In Praise of Voyeurism

At what age do you wake up and become crotchety?

I'm afraid it's happened. In response to my last post, a friend asked whether I thought all these new-fangled machines left nothing to worry about. On the contrary, I think there are tons of problems with these dagnabbed kids and their dagnabbed Tamagotchi-ma-call-ums. It's just that Facebook is not a serious threat. It's so popular, in fact, largely because it imitates the way social interactions were already taking place or being conceived.

(Incidentally, I was glad to see that I wasn't not alone in my grumbling about Zadie Smith's article--bigger, badder responders can be found here, here, and here, some with data to back up what the others argue more deductively and intuitively.)

What really strikes me about the growing popularity of electronic forms of entertainment is how boring they are. They're good for an awkward minute--but how someone can spend longer than a half an hour wandering through landscapes and shooting at things is beyond me. Even the games I remember loving growing up now feel dull--in general, I'd rather read.

I think the problem is interactivity. A gaming culture expects to be able to provide input and to have that input be acknowledged. The problem is that games don't, in their current state, have the virtual robustness to set up interesting possibilities with unpredictable results. It's like one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels that were popular when I was young: it was exciting to have choice, but the novels never lasted long or went into much complexity, and the choice was necessarily constrained. Every opportunity the reader/player is given to make a real decision uses up informational space that could have been devoted to greater richness or complexity of the world depicted. And those decisions are hardly real--all they're sensitive to is "shoot/don't shoot," "touch object/don't touch object," etc.

It makes me feel like some cantankerous Joad Cressbeckler to say so, but I think that these kinds of interactive entertainment generate a certain set of expectations and a certain skill set in people. People who grow accustomed to them become very good at exploring the strengths and weaknesses of an impoverished set of choices given to them, and they expect their every decision or input to generate an immediate reaction. But they become unable to think of new or more complex options, and impatient with forms of entertainment or information that do not provide room for immediate feedback.

What are the results? People want to express and communicate and exchange messages before they build up enough complex information and ideas to provide significant feedback. A lot of learning takes place in idleness or passivity, when we're accepting information, ideas, and words without responding to them yet, or when we're digesting the information that we have taken in and are evaluating it. The problem, in other words, is not excessive stimulus, but excessive response. There needs to be a lag time, time to evaluate, regroup, and realize what does and doesn't make sense. The idea that technology is robbing us of this kind of time isn't new, but I think it has developmental effects on people in terms of the kind of information and interactions they get used to participating in.

I don't like to think of the solution to this kind of dwindling downtime as reflection. Reflection already seems so purposive: something you do in response to a stimulus. (Spend a couple of minutes reflecting! Then, you'll get to give your feedback!) Idleness is better, because there's a sense of total lack of activity, which is what I'm really talking about. Passive intake, mandatory idleness, and then--if ever--the possibility of some kind of response. Maybe surprisingly, I think the kind of voyeurism associated with Facebook is a step in the right direction--it involves passively absorbing other people's lives without any necessary expectation of interaction. It's different from the Internet more generally; the kind of personhood it encourages is older and more thoughtful. Compare it to, say, blogs, which prioritize speedy stimulus-and-response, both on their own comment threads and in exchanges with each other.

Those're my two cents. Absorb it, don't comment on it--I don't let you, after all--and go be idle somewhere for a while.

Two Phrases We Should Use More

Given how much we love to build abstractions from reality, and how much we later tend to confuse those abstractions with reality, it seems like we should use these two concepts from N. Katherine Hayles a lot more often:

Platonic Backhand

Hayles's term for the tendency to judge reality according to abstractions that were derived from it--i.e., the tendency to imagine that abstract forms of the real somehow preceded the real. From this perspective, reality appears like a collection of ideal forms that has gone noisy or static-y from the unfortunate, but essentially meaningless, clutter of individual circumstance.

Taken to an extreme, this habit leads to a worldview that prevents people from seeking new explanations for phenomena or data that don't fit pre-existing theoretical models of the world, because by definition anything that does not adhere to the model is just noise.

Platonic Forehand

This is a newer and less common problem, but an interesting one nonetheless. The Platonic Forehand is Hayles's term for the mistaken belief that any simplified model that can generate "noisy" results can be considered an accurate or realistic model: since reality is full of a bunch of noise, dirt, and static we don't understand, an abstract model that can also generate similar things we can't understand must be doing the same kind of work as the world, generating an equivalent world of its own.

Both moves are essentially idealistic--that is, they privilege abstractions over the irreducible complexity of the world itself. The former denigrates any complexity that doesn't fit the abstraction as not worth acknowledging; the latter sees that complexity, but deals with it by assuming that the only difference between its ideal world and the real world is some incomprehensible messiness, so that adding that messiness to its ideal thereby approximates "the real."

(That second one seems analogous to at least some of what goes on in certain kinds of gritty realism--the addition of "grit" to an abstract model of the world's workings essentially creates an acceptably "realistic" portrayal of the world.)

Now go forth, and accuse others of these nicely named errors!

Computers...taking over...must...make...soulful art...

I've been thinking a lot about this recent op-ed by Jaron Lanier, which claims that we commit a "devaluation of human thought" when we treat computers like minds.

Lanier gets a number of the facts right: the artificial intelligence spin is a sure boost to any technological story, and the analogies between computer "intelligence" and human intelligence are largely overblown in order to win press coverage. He's also right that it's dangerous to imagine that we'll ever know for sure if it's possible to download human minds into software; any tests we can devise to "make sure" that consciousness has been effectively digitized will be the exact tests that programmers and designers are building systems to satisfy. (We all know that it's possible to train kids to ace a test without educating them; the same risk exists in the design of computer intelligence systems.)

For the most part, I side with N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman explains how we came to believe in the idea of a machine intelligence that could be equal to or greater than our own. Hayles has serious doubts about that possibility, namely because it depends upon a belief that the nature of human (or even animal) intelligence could be divorced from its material structure. The mind, she points out, doesn't operate on simple binary principles; until we can create structures that exactly mimic the material workings of the human brain--and to do that, they must be incorporated into a nervous system and "body" that closely parallels our own--we won't ever create an intelligence that works like ours, but better.

That said, I think Lanier has overly simplistic and idealistic images of the bottomless wonder of human intelligence and creativity. He wants to preserve our gasping admiration of "personhood," and feels threatened by the possibility that we may "begin to think of people more and more as computers."

This concern--that human individualism is under fire--has been around for about as long as the idea of human individualism, and I don't see what's compelling or new about Lanier's concern about A.I. It could just as easily be Lanier panicking about the Industrial Revolution turning people into machine parts, about capitalism turning people into "the bottom line"--hell, he could be panicking about how the invention of writing devalues the presence of human teachers, advisors, and memory. His worries that people are passively letting computers mechanically determine their aesthetic choices through Netflix or Amazon is particularly offensive, since it imagines that

(1.) anyone is actually mindlessly doing such a thing [!?] and that
(2.) the aesthetic is the realm of individual expression and taste, which--prior to the existence of evil mechanical algorithms--was some sort of sacred realm in which untarnished individuality blossomed.

I guess those of us who study the arts should be grateful for this bone being tossed our way by a member of one of the more "practical," "sensible" fields. But this is what scientists and engineers always do--they make pleas for the arts and the aesthetic by turning art into a wonderful world that defies logic and keeps us grounded, soulful, human. If this is the price to be paid to get public respect for students and producers of the arts--if we're allowed to be kept around only as the infantilized and inexplicably necessary darlings of scientists, as their extracurricular activities, toddlers and lap dogs--I think most of us would rather be put down.

Let me offer my grounded, soulful, human rebuttal to Lanier's paranoia. Any useful technological breakthrough acts as an extension or distribution of mental processing, so it does work as part of a mind--one that includes human minds in its circuit. It's ridiculous to imagine that the human mind is somehow separate from these systems--as if it weren't altered by the use of a technology like language or writing. All these technologies interact with human minds in reciprocal ways. Recognizing the importance of the human brain in this system is crucial, but we should also recognize that the line between "active mind" and "passive tool" is more arbitrary than someone like Lanier--who wants us to think of computers as "inert, passive tools" to keep his idea of the ineffable human intact--is willing to admit.

Agnostics Battle Atheists: Sabbath Spectacular

Andrew Sullivan points out an online scuffle going on between agnostics, represented by Ron Rosenbaum at Slate, and atheists, represented by Julian Sanchez, currently a fellow at the Cato Institute.

As a former agnostic, I find it hard not to agree with much of what Ron Rosenbaum says. The "New Atheists," as they're called--Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and that whole loose camp--are a little too vocal, a little too certain, and a little too abrasive to be attractive. That said, Julian Sanchez is right-on in his attack on Rosenbaum's logic: the fact that empirically-minded atheists can't explain creation doesn't mean they have to throw up their hands and vocally admit defeat. Just because you can't prove that something DOESN'T exist doesn't mean you can never commit to a position about its existence with reasonable certainty.

Sometimes I wish that atheism hadn't been perverted by this Enlightenment-obsessed New Atheism. My personal trip to atheism went along substantially different lines. I remember learning the word "agnostic" from a classmate in junior high, and (having been raised outside of any religious tradition) thinking something silly along the lines of, "Oh. That's a neat word for what I am." I stayed in the "I-dunno-about-God" camp--even when I immaturely delighted, as the New Atheists do now, in skewering believers--until a couple of years ago, when a sudden realization changed my mind.

The realization was that agnosticism is a kind of cheating. Here I was, not giving a damn about the Ten Commandments, not even really bothering to look into religious issues, but still claiming that I was somehow on the fence about the existence of a God. I asked myself: "If I really believed there might be a God, would I be living the way that I am?"

The answer was obvious: No.

If you are open to the possibility of a God in the only sense that seems worth arguing about--an all-knowing, all-powerful being (or group of them) that made the universe and mankind--then your very first task should be to figure out what that God might be like, in order to understand how to live in accordance with Its (His? Her? Their?) program. The stakes are unbelievably high, and by acting as if they weren't, I had in effect made my choice. In practice, I was an atheist--but when confronted, I was making excuses that, in the presence of an actual God, weren't likely to hold up.

I wasn't about to dedicate my life to religious inquiry--you can't just whip up belief like you whip up a batch of cookies--so I "converted" to atheism. (One perk: no paperwork involved.) But my atheism is really about a lack of belief in any god, unlike the New Atheists, who are, as their critics everywhere note, fundamentalist believers, worshippers of the greatness of No God. According to these faithful atheists, No God (sometimes known, arguably incorrectly, as "Science") will step in and solve all the world's problems, if only we would all listen to the Good News.

It's the latest rebranding of humanism, which is, pretty obviously, a religion--but one that, as far as I can tell, replaces the worship of one beloved imaginary being ("God") with another ("Mankind"). Agnosticism is essentially another brand of humanism, too--it's just not sure whether it should give God a quick nod before it returns to its primary, human-centered concerns.

Outdated and dangerous ideas about "Man" and "the human" are, I think, the real problem with most current belief systems. As a result, I don't have a lot of love for either side of this New Atheist/New Agnostic coin.

Books That Matter: Ishmael

The controversy surrounding Ishmael began even before its publication--it won the massive, one-time-only Turner Tomorrow Prize, and immediately the highly literary judges who chose it began to denounce the selection process. (They said it required them to give too much money to one book in a pool of titles they weren't over-the-top enthusiastic about.)

Personally, I remember my mom reading Ishmael as part of a book club when I was a little kid, but I didn't read it myself until college, when it was the chosen selection of a backpacking group I was involved in. I'm hesitant to include it on any list of "books that influenced me" because of its cultish appeal...it's one of those books, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or any Ayn Rand novel, that seems to pigeonhole you as a certain type the second you admit that it mattered to you.

Still, it did matter to me, because it was the first thing I read that really drove home the ethical implications of the idea that evolution is not directional. It wasn't until I read Ishmael, in other words, that I recognized that every time someone uses a phrase like "saves lives," they only mean "human lives"--and that, world as it is, saving human lives implies significant destruction of other forms of life, often at a permanent, species level that alters and destroys ecosystems.

This is where the "we can have it all" do-gooders jump in and say "We can save both! We can save human lives, and help the world, and if you save humans then, in the long run, environmental impacts decrease!" But that kind of optimism seems like an excuse not to confront the problem, so that while we wait for the (uncertain) effects of the environmental Kuznets curve to kick in, the world--the real world, not just the human world--disintegrates.

It made me realize that every "charitable" decision made to help another human being already contains a dangerously unexplored ethical decision, because it narrows charity to the species that needs it the least. Whatever you want to do in the face of that realization, I think it's important that people realize it. Unfortunately, most of today's philanthropists (a word that literally means, in Greek, "human lovers") cheerfully sweep it under the table.*

So I thank Ishmael for turning me into the kind of smart aleck who listens to your heartwarming description of some wonderful humanitarian, then raises a finger and says something like, "Excuse me, but it seems you're being anthropocentric. You only care about your own species, so even your idea of charity is secretly selfish." Then I smirk and walk away, because I'm even more self-righteously selfless than you are.

*See, for instance, this recent article by Peter Singer, who wonders whether people should stop reproducing...but only because he's worried about human suffering from climate change. (Any emphasis on suffering is a sign that the speaker is primarily worried about humans and human-like creatures, who suffer in ways recognizable to humans. Additionally, it seems like a minor tragedy that worrying about "climate change" has become almost synonymous with "environmentalism.") Or check out this profile of Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates expresses concern about human overpopulation...only to forget about it at the first mention of a possible (and, I think, majorly inadequate) counterargument. Needless to say, both the Gates Foundation and Singer are considered revolutionary thinkers in the world of philanthropy--the Vogue profile notes that the Gates Foundation focuses on "problems that nobody else seems to care about"--and even they can't seem to get past a humans-only orientation. Sigh.

Books That Matter: Amazing Snakes

In the past six months, a lot of blogs have been passing around a meme where bloggers list “books that influenced me the most.” The game’s no fun if you don’t play fair…the books that influence you the most aren’t necessarily your current “favorites”—in fact, I don’t think you’re doing the job right if you don’t have some weird or embarrassing things on there. So, at intervals, I’ll be posting books that changed the way I think about life.

This week: Eyewitness Juniors’ Amazing Snakes.

Amazing Snakes, like everything else published by the geniuses at Eyewitness, featured pages dominated by a stunning central image (of a snake, in this case), surrounded by littler pictures and facts—about how many mice could be killed by a drop of the venom of a cobra, how fast a boomslang could strike, etc.

Published in the late ’80s, the Amazing series came along at just the right time to have a massive, lasting impact on my childhood psyche. I’ll never forget the incredible feeling of running up to an adult, squeaking, “Did you know that the Gaboon Viper has the longest fangs of any snake in the world?!” And hearing the crushing humiliation in their voices as they muttered back: “No…I did not.”

That is how I learned that knowledge is power. And that’s probably why I’m pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities today: to become the most powerful person in the world.