Why It's Hard To Keep Your Head Together These Days

Why does it really matter if people become more robotized?  What ramifications does it have in terms of their ability to survive?  The truth is that becoming robotized affects people’s states of mind, relationships and behavior in such a way that they and the groups they are in are impacted in a very negative way.  And the most important aspect within the process of robotization that affects people is the ongoing loss of organic blendable continual stimuli in people’s minds.  As a result of this loss, people don’t have the means to hold their senses of self together very easily any more.  People in modern technological society tend to break up into fragments of self, which means they have several different presentations of themselves to the people in their lives.  There is less and less meaningful cohesion in the way they present themselves, because there is less and less coherence in their senses of self.  Rather than feeling like an organic whole, it is as if people today felt like a series of parts that are contingently held together by different fasteners that could be easily removed.  And it is not individual parts that make a person a unique organic entity.  Even if a person has a unique creative gift, that unique gift has to be fed by the experiences that are had by the rest of the self in order to have the material for special creation. 

And more and more  today, people  have to work very had trying to hold themselves together psychologically and trying to prevent themselves from falling apart.  They go to talk therapy, both individual and group, and take medications to deal with the symptoms that create the suffering they are experiencing.  Working so hard to hold themselves together can lead to a need to isolate in order to be able to do it.  At such times, socializing with others can be a great effort.  In a vulnerable state of working on fragmentation, socializing can lead to a sense of losing oneself while trying to relate to others.

And the fragments fight for dominance within each person, having difficulty living with each other.  In a world of fragmented experience with a lot of complex fragmenting mechanical entities - machines, computers and robots - that have no core self, people have a lot of unrelated experiences, develop a lot of unrelated skills, and become a series of unrelated presentations of their senses of self.

Each presentation is comfortable in very different life situations with very different kinds of people.  In such a situation, to form a sustained intimate relationship with another human being means suppressing some of these presentations of self, some of these fragments of the person.  And yet because there is no natural arrangement of dominance among these presentations of self, the suppression can’t and doesn’t last forever.  As other presentations of self arise to the surface of consciousness, the relationships establish by the first presentation under consideration suddenly seem incompatible, inappropriate or boring.  The intimate attachments are broken, and the person tries to find new people with whom to establish closeness.  New people that are more in accord with the new presentation of self that has attained dominance.  This process is repeated over and over as different highly figured fragments of the person rise to dominance.  Eventually, the person begins to realize that nobody really seems to fit with him, and he gives up the search for strong connections.  He lives with shallow interchangeable connections to others.  And mostly isolates.

A robot is not built to create and achieve the strong-bonded connections with others that are the foundation of friendship, marriage, family, tribe, community, and nation.  And without these connections, none of us has a special place in human society.  All of us are simply like interchangeable parts, the kind one would order from a catalog to fix a machine.

In an age when terms like self-actualization are used to describe the inner journey taken by a person who doesn’t have to spend all his time worrying about economic survival, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that we are not at the end of this journey meant to be alone.  If our self-actualization leads to such excessive self-definition and such excessive fragmentation into different personas that we are incapable of forming deep-bonded relationships with other people, then something is fundamentally wrong with our life journey.  Robots are fragmented data, fragmented functions, specific events in the external world without organic experience to unify them into a meaningful narrative.  Robots don’t bond with other robots or with people, because they lack the organic blendable continual stimuli to hold themselves together and to hold the encounters they have with people and with other robots together in continual relationships.

Without continual stimuli, there is no sense of self.  Without continual stimuli, there is no consciousness.  There is no making, receiving and preserving of imprints. There are no rich vibrant experiences, and there is no meaningful preparation for death.

We speak of doing things “mechanically”, which means doing things without feeling and without purpose.  When we live life doing things “mechanically” most of the time, life becomes a living death.  We just move forward in life with our empty actions, because if we didn’t we would be living in total numbness. I have talked of process-oriented violence, violence in which a person engages in order to pull himself out of numbness.  But on a less dramatic level, people, can live a process-oriented life: a life where there are no meaningful goals and where a person simply goes through through the motions of life in order to feel barely alive.

So becoming robotized really is a serious threat to confront.  Becoming robotized becomes a subtle process for killing a person’s spirit.  And to the extent that we continue to immerse ourselves in all of the different devices of consumer technology that are available, we are endangering ourselves.  Sometimes, there is not a close temporal relationship between cause and effect in the life processes in which we engage.  The robotizing that I am talking about does not occur all at once immediately after the use of a consumer technological device.  It occurs gradually over time, after the sustained use of several devices.  As a result, most people do not establish a mental connection between the sustained use of several consumer devices and becoming more like a robot.  But it is there.  And it is the kind of situation that has to be acted upon before a person completely loses his human dimension.  It is like an illness that doesn’t demonstrate a lot of meaningful symptamology until it is already in an advanced stage.

And, in particular, the people who are most in danger of losing their human essence are the young people.  They are the ones growing up, who have never known a time when they weren’t immersed in consumer technological devices.  Already we some effects.  Kids sitting together using their their smart phones rather talking to each other.  Incapacity to commit in marriage, as the percentage of the population that is married continues to fall.  Incapacity of both employer and employee to commit to a long-term work relationship.  In the United States, a country with a lot of robotizing influence from all of its consumer technological devices, an increasing number of mass killings by young people who simply strike out in process-oriented violence.  In my opinion, immersion in consumer technological devices has a great deal to do with mass killings like the horrible killing of twenty students and six adults at Sandy Point Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  And if my idea is right, then unfortunately the violence will continue, until the lives of children are somehow dramatically reshaped.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this transformation will occur any time in the near future.

© 2013 Laurence Mesirow

Storm Clouds Over Technologyland

    Perhaps sometimes I talk about organic natural environments in excessively positive terms.  This is because I feel the increasing loss of such environments has led to the development of sensory distortion which has, in turn, had such a pernicious effect on human mental health and human behavior.  Human beings are built for the configuration of stimuli that occurs in these organic environments, and have not evolved as fast as the living environments they have been transforming.  The increasing evolution of human surroundings into our modern technological living environments has resulted in environments that are alternately understimulating and overstimulating for the human nervous system.  In addition, through the screens of digital technology, the sensory configurations are such that, in their lack of organic blendable continual stimuli, they stimulate a person to behave in a robotic way.

    In fairness, grounded environments have never been pure ground and have always had partially developed figure elements that violently try to establish their boundaries apart from the ground.  This includes climactic figures like thunderstorms and hurricanes, geological figures like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and wild animals.  Perishability does not just always mean gradual decay.  Sometimes it stings.  These aggressive modalities of perishability certainly acted as strong motivators to push people to build transcendent technological living environments to protect them against the dangers they perceived.

    People have been developing increasing levels of what they perceive as technological environment protection.  This has given them a sense of security, a feeling that they can withstand whatever aggressive expressions of nature that may present themselves as well as the fundamental decay that is a constant natural process.  However, something has begun to happen in nature that was not present previously in human history and that could significantly upset the power balance between human technology and nature.  I am talking about what has been variously called global warming and climate change.  There has been a significant increase in aggressive climactic events as well as accelerated evolutionary climactic changes.  More aggressive hurricanes.  More aggressive tornadoes.  The melting of the ice caps at the North and the South Poles.  The rising of sea level such that many islands and shorelines are threatened.  More heat waves and droughts.  In general, a warming of the planet such that ecosystems are being greatly disturbed.

    So how does this fit into the philosophical model that has been unfolding through all of my articles?  On a most fundamental level, it means that the partially developed climactic figures in organic environments, like the hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, etc., are breaking away more completely from their attachments to organic grounding, from their participation in more conventional weather patterns, and becoming more free-floating figures, figures that wreak unusually terrible damage on human living environments.  This results not only in the damaging of technological artifacts and technological living environments that have evolved and been superimposed over nature.  It also means wreaking terrible havoc on those patches of organic natural grounding that remain.  In other words, nature as well as those more organic traditional human communities that remain are significantly degraded as a result of the free-floating figures of very aggressive climactic phenomena.

    In addition, organic grounding itself is changed as a result of climate change.  In some ways, it begins to more aggressively move towards swallowing up the figures of humans and other organisms that live within its boundaries.  The rise of water levels from the warming of the ocean water and from the melting of the ice caps threatens to swallow up the homes of people who live on islands in the oceans. 

    Furthermore, some organic grounded environments are turned into experiential vacuums for humans.  Unusually severe droughts are impeding the growth of life on a lot of farmland.  And the melting of the ice cap in the Arctic Circle means the destruction of a complex ecosytem that affects the food supply of Eskimos among others.  So the new environment is a vacuum for Eskimos who are used to relating to a living environment that is covered with ice and that has animals that are intimately connected with such an environment and that provide food for humans.

    As climates shift all over the planet, the organic grounding is destroyed, particularly for humans in traditional cultures and for most animals and vegetation.  To the extent that traditional cultures have evolved for hundreds or even thousands of years in particular ecosystems, to the extent that climate change can drastically alter a particular ecosystem, the new ecosystem becomes an experiential vacuum for a traditional people.  Of course, it is also true for other animals and plants that can’t survive easily outside of a particular ecosystem.  So there is a loss of organic grounding for humans, other animals and plants, even if nature is simply significantly changed and not destroyed.

    Traditional humans develop beliefs and myths based on relationships they have developed with particular ecosystems.  When these ecosystems are drastically changed, the beliefs and myths are no longer based on natural referent points that actually occur in physical reality for these people.  In effect, when modern technology creates such significant changes in natural environments, it is like nature is expelling humans from a strong grounded intimate connection.  And then humans end up floating in a climactic experiential vacuum.  It is a climactic experiential vacuum filled with the tension pockets of the catastrophic climactic events like super strong hurricanes, tornadoes, and storms.

    Such dramatic climate change can act by itself as a significant factor in the destruction of traditional cultures that is occurring today, and although this climate change does not destroy modern cultures that are based to a great extent on modern technology, it does nevertheless have a significant effect on the people who inhabit modern technological living environments.

    If nothing else, it creates a significant setback for the belief that humans can create totally transcendent living environments through modern technology that are truly impervious to the process of perishability that is part of the organic environments over which the modern technological environments are superimposed.  The exploited and repressed organic environments are, in a sense, striking back and no longer acting so much like safe nurturing grounding. 

    One partial solution is to find a way of preserving those aspects and patches of organic living environments that remain and recreate more aspects and patches where possible.  In particular, we should start developing more ways like alternative fuels that cultivate our relationship with organic grounding rather than simply exploit it in a damaging way.  We can only hope that there is still time to undo some of the damage that has been done.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Machines That Surround A Robot

    In the process of studying the influence of modern technological devices on human behavior and thinking, particularly in the area of consumer technology, I have focused on the relationship of individual humans to individual technological devices.  What is the effect of sustained interaction of a person with a single television or computer or smartphone?  More precisely, what is the pattern of influence of a single television or computer or smartphone on humans?  I have tried to show how each  television, computer or smartphone screen is a world unto itself, that sucks a person in and influences a person through the mediated experience provided.  That mediated experience establishes a relationship between human and complex machine such that the complex machine is dealt with in some way similar to another human.  Two mental processes that occur among humans unfold in this man and complex machine relationship: mirroring and modeling.  Through these processes with complex machines, humans are subtly reconfigured to become more and more like the complex machines with which they are interacting.

    What I didn’t take into consideration is the effect of being surrounded by a whole field of experience filled with different consumer technological devices: televisions, computers, smartphones, iPads, video games, digital cameras…..the list goes on and on.  With so many different consumer technological devices being produced, people are buying more and more devices and spending more and more time in front of a screen.  With so many different consumer technological devices, one can spend practically the whole day shifting from one technological device to the next without engaging the external world through primary experience for any significant period of time.  It is my belief that there is a synergistic effect that occurs from experiencing all these different devices serially, and this effect is different from just the intense focus on engaging just one device for a long period of time.

    In previous articles, I have discussed how complex technological devices impact humans as a result of two processes: mirroring and modeling.  In mirroring, a person sees himself reflected through the conduct of a complex technological device.  The behavior of the device is actually controlled by the manipulation of the person through the discrete focused stimuli that he generates.  Nevertheless, to the extent that the person sees the machine accommodating itself under his direction, he then absorbs the perception of the machine as something that reflects who he is.

    In modeling, the person actively tries to imitate the clean angular efficient activity of the machine.  The computer and other complex technological devices are perceived as entities that get things done along an efficient linear path.  There are all kinds of corporate models today for doing work in an efficient linear manner and for urging units of people to operate like machines.

    In these particular situations, mirroring occurs during engagement with the machine, while modeling occurs after engagement with the machine.  Mirroring comes from a more immediate sensory connection while modeling comes from a more mediated cognitive connection.  Nevertheless, in both of these cases, the impact of the consumer technological device comes from the direct one-to-one encounter with the device in the external world.

    It is not that I am now dismissing the impact of mirroring and modeling in those situations where a person engages with just one of these devices.  Particularly, with computers, there is a lot of of focused one-to-one interaction, where mirroring and modeling can be a strong conduit for technological influence on a person.  And yet, nowadays, a person is surrounded by so many different devices- many smaller and more mobile - that he spends way more time engaged with a screen than with an environment in the external world.  And because of this, on one level, all these screens together have a cumulative effect that is different from the one-to-one effect of mirroring and modeling with a single screen.  This is something that I didn’t take sufficiently into consideration when I first started writing my articles.

     I have also discussed how computers and other modern digital devices neutralize, to some extent,  the effects of sensory distortion in the external world as a result of mixing together  the vacuum continuous stimuli and the discrete figure stimuli that are found in vacuum and tension pocket environments.  This is done in order to create island worlds of relatively stable configurations of stimuli on which to focus so as not to have to suffer from sensory deprivation and sensory overstimulation in the external world.  A person is drawn to one of these island worlds of experience and, in the process of engaging with one of these technological devices, he is drawn into a mirroring and modeling relationship with it.

    But my whole model so far has been built on the construct of a person engaging with only one significant technological device.  In truth, most people who were engaging with a computer were also engaging with a television and a movie screen.  A significant portion of them, primarily young people, were also engaging with video games.  And then smartphones and iPads came along.  And of course, although I haven’t discussed them up until now, I should really consider the technological devices involved with audio fields of experience: radio, phonograph, cassette player, CD player, MP3 player.  So people have all of these different consumer technological devices to engage them and draw them out of primary experience in the external world.

    It is my belief that all of these mediated fields of experience fuse together in the mind and form one wraparound field of mediated experience filled with defined discrete stimuli and vacuum continuous stimuli, and this wraparound configuration of stimuli reprograms a person’s mental processes and subtly contributes to robotizing him.  The reason for the fusion is that it is simply difficult to keep all the different screens or audio fields of experience compartmentalized and separate from one another as distinct mental images for an indefinite period of time.  And even if the modern external world is filled with defined discrete stimuli and vacuum continuous stimuli as a result of modern technology, that which keeps a human mind coherent is blendable organic continual stimuli.  In this case, the blendable organic continual stimuli of the mind act as a kind of glue to fuse the images of the different consumer technological devices together.  These fused images then function as a very imperfect secondary internalized layer of grounding.  Granted that it is not as stable as real grounding in a more organic living environment in the external world, it nevertheless begins to provide a mental backdrop from which human behavior can proceed.  This represents a technological influence on human behavior that is different from the mirroring and modeling that comes from focused one-to-one interaction between say a human and a computer.  This wraparound influence is more subtle and comes from the fact that manufacturers are making a greater and greater variety of consumer technological devices and more and more consumers are buying more and more of these different devices.  The bundle of devices in a person’s life become a backdrop for the way life is processed.  It is as if in a person’s mind, the person can perceive many of these consumer technological devices with an internal peripheral vision, while focusing on one main subject device.   

    As a result of having an increasing number of consumer technological devices, a person becomes more and more likely to simply pass his life going from one screen and/or technologically-created audio field of experience to the next, while, at the same time, spending less and less time directly and fully engaging the external world through primary experience.  Although a person uses these devices one at a time, they are all everpresent in his mind, where the continual stimuli of the mind blur them together.  And this becomes a different kind of robotizing influence on the person apart from mirroring and modeling.

    One obvious way to get rid of this robotizing influence is very simply not to use so many consumer technological devices.  And to make sure that one spends significant periods of time during the day in primary experience in the external world.  We are all being seduced by marketing to buy constantly new devices and new models of devices that carry out more and more processes in more and more mobile formats.  So we never have to be away from the screen or technologically-created audio field of experience.  And this of course is where the problem lies.  It takes a lot of discipline and will power to break away from all of these different screens and technologically-created audio fields of experience sometimes.  But it is necessary if one wants to retain one’s humanity.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Contamination Of Traditional Cultures By Modern Technology

    Through the course of my articles, I have used different metaphors to describe the way that modern technological entities like computers, smartphones and robots impact on humans.  I have discussed how these technological creations seem to occupy the role of totems for people in modern society, being placed in the position of entities with complex behavior that people consciously or unconsciously strive to emulate.  People look to these devices for traits that will help them, the people, to survive in modern technological society.  It is not that humans formally make totemic emblems of computers, smartphones and robots, but that they look on computers, smartphones and robots with a kind of reverence, thinking of them as entities that extend the range of their skills, and thinking of the commercial brands particularly of computers and smartphones as quasi-tribal definers of humans.  People who own the newest Apple iPad are to a great extent a group apart not only from conventional computer users, but also even from people who own older iPad models.  Each new iPad model creates new features that create improved worlds of digital events that people with other computer devices can’t share.  People with similar technological devices can share stories about them and discuss attributes and problems.

    I have also discussed modern technology from a psychodynamic point of view, exploring the way in which the complexity of the behavior of these devices leads to their being models for conduct by users who spend so much time with them.  Not only do these devices become models to be imitated, but they also become mirrors in which people see themselves in the behavior that they perceive in these technological entities.  Again, as with totems, these psychodynamic terms represent ways in which people consciously or unconsciously are influenced in their behavior to imitate computers, smartphones and robots, whether or not this imitation is something that improves the person’s behavior or his sense of self.

    As has  been previously stated in other articles, there are humans who resist the influence of the technological entities that surround them.  These are usually people who come from traditional cultures with strong organic grounding, and they experience the rigid behavioral patterning that comes from interaction with modern machines as well as the loss of organic surfaces on which to make, receive and preserve imprints as something foreign to their way of life.  As these traditional people did not participate in the evolutionary flow of technological change, they did not have the opportunity to make the significant psychological changes necessary to adapt to this evolving technology.  These people use this technology in different ways today (cell phones, for example), but it is disconnected from the flow of the rest of their lives.  And, as has been pointed out previously, for many of them, the frictionlessness that this technology brings is psychologically castrating and provokes reactions of violence.

    These traditional people have not had time to psychologically protect themselves against the changes this modern technology brings to their lives.  Insofar as these people want to stay grounded in their traditions and don’t necessarily want to evolve into good members of modern technological society, this modern technology is a kind of foreign predator that threatens to contaminate their culture and their lives.  The technology entered their lives too rapidly; it was added to their lives through the strong influence of the dominant technological society that surrounded them.  And so these traditional people didn’t have the opportunity to evolve rules of avoidance, of taboo, with regard to these machines, particularly the devices of consumer technology.

    For a time, there were some people in traditional cultures in the Third World who did try to resist on some levels the ways of modern industrial society.  These were people who sensed the consequences that would result from adopting the technological customs of modern industrial society.  And yet their resistance proved to be a losing cause.  Technological incorporation began with Native Americans when they started using the guns of the white man.  And that, of course, was just the beginning.   

    But traditional cultures from the Third World that are very grounded in nature cannot adopt modern technology without significantly disrupting their ways of life.  It is not like the adaptations that have occurred in the Western world and in some Asian countries to ongoing technological change.  Again, Western adaptation and the adaptation of some Asian countries does not mean that the sensory distortion created by the technology that  these cultures make does not continue to be harmful to the primate natures of their members.  It just means that the people in these cultures have found a way to make psychological accommodations to their technology, so that the technology is not totally culturally disruptive.

    For many people within traditional societies, the experience of modern technology has been so culturally disruptive, because it is experienced as a form of contamination that eats away at their connections to the natural world.  Without these connections, traditional people experience disorientation, an experience of floating in a vacuum.  And as they go numb, many lash out with violence in order to feel alive.  I have spoken at length about violence directed outward towards people in the external world.  But, in truth, for many people, the destructive energies are directed inward towards themselves.  I am not just talking about people who commit suicide.  There are also people who engage in self-destructive behavior that ultimately proves to be lethal.

    Some people start drinking heavily and become alcoholics.  In some Third World countries that are producers of illegal drugs for export, many of the people in the local population have started abusing the drugs.  And, at a time when there are serious epidemics of sexual diseases and, in particular, H.I.V., many people in these cultures continue to engage in unprotected sex.  Each of these activities not only damages the abusers but also any offspring the abusers are likely to produce.

    Now obviously there are people within these traditional cultures who are able to survive and even thrive in the world of modern technology.  But this is because they are able to embrace the technological culture that is connected with modern technology.  The people who are contaminated and damaged by modern technology are the people who feel more closely bonded to the traditional culture.  So, in many cases, it is not only the more traditional people who are damaged and destroyed by modern technology but the traditional culture itself.

    This leads to the following question.  We can mourn the loss of natural environments as they become encroached upon by modern technological development.  We can mourn the loss of more organic traditional buildings, as older buildings are replaced by more technologically functional buildings and by skyscrapers.  But do people in modern society have any reason to mourn the destruction of traditional cultures of which they are not a part?

    Traditional cultures are models for people today with regard to how to ground in the organic environments that create opportunities for rich vibrant experiences that allow people to make and receive the imprints that allow them to feel fully alive and ultimately to prepare for death.  These cultures are models for people living more as primates rather than people living as robots.  They remind us of some of the aspects of life that we have given up or are in the process of giving up, as we become more and more immersed in our interactions with modern technological devices.  Traditional cultures model for us how to have relationships with other people built on the immediate intensity of primary experience rather than on the fragments of communication in mediated text messages.  And they model for us how to have more direct connections with the natural environment free of a lot of mediating technological equipment.  They teach us how to elaborate this connection with the natural environment throught the art, artifacts and architecture that we create.  And they teach us how to elaborate a grounded connection even to the vacuum environment of the cosmos through religion.  In short, traditional cultures emphasize those aspects of our human identity that we are losing as we become robots.  And this is why it is important to prevent traditional cultures from totally disappearing from the earth.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

The Robot Words We Use

    Words are mental entities that create boundaries for the concepts and phenomena they identify.  By creating these boundaries, words can turn different concepts and phenomena into the building blocks for thoughts.  And verbal thoughts are the basis for the way we order our world and communicate with other people.

    Now some concepts and phenomena lend themselves to more precise boundaries than others.  It is much easier to create mental boundaries around a house than around a wave in the ocean.  A wave is constantly shifting shape and size as it moves along the surface of the water.  It has an imprecise beginning and an imprecise ending.  I have called it a continual stimulus, because it continues over time and space with borders but without precise borders.

    I have also had to think of a name for stimuli like the endless darkness in a darkened room or like the hum that occurs in total silence.  In these cases, it is not a matter of imprecise beginnings and endings as with continual stimuli, but a complete lack of beginnings and endings.  To give a visual label to this idea, I came up with the name of continuous stimuli, which, of course, is very similar to continual stimuli.  But, for me, continuous carried the notion of forever ongoing, while continual only carried the notion of somewhat ongoing.

    Anyway, I think this linguistic problem I have here is symbolic of the difficulty in trying to accurately order and name all the concepts and phenomena of the world with language.  And to the extent that I come up with a name for one of my concepts, it occurs within the pre-existing structures - the words - of a given language.  In this case, it is English.  It is true that words can be created - particularly in philosophy - to describe concepts for which pre-existing words are inadequate.  But even then, no language has the words or the word components to adequately name all the phenomena in the universe.

    So the fact that I had particular difficulty giving a name to a continual stimulus - a name that adequately described its visual properties - is not surprising.  And, particularly, of all the three stimulus categories in my model - discrete, continual, and continuous - the continual stimulus has been the most difficult for me to adequately name.  Sometimes I have also used the term blendable, but blendable doesn’t describe what a continual stimulus is when it is by itself, or how it moves over time.

    Given my difficulties in naming this stimulus, it explains why I have been thinking of taking a different approach to my stimulus model.  At least sometimes I am thinking of using more philosophical terms to define stimuli instead of visual terms.  For discrete stimuli, I am thinking of the term determinate stimuli, because such stimuli can be adequately identified in terms of boundaries.  For continual stimuli, I am thinking of the term indeterminate stimuli, because such stimuli cannot be adequately identified in terms of boundaries, even though such boundaries do appear to exist.  And finally, for continuous stimuli, I would like to use infinite stimuli, because an infinite stimulus does not appear to have either spatial or temporal boundaries.

    By using these new terms, I know that I am losing something in the suggestive properties of the names I use as well as gaining something.  There is something very immediate, very experientially present about using terms that can be understood visually.  And yet there are no good words that adequately describe all the things that a continual stimulus is and does.  It may be more precise to describe what a continual stimulus isn’t, at least in comparison to a discrete stimulus.

    And this leads us to the realization that words are imprecise and incomplete instruments in conveying the reality of many aspects of human experience.  They are great for math and logic and for computer programs that are built on combinations of ones and zeroes.  And they are great for giving us streams of information on the Internet.  But they are not as good for defining natural settings, emotions, and non-logical ideas.  These are areas where words suggest and describe rather than precisely define.  Nevertheless, people can make a connection to these areas of experience through words, as long as they realize that words do not subsume all meaning in these areas.

    But increasingly today, people not only want to have easy control over their living environment through technology, but they want to have easy control over the mental phenomena they talk about.  The best way to do that is to turn the verbal field of experience into one filled with easily definable discrete concepts.  This is the world today of hard science and technology.  The verbal world people live in today is one that is reconfigured to be easily controlled and manipulated.  So, for example, we talk about a brain being hard-wired, as if it were like a computer.  By talking and thinking this way, we feel we are more able to not only fully understand the human brain, but also to control and manipulate it.  And increasingly the approach of control and manipulation is utilized in more intrusive forms of marketing on movies, television, computers and smartphones.  Very poetic indeterminate words, that are meant to be simply suggestive in poetry and literature, are used to get people to buy very focused determinate products.  Atmospheres are created to get people to buy discrete services and products.  This is the nature of advertising today.  Indeterminate words in the service of very determinate purposes.

    So not only do we begin to model our minds after computers and robots, but our language, in order to have a sense of control through precise focus, becomes modeled after the different complex signals that operate computers and robots.  In most situations, there is little room for words that only imperfectly name the concepts and phenomena that they talk about.  And poetic words are used for discrete strategic purposes in marketing and advertising.  Today, no meaningful gravity is ascribed in serious discussions to these poetic concepts and phenomena that are simply used to talk about that which is indeterminate.  Perhaps this helps to explain why poetry does not have a very large following in modern technological society.  The truth with which it deals does not lead to control or manipulation over something, but rather an intimate understanding and communion with different aspects of the flow of reality as it is.  Poetry’s language and content deal almost entirely with indeterminate stimuli.

    And this brings us back to the problem I had at the beginning of this article.  I was trying to find an accurate precise name for a phenomenon that by its nature was very imprecise.  And that is why I decided that more than one name was useful, because each name could emphasize different aspects of the phenomenon.  This notion of using different names to describe different aspects of the same phenomenon is not unique to me.  Again poets think of different descriptive names within their poetry for certain phenomena they’re discussing.  The same is true for theologians.  Look at all the different names there are for the Divinity in Judaism.  Including a name that is simply “The Name”.

    Normal everyday language is much more sophisticated than a code.  In everyday life, there is not always a simple one-to-one correspondence between words that are names and the concepts and phenomena they represent.  And if I have created a philosophical model where the names do not perfectly describe the concepts and phenomena for which they are designated, at least I know that I am not eliminating concepts and phenomena from my model and my world, just because I have difficulty finding the perfect names for them.  This is in distinction from modern technological language which is increasingly having influences in areas of life for which it was not created.  To the extent that this language or language style starts permeating non-technological areas, like most of the social sciences, it eliminates the areas of imprecision from our own self-perceptions, the indeterminate continual stimuli areas, which contribute to our perception of ourselves as organisms, as animals, as mammals, as primates and as humans.  What is left is terminology that subtly contributes to viewing ourselves within a technological framework in terms of machines, of computers, and of robots.  We are the terms we speak.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Depression As A Defense Against Modern Technology

    One of the most disabling conditions to afflict human beings, that we hear a lot about today, is depression.  Nevertheless, in spite of its negative effects, its prevalence today is an indication of a protective posture that actually has some usefulness in dealing with the sensory distortion that exists in modern technological environments.  In other words, for some people, depression is a lesser evil in comparison to sensory distortion.  In particular, I am talking here about depression as a manifestation of conative anesthesia - the numbing of the will.  People withdraw inside themselves and go numb - sort of like an emotional hibernation - in order to avoid feeling the panic and disorientation that comes from feeling a lack of organic bonds in the vacuum spaces of the world today.  People also withdraw inside themselves in order to avoid feeling the pain and irritation that come from the tension pocket segments in the environment.  However, for this article, I am going to focus more on the effects of vacuum spaces.

    Up until now in my articles, I have tended to focus more on certain parts of my philosophical model:  on the relationship between figure and ground and on the relationship between discrete stimuli and organic continual stimuli.  But the experiential vacuum patches and the vacuum continuous stimuli also have a profound effect on people today and depression is just one of the most visible of these effects.

    Particularly in the West, the vacuum is looked on as having a specific purpose.  To the extent that people think of life as affirmative engagement with figures in grounded environments, in order to have rich vibrant experiences and make, receive and preserve organic imprints, the vacuum is the place where people go to preserve organic imprints and create a surrogate immortality to prepare for death.  The vacuum is the place where people rise above the perishability that occurs in organic grounded environments and where they can live in the belief that “things”, whatever “things” may be in a particular person’s life, can go on forever.  Perhaps a perfect example of such a vacuum environment would be a penthouse apartment in a modern glass box skyscraper.  One is totally separated from the organic movement on the ground, living in a building made of cold steel and glass materials that are not subject to the perishability that wood and other organic materials are.  There are usually no wooden beams or moldings to give sensory variety in such steel and glass skyscrapers.

    The problem is that in an apartment or a condo in such a structure, one is separated from the field of experience on the ground, where one is likely to encounter the organic phenomena - the people, the movement, the encounters, the situations, the adventures, the street life, the patches of nature - that can predispose a person to make and receive imprints and to live vibrantly.  The environments that are best for preserving imprints are not the environments that are best for making and receiving imprints.

    And depression is not only caused by the fundamental experience of sensory distortion in vacuum environments.  It is also the result of the consequence of such sensory distortion - the lack of opportunity to make and receive new organic imprints and to live a more rich vibrant life.  Without such opportunities, one is in a kind of living death.

    Now, in fairness, there have been many philosophies and religions throughout human history that have somewhat different values about life than those I have put forth in my articles.  In these philosophies and religions, life on earth is simply a step on the journey to the return to the eternal cosmic oneness.  A person is trapped in the perishability of the world of matter, but eventually, he can return to that which lasts forever, an eternal spiritual world that is the only meaningful world.  With such a conviction, there is much less to impel a person to worry about the imprints that he makes and preserves in the sensory world of this life.  The whole notion of the individual with individual imprints or even a group of people with a collective imprint like a building or a bridge is much less important if one is focused on attaining bliss in the experiential vacuum of the next world.  Rather than being depressed as a result of having to live in a vacuum, people with these vacuum-affirming philosophies and religions embrace those experiences that can give them a sense of the cosmic vacuum while still in this world.  This is where meditation, mysticism and certain drug experiences come in.

    On a certain level, this orientation relates to a variation of the mind-body dichotomy that has been present throughout human history, and that I discussed in a previous article.  It deals with the existence of non-material and material worlds.  My principal concern is that to the extent that one focuses on dwelling in a non-material world that is separated from the material world, in order to embrace eternity and infinity in this life, one is minimizing the importance of the human drama.  In the fundamental human drama, one grapples to make, receive and preserve imprints, have rich vibrant experiences in the sensory world and create a meaningful surrogate immortality on the surfaces of the field of experience in the sensory world.  If one is to come into the material world only to then develop a posture to do as much as possible to stand apart from it, why bother.  If, with our highly developed cerebral cortex and our highly developed reflexive awareness, we are so afraid of death that, on a certain level, we embrace an almost death-like state, as we embrace the cosmic oneness, the cosmic vacuum, then we are avoiding the whole narrative that makes us special as humans.  We as humans are destined to tangle with the forces of organic perishability to make our small durable imprints on the face of the universe.  But we make these imprints as finite entities that are distinct from the forces of infinity and eternity that are embodied in the experiential vacuum of outer space and of the vacuum spaces in the modern technological living environments that we have created.

    We wish to have some of these imprints protected by eternity and yet, because they are imprints, they still are finite and they still have some of the vibrancy of transitory organic phenomena.  It is a human mission to try and take that which is vibrant and finite and transform it into something that partakes of eternity.  This is how humans can transcend their reflexive awareness of their mortality within the context of a meaningful human narrative.  To sink into a life of meditation, mysticism and/or drugs is to embrace the infinity and eternity from which they, the humans, came and to which they will return without embarking on their uniquely human mission.

    And yet the sensory distortion of modern technological society pushes large numbers of people to give up the grappling for more eternal meaning within the finite external sensory world.  By withdrawing into vacuum mental states, they are giving up on a fundamental opportunity in life.

    Unlike meditation, mysticism and drugs, depression, is an involuntary numbing of the will.  Rather than an affirmative embracing of infinity and eternity, it is an involuntary withdrawal into the experience of the vacuum.  And in the state of depression, one still maintains a strong awareness of the world from which one is withdrawing and one experiences feeling bad about not being properly able to make, receive and preserve organic imprints.  Yet more and more people are using this mental posture as a vehicle for dealing with the sensory distortion of modern technological living environments.  It is a posture that leads to dwelling in a living death.  And although depression is a tactic that helps people to survive today, its prevalence is not a good sign for human society.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow

Life On The Screens Of Computers And Smartphones

    The process of writing my articles on an ongoing basis has started to stimulate the evolution of my thinking on the effects of modern technology on living environments and human behavior.  This is leading to a fine-tuning of some of my major ideas alongside of simply exploring their ramifications in different areas of human experience.  The present article represents an important fine-tuning.

    In past articles, I have often referred to how people not only have the capacity to model themselves after parental figures, but also after any entity with complex behavior including animals, complex astronomical, climatological and geological phenomena (like the sun, moon, thunder and mountains), and finally computers and robots.  And apart from computers and robots simply playing a larger and larger role in our daily lives, there is a particular reason why humans feel impelled to model themselves more and more on them.  It relates to creating fields of experience with seemingly manageable sensory distortion.

    As I have discussed, modern technological living environments create fields of experience that alternately overstimulate and undertimulate our primate nervous systems.  People bounce back and forth from sensory overstimulation to sensory deprivation in the external world.  They try to maintain a sense of equilibrium by creating their own fields of stimulation through speeding up their will with conative acceleration, which leads to a speeded-up flow of activity, and through numbing the will, conative anesthesia, which leads to a kind of slowing down and withdrawal from the external sensory world.  Neither one of these responses is a perfect answer.  Conative acceleration leads to a kind of personal exhaustion and jadedness from so much overstimulation.  Conative anesthesia can lead to a person being in a kind of a living death, withdrawing from any kind of a meaningful life narrative in the external world.

    In other words, neither strategy when used regularly allows a person to have a long-term trajectory for an engaging life in the external world.  Nevertheless, the advances in technology have allowed for the development of a different kind of solution to the problem of sensory distortion.  Sensory distortion basically results from experiencing too much discrete stimulation in the form of static or tension pockets in the external world and too much infinite continuous stimulation in the form of large vacuum spaces in the external world.  Another factor is that in a modern technological living environment, there aren’t enough organic blendable continual stimuli from nature to allow a person to feel grounded and to feel fully alive.  But modern technology has developed a way of mixing together discrete static stimuli, the potential source of sensory overstimulation and continuous vacuum stimuli, the potential source of sensory deprivation. 

    With robots, there is an alternation between discrete focused movements on the one hand and vacuum pauses on the other as the robot shifts to another direction or another action. This mode of functioning provides a subtle model for humans.  Robots represent a stabilized behavioral entity that functions effectively in the fields of sensory distortion of modern technological living environments. 

    Computers and smart phones are stabilized sensory living environments on screens.  With such living environments, extreme conative reactions are prevented, even though organic grounded environments aren’t present.  Mixed together in intricate digital patterns where the use of 1 and 0 parallels the use of discrete stimuli and continuous stimuli, the stimuli experience from a computer or smartphone becomes easily absorbable without provoking an imbalanced reaction.  And the computer screen becomes a kind of oasis in a modern technological living environment full of disequilibrating sensory distortion.  It becomes a place where a person can regroup and put himself together again sensorily.  The sources of sensory imbalance are neutralized by being intricately blended together.

    So are computers the source of mental health for people in modern technological society?  Not necessarily.  Although digital patterning can create a kind of equilibrium in the configurations of stimuli that pass forth on the computer screen, something is missing that is important for human stimulation.  I am talking about the organic blendable continual stimuli that are crucial in the presentation of stimuli to humans at a given moment and in the flow of stimuli to humans over time.  It is these stimuli that provide grounded coherence to a scene in the external world, and that, in general, provide grounded coherence to the flow of stimuli over time.  It is these stimuli that make a given phenomenon more organic rather than technological.

    Now defined discrete stimuli and vacuum continuous stimuli are important for giving definition to a particular phenomenon, but blendable continual stimuli are necessary to give a phenomenon coherence.  Without these blendable continual stimuli, it is as if the phenomenon is made up of a series of discrete points.  Discrete points don’t have the continuity to provide grounding.

    Phenomena like computers and robots are flawed models for humans and they provide flawed mirroring.  Without blendable continual stimuli, computers and robots lack a coherent core, and they provide images for humans that neither model nor mirror in a way as to provide a strong coherent sense of self..  Human selves that are modeled after objects of modern technology are much more fragile without that sustained stimulation of coherence from the model.

    It is simply not enough to have a balanced field of experience in a complex entity that is to be a model.  For it to be a strong model, the complex entity also requires organic continual stimuli, something that is not readily present in modern technological devices.  Organic continual stimuli are the foundation of emotional bonding among humans, of nurturance for humans that are young and dependent, of flexible guidance as humans gradually grow up and become more independent.  Continual stimuli become the core of a strong independent sense of self.  Without the coherence provided by continual stimuli, there cannot be a strong sense of independence in a person in modern technological society.

    Granted that the discrete stimuli that come from learning and following rules, receiving training and maintaining discipline are also important for developing a strong independent sense of self.  But people have plenty of contact with rules and discipline in dealing with the rigid behavior of modern complex technological entities.  What is missing is the time needed in nurturing and bonding relations with other humans.   To be constantly inundated with a flow of discrete static and continuous vacuum stimuli means that people become defined like machines with little organic coherence.  So people develop senses of self that can easily crumble apart in different ways with mental illness.  There is no doubt but that the rising awareness of mental illness starting in the nineteenth century, burgeoning in the twentieth century and almost taken for granted in the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, the result of the growing lack of continual stimuli in modern technological living environments, which has led to both a loss of sustained bonding and nurturance between humans as well as a loss of sustained bonding within individual humans.  Humans are not like machines, where the parts can be assembled together with relatively tenuous contingent connections.  Without strong internal bonding, people fall into neurosis, bipolar disorder, borderline personality, multiple personality and many other disorders.      Without strong internal bonding, people fall into process-caused violence.  Violence is a way of stimulating a numb person to life as in the process-caused violence of the lone mass murderers in the United States.  But one result of being able to shock oneself to life by violence is that a person is temporarily held together.  Of course, it doesn’t last long, because blendable continual stimuli are not involved.  To be jolted together is not the same as being bonded together.

    In truth, the equilibrated digital fields of experience on a computer screen are not a substitute for the rich vibrant fields of experience in a more organic environment in the external world.  Without the component of blendable continual stimuli, computers and smartphones create a more subtle form of sensory distortion than that which is found in the macroenvironment of modern technological living environments.  Nevertheless, that subtle sensory distortion can have equally harmful effects on human beings.

© 2012 Laurence Mesirow