Pigeonholes of the Self

28. January 2011 · 4 comments · Categories: Life, Philosophy, Technology · Tags: , , , ,

Last week I talked about our desire to pigeonhole other people and offered some thoughts as to why we do it, as well as a very brief way (in a footnote) how to avoid doing it.  I ended mentioning the observation I’ve made that some people pigeonhole themselves.  I want to offer some more thoughts on this.

I know a number of people who have a tendency to identify themselves by a single characteristic.  They reject their own complexity in order to identify themselves by this single characteristic.  I’m not sure why some people do this, but it tends to be clearest with regard to characteristics that are typically frowned upon.  A clear example would be from Shirky two weeks ago about the anorexic girls who would band together in forums on the internet.  These girls had come to see their most important, defining characteristic to be that they are anorexic.  The fact that they are far more than simply anorexic seems to pale in their minds to this single characteristic.  It becomes important to hold onto that characteristic at all costs.  Anything that might be critical of that characteristic then becomes an attack on who they are, as that single characteristic defines them.  Attacking anorexia is attacking them.  The narrowness of the view of their selves also makes it possible for them to claim that anyone who is not anorexic cannot understand anything about them, for they are their anorexia.  When they find acceptance in a group where this becomes the common bond, the other complexities don’t matter as much, for here they find acceptance for this defining characteristic.

While I think we all have a tendency to want to reduce ourselves and others, as the simpler something is, the easier it is to handle.  I think it is the reduction of ourselves that we most clearly see the effects of Web 2.0.  Never before have we been able to connect with so many people, centering ourselves around a single issue or characteristic.  We can isolate ourselves from differing opinions and different people.  We are no longer forced to stand before one another and face the complexities of ourselves or of the other people.  In focusing on what we have in common, we lose the differences that make us unique, the differences that make us human.

Again, by no means is this problem solely the fault of Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 doesn’t cause this pigeonholing, but rather, magnifies the problem and tendency to pigeonhole ourselves.  When we’re given the opportunity, we avoid the hard questions and the difficult realities that come in living in genuine community with one another.  We want to find people like us.  We don’t want to wrestle with the possibility that the world is bigger than we see it.  We don’t want to accept that we might not have all the world figured out, that we might not even have ourselves figured out.

While this problem is magnified by improper relationships, it is only in proper relationship that we can solve the problem.  Having people in our lives with whom we can be honest, who ask us the hard questions, who choose to see us as more than a single characteristic (or even set of characteristics), who embrace our complexities, while encouraging us to embrace them ourselves.  Instead of running from being known, we must be known, especially if we are to know ourselves.  It is here we find the possibility of being truly human, in the glorious beauty of our messiness and complexities.

Lanier, Turing and Imaginary Friends

27. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Life, Philosophy, Teaching, Technology · Tags: , , ,

In the previous post, I talked about how Lanier observes the meaning of the Turing Test.  The Turing Test takes a computer and a human, puts them in a room and asks another human outside the room to interact with both through printed notes and the human outside is supposed to figure out which is the human and which is the computer.  If the human outside cannot distinguish between the human and the computer, then the computer has passed the test.

While some think that this test shows computers are conscious, intelligent, and/or persons, Lanier is concerned that it demonstrates how we’ve degraded these concepts.  I want to present a third possibility that I think may be a better assessment of the situation.  It is not that computers exemplify these concepts, nor that we’ve degraded the concepts, but rather, we’ve allowed our imagination to fill in gaps in order to see things as human, but applying it to computers becomes a gross misapplication.

We use imagination to fill in the gaps of our experience of other people all the time, and I think that we can say that social media and other technology has encouraged that and made it even more natural to do so.  We are only given a limited amount of information about a person, but using our imagination, we are able to see them as more than the information we have, and as an actual person.  With our imagination, we construct in our heads what it would be like to be that person.  To use Lanier’s lock-ins, we do so much of our interaction with people in non-face-to-face means (and even face-to-face means may still require imagination) that we’ve become locked-in to the mindset of using our imagination to fill in gaps that we don’t know/can’t experience about the other person.  We’ve gotten so used to using our imagination with that basic level of information to see the other as a person that when we get the same type of feedback from a computer, we start to fill in a person around the computer.  Our imagination is used to making those kinds of jumps and so it naturally does that when we encounter a computer that is imitating human things.

As we have more face-to-face interactions with individuals that are more than words on a screen or sounds waves transmitted digitally, it allows us to use less imagination and more memories to fill in the gaps.  We have relationships with the person and not the person as we imagine him/her to be.  The problem comes when we’ve gotten so used to using imagination that memories aren’t necessary to our interactions with other individuals.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, I hope this blog generates discussions that can continue on into your lives, with the people you live in community with.  I hope that these discussions create memories and eliminate the need for imagination to fill in gaps in your relationships with one another.  I realize that you can’t have those kinds of relationships with everyone, but I think Kierkegaard is right that we need them with some people.  We need to live life with people who we know see the world and experience the world, with whom we create memories and start to understand how they see and experience the world.  The best use of on-line interaction is to feed the face-to-face interaction.  However, if we can abandon the face-to-face interaction, thanks to our imagination filling in the gaps that should be filled with memories, maybe we have returned to our childhood, and live in a world full of imaginary friends.

You Are Not a Gadget Thursdays – An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication

26. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Philosophy, Teaching, Technology · Tags: , , ,

(Note: This week’s post is going up late, in part because the day was fuller than anticipated, but also because this chapter has so much that is bloggable, I could spend a couple weeks on this chapter.)

You know a chapter is going to be interesting when in the sixth paragraph, Lanier compares the “cybernetic totalitarians” with the Left Behind novels.

In the second chapter, Lanier goes after those that he calls “cybernetic totalitarians”, that is, the people who anticipate a Matrix-like day where the robots we created will reproduce and improve themselves to take over the world, but even more so, humans would then enjoy a state of immortality, living safely in virtual reality, whether through our physical brain or through a digital creation of our brain.  The parallels between the Rapture and this vision of the world are eerily similar, as something that seems bad occurs which brings about a much anticipated state of immortality.  Lanier is not impressed by either story.

The big idea Lanier attacks in this chapter is that computers should be treated like independent, autonomous creatures. Lanier expresses great concern that our idea of what it means to be a person is diminishing as our expectations/interpretations of the capabilities of computers increase.

To explain this point, Lanier looks at the famous Turing Test.  The Turing Test asks if a human can tell the difference between a computer and another human being.  If the person cannot distinguish between the two, according to Turing, that raises questions about the computer having consciousness, intelligence, or even more.*  Lanier points out that this is one application of the Turing Test, claiming that the computer has consciousness, intelligence, or even some kind of personhood.  However, there is an alternate, but consistent application of the test, that is, what does the test tell us about our definitions of consciousness, intelligence, or even personhood if we are willing to attribute those traits to computers?  Have computers risen to these standards or have we lowered the standards?

When Lanier looks at the cybernetic totalitarians, he sees people who have reduced humanity to something comparable to a computer.  He talks about people looking forward to the day when they can be uploaded onto a computer and become immortal digitally.  For these people, personhood can be reduced to information, and if we are only bits of information to be preserved forever, then of course, we’re going to put a premium on information itself.  However, information only has meaning if it has an observer to observe the meaning.  If there were no humans, computers could flash all kinds of things on the screen, but Lanier says that it would be a stretch to call it information because there is no one to inform.

Lanier pushes back against the idea of computers being intelligent, but rather, those who program the computers being intelligent in their software design.  Even with all the amazing things that computers can do (defeating a world chess champion, for example), a computer cannot understand a spoken sentence.  It may be able to imitate understanding to an extent, but a quick visit to a translation site shows the limitations a computer has with something we do almost automatically.  There are many reasons for this shortcoming, but for Lanier, the shortcomings are signs that the computers are only reflections of the programmers.

Returning to the ideas of “lock-ins” in the previous chapter, I think Lanier is concerned that we are locking ourselves into the idea that computers don’t need us, but we need computers and that information is what matters because ultimately that which is important about us is that we are essentially information.  When humans start to believe that our personhood can be preserved by uploading “ourselves” onto a hard drive or into a cloud, Lanier is concerned that we’ve degraded the concept of personhood to where it no longer serves as a meaningful distinction for humanity.  We allow ourselves to simply be gadgets of information, rather than functioning human beings, something that is so much more than a gadget.

Lanier ends the chapter raising concerns about the ability to distinguish a zombie (that is, someone who can be uploaded to a computer) from a real human.  It is at this point that he opens a significant can of worms, for it requires knowledge of how the individual sees life to determine the distinction between the two.

This problem is significant because it parallels a point I wrestle with in my dissertation.  How do we know how to distinguish between a human and a non-human to decide who does and does not have human rights?  We do it all the time, but how do we do it and how do we know that we’re accurate with our distinctions?  As we advance into the future and computers become better and better imitators of human speech and action, we need to be able to distinguish between the imitation and the real thing.

I have further thoughts, but they deserve their own post.

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*Lanier explains that Turing’s life story casts a very sad, but interesting light on why Turing would have postulated about this test that is well worth looking at, but is tangential at this point.

You Are Not a Gadget Thursdays – Chapter One – Missing Persons

19. August 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Philosophy, Teaching, Technology · Tags: , , ,

I recently picked up the books You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.  I’m making it my goal to post about the former on Thursdays and the latter on Fridays.  If you are not familiar with these two figures, both are responding to the Web 2.0 movement with Shirky embracing the possible good things and Lanier waving huge red flags about the possible negatives.  I’m starting with Lanier largely because I got my hands on his book first.  While these books are largely serving as my personal starting point into looking at the Web 2.0 discussions, given the way that today’s students use the interent and are daily becoming more and more entrenched in this mode of operation, I believe it will be useful to understand Web 2.0 and also discuss how it relates to teaching as I progress in my understanding.

Lanier’s first chapter talks largely about the effect of “lock-ins” on society.  One obvious example he gives is the London subway system, some of which was built more than a century ago.  When they built the tunnels, they built them so that a specific size car would be able to run through the tunnel.  As technology progressed and things like air conditioning were developed, they could not bring these advances into the subway system for the tunnels didn’t allow for a car that had the necessary room for people, engines, and air conditioning.  Because the size of tunnel was locked in, what could be done with subway cars was limited.

Another example he gives is the use of MIDI software on music production.  MIDI is intended to be used in conjunction with a keyboard, primarily focused on going up and down steps.  While this can capture a keyboard quite well, you miss out on some of the nuances that cannot be demonstrated on a keyboard.  Even today, most digital music making software is based on the MIDI model, which in turn, narrows the experiences of music by those who listen to music primarily made using such software, including must of the pop music today.  People don’t hear those nuances anymore and so we’ve adjusted our expectations of music such that those nuances are not a part of music.

The concern that Lanier has is that Web 2.0 presents a model that has “lock-ins” whose effects will not become obvious until we’re locked in and it becomes easier to adjust to those effects rather than to change the model.  His most significant concern is about human persons.  Lanier is concerned that Web 2.0 presents a template that leads us to focus on networks rather than on the people who make up the networks.  If we buy into this template, Lanier is afraid that we will come to adjust our conception of personhood to one that sees people more as gadgets rather than reject the template for the effect that it has on our understanding of personhood.  (Hence, the title of the book.)

As the first chapter is primarily setting up his “manifesto” to come, he does take the time to make it clear that he is not attacking any single person, but rather the collective ideas that permeate from the Web 2.0 mindset.  Rather he will be speaking negatively about the potential hazards he sees at first, while using the last part of the book to construct a counter proposal of how to interact with each other in the digital age that preserves personhood.

Since I spend a significant part of my dissertation talking about the way we view personhood, I am quite curious, both in Lanier’s objections to Web 2.0 and to his promised proposal.  Personhood is a very difficult concept to deal with, and people tend to go in two directions with it.  Some people try to generalize personhood to where it becomes a characteristic that is held by a group of people and the people who have that characteristic are persons.  Others try to dig at the idea of personhood being uniquely instantiated in each human being.  The former idea is much easier to explain, but seems to lose the importance of the individual in the process.  The latter idea preserves the idea of the individual person, but recognizing persons becomes more difficult and one can question what the general concept of personhood even means.  (In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be posting a series of blogs wrestling with personhood and teaching in more detail.)

Additionally, I’ve also been thinking about what various “lock-ins” are present in my life?  What effect do these “lock-ins” have on my life?  What am I missing out on because of these “lock-ins”?  What have I gained because of them?  While I haven’t been able to come up with many answers to these questions, they do remind me of Ludwig Wittgenstein arguing that our forms of life and language games are a kind of “lock-in” of which we are often unaware.  Just like the language games, I’m sure these “lock-ins” have positive and negative effects on our lives, and although we can’t necessarily change the “lock-ins”, being aware of them helps us look for ways to deal with them.

If any one has any thoughts on personhood or on different “lock-ins” in our lives, I’d love to hear them and explore the meanings of each of them.