Will Machines Become Smarter Than Humans?

            With technological change occurring so rapidly today, there is a lot of speculation about what human life is going to be like in the future.  A major line of speculation revolves around something called the singularity, a moment in time when machine intelligence becomes superior to human intelligence.  There is considerable variation in the prediction of when this moment will actually happen, although many people say it will occur by 2045.  And although the idea is that the singularity will have a dramatic change on human life, no one can say for sure what that change will be.

            One very dramatic theory is that propounded by Louis Del Monte, a physicist and an author who has written a book called The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.  In an article written by Dylan Love for Business Insider on July 5, Del Monte paints a picture of a future world where machines become independent and self-sufficient and displace humans as the top species on the planet.  Meantime, most humans will become cyborgs – part-human and part-machine -  in order to attain what they experience as immortality.  Nevertheless, machines may turn on humans as “an unpredictable and dangerous species”.  Future machines, with their supposedly increased self-awareness, will find humans too violent and too disposed to developing computer viruses.

            There are two topics I want to discuss with regard to the singularity: the alternate future described by Del Monte, and a reiteration of why machines can never truly replace humans.  With regard to Del Monte’s vision, I would like to first start by reviewing some of my ideas regarding human change during the years of the modern technological revolution.  One of my major themes has been that humans have not been able to evolve as fast as their machines, and this has resulted in a situation where the human nervous system is not able to comfortably absorb the configurations of stimuli created by modern technological living environments.  People today are understimulated by the frictionless vacuum environments created, environments like high rise apartments that are lifted above the movement of life on earth, frictionless transit within cars on smooth streets, and isolated suburban homes.  People are overstimulated by static-filled tension-pocket environments like noisy crowded downtowns, all kinds of noisy speeding vehicles, the noise and dust of building and highway construction, air pollution, and soil pollution.  People today are never able to feel fully grounded in their living environment as a result of sensory distortion.  They experience sensory distortion as something that is damaging to their psychological health.

            People try to deal with this sensory distortion through two distinct postures.  One of them is conative acceleration where a person speeds up his life in order to create his own manageable static-filled, tension-pocket, friction-filled life experiences that can block out the sensory distortion of technology-based activities in the field of experience that surrounds him.  Blocking overstimulation or understimulation in the external sensory world with one’s own internal overstimulation.  The other posture is conative anesthesia, where a person slows down his life activity and withdraws from the external sensory world into a state of understimulation.  A lot of this posture is handled through activities like yoga and meditation and through drugs.  It can also be handled by falling into depression.  Conative anesthesia blocks sensory distortion by basically causing a person to numb himself.

            But still another posture to take in order to deal with sensory distortion would be to become part-machine, to become a cyborg.  A machine is built to be only receptive to defined discrete stimuli and does not suffer as a result of a lack of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli, the kind of stimuli that give a person the experience of grounding.  The latter kind of stimuli are only important for the life of an organism.  A machine does not consider a configuration of stimuli that is unusually high in defined discrete stimuli to be an experiential imbalance.

            So becoming part-machine means minimizing the sensory distortion that tends to make a person feel uncomfortable.  But as a side-effect, it also tends to lead to the fragmenting of the human sense of self.  The cyborg is composed of two very different components that do not really merge together.  The machine part of the cyborg is not susceptible to the organic perishability to which the animal part is susceptible.  So the cyborg can never really experience himself as a cohesive whole.  On the other hand, becoming a cyborg does mean that a person is making a serious attempt to reach a real immortality by becoming in effect a machine whose defective parts can always be replaced.

            But what would happen if a person eventually trying to replace his whole body, maybe including his brain, with machine parts?  To the extent that he no longer has any of the physical presence to which his sense of self had been previously attached, is there any way that we can say this person is still a human?  Even if the person was somehow able to transfer the content of his animal brain to his machine brain, can one also transfer the content of the human mind (assuming we continue to think in terms of the mind/body dichotomy)?

            Returning now to Del Monte’s vision of the future, perhaps, unlike what Del Monte proposes, humans will become so much like machines, that they will no longer represent a threat to them.  Humans will approach the machine essence by becoming increasingly machine-like cyborgs, and machines, particularly as robots, will approach the human essence by becoming increasingly human-like androids.  The increasingly complex interaction between humans and machines will lead to more and more mirroring and modeling among themselves, until they resemble one another to a great extent.

            To me, this is an even more frightening scenario than having machines neatly displacing humans.  At least, in the latter case, humans are still to some extent conscious of their nature as organisms and are capable of fighting back against a machine takeover.  However, if humans become increasingly immersed in their cyborg evolution, then they are giving up their human essence from within.  Then there is little left to save of their humanity, little left to fight for.

            It is important to remember that all the increasing complexity of machines can only imitate but never re-create the basic core of human nature.  Even androids will always be machines undergoing certain discrete defined mechanical processes that are triggered by discrete defined stimuli.  No matter how independent certain robotic machines may appear, they are not stimulated by the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the foundation of being alive as an organism.  And these robotic machines are never stimulated to develop a cohesive organic sense of self capable of making, preserving and receiving organic imprints.  It is not necessary for these machines to create organic imprints as vehicles for surrogate immortalities.  And by continually replacing worn-out parts – both machine and animal – people who become cyborgs don’t need to think in terms of surrogate immortalities.

            Without a cohesive sense of self, machines can never develop the conscious awareness capable of sensing organic imprints in such a way that the imprints are converted into rich vibrant life experiences.  No matter how complex they get, the main focus of machines is going to be functionality, getting from point a to point b, rather than simply feeling alive.

            Machines are, of course, capable of understanding code connections (a representing b, etc.).  But they are not capable of more ambiguous symbolic connections, the connections between phenomena based on blurry flowing blendable continual overlapping resemblances. These connections provide deep resonating meaning and a deep mental grounding for people and their cohesive senses of self.  These symbolic connections provide the foundation for emotional bonding based on overlapping resemblances and deep connective meaning, with other people, with other organisms, with the world and with the cosmos.  They are the foundation for all kinds and all levels of creativity.  Without symbolic connections, life activity is simply going through the motions, which is basically what even the most complex machines do.

            These are thoughts to keep in mind when we are tempted by what seems to be immortality, as we very gradually move towards becoming cyborgs.  Again, I feel that the real danger to humanity may not be robots turning on human beings, but human beings turning against their own human nature.  We have to constantly remind ourselves that there are values in being organically human, a state of being that no machine, however sophisticated it may be, can ever replicate.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Creating A World Out Of Thin Air

            There’s no longer a need to touch many things these days.  With the Internet of Things, many daily processes in our lives are activated by remote control.  Some processes are activated by a timer.  Other processes like the lights, water faucets and toilets in many public washrooms are activated by our proximity to sensors.  Yet, in spite of the fact that so much goes on around us these days without our tactile participation, it is reassuring to know that some things in our everyday lives still require contact from our fingers.  For example, touch screens in our cell phones.  Touch screens are not organic surfaces and do not allow for physically making and receiving organic imprints.  But at least there is some touch involved, an experiential reminder that we still live in a physical world.  At least there are some physical anchors we can count on to cling to as floating figures in the experiential vacuum of modern technological society.  Right?

            Wrong.  Yasuaki Monnai, the head of a research group at the University of Tokyo has created a touch screen that one doesn’t actually touch.  It is a holographic touch screen.  Now actually this has been done before.  Others had been able to project a holographic touch screen onto any surface.  What makes Monnai’s invention so different is that, through the creation of ultrasonic vibrations, one can actually feel the touch screen.  In effect, one is given the tactile illusion that one is actually using a material touch screen.  This definitely makes the holographic touch screen more user-friendly.

            But what benefits, according to Monnai, can accrue from using a holographic touch screen in the first place?  One advantage is that it can be used even when a person’s hands are wet or greasy.  Furthermore, the user does not have to worry about coming into contact with germs.

            Now I have never seen anyone who had an urgent need to use his smartphone whose hands were wet and/or greasy.  If you get a call and your hands are wet or greasy, you can dry your hands or wash your hands and call the person right back.  As to germs, are we all going to end up living in a perfectly antiseptic world?  What Monnai seems to be implying is that the only surface that we can touch without getting infected is air.

            This Haptic holographic display, as it is called, is simply creating one more layer of vacuumization for modern human life.  Imagine if we found a way of transforming all the phenomena with which humans have to deal, so that they would exist just in thin air without any substance, without any material essence.  We would never again have to worry about what was on our hands.  We would never again have to worry about contagion from germs through touch.  And at the same time, through Monnai’s invention, we could create the sensation of touching, while we were making contact with thin air.  Would this constitute actually being alive in the external world?  Although we would experience the sensation of touching, it wouldn’t really be touching some phenomenon with mass and matter.  We wouldn’t be making, preserving or receiving organic imprints on the experiential surfaces that we were supposedly touching.  And sustained contact with air surfaces could lead us to becoming overstimulated by physical contact with material surfaces.  It could, by extension, contribute to overstimulation with regard to real social connections with the material entities  that we call other people.  We would be living in our own very private sensory bubble, our own very private world.

            So the question arises as to whether it is really necessary to create and deal with these interactive holograms.  For those who would make them a part of everyday life, there is a deeper reason for using them than concerns about wet hands, greasy hands or germs.  Interactive holograms allow humans one more degree of separation from and transcendence above the perishability of more natural material living environments.  The more we become separated by technology from the organic perishability of more natural material living environments, the more we become afraid of and intolerant of what little organic perishability remains in our modern technological living environments and of the organic perishability within ourselves.  And the more we feel a need to separate ourselves from these small remnants of natural material living environments and from our own organic selves.

            Of course, it is one thing to separate from the organic stimuli of nature through surrounding oneself with the modern technological environments we have had up until now.  Yes, we have had an experiential vacuum as the base of our typical field of experience in modern technological society, but we have also had clusters of free-floating material figures.  In the material world, this means solid substantive figures, phenomena which we can actually touch without having to artificially supply the sensation of touch.  What if we decide that to avoid catching illnesses through germs, we would be better off turning more and more of the phenomena with which we interact into holograms, into vacuumized figures, and then find a way of artificially supplying the sense of touch to our contact with these other holographic phenomena.  In such a field of experience, we would be making only the most tenuous contact with the external world.  To the extent that we were only artificially supplied with the experiences of sensation, we would really mostly be living from inside of ourselves.  Our inner world and our outer world would blur together, and after a while, we could never be sure if we were dreaming what we were living.  Life would become a living death which we could never escape.  In such a purified holographic world, where all the figure phenomena with which we came into contact would lack solidity and substance, not only would we have decreasing opportunities for making, preserving and receiving organic imprints, for having rich vibrant life experiences and for preparing for death with a surrogate immortality, but gradually we would lose our full human consciousness which gives us our awareness of the potential richness of life and our awareness of our mortality.  In a perpetual dream mentality, there are no firm boundaries of life.  It is a flowing mental grounding that doesn’t correspond to the realities of our finite limitations in the external world.  It doesn’t stimulate us to participate in those experiences and those events that act as highlights of a meaningful purposeful life.

            Yes, the need for a holographic touch screen represents something deeper than simply concerns about the condition of one’s hands or one’s hygiene.  Creating a purified vacuum state of experience puts us in an experiential state with no boundaries, an experiential state without beginning or end.  It is an experiential state that seduces us into thinking we are living free of organic perishability, free from rot, decay and death, in a state of immortality.  Except that like the hologram, it is a kind of illusion.  We may not be directly experiencing organic perishability around us, but it is still going on inside of us.  We are still organisms that are going to perish one day.  But by deluding ourselves into thinking we are living in a kind of eternity in a world filled with interactive holograms, we will not be motivated to create a surrogate immortality of preserved organic imprints that can help us to prepare for death in a more realistic way.

            Interactive holograms will only prevent humans from properly confronting their finite existential realities in life.  They will prevent people from having a rich vibrant life filled with organic imprints and a death that has been prepared for with preserved organic imprints.  Interactive holograms are a potentially dangerous aspect of the new technological realities of our time.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Take A Robot To Lunch This Week

            In today’s world, robots are being inserted in more and more different human activities.  They have been programmed to do many distinct kinds of work in factories and warehouses.  Robots perform surgeries and handle radioactive wastes.  Although sometimes robots do work that is difficult or impossible for humans to do, in many cases, robots replace humans in jobs that the latter need in order to survive.  However, the result of being put out of work is not only the loss of economic support for the worker.  The unemployed person goes into an experiential vacuum as a result of lack of interaction with a workplace and with other workers.  And in today’s world, a person who loses his job, frequently has an extended period of time being unemployed, of time being in an experiential vacuum.

            But robots are also being programmed to create positive experiences for humans.  Robots are going to increasingly become companions to humans in all kinds of situations.  A relatively popular form of robotic companion is the robotic pet.  These pets supposedly give you all the advantages of real pets without the annoyance of having to actually take care of them.  No need to feed them, take them for a walk, replace kitty litter, take them to the groomer or take them to the veterinarian.  These machines can walk around, respond to commands, and learn enough from their masters that they can develop an identity.

            Then there are robots that focus on interacting with children.  Some of these robots serve the purpose of pleasure for children through playing games and dancing.  Others that are being developed involve more serious functions – teaching children how to read as well as acting as a trainer for physical exercise.  Supposedly some of these robots will be able to help children with cognitive disabilities.

            There are robots being developed just to be human-like companions.  They can “read” speech inflection, facial expression and body gestures and can somehow provide affection for people who are lonely.

            One particular kind of isolation or loneliness that a person can experience is that related to sexual intimacy.  There are anatomically correct female robots.  I have not yet heard of any anatomically correct male robots on the market.

            There are robots that specialize in taking care of the elderly.  These robots perform tasks as diverse as laundry, cleaning and reminding elderly people to take their medicine at appropriate times.  This includes actually handing the medicine to the person.  Other possible tasks include serving the elderly beverages, assessing their general state of health and being able to contact emergency personnel, should a health crisis arise.  These robots also “socialize” with the elderly, so they won’t feel so lonely.

            There are even plans to include certain robots on long distance flights to other planets, to moons and to asteroids.  Supposedly, the robots can help space travelers to feel less lonely.

            We can see that robots can be built to satisfy a lot of different companionship needs.  The question is what is it that causes some people to enjoy relating to robots similar to the way they relate to humans and pets?

            One obvious reason relates to the whole issue of taking care of another organism.  In today’s modern technological world, which lacks a lot of organic grounding and is filled with sensory distortion, individual humans have to spend a lot of time and energy just taking care of themselves psychologically.  Most parents today lack the patience to spend long hours interacting with their children, playing with them and teaching them new things.  Without much organic grounding in the modern technological living environment, there is no template for creating the deep-bonded relationships that lead to sustained nurturance and care.  It used to be that children in modern society were placed down in front of the television to avoid allowing them to bother their parents or caregivers too much.  Then along came the video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets, and these became even more impelling ways to capture children’s attentions and occupy their minds.  It is now a logical progression to move from these forms of consumer technology to robots.  And robots can become involved not only in terms of playing with children, but also educating them and even giving them a kind of nurturance.

            This sloughing off of care responsibilities also explains the development of robots for taking care of the elderly.  As people live longer and sink into chronic health conditions that require ongoing care, there is seldom a strong large family unit available to divide up the tasks of care.  In small nuclear families, overwhelmed children of elderly parents will grab at robots to care for their parents.  Particularly because the children, with all of their own narcissistic needs, feel resentful having to spend so much time away from just being themselves.

            Robots are basically a perfect vehicle for deflecting any meaningful confrontation with the nurturance gap that is growing in modern technological society.  Robots are machines that, however complicated they may be, are not going to be able to provide organic nurturance to modern humans who, because of their lack of organic grounding, are incapable of really dealing with this most fundamental mammalian need.  The creators of these robots will say that the robots are not meant to replace human caretakers, but rather to complement them.  However, the borders for what is the appropriate use of such robots are rather blurry, and for busy adults with full professional and social lives, the temptation to slide into using caretaking robots in more and more situations is very great.  For the dependent children, it means less time spent in the presence of the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli from other humans and more time with the digital defined discrete stimuli from what are basically machines.  Do we really want our children to be molded into robots?  For elderly people, it means being in encounters with entities with bland behavior, robots that provide no meaningful organic friction, no meaningful interactions as those that would come from an organism that is truly distinct from oneself.  Is a relationship with a robot truly a living relationship?  The kind of relationship that would pull an elderly person out of passivity, out of depression, out of himself?

            Another reason that people are drawn to the use of robot companions is to overcome a basic sense of loneliness.  More and more people in modern technological society live alone.  This column has discussed that it is much more difficult to form or maintain deep-bonded relationships with other people in a living environment that does not provide a template for such a relationship.  Modern technological societies do not have the organic grounding to provide such a template.  In addition, as people interact more and more with complex behavioral entities like video games, computers, smartphones and tablets, it becomes more and more difficult to directly experience affection and love, to experience flowing blendable continual emotional stimuli and to exchange organic imprints with other people.

            Robots provide the opportunity for creating a kind of emotional connection, at least a connection flowing from the human to the robot.  Whether the robot is to provide general companionship or sexual intimacy, the human has at his disposal a complex behavioral entity that supposedly can pull him out of himself and give him the impression that he is not alone.  Because a robot is initially somewhat of a blank slate and has to be programmed, it can eventually be trained to have a kind of a personality that is similar to or that complements its owner.  In effect, the robot is an extension of its owner.  And to the extent that the robot is part of the owner, the owner never really does get pulled out of himself.  He is not drawn into the external world.  It is like the person is living in a dream rather than in real life.  In such a situation, a person is expending a lot of energy and not making, preserving or receiving organic imprints, not having rich vibrant life experiences, and not preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.  Interacting with a robot lacks the kind of organic friction that leads to organic imprints and rich vibrant life experiences.

            Is a robot truly the kind of companion a person would want on a long space flight, let’s say to Mars?  Can a robot ever be a substitute for another human or for a pet?  Only if the human has become primed for the encounter by becoming somewhat robotic himself.  A robot is never going to be a replacement for an animal when it comes to humans who still have a significant organic grounding in themselves.  For such people, robots are never going to be a true substitute for real humans or pets.  And that is a good thing for the human race.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

What We Are Losing By Becoming Robots

            One of the central points that has been made in this column is that humans cannot biologically evolve as fast as technology can change.  In particular, the human nervous system cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with the changes in the configurations of stimuli created in the human field of experience by technology.  Modern technological environments tend to eliminate the organic stimuli found in nature – the flowing blendable continual stimuli that come from natural phenomena, the kind of stimuli that are relatively easier for humans to absorb.  Instead, a typical modern human alternates between experiencing, on the one hand, the overstimulation of abrasive bundles of defined discrete stimuli – tension pockets created directly and indirectly by many modern machines and their waste products –and, on the other hand, the understimulation that comes from experiencing the vacuum spaces filled with infinite continuous emptiness stimuli, the spaces that humans use to rise above the organic perishability found in natural environments.

            This being said, it does not mean that humans aren’t evolving at all, as a result of their interface with modern technology.  However, many of the changes are behavioral rather than physical.  It has been discussed many times in this column how complex modern machines have acted both as mirrors and models, particularly for young people.  And people are becoming gradually more robotic as a result.  What hasn’t been discussed is what humans are losing as a result of becoming more robotic.

            A very useful concept for discussing what has been lost is the notion of vestigial structures and functions.  I became very interested in this notion after reading J. Howard Moore’s book Savage Survivals.  Some of his ideas I find very intriguing; others I don’t agree with.  It seems that during evolution, some parts of the bodies of organisms evolve, while others go into disuse and then either degenerate or remain underdeveloped.  Examples of parts of humans in disuse are the appendix, the ear muscles, the tail and tail muscles, wisdom teeth, and the hairy covering of human bodies.  All of these were body parts that had a very important function at some stage of human development.  Now they don’t, but they continue to exist in a diminished form anyway.

            Humans also have behaviors that are vestigial.  An example of involuntary vestigial behavior is when people get goose bumps when they are cold or afraid.  This form of behavior goes back to when human ancestors were covered with fur.  Ruffling out the fur could keep one of our ancestors warm.  It was also the way a mammal could make himself look bigger than he actually was in order to frighten away an enemy.  Porcupines ruffle out their spines to scare away potential predators. 

            Then there are forms of more voluntary vestigial behavior. Hunting has become a vestigial behavior in modern technological society.  It is done only by a certain group of enthusiasts.  However, I don’t think that one of the behaviors Moore talked about as vestigial is in fact quite as vestigial as he said it was in his book published in 1934.  Fighting is a very common form of behavior today, whether among school kids, martial arts enthusiasts, isolated criminals, urban gangs, soldiers, revolutionaries, or terrorists.  I think that in modern technological society, fighting is, underneath the more surface reasons, a defense against sensory distortion.  It represents an expression of conative acceleration, of the speeding up of the human will, so that a person can create his own world of abrasive tension-pocket stimulation to block out the abrasive tension-pocket stimulation and the vacuum stimulation that surround him.  When he creates his own field of experience through fighting, he gains control over his field of experience.  He is no longer buffeted around by sensory distortion over which he has no control.

            This is distinct from fighting in more traditional natural living environments, where fighting has been used particularly for men as a form of self-differentiation, as a way of developing strong figure boundaries to protect oneself from being swallowed up by the strong enveloping grounding of the organic habitat.  Men fighting men, figures knocking against figures, becomes a way of separating from organic natural fields of experience.  Fighting in more traditional natural environments is an instinctive way not only of defending oneself but of defining oneself.

            Anyway, for many people, certain televised sports such as soccer, American football and hockey do take on the role of vicarious vestigial forms of fighting.  This is a way that modern technology has contributed to making physical fighting a vestigial component of the personal lives of many of us.  Many people from modern technological society with their modern values of cooperation and peace would look on this spectator violence favorably.  Yes, these sports lead to concussions and a lot of other injuries, but that does not directly affect the people watching these sports.  So television viewers can watch violence without getting involved themselves.

            The main counterargument to making physical conflict vicarious and vestigial is that unless this transformation occurs with everybody, the peace loving people leave themselves vulnerable to other people whether bullies, criminals or people in gangs, warlike countries, or terrorist groups.  The peace loving people lose their capacity and their desire to stand up to those people who threaten them.

            There are many people in civilized industrial societies who do not have a visceral feel for how dangerous the threats are from many of the groups in the Middle East.  Unfortunately, trying to reason with members of these groups, trying to negotiate with them, just doesn’t seem to work.  They want victory and not compromise, not peace treaties.

            The vacuumized conflict of sporting matches on television, or even movies and television programs about war, crime and adventure, blurs into real life, so that, on one level, we don’t experience the full sensory impact of real life threats.  Real life threats become vacuumized, become unreal.  While stories on the screen show us the effects of violence, they make us numb to it at the same time.  That is unless or until something might happen to us.

            I have recently been considering that modern technology not only makes human behavior vestigial, but it even makes human emotions vestigial.  Machines are made of defined discrete parts that are frequently screwed into place or fitted into place.  The parts are relatively easily disconnected from one another, easily interchangeable, easily replaced.  We can say that most of the parts are shallow-bonded to one another, and this is what allows mechanics and computer specialists to repair machines.

            To the extent that humans allow modern technology to mirror them and model for them, they pick up the modalities of connectedness that they use with each other from these machines.  Our relationships with each other become more shallow-bonded, more contingent, more transient.  For many of us, deep-bonded connectedness, real intimacy, exists in an undeveloped vestigial state.  This is one explanation for why people live together today rather than get married.  They want a more contingent relationship that allows for an easier escape.  The high divorce rate in most modern technological societies is also one indication that for a lot of people, intimacy exists in a much diminished vestigial form.

            To the extent that we still have some control over the future evolution of our behavior and our emotions, we may ask ourselves if we really want to move in the directions that have been established regarding our behavior and our emotions.  Becoming robotic means not only evolving towards a new way of being, it means diminishing the importance of certain traits that are important as foundations for our traditional concept of what it means to be human.  It means diminishing the mental attitudes that allow us to truly defend ourselves against the people who would hurt us, on the one hand, and to truly bond with the people that we love and care about, on the other.  We, as humans, may have to try and find a way of activating again many of the behaviors and emotions that are becoming vestigial as a result of modern technology.  Becoming robotic means becoming numb in both our positive and negative connections to other people.  It means becoming numb to ourselves.  We maintain these connections to others and to ourselves on a vestigial basis.  For now.  In the future, as is the case with many vestigial organs, even the vestiges may disappear.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

Reading The Mind Of A Robot

            In Mexico, there is a saying which translates into English “Every mind is a world”.  The implication is that every mind is a separate psychological entity that has a coherent self-contained consciousness that can be impacted by other minds but that always remains protected from total penetration and control.  To the extent that machines can be controlled by commands, it is because they have the electrical potential for different activities, but lack a coherent sense of self to direct that potential.  At least up until now.  People are working on creating computers and robots that can approximate as much as possible the cerebral activity of humans.  And through this, there is the hope of somehow creating an equivalent of a mind and a sense of self in robots.

            And while one group of scientists and engineers is trying to create the possibility of robots becoming like humans, another group of scientists and engineers is creating the conditions for humans becoming like robots.  In the case of the latter, I am thinking of the successful experiment that just occurred that allowed for the direct transmission of a message from the brain of someone in India to the brain of someone in France using the Internet as an intermediary.  Brain activity of the person in India was obtained via an electroencephalogram.  This activity was converted into the letters of the two word message using binary code.  Then the message was passed to a computer and then to the Internet where it was transmitted to the person receiving the message in France.  Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to activate a part of the brain of the receiver, letting him know that the message was arriving.

            There is the hope that this technology could be useful to help those who have severe communication difficulties.  Unfortunately, the potential for misusing this form of “communication” once the technology evolves is enormous.  What is important here is the fact that the stimulation used here is the kind of focused defined discrete stimulation that is also used to activate modern machines.  The implications of this are vast.  Eventually we could get to the point where certain people could control other people’s movements and activities through thoughts.  Individual humans would no longer have the effective mental barriers created by protected coherent senses of self.  Gradually trained to respond primarily to these focused defined discrete thought stimuli, humans would lose the capacity to respond to the less focused organic flowing blendable continual stimuli found in nature.  Without the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli, there is no possibility for a person as an individual organic entity to make, preserve or receive organic imprints, to have rich vibrant life experiences as an individual organism, and to calm the anxiety in his coherent consciousness by preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.

            Brain to brain communication can all too easily lead to the abuse of thought control.  The experiment just performed in India and France was still very primitive and very limited in its scope.  But modern technologies have a way of evolving very quickly, and they frequently move into applications for which they were not initially intended.  This technology-based brain-to-brain communication is qualitatively very different from telepathy, one of the major forms, along with clairvoyance, precognition and telekinesis, of so-called extra sensory perception (ESP).  ESP is something that is still being studied, and while many people believe in its existence, many others do not.  While some students of ESP believe that we all have the natural capacity for ESP, in reality, it is only a relatively small number of people who actually profess to have it.  I am not aware of any of these people using their ESP abilities to try and control and manipulate other people on a sustained basis.  On the contrary, particularly with telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition, there is the sense that many of these people do not have control over when they are going to have their supposed ESP experiences.  Instead, these experiences seem to happen at unexpected times.  It is almost like the ESP controls them, rather than vice versa.  Yes, there are clairvoyants who are used to find property or lost people, but most clairvoyants do not seem to have such control over their skills.

            The distinction between technology-based brain-to-brain communication and traditional mental telepathy has to do with the kind of stimuli involved.  In the technology-based brain-to-brain communication, the stimuli for most of the communication journey are digitally-based  defined discrete stimuli.  Because they are defined discrete stimuli, they are easily controllable, and therefore potentially enable the senders of these stimuli to control the people receiving them through the content of the message.  In most cases, the receivers of telepathic messages do not appear to be controlled in any way by the messages they receive.  The receivers are not usually being told to respond in a certain way.  Sometimes the receivers might pick up thoughts from people in danger, which might lead the receivers to try to help the senders, but frequently, such thoughts are translated into physical reactions.  The receiver does not receive a specific message, but instead a global sense of dread or uneasiness or some other vague sensation.  In other words, the message is not a focused, defined, discrete message in such cases.  It is received as organic, flowing, blendable continual stimuli.

            And frequently even the verbal thoughts that are supposedly received through telepathy are not specific, but instead ambiguous.  Such thoughts when received are a mixture of defined discrete stimuli from the verbiage and flowing blendable continual stimuli from the ambiguity of the thoughts being conveyed.  So telepathy functions very differently from the brain-to-brain communication under consideration here.  It does not lend itself to the kind of control of one person by another, because basically it is such an uncontrollable mental function.  It does not tend to be discrete and focused.  It tends to be flowing and blurry.  It cannot be used to enslave people the way that modern computer-based brain-to-brain communication could very possibly be used in the future.

            The question presents itself as to why people felt a need to develop a technology like this?  Was it simply to help certain people with communication disorders, people who are unable to speak?  I tend to think that there is a much deeper reason involved, a reason connected to one of the major reasons that people have felt a need to develop the whole modern technological infrastructure.  Developing a technology that potentially allows a person to control another person by potentially turning him into a puppet or a robot puts the controller into the role of God.  Being omnipotent is one of the traits we ascribe to our monotheistic God in the Western tradition.  Having potentially endless control over another person’s mind certainly puts the controller well on the path to a kind of omnipotence at least over people.  It certainly gives the brain-to-brain communicators a more effective temporary experience of feeling immortal than would be gotten by traditional pathways  of creating a surrogate immortality like having a baby, planting a tree, writing a book, breaking a sports record, painting a picture, building a business, or leaving a fond memory.  Playing God through brain-to-brain communication and potential thought control allows a person to temporarily deny the existence of death.

            The problem is that while one person is playing God, another person, in losing his free will, loses his capacity to live a rich vibrant independent life and to leave his own individual surrogate immortality and thus to prepare for death.  In truth, thought control over a person causes the person to lose his individual coherent sense of self, the very essence of his humanity.  This is why the experiment that just occurred in India and France should be the cause of great concern for anyone who is interested in maintaining the freedom and the dignity of the human race.

 

© 2014 Laurence Mesirow

Life Has Become A Perpetual Roller Coaster

 

            A few weeks ago, I went to a street fair in one of the suburbs north of Chicago.  The Chicago area has many wonderful street fairs during the summer, and they are something that is eagerly awaited by its inhabitants during the long cold snowy winters.  But as with many of the fairs, there was one aspect of the entertainment that I found annoying.  There was a rock band that was playing the music so loud, it was hurting my ears.  The musicians seemed to be quite comfortable with it.  It didn’t seem to matter that most of them would be deaf by the time they were in their thirties.   It is true that most of the audience seemed to tolerate the music volume.  Many of the members of the audience had wisely come prepared with ear plugs. For those who didn’t, they would be subject to the same damaging effects as the musicians.   In particular, it was the electric bass and the electric guitar that were coming out with extremely strong penetrating sounds.

            The electric guitar and electric bass have been two of the hallmarks of international popular music since rock and roll.  Some genres of this popular music like heavy metal seem to particularly exploit the highly penetrating vibrations of these instruments.  And it is as if the vibrations are auditory strings and the listeners are puppets who are almost impelled to make jerky muscular movements in response.  To me, this response has a different flavor from the natural response of people to rhythmic sounds in music based primarily on acoustic instruments.

            In many rock clubs there is also an explosive visual stimulation to complement the penetrating vibratory sounds of modern pop music.  The strobe lights are as sensorily disruptive as the electric instruments.  Strobe lights can provoke seizures in people who have photosensitive epilepsy.  But for most modern young people, they are simply an added element in increasing the total intensity of the experience.  The combination of the auditory disruption of the music and the visual disruption of the lights creates a machine-based ecstatic disequilibrium for them.

            Technology has been used to create a purposeful disequilibrium in human entertainment for many years now.  Perhaps the most salient examples are the roller coasters, ferris wheels and other rides found in amusement parks.  The disequilibrium of these rides was a special treat when they first appeared.  They offered something unusual for people who, for the most part, lived very conventional routine lives.  And this is the key.  People who went to amusement parks did not usually go that often.  My friends and I went a few times during the summer at most.

            On the other hand, people can listen to recordings of heavy metal music all the time.  And they can go to music clubs every week.  So sensorily disruptive technology is much more integrated into people’s entertainment today than in the early days of the amusement park.

            Other forms of entertaining sensorily disruptive technology today are in the area of transportation.  Certain forms of high speed transport create tremendous disequilibrium through a rapidly moving sense of dislocation.  Vehicles like race cars and motorcycles.  Apart from the dislocation of the rapid speeding movement, there is the additional component of the abrasive static noise.  Race cars are the domain of a more select group of people, but a lot of young people love to speed with their conventional cars, sometimes specially re-outfitted for more speed and more noise, and many people have motorcycles and motor scooters.  For many people, motorcycles and motor scooters are their fundamental form of transport.  Within the sensory distortion these vehicles create, people are also very vulnerable to serious accidents.

            What unites all these sensorily disruptive technological devices is that they are attempts by humans to create controlled sensory distortion to block out the pervasive sensory distortion in their external living environments, a pervasive sensory distortion over which they have no control.  The crowding, the bundles of highrises, the speeding noisy vehicles on the street, the air pollution, the dust, noise, and general disruption from construction sites.  This controlled sensory distortion is also a means to block out the deeper experiential vacuum that underlies all human experience in modern technological societies as a result of the loss of organic grounding.  In a living environment with very little organic grounding, people try to calibrate the amount of stimulation they receive by going back and forth between overstimulation and understimulation.  The entertaining sensorily disruptive technological devices that have been discussed in this article are simply a part of the overstimulation segment of the total configuration of stimuli that many people create for themselves today.

            But although people are vulnerable to cravings for sources of overstimulation today in their sensorily distorted living environments, these cravings are not simply generated by their own needs.  In previous articles, it has been discussed how modern businesspeople assess where the “pain” is in people’s lives, a “pain” that is a source of friction. Then they try to develop and market labor-saving devices and apps to eliminate this friction.  The source of friction is usually a source of organic friction, a natural part of human routine that helps to keep a person, alive, connected to himself and to the external world.  In order to convince a potential customer to buy this labor-saving device or app, a businessperson has to convince him that the friction he is experiencing is actually an abrasive negative tension-pocket source of stimulation that should be eliminated.  And, of course, the continual elimination of positive sources of organic stimuli pushes a person deeper and deeper into an experiential vacuum in his mind.

            This is where entertaining sensorily disruptive technological devices come into the picture.  While some businesspeople market the possibility of eliminating all supposedly painful friction, so that people can live a supposedly beautiful relaxed life of leisure, other businesspeople market sources of sensorily disruptive stimuli such as those we have been discussing in this article, in order to pull people out of their numbness, to help them feel fully alive, to give them “kicks”.

            The end result is a situation where consumers are titillated to purchase products and services that allow them to try to calibrate the amount and kind of stimuli that they absorb, within a field of experience with very little in the way of organic flowing blendable continual stimuli from grounded sources.  So consumers bounce back and forth between the overstimulation of large bundles of defined discrete stimuli and the understimulation of infinite continuous emptiness stimuli, between tension-pocket and vacuum.  This bouncing back and forth occurs both in a consumer’s direct contact with the products and services and also within the consumer’s mind through advertising suggestion.

            Habituations and addictions develop in people when certain fundamental emotional needs can’t be met through normal channels, through available sources of emotional stimuli.  So people develop emotional attachments to disparate phenomena (drugs, alcohol, food, gambling).  They develop receptors for receiving stimuli from these phenomena in the hope of deriving stimulation for and thus satisfaction of the original need.  Of course, the original need is not satisfied by the stimuli from these alternate phenomena, but the mental and physical pathways have been developed that create desires for these alternate phenomena.  So the person continues to go after these alternate phenomena while always failing to satisfy the original need.

            In today’s world, businesspeople market vacuum-creating labor saving devices and apps and tension-pocket creating entertainment filled with kicks as a substitute for the fundamental needs for organic grounding that people have in modern technological society.  People crave these modern products and services, because solid organic grounding is not easily available.  They crave these products and services in a way that has similarities to the cravings for the products and services involved in traditional habituations and addictions.  The world today is filled with these modern products and services and the money paid for these modern products and services, but the stimuli of organic grounding that can give people cohesion and a feeling of being centered is in short supply.

 

(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow

 

Going To A School For Robots

            A friend of mine was recently telling me about the spread of the use of online degree programs to high school.  This was news to me.  I had heard about the growth of programs through institutions like the University of Phoenix that led to online college degrees.  I knew that you can learn to do a lot of specific practical tasks through YouTube and other online sources. And I knew that high schools used computer programs for specific focused educational purposes. But I had never heard about the kind of far-reaching educational programs for high school that my friend was talking about.

            During precisely those years when a human being is trying to develop the social competencies that help him transition from being a child to being an adult, it is important that an adolescent has ongoing interpersonal communication practice.  And I mean social practice with three-dimensional human beings in the external world of primary experience.  Lacking opportunities for such experience, and simply immersing oneself in educational cyberspace will lead to certain unforeseen consequences.

            To understand the situation of high school online education a little better, we must review the world of experience that is available on a computer screen.  The computer screen itself is an empty vacuum of continuous imageless stimuli that would stretch into infinity if the screen wasn’t contained by a frame.  There is no grounding in this screen.  What the screen does have floating on it are three levels of discrete stimuli.  There are the discrete stimuli of digital points of light and color.  Together these digital points form configurations that make visual images and that make words and numbers.  The words and numbers are a means of generating discrete digital data.

            On a basic visual level, there are the visual equivalent of digital ones and zeroes on the screen.  Points and non-points.  The points can cluster together, but they can’t deep-bond or merge together with one another.  They can appear to merge together in a movie or a television program on the screen, but the images are all clusters of digital points.  There are no flowing, blendable continual stimuli to bind things together.  This is the basic visual experiential pattern that online high school students have to deal with during the course of their school day. 

            In terms of subject matter, there is another pattern that corresponds to the basic visual pattern.  Online education lends itself to excerpts of books, short discrete defined pieces of narrative or expository writing that don’t go into anything in a deep grounded way.  They are chunks of cognitive data floating free of any meaningful grounded larger contexts.  Students absorb facts, ideas and literary images without spending time relating them to contexts that connect deeply to their lives either in psychological or practical ways.

            Yes, students do interact with programs that get them to actively participate in their education.  Students have to respond to questions and to prompts.  But these are defined discrete responses to defined discrete problems and situations.  This is not the way life always is.  Life is filled with ambiguity and contingencies.  Many times solutions to problems are not simple and are tenuous at best.  Human teachers can bring this dimension to class studies through class discussions and through one-on-one conferences.  Primary experience life situations are filled with flowing blendable continual stimuli that have ambiguous blurry definition.  This can’t be reproduced in the world of the computer screen.  The computer screen deals with defined discrete digital certainties. 

            Now from what I understand, teachers do supervise these programs for their students.  Teachers are present in the classroom.  But the bulk of the daily work that the students do is on the computer screen.

            To the extent that the computer screen does not contain stimuli – either visual or cognitive – that reflect the ambiguities of life, students will not be properly prepared for adult living.  They will become intolerant of the uncertainty and complexity of adult living in the primary experience world, and feel safer with the certainty and greater clarity of the cyber world.  Their minds will become molded to mirror the workings of the computer.  And as this happens, they will become less and less capable of functioning as organic human beings.  Less and less capable of the bonded connections that lead to good solid love relationships, good solid work relationships, good solid friendships and good solid community participation.

            Even those modern students who are not in online classes, but who use consumer technology a lot, are having difficulties forming solid human connections in the external world.   Such students end up in an intolerable growing isolation in an experiential vacuum.  Although some of their isolation is due simply to withdrawal from the overstimulation of abrasive static stimuli as in the crowding from overpopulation, noise pollution, air pollution, and, in general, the accelerated pace of modern life, much of it is due to feeling overwhelmed by simple bonded connections to other people.  And as the students withdraw further into numbness to escape what are for them the increasingly overstimulating human situations in the external world, they try to fight that numbness at the same time by doing self-destructive things like drugs, binge drinking, cutting their wrists or carrying out attempted suicides.  In the case of the suicides, many of the young people hope that by warning other people directly or indirectly, someone will save them before it’s too late.  But the sad truth is that an attempted suicide – one that fails - actually temporarily brings many students to life, pulls them out of the living death of their numbness.

            Other students just become more successfully robotic from their immersion in consumer technology.  Somehow they find a way to survive the technological isolation in which they have immersed by taking on the traits of their technology.

            Students need the massage of human contact.  And human teachers are going to be more successful in putting facts and ideas in larger contexts, so that knowledge can be taught as a more coherent flow.  This parallels the flow of organic life based in primary experience.  This is the way life should be lived by mammalian human beings.  Having ongoing interactions with teachers and with other students teaches students to engage the external world, to become active members of other social groupings like families, clubs, and communities.  Ongoing interactions in the primary experiences of the classroom help students to develop coherent identities within human structures outside of themselves.

            On still another level, our minds become indications of what we have become as people.  If what our students absorb is digital points; defined discrete images, facts and ideas; excerpts of books; random chunks of entities and events floating in an experiential vacuum, then all this will act as a mirror and an implicit model for how our students will develop, how their minds will configure.  Lack of coherence in their daily fields of experience, in their worlds of experience in cyberspace, will lead to lack of coherence in their unfolding senses of self.  And a fragmented sense of self is not conducive to long-term viability of an organic individual human.  In the long term, fragmented senses of self pose a real danger to the human race.  This is what we have to consider when something as seemingly innocent as online high school degree programs are introduced into the lives of many of the people we love dearly, people who look to us for guidance and protection.

 

© 2014 Laurence Mesirow