to objective external world reality and subjective reality.  And it is interesting to see how these different kinds of old and new reality can be mixed together in different ways.  And this is likely to happen because all of these realities except objective external world reality are not common sense realities.  They are not sensorily grounded realities.  So now we get ungrounded not only through our emotions and intimate sensations in subjective reality, but in our very perceptions of the external world in screen, augmented and virtual realities.  And I would submit that not only do ungrounded emotions and intimate sensations influence the way we experience our perceptions, but also perceptions that are ungrounded by modern technological realities can, in turn, unground our internal thought processes that are based on our connection to our objective external world reality.  The sensory distortion that these modern realities create because of the way that they vacuumize our fields of experience makes us not only ungrounded, but unbalanced, less rational, a little crazier.

            Along comes Donald Trump, who is a master of dealing with modern realities.  He had his own reality show – The Apprentice – which was really a blurring of Trump’s subjective reality, objective external world reality and screen reality.  In other words, it was a Trump reality that played with people’s minds.  And nowadays, there are Trump’s tweets which combine his subjective reality with the screen reality of a twitter account.  And somehow Trump feels (and many of his followers feel) that his internal subjective reality is given a greater gravity, a greater grounding as a result of its fusion with the externalized screen reality of Twitter.  To the point where the externalized screen reality of Twitter is imparted with the gravity, the grounding of an objective external world reality.  What Trump says is supposedly fact even when it is pure lies or fantasy.  In other words, the screen reality of Twitter acts as a bridge by which Trump’s subjective reality becomes an objective external world reality.

            And people today, with their extensive experience with different screen realities and with their developing experience with both augmented reality and particularly virtual reality are very open to blurring the boundaries between different realms of reality.  They are increasingly predisposed to becoming ungrounded from objective external world reality and bouncing around many different realms of technological reality.  And they are increasingly open to a man like Trump who imposes his subjective reality on other people’s objective external world reality through the bridge of different modes of technological reality.  Trump has become a model for how an authoritarian regime can be established in a democratic country.  Perhaps the novel 1984 was just a few decades off in what it depicted.  Unless the American people can find ways to resist the reality-bending visions that he creates.

© 2017 Laurence Mesirow