More on Sexual Intimacy In Modern Technological Society

The topic of the effects of modern technological environments on human sexuality is very complex.  I covered one angle of viewing the topic in my last essay.  In this essay, I want to focus more on the nature of emotional commitment in sexual relationships today.  I pointed out in the last essay how people look at a variety of sexual bodies as a substitute for the lack of organic sensory variety in a living environment relatively bereft of nature, natural phenomena and nature-inspired human creations such as traditional architecture and art rich in ornament and texture.  People hook up today not to make and receive imprints, but simply to feel a rush of sexual stimulation that will allow them to fight off sensory distortion and feel alive.

And people are starting to have sex younger and younger.  This is partly because sexual maturity is coming earlier than it did in the middle of the nineteenth century.  The average age then for menarche was 17.  Now it is 13.  That is a big fall statistically.  Girls are becoming sexually mature as early as eight years old.  There have been a lot of theories proposed as to the reason for this.  Improved nutrition does seem to have an influence.  But there are suggested theories about other contributing factors.  One theory points to the chemicals in a modern industrial environment; another talks about the influence of the hormones found in meat and chicken; still another focuses on stressors in the family situation, and still another that we should consider all the sexual stimulation that comes from our sexualized modern culture: the shows on television, the lyrics to the songs on radio and on iTunes, the advertisements in all of the media.  No definitive connection has been made between early sexual development and any specific chemical,  hormone or stressor.  As to the fourth theory, if one accepts it, one is forced to ask why has our modern culture become so sexualized.  Why at this point in history was there a scientific push to develop birth control pills and IUD’s?  Not simply because of overpopulation.  There is not even a general consensus as to how threatening overpopulation is.  Many people don’t take it seriously.

Perhaps one cause of early sexual development is precisely the fact that sex becomes the one opportunity to take advantage of a lot of other grounded organic surfaces in order to feel alive.  One can enjoy sex outside of marriage with a lot of different partners without having babies.  If this theory is correct, young people evolve into being biologically sexualized at an early age in order to be able to take advantage of the one kind of experience readily available today that allows for satisfactory organic communion.  Sex is a sub-category of all the experiences that allow for organic connection to the external world.  If other outlets for organic stimulation are diminished, the desire for sex - a form of stimulation not dependent on the larger field of experience - becomes that much more heightened.

At the other end of the period of life called adolescence, it becomes more and more difficult to enter the stage of life where a person is able to obtain economic independence - the stage of adulthood.  This is  partly because more and more jobs require more and more training to deal with increasingly computer-controlled machines.  And more and more other jobs require advanced education to deal witht the increasingly complicated businesses and services required by a modern technological society.  It becomes more difficult to contemplate marriage when one is unable to make enough money, even with one’s spouse, to meaningfully support them as a couple.  Furthermore, one member of the couple may have to go to graduate school in one city for his professional development, while the other member of the couple may have to go to graduate school in another city for her professional development, thus putting an enormous strain on a committed relationship.

So the period of adolescence is pushed backwards into childhood because of precocious sexual development and forward into adulthood as a result of increasingly complex requirements for work.  In today’s world, a person can be sexually ready more than twenty years before being economically ready for a long-term committed relationship.  In such a situation, commitments in sexual relationships can be very tenuous, even for young adults.  This is particularly true, because of all the individualizing experiences a young person is encouraged to have today in order to create a unique self definition for himself.  It is a unique self definition that allows a person to truly transcend above his sensorily-distorted living environment and become competitive in his work, love, and community life.

Unfortunately, an overly sharply-defined sense of self makes it that much more difficult for someone to find another person who complements him.  In some ways the other person fits, but then there are ways that they have developed in which they are truly incompatible.  Less differentiated people are much more able to accommodate one another and complement one another in committed relationships.

In spite of all the obstacles I have listed, there are young people who succeed in today’s world in forming sustained intimate relationships, at least for a period of time.  These are couples where, in spite of all the individualization, individuals are able to find their “other half”.  And it is exactly that.  Because there is little or no grounding in a template of organic community and a template of an organic living environment, people use their partner not only as a romantic and sexual partner, but as a point of secure grounding and a point of orientation to the world.  People are drawn to one another with the impelling force that they are normally drawn to the ground with gravity.  This is where you get into codependent relationships, where individuals have difficulty defining themselves apart from their partners.  The paradox is that you have overly defined individuals in modern technological society who are craving for intimacy and emotional grounding and who then have difficulty separating themselves from their partners psychologically once they get it.  And this is the problem that results when a person makes another person his only principal source of social groundedness.

In traditional society, individuals find emotional grounding in many different layers of family and community.  This alleviates the emotional intensity on the romantic partners.  But as families and communities crumble in modern technological society and couples find themselves without a support system, they cling to each other in the sensory distortion of the vacuum and static society.

Are there exceptions to this tendency towards codependency in intimate relationships today.  Yes, there are couples where there are partners who maintain a healthier distance emotionally from one another.  Usually, it is because they are capable of staying connected to larger families and communities that remain intact in spite of the sensory distortion in their environment.  There are individuals and groups that are psychological survivors in spite of the sensory distortion.

This is in contrast to all the people who are incapable of finding even a pathological form of intimacy, because one person doesn’t provide enough sensory variety for them in an environment deprived of organic stimuli.  And yet, for these people, it somehow works out perfectly on one level of survival.  The period of adolescent sexual experimentation gets extended backward into childhood and forward into young adulthood and beyond.  A person becomes a very young adolescent because of early sexual maturity and evolves into a very old adolescent because of increasing education and job training requirements.  So the craving for sensory diversity is satisfied as a result of changed biological and educational circumstances.  But the need to make, preserve and receive imprints remains increasingly unfulfilled, except, to some extent, among codependent couples, who lose their senses of self in the process of trying to make, preserve and receive imprints in an increasingly sensorily distorted living environment, and among some other couples who amazingly survive in healthy committed relationships.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow

Sexual Intimacy in a Non-Intimate Living Environment

It is hard to believe that I have been doing in-depth analysis of the effects of modern technology on human living environments and the effects of those transformed living environments on human behavior without discussing in any significant way the topic of sex.  Sex is important for this analysis, because it has acted as an impetus for technological transformation, and technology has had a profound effect on the practice of sex.

It is possible that some of my discussions of sex may prove to be disturbing to some people.  I do not present these ideas to purposely shock people, but rather because they fit into the larger picture I am trying to create of the harmful effects of sensory distortion in our living environments today.  To my way of thinking, modern sexual behavior is one of many seemingly disparate types of behavior being displayed today that are being influenced by a common global situation.

For the purposes of our discussion today, I am going to focus on heterosexual sex.  When I use the word “sex” for purposes of brevity in this essay, I will be referring to hetersoexual sex.  Homosexuality will be discussed at a later time.

Heterosexual sex represents the perfect combination of a process that simultaneously makes and preserves imprints.  In the process of making love, a man and a woman make experiential and sometimes emotional imprints on each other.  Sometimes sex leads to infatuation, and sometimes it forms a component of true love which can endure over time.  Sometimes sex leads to pregnancy which, as a one-two combination, represents nature’s most fundamental example of a process where making an imprint leads to a substantive fixed imprint.

There have been certain patterns to the attitudes towards sex in traditional societies.  In many societies, it was thought that premarital sex was important as a way to enjoy sex without responsibility and to develop sexual confidence and sexual technique.  These were societies where people experienced the organic environments surrounding them as an embracing grounding component in their lives.  In most cases, they were societies where internal self coherence was more important than external self definition.  One’s strength came from how one held oneself together within rather than how one presented oneself in a unique way in the external world.  Strong self coherence leads to feeling comfortable blending with others and participating in a strong collective imprint in a society.  In such a society, it was a way to promote a bonding of the community in which interchanging partners participated.

So sex is a multi-layer imprint experience.  In other societies in the past, any experience of sex was thought to leave by itself a fixed imprint every bit as lasting for the lovers involved as the sometime result of a baby.   These societies were composed of people trying to define themselves as figures to stand against the strong impelling influences of an organic grounded environment that these people experienced as predisposed to decay, rot and general  perishability and as threatening to swallow them up both physically and psychologically.  Sex was viewed as an interpersonal extension of their larger organic environment.  To these conservative societies, multiple sexual partners were perceived as diverse multiple imprints that threatened to take away a person’s self definition and his capacity to commit to any one partner.    In these societies, the first experience was considered to be an important indelible experience.  So if a continuing relationship was to be encouraged, the first contact was to be done within the context of marriage.

Still other societies vacillated back and forth between the attitudes of these two sexual postures: formally espousing no sex before marriage and yet allowing discreet premarital and even extramarital relationships.  And this is because people have been torn through history between the desire for being stimulated by making and receiving imprints with different partners and the desire to preserve imprints by creating a sexual exclusivity within a committed married couple.

Today, however, we are experiencing something uniquely different in the world of sexuality.  Sex today has become a strategy for helping people to survive the sensory distortion of modern technological society.  Another person’s body is one of the few organic surfaces left to feel organically connected to the external world.  And in our overpopulated world, there are multiple other bodies available in order to get the diversity of organic stimulation one would get in a forest, on a lake, in a flower garden or on a mountain.  Sex becomes a vehicle for obtaining a substitute communion with a larger organic external environment.  Sex becomes a vehicle for breaking out of laminated surfaces.

This is no longer about the premarital sex that occurs in certain tribes and traditional communities and that leads to a bondedness among group members and participation in the collective imprint of a generation.  Today’s sex tends to be a more desperate sex to feel organically alive.

            The development of the birth control pill and IUD has mad it much easier to separate the making imprint aspect of sex and the preserving imprint aspect of sex.  Heterosexual sexual activity has become severed from pregnancy activity.  In addition, these improved forms of contraception, which can be used to allow committed lovers and spouses to have sex without pregnancy, create the opportunity for individuals to engage in a totally uncommitted and almost anonymous “free love“.  People “hook up” with another person in order to get a shot of organic stimulation to fight sensory distortion.  Even HIV hasn’t slowed  this hooking up sexual activity down, as many people have reverted back to the use of condoms in addition to birth control pills and IUD’s to protect themselves against contraction of the disease, and many people take their chances with unprotected sex.  Sex has become an important aspect of emotional survival.

As people try to find the means to deal with the harmful psychological effects of sensory distortion, sex becomes a means to try and maintain an internal equilibrium.  Sex becomes a means to shock people out of the effects of the numbness in a vacuum and to isolate people from the sensory disruption that occurs in overstimulating places in the environment: the tension pockets.  All different forms of kinky sex are used to light the fire of life in people who feel less and less alive from the sensory distortion in their living environments.

In today‘s world, for men who have become impotent, science has created new drugs.  However, younger men who have no problem with sexual performance use these drugs to “enhance” sexual performance.  They are really using these drugs to deal with a psychologically-based general numbness.

As people are increasingly surrounded by an environment defined by mechanical and electronic processes, even their sexuality becomes impinged by mechanisms.  More and more people are turning to electronic sex toys to satisfy themselves.  One can even find sex toys that can be manipulated by another person at a distance.  One might ask what is wrong with using these if they provide pleasure and nobody gets hurt.  Taken by themselves, there seems to be nothing wrong with using these sex toys.  But within the larger picture, they represent one more aspect of our lives where we place a machine surface between us and other potential organic surfaces.  And cumulatively, the mirroring and modeling and leaching and blending effects of all these complex machines can be dangerous.  

The next step will be virtual reality sex, so that people can pull themselves entirely out of the distorted effects of modern technological environments into a vacuumized version of sex.  People will attach themselves to a machine where they experience virtual sex.  It will become sex with a  pseudo other person where the only person one really has to satisfy is oneself.  No necessity to be involved with imprints.  In such an environment, one is truly free of preoccupation with hurt feelings or lack of commitment.  One walks away satisfied, away from a sex object that doesn’t exist apart from one’s desires.

In an environment of sensory distortion, sexual activity is increasingly unconcerned with making or preserving individual or collective imprints.  There is little bonding between people without an organic template, and that is shrinking in today‘s world.  One hooks up with another person for a basic isolating physical satisfaction.

I realize that I have been dealing rather abstractly and mechanically with a subject that one is accustomed to hearing dealt with in more feeling intimate terms.  But that is precisely the point.  Even as sex is used as a defense against sensory distortion, aspects of the sensory distortion start to leach into sex.  And real intimacy becomes increasingly difficult with a  template of organic grounding that is shrinking.  In other words, there is a reason that newlyweds go to romantic resorts in beautiful settings for their honeymoons.  Romantic love and intimacy are enhanced by organic grounded environments.  Lovers can more easily make imprints surrounded by palm trees and sandy beaches and a deep blue sea.

c 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Individual Imprints and Group Imprints

In discussing the notions of making and preserving imprints, I have not focused enough on an important distinction regarding sources of imprints.  Some imprints are made by individuals and others are made by groups.  Some imprints are preserved by individuals and others by groups.  When an individual preserves an imprint as part of his preparation for death, it becomes part of his personal surrogate immortality.  This represents some of the imprints we have talked about like a book, a work of art, a planted tree, and a small business.  It also includes the memories he leaves with other people.  When a group preserves an imprint as part of its eventual preparation for death, the imprint becomes a part of its surrogate immortality.  Such imprints include a building, a mural, a dam, a family, a large business, a culture, and the memories it leaves with other groups and individuals.  Different kinds of mentality are needed to produce a personal surrogate immortality and a collective surrogate immortality.

A very good example of a group interested in preserving a collective surrogate immortality is the members of a traditional society, that want to preserve their culture and cultural artifacts.  In order to be able to do this, a specific kind of mentality has to be bred in these group members.  A traditional society is a group that is usually built on the continual stimuli from the grounding in a more organic environment.  The group is grounded in the environment and the individual members are grounded in the group.  The individual members have senses of self that are based on a strong sense of coherence to the group.  They are immersed in and surrounded by the continual stimuli of bondedness to the members of their family, their clan and all the other sub groups within their group as well as to the larger group itself.  The individual members of the group are allowed to differentiate themselves as individuals, but only up to a point.  For example, a crafts person is encouraged to make beautiful pieces of craft, but only within the confines of the categories of the structures and designs permitted within the culture.

Furthermore, an individual in a traditional group goes through life stages in his life cycle that flow into one another.  There is a unity to the life cycle.  A child sees the adults around him who model the roles he will assume.  He starts learning the general modalities of behavior that will lead into adulthood.  As an adolescent, he starts more actively learning, sometimes as a kind of apprentice, the adult role.  As an adult, he starts creating a place for himself in the community by getting married and forming a family, by working and by direct social participation in the community.  This place earns him the respect that allows him to grow into a revered old age, should he live that long.

Everything fits into place in order that the individual can participate in the coherent group imprints used to form the collective surrogate immortality.  The strength of a person’s sense of self in a traditional society is based more on self coherence rather than self definition.  There is some self definition, but it is a self definition which allows a person to play a particular role in the collective imprint being left by the society on the larger community field of experience.  In such a society, the danger for a person is that there is so much submersion in the group that there is not enough self definition.  The person doesn’t feel alive enough, because he doesn’t feel defined enough.  He feels too blurred in all ways to really be able to focus and think clearly and crisply.

One way a person in a traditional society can deal with such a danger is through the discrete stimulation of violence either directed towards others or towards himself.  Among the Plains Indians in the U.S., a young man sticks a bone or a wooden skewer through his chest in order to have a vision that will give him his unique male adult identity.  In some traditional societies, a man has proved his valor through different feats of war or perhaps through his skill in the hunt.  All these acts or tasks allow a man to give himself some self definition in a society and an environment that could potentially threaten to swallow him up.  There is an ongoing tension between the individual and the group.

In modern society, the focus has been on the individual, who is a free-floating figure along with all the other free-floating figures of people, animals, things and places, floating in the laminated vacuum and the tension pockets of modern technological environments.  The individual is in an environment of primarily discrete stimuli from the floating figures and continuous stimuli from the emptiness of the vacuum.  In today‘s world, a person with access to economic resources and opportunities is focused on creating and preserving a personal surrogate immortality.  This occurs as a result of the person unfolding his potential in different directions as much as possible.  As he grows up, he develops different capacities through school and additional lessons that give him a unique set of competencies.  For example, the person becomes a good trumpet player and makes the varsity baseball team at school.  He majors in mathematics as an undergraduate and then decides to go to law school, where he becomes a lawyer.  In addition, he goes to live in Italy for his junior year abroad, and visit’s a distant relative in South Africa for a summer after he graduates college.  During college, he has summer jobs at a sushi restaurant and as a  carpenter working on new homes.  I have perhaps exaggerated the quantity and diversity of life experiences of this hypothetical person to make a point.  A great diversity of life skills and life experiences leads to a unique self definition, but sometimes this very diversity leads to a kind of mental disjunction which I shal discuss shortly.

This is a very different set of developmental life experiences from a person in a traditional society.  The latter tends to stay in his community on the community land.  There are not a lot of highly individualized life experiences to have.  For the person in modern technological society, his whole life tends to be individual life experiences and a variety of life skills that mold the mind and body to leave unique imprints and a unique set of imprints in preparation for death.  And wheras the traditional society person worries about losing his sense of self to the large group, to other humans, the modern society person worries about holding together the different fragments of events, experiences and skills he has accumulated, and preventing his sense of self from breaking apart.  In other words, excessive self definition leads to self fragmentation.  It becomes harder and harder to integrate all the fragments of different life events, different life experiences and different life skills.  Unlike the traditional society person, the modern Western society person does not have to worry about loss of self from submersion in a group (unless he voluntarily joins a cult, in order to escape the vacuum.)  Instead the modern society person has to worry about loss of self to many self-fragments.

In effect, I am saying that an additional explanation for mental illness today - along with such other theories as dysfunctional families and chemical imbalances - is the sensory distortion of modern technological environments.  This latter influence leads people to experience themselves as isolated figures and eventually isolated fragments of figures.  The focus on the individual that started in the Renaissance in Europe evolves until eventually, the grounded community connection for a person withers away into relative insignificance, as the individual loses the the experiential glue that holds him together.  So it is not only the lack of organic experiential surfaces that makes it difficult for modern industrial people to leave the individual imprints that were so cherished in breaking away from traditional communities and collective surrogate immortalities.  It is the lack of a coherent impress or stamp from the self in making and preserving the individual imprints necessary for a personal surrogate immortality.

A healthy sense of self is based on a balance between internal coherence and external definition.  Perhaps, as one looks across the flow of human history, one can identify certain transitional periods in societies when there was an approximate balance between these two aspects of a sense of self.  Periods when technology was somewhat developed, but it had not yet taken over the whole landscape.  In the Western world,  such periods would probably be located some time between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.  As one looks across the flow of history, one can see that as the push for technological dominance over the environment has moved forward, such a  period of balance has not had favorable conditions for lasting very long.  In today’s world, the imbalance towards self definition is quite strong.  And in such a hypothetical transitional period, there would have been an opportunity to participate relatively equally in a collective surrogate immortality and in a personal surrogate immortality.  Preserving the imprints of the group that gives an individual his grounding as well as preserving his own imprints.  Such an opportunity definitely does not exist today.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow

Defenses Against Sensory Distortion

One important way that sensory distortion from modern technological environments affects our behavior is in the velocity of our activity.  By changing the velocity of our activity, we can create a self-generated field of stimuli that supplants the uncomfortable configuration of stimuli we are experiencing around us.  There are two principal ways we can generate this.  Both involve transformations of our will.  In other words, a transformation of an internal aspect of the mind leads to the transformation of the presentation of human activity.

The first way is one that I will call conative acceleration: the speeding up of the will.  One posture for a person in sensory distortion is to speed up the will and the activity it creates to such an extent that the stimuli from the activity prevents the experience of the sensory distortion in the external surroundings.  Why is it that people seem to be moving so quickly in crowded urban environments like Manhattan.  They are creating an intense level of stimuli by moving quickly, but it is a level of stimulation over which they have control.  It is an intense organic level of stimulation.  In truth, it is like an intense self-generated field of experience.  And the intensity from the accelerated stimuli blocks the sensory distortion from reaching the brain.
Now conative acceleration can be effective against two very different types of technological environments.  It can combat the sensory overstimulation of tension-pocket environments like crowded noisy urban neighborhoods.  In many modern corporations, employees are expected to be more productive than ever and work longer hours.  This attitude is the foundation of a psychological defense.  People have to fill their time all the time, slot every moment, in order not to experience the overstimulation on the streets below.

Another posture that people can take to deal with sensory distortion is numbing themselves and psychological withdrawing from their external surroundings.  This is done with meditation or using drugs like marijuana, sometimes with the support of mystical groups, and the people become very passive and calm themselves to float in reverie. This I will call conative anesthesia: the numbing of the will.  Rather than try to grapple with and suppress the sensory distortion as in conative acceleration, in conative anesthesia, the person withdraws from the sensory distortion in the external environment and into a world of alternate stimuli inside his  head.

Conative acceleration can also act as a defense against some of the dangerous effects of vacuum environments.  Although people like to think of vacuum environments as environments where figure and ground phenomena can be preserved indefinitely, there actually is a destructive danger present.  This danger is entropy.  Entropy is the tendency for matter to distribute randomly and uniformly in a physical vacuum.  So if you leave something in a vacuum for a long enough period of time, it starts to fall apart.  But this is a much more subtle long-term disintegration than perishability in grounded natural environments.  For humans, the psychological effect of entropy is the gradual crumbling of consciousness.  All sorts of weird things happen to people when they are placed in sensory deprivation chambers.  They start imagining things and hallucinating.  This is much like the mirages thirsty men have when they are lost in a North African desert - a natural environment that is very influenced by vacuum aspects.  Miles and miles of sand particles that don’t bond with one another and that create a scene with little grounded sensory variety and with no significant figure landmarks to the untrained eye except an occasional oasis.

As a defense against the overstimulation in tension-pocket environments, conative anesthesia and withdrawal is a way of removing oneself into a calming vacuum environment.  In the internal vacuum environment, the person can temporarily preserve his psychological integrity by partly shutting out all the abrasive static stimuli that impinge on his boundaries.  These stimuli continue to impinge to a certain extent on the person and, in a way, continue to connect him to the external environment.  Nevertheless, they are not able to disrupt the psychological integrity of the person, because the person is floating in his own internal psychological vacuum space.

Now we have previously talked about how vacuum external environments do involve the subtle dangers of entropy.  But entropy makes its presence strongly felt when one is in a vacuum environment for a long period of time.  Entropy is not as much of an issue during short periods of meditation.

Finally, some people assume a meditative vacuum posture as a defense against a primarily vacuum external environment.  The advantage of the meditative vacuum posture is that a person maintains his psychological integrity, because he or she is at least in control of his own vacuum.  The person has reduced the size of the vacuum in which he dwells to manageable proportions.

So are there any significant problems for people in assuming these postures.  Each of these postures has important side effects and consequences.  Conative acceleration is exhausting and wears us down.  Conative anesthesia is numbing in such a way that we somehow don’t feel fully alive and connected to the external world.  In both cases, people survive.  But without organic grounding in the external world and organic grounding in the internal world of the mind, there are no templates to allow a person to develop deep sustained intimacy with another person.

These postures allow individuals to survive as isolated units.  They are not very helpful for the sustenance of social connection.  When one is moving very fast, they are moving too fast to bond.  When they stop moving or move too slow, there is not enough energy to reach out and engage in bonding.  There is a reason for the high percentage of marriages that end in divorce today.  There is a rhythm to organic connectivity that is very difficult to maintain in modern technological environments.

Speeding up or numbing the will is conducive to survival today, but it is not conducive to making, receiving or preserving organic imprints.  This is true both because there are fewer organic surfaces on which to make imprints in our field of experience today, and because the velocity of our mental activity is such that we are too detached from our external field of experience, even if we wanted to make, receive and preserve imprints.  This is simply one more aspect of the way in which modern technological environments interfere with fundamental human needs.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow

Animals, Humans and Robots

As scientists and engineers continue working on the human-controlled evolution of robots, it becomes important to try and discover, if they exist, those aspects of people that are unique to them and that robots can never imitate.  This is particularly important today, because for some of the creators of robots, one gets the feeling that they are playing God in the evolution of a new race of robots that will be everything humans are already and, in some ways, even superior to humans.  This is shown by the scientists and engineers who create robots to do things that imitate human behavior but that aren’t intrinsically in the service of humans like playing chess or having basic conversations.  In truth, even with regard to those robots that are created just to serve humans, the robots may be inadvertently moving into experiential territories that diminish the uniqueness of humans.  For instance, robots who take care of older people.  This is why an attempt has to be made to develop a conceptual firewall that will keep robots out.

To do this, I would like to work with two conceptual frameworks that have appeared previously in my writings.  First, there is the theme of configurations of stimuli and phenomena.  At this point, I would like to review two models I’ve used in the past.  Grounded phenomena are phenomena that tend to blend with other phenomena: water, clay, earth, lava, grasslands.  Figures tend to have defined boundaries and tend not to blend with other phenomena.  Any distinct object, plant, animal or person fits this category.  Vacuum is the spaces between different figure and ground phenomena.

Continual stimuli are stimuli with indeterminate borders and with blurry beginnings and endings: a wave, a legato sound from an organ, the taste of chocolate, the smell of perfume on a woman.  Discrete stimuli are stimuli with determinate borders and with crisp beginnings and endings: a line, a dot, a staccato sound from a drum, a puff of air.  Continuous stimuli are stimuli with no beginning and no end.  The total darkness in an unlit basement and the soft hum in total silence are examples of continuous stimuli.

Animals are figures that are still highly connected to their grounded environment.  Their minds operate on the basis of a relatively few instinctual determinate discrete stimuli and a lot of intermingled indeterminate continual stimuli that produce gross responses.  Domesticated animals operate on the basis of more discrete stimuli than their wild relatives as a result of human training.

Now some people at this point might wonder where I have the evidence for these statements.  Basically I am postulating the existence of a kind of stimuli that are not subject to the precise study, measuement, classification and control that determinate crisp stimuli are.  Scientific studies have difficulty working with indeterminate stimuli.   Science tends to look at anything blurry as somehow not real and substantive.  Blurry is perceived as a deficient focus on the world.  When it can, science will convert blurry stimuli and ground phenomena into crisp stimuli and figures, and in doing so, it distorts them.  But as long as we experience blurry stimuli, frequently in the process of trying to make a precise focus, then they have real and substantive value.

Returning to animal minds, my map is based on soft empiricism and inference.  Animals do have structured behavior, but not of the complexity of humans.  Humans, with their cerebral cortex, balance the continual stimuli they experience as animals with many more discrete stimuli.  Humans use the discrete stimuli they experience in the world and in their minds to build an environment filled with a lot of figures and defined surfaces.  As human history unfolded, humans developed the increasingly complex figures of industrial machines, computers and robots as well as the hard laminated surfaces of modern technological living environments.  They became increasingly surrounded by sources of discrete stimuli rather than the natural grounded sources of continual stimuli necessary to activate and keep alive their more primitive fundamental animal nature.  For humans, unlike animals, are not so immersed in the grounded phenomena of nature and the continual stimuli it produces. They rise above nature and become more distinct from it than animals.  And yet unlike robots, they do have a grounded base, they are still partly activated by blurry continual stimuli.  Robots are activated by mechanical discrete stimuli.  Granted that there are attempts today to combine robot parts with biological parts, it is still important to note that the robot parts are still operated by complex mechanical signals that at their base are still discrete signals.

The other conceptual framework within which I want to work for distinguishing humans from robots is the framework of imprint theory and purposes for existence.  Just as the cerebral cortex of humans allows them to focus on and create more figures and discrete stimuli, so it allows humans to be conscious of their own mortality and to prepare for death by preserving a lot of the imprints they make.  Animals can leave imprints in very basic ways like having offspring and marking their territory.  But this pales beside the complex imprints made and preserved by humans.  Humans create complex cultures, societies and civilizations.  They create art, artifacts, monuments, ideas and the means for preserving these ideas in tangible form.  Humans create preserved imprints and they create vessels for containing and protecting these preserved imprints like museums, galleries, libraries and archives.  But the important thing to remember is that all these preserved imprints start from vulnerable human imprints that are made by the human mind sometimes initially to feel richly alive and sometimes directly to prepare for death.  There is an organic beginning to these imprints and a human mental beginning to these imprints.

And part of the content of these imprints is the continual stimuli emanating from the structural coherence in the mind that allows the imprints to have meaning.  The very notion of an imprint as opposed to simply a mark implies a mind that coheres together because of internal continual stimuli.  Because robots are activated by discrete stimuli, the foundation of engineering, they really leave marks rather than imprints.  In previous essays, I have talked about robots leaving imprints, but I was only talking within such perameters to emphasize that a particular mark was made by robots rather than humans.  But, in truth, robots make marks on their external world, while humans make imprints.  As complex as robots get,  their mechanical robot parts will never have the human base of continual stimuli to give them consciousness and an unconscious, and the blurry dreams that lead to concrete plans that lead to the development of complex imprints in society, culture and civilization.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow

The Purpose of Work in Modern Technological Society

What is the purpose of work?  The answer may seem obvious, but maybe work is more than what it seems to be in modern industrial society.

The answer for most people in modern industrial society would be to make a living so that they can survive economically.  By surviving economically, I mean to produce goods or services, so that one can survive materially.  There are people who enjoy their career, but for most people today, their life is where their work is not.  Sometimes, they have to work constantly simply in order to survive, and therefore have little or no “life“.  Whether it is some of the time or all the time, work for modern industrial people is mostly to make a living.

Nevertheless, I would say that there are other equally important purposes that are not being satisfied for most people in today’s industrial world.  First, there is work as a vehicle for rich vibrant experiences.  In the old days, work provided the opportunity for a person to engage the world in stimulating ways.  This was possible because there were a lot of experiential surfaces available for organic imprints.  In saying this, I am aware that life could be nasty and brutish for many as, for example, peasants confronted a multitude of hazards from the socio-political environment as well as natural environment.  In terms of the natural environment, the grounding of nature contained a lot of partly differentiated figures like wild animals, poisonous plants, diseases and dangerous weather and geological phenomena as well as difficult rocky terrain that could make life difficult.

But even with these problems, work closer to nature had rich vibrant experiences intermixed with the dangerous ones which allowed a person to feel intensely alive.  Engaging with the external natural world generates wonderful feelings that are not reducible to anything else.

Work has also provided the opportunity to prepare for death.  In preliterate societies, many sacred artifacts are passed on from generation to generation.  My home town, Chicago, was known for having a totem pole from the Northwest Coast Indians on the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Canada.  It was in a park, and it was a landmark where many young people used to gather.  However, it was a sacred totem pole, and the tribe wanted it back.  Chicago very graciously gave the totem pole back to the tribe, and the tribe gave Chicago a new less valuable totem pole to replace it.  The older totem pole was a sacred artifact, a preserved imprint, that the tribe wanted to keep.  Many civilizations have produced all kinds of preserved imprints:  monuments, castles, churches, buildings, works of art, written music, books, written law, constitutions, and roads.  These involved work that went beyond present economic survival.

For Americans, like other modern pioneer peoples with a Protestant work ethic, work became a mixture of economic survival, rich vibrant experiences  and a strong desire to prepare for death.  Americans enjoyed the experience of engaging with their physical surroundings.  But while they experienced the rich vibrant experiences engaging with their surroundings, Americans wanted to conquer the surroundings and be transcendent over them.  In the process, many of the organic imprints that were made in the rich vibrant experiences, were also fixed in a photographic sense or preserved.  As America evolved, it became very successful at developing technology to help it preserve the imprints it made.

Like making imprints, preserving imprints is a distinct purpose from economic survival.  People like to know that some of their work efforts will remain in some form, even after they, the people, perish.  Work has been a major vehicle for preparing for death.

During the early years, Americans engaged with the basic materials of the world like more traditional peoples and made durable things with tools as carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, weavers and potters.  But as they have evolved, Americans have been so successful at preserving imprints, creating whole technological living environments, that it is more and more difficult to find organic surfaces to act as templates for future rich vibrant experiences.  And there are fewer opportunities for leaving meaningful preserved imprints.

We are left with the idea of work for financial survival.  Factory workers work with industrial machines; office workers work all the time with computers.  Factory workers provide mass produced, machine imprinted products.  Office workers work with preconfigured formulaic contracts and forms to provide impersonal services.  Making as much money as possible through products and services becomes a substitute for the lack of rich vibrant experiences and lack of opportunities to leave meaningful imprints.  And actually those people who do a lot of their work on computers take their office with them when they leave their office.  Or else their computers simply become their offices.  So they never have to leave work.  And there is little to life beyond this work.

But because it is work primarily for economic survival and not for making and preserving organic imprints, it is work that is depleting rather than reenergizing.  And it is work that exists outside of a meaningful life cycle that focuses on patterns of making and preserving imprints.

One other angle from which to examine modern work: because modern work is not very involved with making or preserving imprints and because it involves intimate interaction with machines and computers that mirror and model for humans, modern work tends to convert humans into robots.  We deal with the ungrounded, free-floating figures of machines and computers in the experiential vacuum of modern technological living environments.  We deal with the free-floating figures of tons of discrete defined data within the vacuum of a computer screen and with a lack of a larger cognitive context for this data.  It is these ongoing technological experiences that lead people to think of themselves as being “wired” like machines.  And the machine becomes the model for how we view our mental and physical organization as humans within the framework of science.  And we become more what we think we are.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow

Mirroring and Modeling in Modern Technological Society

An important theme in the history of Western Civilization has been the increasing domination over natural environments through technological development.  This flow of improving forms of technology not only enables humans to rise above and separate themselves from the perishability caused by wild animals, poisonous plants, diseases and climatological and geological catastrophes, it also allows humans to pull themselves away from the inadvertent mirroring and modeling that occurs with the interaction with natural phenomena and, in particular, with wild animals.

By mirroring, I am referring to how different natural phenomena reflect back certain characteristics that a person then sees in himself.  By modeling, I am referring to how a phenomenon, through certain characteristics acts as an idealized version of what a person aspires to be consciously or unconsciously through emulation.  Both of these terms are customarily used in modern psychodynamic psychology to refer to relationships that an individual has with parental figures.  The focus is on how parental figures mirror a person and how parental figures act as models or are turned into models for a person.  But I feel that a controlling psychological influence can issue from any powerful phenomenon, even when a person thinks he is standing apart from it.  The influence leaches out, even from phenomena held at arms length.  As long as the phenomenon has a sustained presence in the person’s experiential neighborhood and has active complex processes, it can end up being a mirror and/or a model.  This is true for phenomena like animals, natural climactic and geologic phenomena, and complex machines.  It is also true of subject peoples or individuals who can have a very strong indirect influence of mirroring and modeling on the dominant peoples or individuals.  A subject person can be a very good analogy for a “subject” machine that also caters to the wishes of its master.

Anyway, people in traditional organic environments naturally became and aspired to become like the natural phenomena that surrounded them.  In most cases, these natural phenomena represented potential dangers.  By incorporating some of the traits of these natural phenomena, people could then protect themselves against the dangers.  The people would end up having their own strengths as well as the strengths of their adversaries.  The incorporation of these phenomena occurred through religious practices:  animals were anthropomorphized into totems who protected clans within tribes.  In some early civilizations still close to nature like Babylonia and Egypt, animals were combined with human beings to become gods.  Various inanimate natural phenomena were anthropomorphized into deities in Babylonia and Egypt as well as other polytheistic religions like those of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Norse.  The sun, the moon, the sea, the sky, agriculture, thunder, the earth among others were all incorporated into the gods of these polytheistic religions.  To the extent that these phenomena mirrored people, it was as if certain traits naturally leached into people’s minds and behavior.  To the extent that natural phenomena were models for people, people aspired consciously or unconsciously to become more like certain traits of certain phenomena in their living environments.

As Western cultures industrialized and modernized, people from them looked at people from certain more traditional cultures as “savages” - people who were still immersed in living environments with wild animals and other potentially dangerous phenomena, and who, to survive, had seemed to take on some traits of these potentially dangerous phenomena.  According to people in the West, “savages” were not people who had evolved into a more culturally transcendent state where they could hold themselves away from the seemingly wild uncontrollable phenomena that surrounded them.

So “civilized” Westerners became more and more separated by their increasingly technologized living environments from the leaching influences of the dangerous phenomena from traditional organic environments.  In terms of my previous models, these phenomena could be categorized as incipient figures: figures rising into differentiation from the undifferentiated and undifferentiating aspects of a natural environment that swallowed up perishable phenomena through decay and rot.  Violence was a way by which many people in traditional preindustrial organic environments could psychologically separate themselves to some extent from organic living environments that threatened to swallow them up.  Violence is sharp and direct and focuses the mind and makes it more defined.  It was a way that humans could imitate some of the totem wild animals and anthropomorphized natural phenomena and create strong psychological boundaries and fight perishability.  The irony is that “civilized” people have continued to behave with agression and violence but in more mediated ways.  As modern technological society continues to move people away from natural environments, guns and bombs allow people to express the violence of animals but in more transcendent ways.  The influences of animals and machines come together here as we transition to a more and more technologized society.

In modern technological living environments, humans have succeeded in separating themselves, to a great extent, from the ongoing perishable tendencies found in traditional organic living environments.  They live in sanitized environments with laminated surfaces free from decay and rot.  They no longer have wild animals present except in zoos, and most dangerous natural phenomena like lightning and floods are kept at a mediated psychological distance from most people.  Earthquakes and hurricanes are somewhat the exceptions, but modern technological cleanup and rebuilding responses are relatively swift and thorough.  Today, people feel fairly safe from natural danger in their technological evnironment.

But there are the dangers that we have discussed related to sensory distortion.  These are the new dangers that people have to deal with in modern technological environments.  And just as people would identify with totemic animals and anthropomorphized natural phenomena to survive in traditional organic environments and use mirroring and modeling to do this, today people are unconsciously beginning to identify with modern complex machines - computers and robots - to survive the dangers of modern technological environments.  Modern complex machines mirror and act as totemic models for humans.  Computers, smart phones, and video games.  According to Dr. Jorge Cappon, a well-known psychoanalyst in Mexico City and professor emeritus at the UNAM, we surround ourselves with different brands and different models that correspond to different totemic animals.  For example some people swear by Macs, others by P.C.’s.

And as we immerse ourselves in these different consumer machines, we begin to take on the traits we experience in them.  We think we have control over them, but through our interactions with them, they indirectly shape us.  The influence from them leaches out.

Just as before in traditional living environments, there are phenomena that reshape us into becoming not-fully human beings.  In the traditional living environments, there was the threat that we would imitate too much the animals and other natural phenomena that filled our environment.  There was the threat that we would become wild and unregulated.  Today, the problem is that we are imitating too much the computers, robots and other high technology phenomena that surround us now.  And as long as we regularly interact with such phenomena, their influence will continue to leach out.  Instead of being wild and unregulated, today the threat is of our becoming numb and remote and losing our social connection to other people.  Computers and industrial machines make it possible for people to be available for work 24/7.  We get drawn into the rhythms of the technology that surrounds us and with which we interact.  We move in pace with the discrete well-defined processes that require our involvement to complete tasks.  Today, instead of having to worry about sliding into becoming “savages”, we have to worry about becoming androids or cyborgs.  And society is not providing a concerted effort to break the slide in any way.

c 2011 Laurence Mesirow