“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
The relationship between technology and narrative is long-standing. Indeed, some have argued that it is at the heart of human civilization.
It was once fashionable to characterize human beings as tool-using animals (although this turns out not to be the best way of getting at whatever might be distinctly human). It has also been suggested that we understand human beings as story-telling animals. Technology theorist N. Katherine Hayles has implicitly argued for a synthesis of these two positions by framing narratives as a technology for making meaning.
Hayles argued that “the primary purpose of narrative is to search for meaning, thus making narrative an essential technology for human beings, who,” she claims, “can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.”
Historian of technology David E. Nye has also linked narrative and technology in a slightly different, but likewise intriguing manner: “Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities,” Nye observed.
“Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.”
“To link technology and narrative,” he adds, “does not yoke two disparate subjects; rather, it recalls an ancient relationship.” What’s more: “A tool always implies at least one small story. There is a situation; something needs doing.”
Nye argued that tools and narratives emerged symbiotically, as byproducts of a capacity to imagine what was not temporally encased in the present. He argued, too, that human culture depended on their emergence. In other words, tool making and storytelling are deeply related and integral to the human experience as we know it.
Not surprisingly, we use technology to tell stories, themselves a kind of tool as Hayles suggested, and we tell stories to sustain and direct our use of technology. To better understand our relationship to technology, then, it is certainly worth examining the stories we tell about our tools. Some of these narratives are of the grand variety: stories, for example, that aim to explain the underlying dynamics driving human history or the ostensibly distinctive features of a national culture. The Enlightenment myth of progress, comes to mind, or the myth of American ingenuity. Some narratives frame a particular class of technology, such as the mythos that surrounds the automobile in American culture. Then there are the more modest micro-narratives, which we weave around our own personal devices and tools. These stories order our relationship to technology as individuals and as a society.
Over the past several years, I’ve been especially interested in the role played by narratives of inevitability, that is to say, narratives that frame technological development as a deterministic process to which human beings have no choice but to adapt. I’ve sometimes called this the rhetoric of technological determinism.
Several years ago I also coined a phrase that now strikes me as being rather less clever than then I imagined. With a nod to the Star Trek franchise, I began writing about those who deployed narratives of inevitability as suffering from a Borg Complex. I’m not especially well-versed in Star Trek lore, but it seemed to me that the Borg meme was popular enough to work as a catchy label for the rhetoric of technological determinism. You’ll remember that in the Star Trek universe the Borg are a hostile cybernetic alien race that announces to their victims some variation of the following: “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”
Resistance is futile. This seemed like a perfectly apt way to sum up the essence of the rhetoric of inevitability that was such a common feature of tech discourse.
I’ll give you a few of the examples that initially captured my attention.
Here is the notable American tech enthusiast, Kevin Kelly, on the question of automation a few years back:
“It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will … be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time.”
Kelly, incidentally, is probably a poster boy, if a rather amiable one, for the rhetoric of technological determinism. He wrote a book about tech trends actually titled The Inevitable.
Writing about ed tech in 2012, Nathan Harden claimed, “In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it.”
A moment’s reflection will, of course, reveal that the trends Kelly and Harden claim to be merely announcing as inevitable outcomes are not merely matters of technical development and innovation. They are also functions of economic policies, legal structures, political power, and shifting cultural values.
Interestingly, around the time that I was first collecting examples of these stories of inevitability, Google was pushing its first iteration of Google Glass. Initially, it was widely touted as a transformative new technology. Gradually, however, it became clear that however many stories of inevitable adoption were told, Glass was not going to catch on.
At the time, the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin, made the following claim in an interview with HuffPost:
“I’ve used [Google Glass] a little bit myself and – I’m making a firm prediction – in as little as three years from now I am not going to be looking out at the world with glasses that don’t have augmented information on them. It’s going to seem barbaric to not have that stuff.”
This firm prediction has not, as they say, aged well.
Glass is but one relatively recent and prominent example of tech touted as inevitable, which was anything but. As it happens, though, we tend to forget these examples. As historian Thomas Misa has written,
“we lack a full picture of the technological alternatives that once existed as well as knowledge and understanding of the decision-making processes that winnowed them down. We see only the results and assume, understandably but in error, that there was no other path to the present. Yet it is a truism that the victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological ‘paths not taken’ are often suppressed or ignored.”
Naturally, most of the examples I’ve collected over the years come out of my own US context, but narratives of inevitability are widespread. I’ll note, for the UK audience, one example from a 2017 report prepared by a Conservative MP presenting the case for a tech friendly government policy. “It is impossible to resist the rise of the machines,” the report concludes, “so we must let them lift us towards a Global Britain that uses the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a springboard to a more productive, outward-looking economy.”
You may have already noticed the prevalence of this rhetoric of inevitability. In more recent years, it’s often framed public debates about autonomous vehicles and surveillance technologies.
It’s worth noting that narratives of inevitability come in all manner of temperamental variations, ranging from the cheery to the embittered. There is also variation regarding the envisioned future, which ranges from utopian to dystopian. And there are different degrees of zeal as well, ranging from resignation to militancy. Basically, this means that the rhetoric of inevitability may manifest itself in someone who thinks resistance is futile and is pissed about it, indifferently resigned to it, evangelistically thrilled by it, or some combination of these options.
The sources of these narratives also vary. They may stem from a philosophical commitment to technological determinism, the idea that technology drives history. This philosophical commitment to technological determinism may also at times be mingled with a quasi-religious faith in the envisioned techno-upotian future. The quasi-religious form can be particularly pernicious since it understands resistance to be heretical and immoral. Painting with a decidedly broad brush, the Enlightenment, in this reading, did not, as it turns out, vanquish Religion, driving it far from the pure realms of Science and Technology. In fact, to the degree that the radical Enlightenment’s assault on religious faith was successful, it empowered the religion of technology. To put this another way, the notions of Providence, the Kingdom of God, and Grace were transmuted into Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. If the Kingdom of God had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation. It’s worth noting that stories of technological inevitability tend to flourish in contexts were the cultural ground has been prepared by linear and teleological understandings of history.
Of course, narratives of inevitability most often arise from a far more banal source: self-interest, usually of the crassly commercial variety. All assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimize resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future.
Recently, Margaret Heffernan succinctly summed up the underlying message of Big Tech’s rhetoric of inevitability in a personal and eloquent reflection on the theme: “The future might not have happened yet, but it was already decided.” “The goal,” as she put it, “isn’t participation, but submission.”
Once again resistance is futile. One either gets on board or gets left behind.
Narratives of inevitability have the effect of foreclosing thought and deliberation. If outcomes are inevitable, then there’s nothing to do but assimilate to this pre-determined future, to go along for the ride prepared for us whatever the consequences. As Lauren Collee has recently put it, “Techno-determinist futures … are used to habituate us to the present.” And, specifically, to the present designs of tech companies.
The truth, of course, is more complicated. As historians of technology have demonstrated, historical contingencies abound and there are always choices to be made. The appearance of inevitability is a trick played by our tendency to make a neat story out of the past and project it onto the future. And this tendency is one that tech companies are clearly prepared to exploit.
So, to sum up, beware narratives of technological inevitability. Resistance, if it be necessary, is not necessarily futile, and, as Heffernan reminds us, “Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.”
This post originally appeared on L. M. Sacasas’ blog, The Convivial Society.
Photo by June Admiraal on Unsplash
” If the Kingdom of God had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation”
It’s worth noting how both technological utopias and communitarian ones are peculiarly post Christian or post Christian colonisation outgrowths. The Graeco-Roman addiction to sentiment and abstraction remains in the most dry of Scientism, and addiction to unfalsifiable modelling as science.
The Semitic does not natively “float” like Hellenised Christianity does. If the Western Enlightenment reduced the Christian influence, it only increased the Hellenistic aspect. That’s why floating utopias stay, indeed are strengthened.
If we cannot/are unwilling to see more precisely how, where and why Christianity was a wrong turn, albeit one very beneficial for the various existing cultural and spiritual problems of the Roman hegemony, we are liable to repeat the core error over and over. This Chinese man is thus advising that we take great care in too easily dismissing the points of view of our own ancestors.
The thing that’s inevitable is that technological “progress” will continue as long as conditions enable it. The most necessary condition is the availability of sufficient amounts of exosomatic energy and materials. Human desire for more and more stuff is a given. Life, and humans are lifeforms like any other, itself knows no satiety. Living organisms only go into a stasis, no-growth mode when energy and material supplies are at their limits for their given technology (ways of using resources and materials) AND they are unable to develop-evolve new ways of using energy and materials that are more efficient and/or that exploit new types of energy-materials. We humans are at the end of our current fossil fuel and non-closed-cycle material usage tech and resource paradigm. We are working on developing a new paradigm with new sources of energy (renewable and nuclear) and closed-cycle material usage supplemented with extraterrestrial material sources (asteroids and lunar). If we make this transition, it’s a certainty that tech “progress” will continue, and this is the goal of those. like the WEF elites, who seek “sustainable growth”. If not, then maybe we’ll settle into stasis like other lifeforms have been forced to do. If “progress” does continue, then human extinction, as well as the rest of the earth’s species, becomes increasingly probable due the fact that our ongoing “advancements” in science and tech will either totally dehumanize us or replace us with AI and machines or will produce something, or combination of things, like Vonnegut’s “ice nine”.
Hence, the best hope is that we fail to make the transition and then develop cultural forms that can endure and provide decent, healthy, and happy lifestyles. Those few people, like Anutans, Tikopians, San, Piraha, etc. who have not yet been pulled too deeply into the maelstrom of “progress” are the last living examples of this type of lifestyle.
Peace Sir,
That sounds extremely disempowering, but I think it is correct given a certain framework of understanding that modernity has bequeathed to us/cornered us all into.
Basically seeing the world as material at base, with a layer of almost arbitraty”culture” on top, must be remembered is the unique perspective of this epoch.
The Indigenous Australian worldview is steeped in the power of the spirit, and the Creator of them as well as us, in All Time. If we out down our assumptions to connect with this directly, many new options become available.
Salaam.
“I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I’m not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win.”
Richard Stallman
It’s great to want to change the world, to create some kind of utopian heaven on earth. If that’s what you feel called to do, you must go for it, even if that makes you a Stallman. After all, you really cannot be other than what you are, the product of all the nature and nurture in your life, and if all of that is driving you to be a change-agent/prophet, then:
Do, say, and live what you feel is right. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Live so as to die with a good conscience…Listen to the Man of La Mancha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo7VlD66ISM
Follow Vonnegut’s dictum:
“Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
*Harmless untruths”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
(I myself am also one of the Don Quixote types, and so, I’m with you brother.)
Nevertheless, just as we all know that we are going to die, and yet we keep on “fooling” ourselves into living (see Varki’s Denial Theory), so too we should know that THE WORLD WILL NOT CHANGE UNLESS IT IS READY TO CHANGE, and yet we may be programmed by our nature and nurture to keep trying to change it anyway. That readiness for change comes from a complex interplay of forces, and most of those are forces about which we have no consciousness let alone any ability to control. So, you do what you feel you must do, and that’s the product of nature and nurture, and then the world (the rest of humanity conceived as some sort of a whole) may yet come around to change in the way you wish that it would. (Remember that there is subjectivity in this…Your own vision may not be everyone’ else’s, and certainly not in every detailed aspect. This complicates matters immensely, doesn’t it?) You may even be one of the future-celebrated pioneers or founders of this new world. At least, if you do what you feel is right, you will have a peaceful heart, a good conscience, and that’s one of the most valuable things you can have, isn’t it? Also, you’ll be a part of a long line of respected prophets, warners and preachers, like Lao Tze, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Fuller…good company to have.
Now, looking at the big picture, and back at the matter of the inevitability that humans, as lifeforms, will seek to increase their power (control and useage of energy and resources) via technological “progress” as long as the conditions (energy and materials availability + tech and resource paradigm) enable this…
A scenario that may play out is described by Ted Trainer:
https://thesimplerway.info/
Trainer himself though realizes that this scenario has only a marginal probability…too many variables are at play insuch matters of political economics. Basically, what he says is that conditions will arise that will force a breakdown of mega-sized social organisms and a return to smaller-scale and more localized social organisms. His thesis depends on the assumption that a fully renewable energy and materials supply infrastructure will not be capable of sustaining the current high levels of consumption let alone enabling growth. Unfortunately for this thesis, the potentials of renewable energy (and nuclear…new fission, possibly fusion) and materials techs are actually far greater than Trainer recognizes. He hasn’t done enough homework to see this.
Let us suppose though that, even though Trainer’s assessment of the full potentials of renewable energy (and we also must account for nuclear energy, a dangerous reality that is coming, being pushed forward strongly by China and Russia and WEF types like Gates who must assure growth) and materials is far too pessimistic, it could very well hold out effectively in the shorter term, i.e. We may very well not make the investments needed for the full development of the next TRP beyond fossils and non-closed materials usage in a timely manner, and so the world could fall into a scenario much like Trainer envisions. (Nevertheless, the potentials of these techs are there and the desire to develop them will be there.) If we could be stuck for a long enough (?) period in a situation where we are forced to downscale and simplify as Trainer envisions (and that’s a lot like Lao Tze’s concept in The Tao Te Ching, ch.80, a couple thousand or so years before Trainer), it is possible that cultural and epigenetic behavioral evolution could occur and lead to a solidification of Trainer’s “Simpler Way”, and hence there would be a world with a resistance to getting back on the road of “progress”…How strong a resistance? (We might become like the Na’vi in “Avatar” no longer caring about having lite beer and blue jeans?) How universal, i.e. Would enough of the world have solidified a culture of stasis, simplicity, and localization? If this is not 100% universal, how long can it hold? Wouldn’t it turn out that perhaps the majority of the world might become “Na’vi” for a while but then have their way of life altered, just as happened with past indigenous tribes, as new technologies spread and develop to full potential after at least a few nations have made the next TRP transition fully?
There’s also the analysis given by another Ted, Kaczynski (The “Unabomber”):
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
Kaczynski did go over the edge a bit, actually he just did what he thought was right, but his analysis is still very worthy of respect, and is even noted by the philosoper John Gray in “Staw Dogs”.
Trainer and Kaczynski together sum it all up:
We are either not going to make the transition smoothly, or we are going to make it, and then our technology will destroy us.
In any case, unless we also manage to do something truly irreparable to the earth’s ability to support life, admittedly a very real possibility, life itself will go on, and if it’s without humans, well then, we’ll just become yet another of millions of species who were evolutionary failures.
Of course, we should know that how the big picture plays out in all of its details is a bit farther out on the horizon for anything more than speculation. For now, we each must live the way we must, and those of us who have visions of better ways, of how we want to change the world, must try to live them, must do our best as we live within the “beast” of modern global economics, in which we “live and move, and have our being” (as the Greek poet Epimenides said of Zeus), and from which the vast majority of us cannot fully escape…We moderns can’t even eat without dependency on the global corplex.
Peace Sir,
Heaven on Earth as a concept itself is biased by modernity and the Graeco-Roman lineage. Indigenous, Egyptian, originary (pre Greek influenced) Muslim and Buddhist, and older Chinese do not have this dualism.
The local is the local, the universal is that which ever floats into “Heaven”. “We” moderns still have many choices at that local level. “Being the change” never happens in abstraction. As Mr Yunkaporta’s “Sandtalk” speaks of, dialogue and relationship have so much more going for them in terms of this than monologue. Monologue, like monoculture, only seem to lend one power, it’s just a power that destroys itself from its lack of generative imagination, because it so often refuses to listen to good guidance. Deep issues with one’s own parents and ancestors to straighten out there.
Perhaps to convey this: “Heavenly” pessimism and optimism are of the same root, and seem to end in the same (antiseptic corporate narrative controlled) place now. Peace and wholeness is something else. It is closer to the willingness to die in the good fight, as aid to living the whole life without fear, all tied by faith that ultimately we all face our Reckoning.
Salaam.
—
O you who heed warning:
Say not: comply thou with us.
But say: examine thou us,
And listen.
And for those who spurn guidance while claiming virtue is a painful punishment.
– The Recital, 2:104
Salam to you as well Lionel,
I’ll not debate whether the more ancient philosophers had a non-dualistic concept of reality, but I do think it is highly debatable or at least very hard to discern one way or the other depending on how ancient you wish to go…
What I would say is that the idea of Heaven on Earth should not be understand as dualistic at all but quite to the contrary, as reflective of a nonbelief/agnosis in a ‘heaven”, a world beyond. It is anti-/a-beyondist because it says we are seeking to build this ideal place here on this earth, and we are not even asking whether there really is a beyondist heaven. The question then becomes what is this ideal place like, whether it really exists or not? What is our concept, our vision of heaven? Is it like the heaven of the beyondist believers in various religious traditions, whatever their heaven concept may be, if even they themselves have a consensus on that, or just what exactly is it? Then we are faced with the problem of finding a consensus, a common, shared vision of this ideal world. After all, one must have a vision in order to guide one’s efforts and if it’s not a shared vision, then it better be a very simple vision indeed, one that can be actualized solo or by a very small group of fellows.
Reality is that we humans never have, or at least cannot maintain for very long, a common vision of how we want to live, unless we are forced by the limits of our tech and environment to solidify one. We wind up with a sort of “roller-bearing self-adjusting shambles” that embodies-seeks to fulfill the more powerful of our basic desires, a self-organizing and constantly mutating-evolving, if tech and resurces enable it, whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts, that has a life force of its own, a social entity with an economic way of life and a culture. As individuals we seek our happiness, our peace within this greater whole, but when we see, those of us who do see, who do become aware, that the behavior of the greater whole is not in harmony with our personal, inner values, we then must either break with the whole or seek to change it. Yes, there can be peace and happiness in this struggle, and even when we may know that it may be futile until the external conditions act to support the kind of change we wish to see. It would be more pleasant, easier for internal processing, to be ignorant of the futility, to have blissful ignorance, but ah well, once you see the truth, you cannot unsee it, and must struggle on anyway, if that is your fate, your “calling”.
Peace friend,
As Buddha was saying to the Brahmins of his time, “show up first of all and don’t worry about fiddling with the rest beforehand”. Those are a central distraction when taken in the wrong priority.
Abstraction is a heaven bias, whether that be abstraction about heaven on earth or abstraction about heaven as heaven, or just ideas independent of personal instantiation (“Clean your room” a la Jordan Peterson). The East is famously more immanent than the West, and there is much I agree with that, but that is not because the Celts were not immanetly focused – abstraction is distinctly an addiction and power from the Greeks, to the high Romans (Stoics, etc vs Roman ancestor worship), to Pauline (not early) Christianity.
As such, I better spend less time here and focus on my family and kids, and get us all more ready for what is coming. I don’t think it is futile at all, if only because it is so much fun doing it. Teaching them to think like warriors, and live and love, in belonging and mutual loyalty, in the meantime. It is possible.
Salaam and wholeness, to you and yours.
Salam always my Brother-Fellow Warrior,
Since I’m more prone to reading Robert Sapolsky on neurobiology and behavior than to studying ancient philosophers, I’ll have to say that everything in our minds, our brains, is an abstraction, just a representation in our neurobiological “machinery” (our computer hardware). Certainly all of our language is just abstractions too, higher level ones like higher level programming languages in computer technology. We never know anything directly as it really and fully is. We live in a world of abstractions and even abstractions of abstractions that play out in our subconscious minds and that serve us well as lifeforms…well enough that we humans, the masters of abstraction, and of self-deception too, have become the master species of the earth.
True enough, if one considers the process as a goal in itself, not necessarily the achieving of the envisioned objective, then nothing is futile in our efforts to change the world so it better fits our envisioned ideals. It’s like when someone asks you if the fishing was good, and you answer “Well the fishin’ was good, but the catchin’ was poor.” Gotta keep on fishin’ and enjoying that process, and who knows, if conditions are right, we may just also do some catchin’.
Take care of self and family and keep up the bigger fight too,
Greg
Peace Brother Greg,
Excellent, this is at the core of things.
Firstly, on the right brained side. There was a book called “The Embers and the Stars” written in the 80s, by a devout Czech Christian and philosopher called Erazim Kohak. He traces the line of Western thought that leads to the “all is abstraction” conclusion, and makes a very interesting case that as long as we remain in this auto-virtualised cul-de-sac, proper instantiated respect for our environment is impossible. If consciousness/mind is an accident, then we are aliens in a dead world, and no natural and essence/self derived boundaries for action and relationship with it exist. The line will keep moving as we change our identification. He basically predicted trans-humanism, but also showed how “all is abstraction” is something humans and culture (ever phenomena of place and localism) are simply not able to handle. If taken to its full conclusion with full self consistency it leads to nihilism and the desire to destroy the world.
Then on to the left brained side, there is Wolfgang Smith:
https://philos-sophia.org/restoring-sense-universe/
He makes a direct scientific attack at any science that claims any “all is abstraction” conclusion. He shows how this has no scientific basis whatsoever (even if there is great institutional motivation to pretend otherwise), and that most evidence points the other way – even evidence for how the mind actually perceives things:
https://philos-sophia.org/mystery-visual-perception/
Both Mr Kohak and Mr Smith are not fans of Descartes, as one can imagine. So many of us are still his followers though, and Mr Smith even argues that the “Descartian oversimplification” was a required one for the West to leap into it’s technical developmental stream. It’s not self consistent, it leads to a dead world, but it allows us to be obsessed with things that don’t matter and keep busy with activity therein. A fair enough trade to pass the time I suppose…
Salaam.
PS. It’s not about unseeing truths, it’s about understanding where our own perception has been skewed and tainted by our own flaws and hidden agendas. It only has to stray a little to miss the point. As Socrates said (even if I am suspicious about his dualism away from the body), convincing delusion must nevertheless resemble and rhyme with truth and impart a “this is the whole truth” feeling.
Salam Brother Lionel,
I suspect that you and I may be not quite on the same wavelength due to some semantic difficulties, in particular some differences in our perceptions or intentions in using the word “abstraction”. Here’s what comes up when the word is Googled:
noun: abstraction
1.
the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events.
“topics will vary in degrees of abstraction”
o something which exists only as an idea.
plural noun: abstractions
“the question can no longer be treated as an academic abstraction”
2.
freedom from representational qualities in art.
“geometric abstraction has been a mainstay in her work”
o an abstract work of art.
“critics sought the meaning of O’Keeffe’s abstractions”
2. 3.
a state of preoccupation.
“she sensed his momentary abstraction”
3. 4.
the process of considering something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments.
“duty is no longer determined in abstraction from the consequences”
4. 5.
the process of removing something, especially water from a river or other source.
“the abstraction of water from springs and wells”
My intent was more like #1 while I suspect that yours was more like #4. Perhaps I would better have used the term “representation” as my intent is like the representations of physical objects and languages, information, in a computer, as well as within our brains. I think that perhaps #4 is closer to what you intend by “abstraction”, that you object to things being disconnected and conceptually separated from one another in spite of the fact that they interact and interdepend and thereby form a greater whole, a much more complex macro-phenomenon (and one with epiphenomena) than we may be able to understand, even though we may understand individual parts of the whole. If that’s your intent, I’ll heartily concur.
Now, as to ontological arguments, however you may wish to characterize them, left- or right-brained, a distinction that may not reflect much difference actually, according to Sapolsky’s review of it in “Behave”…I’m a firm Nietzchian Existentialist. Here’s what I’ll take as my catechism’s answer on the nature of the universe, the that-which-exists:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/520803-and-do-you-know-what-the-world-is-to-me
I also, with Nietzsche, do not agree that the universe can be described by a purely mechanistic “billiard ball” model, and hence do not believe in the heat death theory (2nd Law of Thermodynamics…Entropy) of the universe which follows from taking Kelvinian thermodynamics to its logical conclusion of a final state. The key difference between the Nietzschian and Kelvinian viewpoints is that Kelvin saw idealized, forceless billiard balls (the atoms of Democritus?) while Nietzsche saw centers of force, essentially the same as what modern physics now sees in the quantum world.
I’m sorry that I’m just not ready to devote the time to fully dive into the philosophical writings you note. I guess, due to my unique nature and nurture and situation, I don’t find them as interesting as you do. I will say this though, upon reading the Smith articles: I don’t think he’s saying much that’s new-revolutionary. In fact he may not be far off from the old book “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” in which Zukav makes the case that Quantum Physics and Eastern philosophy are convergent. The deeper we dive into the world with our scientific method and its technologies, which you note may have started out with “Descartian simplification”, the more we are becoming aware of its overwhelming complexity, nonlinearity, and our inability to fully measure and predict, both the more complex the phenomenon and the more closely we look at what we thought were simple phenomena. The unfortunate thing is that we continue full speed ahead down the road of “progress” even though we should be far more careful. Going from rocket science to genetic engineering was a leap we simply are not equipped to handle…complexity and consequences are infinitely greater.
All for now, and take care.
PS…I’ll take Aristotle’s side, not Plato’s.
Peace Sir,
Very interesting. Your mind is sharp as a sword, no doubt.
What Mr. Smith has to say isn’t new and as a Perrenialist I think he would be pleased to hear he is not revolutionary! The manner which he attacks things is new however. Part of this is that as a devout Catholic and “fully credentialed” scientist, he is openly suspicious of Eastern forms. I find this very healthy, it shows ancestral and embodied loyalties – it would make Confucius happy at least.
Ultimately what I mean by abstraction derives from being and “feeling”, not definitions, even though definitions help. One kind of “definition” in the flesh is, does a being instantiate in manner and way of relating, self consistency with what they are saying they stand for? If not, this is surely powered by abstraction that enables such lack of self coherence. And the fruits of it from the Trad Eastern point of view are quite clear in the corporeal world: their line will be at constant war, with parents abandoning guidance for children and children disowning the ways of the parents.
It is possible for example to see that Aristotle is not really in dispute with Plato, that one is the completer of the other, as master and apprentice of one lineage. There is a personal alchemy and temperance involved in this going inside though, which “the spirit of abstraction” would prefer to stay away from and cling to dualisms on either side instead.
Let me sign off with a “definition” of sorts… or at least a statement, on Holism:
—-
Unity (Tawhid) remembers that we are always inside and part of the whole pattern we seek to understand. It is impossible for any but Him to stand outside.
Expressible in system and useful to articulate with definitions and rules, it is not itself a system and resists the framework that distances by demanding definitions and rules, because every part is itself a whole that resonates with all others.
Speaking of it thus calls for word, action and conduct consistent with the unity that is pointed towards by all the laws and poetry of nature, to allow the unity and wholeness of the individual to be fully composed in manifestation. So to be whole is to be natural, and to be natural is to be principled, spontaneous, integrated and beautiful in hospitality, protection and manner.
In lieu of rules, instead guidance takes the fore – both as receiver and transmitter.
—-
Salaam.
Salam again Lionel (and Assalmu’alaikum wa rahmatulahi wa barokatu if you’d like the complete Islamic greeting),
Thanks, and clearly, your mind is at least as sharp as well, and so it’s a pleasure to continue our dialogue, to help keep my sword from getting too rusty and to remember how to yield it a bit. I do feel its sharpness may be decaying a bit as I age, but it may also be a bit more sure, less brittle, less confused, as I believe Confucius observed with his mind as he aged.
So, if I may hazard a guess here, you must be a fan of Rumi, and hence a follower of the Sufist way in Islam. If not, then you may as well be and you surely would like Rumi. I have read some of Rumi, and once owned a collection of his writings, but I gave it to a friend. I did enjoy reading it and it’s certainly on my book-ordering wishlist that keeps growing faster than the funds I have to fulfill it. As for myself, I am a follower of Islam in a way that I suppose is a bit secular (to those who don’t see the sacred in anything but recieved and believed dogma) or perhaps more scientific or personal-subjective, definitely not literalist, and hence I have an affinity for the Sufistic way, and and a strong antipathy to Wahabi Sunnism, though I try tolerantly to understand those of that stripe…love the sinner, hate the sin.
Yes, it’s true that definitions are often too restrictive, that they don’t fully enclose all of the feelings that come with a word…all the things that happen in our brains, our minds, when we see or hear a word. After all, definitions are just made up of words too and those words require definition. For each of us any given word, a sound sequence in the brain’s auditory cortex may evoke quite different neurobiological responses, and those responses are the word’s real “definition” for each of us. (They can also be a function of external and internal conditions affecting our brain state at a given moment.) How similar those responses are to another person’s is mostly a function of how similar our cultures may be… our respective experience-education bases. Depending on how complex a matter may be or how conceptually grayish (unlike the pure black and white of puerly abstract mathematics or logic) it may be, the greater the effort that may be needed to get on the same wavelength so that we can really communicate. Giving a definition is a first step in this process…The goal being to communicate…exchange thoughts and ideas. This sure can be a clunky and convoluted process and one is never really sure that it’s completed perfectly, probably it never is, but the alternative would be what? A Vulcan mind meld? Would even that be perfect? There’s just always some degree of “slop” in communication processes, and that slop seems to be a large part of what produces the various schools of philosophy. Sophism certainly wouldn’t exist without, I suppose.
I guess you must be familiar with Chuang Tzu too…Here’s a link to Watson’s translation: https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html I believe Section Two, “Discussion On making All Things Equal” would be pertinent to the matter of word definitions. I’d also say that Chuang Tzu would be the closest thing to a Chinese Rumi. I really like Chuang Tzu!
The Unity concept which you define-describe, the resolution of differences as Chuang Tzu might put it, a unity that only exists when one’s words are one with one’s thoughts and actions is indeed too the thing sought by all Taoists. I think too it’s the thing that’s intended by the Haditz which says that the greatest jihad is that for the conquest of self. It also calls to mind the words of Confucius:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/216110-at-fifteen-i-set-my-heart-upon-learning-at-thirty
(For Confucius, achieving it was a life-long struggle. So too, it is for all of us, but not all of us start on such a path, and a great many are distracted or derailed from it.)
It’s also surely the same as the Moksha of Hindus and Buddhists. So, here we are in the camp with the perennialists with Smith et alia…
We search to unify, not just our own lives and behavior, but the various branches of science philosopy, and religion, or I’d guess it’s more accurate to say that we seek the common threads among them, the common source from which they all flow. We want a sense of unity in our intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Why do we want this? What’s the psychology? A desire for a sense of understanding of all things that gives us a sense of peace-inner power?
I believe that the ultimate unification is found within neurobiology and evolutionary psychology, and that since neurobiology is ultimately physics, that means Physics is THE unifying science. It is the common thread of all phenomena. From it is built-up all phenomena and epiphenomena. It is the real God. So, as long as we have not yet fully described the physics of how our behaviors and ideas arise, we are still in the age of alchemy on these matters. Some of our guesses may be right and some not. Wandering and exploring in philosophy or in non-neurobiological psychology is a fascinating activity for those so inclined, but it is still alchemy, a partial science with some qualities defined and inter-related-correlated but not with mathematically-formulated, experimentally-verified “laws” and hence not a full one which allows full control. Unfortunately though, we are getting sophisticated enough to start playing god with things even though we really are only just endowed with enough science to be dangerous, and we are certainly not the wise gods we imagine our God to be, the kind that understands all ramifications of what we do and does only what is best for all…Our behavior, beyond our technological abilities, is still almost indentical to that of our closest ancestors, the chimps…We are chimps with nukes, AI, nanotech, genetic engineering… We’d be better off, and all the rest of nature too, if we were blocked from further scientific-technological advancement…We’ve achieved enough and have become the lords of the earth, and now what do we want? To go on trying to be God ominpotent and omniscient ruling over the entire cosmos? Yes, I’m afraid that is what we want, that this is our primary drive as embodiments of will-to-power, as living organisms. We can only stop, be permanently blocked from continuing to increase our Godlike powers, by failing to make the transition to the next TRP. The next century or two will tell whether that will happen.
Peace Sir, it is truly an honour to interact with an elder of such life experience here.
I can’t really describe myself as a Muslim. I’m a big fan of the Qur’an when taken on it’s own terms, and I think the archaeological evidence that the Prophet was from Petra, not Mecca, is pretty solid.
I certainly appreciate the wisdom of tradition (more Ibn Arabi than Rumi though, and Wang Yang-Ming than Chuangzi), and it’s ability to transform us into unified saints/zhen ren when approached with due respect – even when literally full of rubbish (like Chuangzi’s Useless Tree). I do see a bit more modern Due Dilligence is required at this hour for any of that stuff to take now, we have a lower tolerance for rubbish these days, and that’s not all bad. The way empire and priesthoods have been mutually corrupted over history, and the pointless bloodshed and destruction this has led to, is not wise to ignore… something the Qur’an itself (when not hidden by Islam) is quite clear about.
Tech inevitability destroy family, embodied relations to land/nature/time, and safe belonging to home, culture and ancestry. These above all are reasons I don’t believe in it, but nor do ignore the danger of assuming it as a basis to fight it (like I see many Feminists assume their own weakness for example, and perhaps many local futurists too).
I find “God” also has the same problems…. hence prefer the more Semitically rooted rendering into “The thing worthy of worship and service”, as opposed to “a thing worthy of worship and service”, which in its implied pluralism does not exist (yet giving plenty of room for devas/jinn/spirits etc to run around doing their disembodied thing – even some kind of Heavenly Father). Putting Him in place rather than “God” as the priority of my life has certainly shown fruit in healing much of the aforementioned.
Salaam, and may She nourish and protect all here seeking to do their best for the world according to Principle.
Salam younger brother,
Likewise it is a pleasure and honer to share ideas with an energetic younger thought-warrior who also has insights worthy of being considered. I may now be a bit of an old dog not willing to learn many more new tricks, but then again, I do try to keep my mind open. We are like those proverbial blind men and the elephant, and what some other blind man says is worth hearing if we want to get a complete picture of what the elephant is.
So, I’m a little off with my guess that you might be in the Islamic camp, and yet I wonder if Rumi would have seen himself as Islamic. Really, it’s best to avoid labeling others or ourselves anyway, at least unless we are sure we fully understand what we mean by any particular label and whether it fully applies to the person in question…conditions never fulfilled though we may often wishfully or sloppily think they are. Such thinking then often leads to much trouble and confusion…rubbish.
Of course too, any of the holy books or books of ancient philosophers, are things we never fully comprehend in the way they were meant to be. Some of them may even contain intentionally hidden meanings. A haditz says that in every verse of the Q’uran there is an external and internal meaning. Being so far removed from the times and culture in which such books were written makes the task of fully, truly understanding them well nigh impossible. Even if we could magically be transported back to be able to speak directly with their supposed authors and have time to fully acclimate to their culture, would we understand? Did they themselves? Ah well, we do our best, and muddle along, but must always try to keep some humility, awareness that our understanding is just our best guess and may be wrong…scientific humility, the greater part of what “science” is supposed to be.
As to the original theme of our dialogue here, your article on the non-inevitably of technological “progress”, I want to make it clear that I don’t think that it’s inevitable, but I do think that for it to stop will require external constraint, and specifically an irrecoverable collapse of our ability to supply increasing amounts of energy and materials, a collapse of growth economics, and that, even though a collapse may be coming, it is not certain how extensive it will be and whether it will be recoverable. Humans, as a whole, will keep trying to make tech progress as long as they can based on their tech and resource limits. That’s all.
I adhere to the “geographic determinism” of Jared Diamond and so I have to say: If we got into our situation by geographically determined processes, we’ll also get out of it that way.
Please read http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Geographic_determinism.html to get the fully nuanced explanation of this straight from him.
Names of “God”, concepts of God? Well, the Q’uran is said to contain 99. The indication of research on God concepts is touched upon in Sapolsky’s grand review work, “Behave”, a highly recommended read, more important than the Q’uran or any works of philosophy, as far as I’m concerned. Basically, our God concept is what we want it to be, and why we want it to be as we do is a function of nature and nurture. (Oh, and by the way, nature can be influenced-altered by nurture…epigenetics) A big part of that nurture is culture and a major part of that is technology, and so I wonder what is happening to God concepts as we continue onward with the so-called 4th IR? I wonder if “Future Shock” (the Toflers) from all of our increasingly rapid tech change is driving many people back to traditional beliefs where they find a sense of stability and peace? It could also be possible then that such “Future Shock” stress might at least put some brakes on tech progress. Read Kaczynski’s manifesto though, and you’ll understand why the march of tech progress will not be abandoned voluntarily.
Good luck and Take care, brother.
Peace Sir,
May our conversation, and mutual respect and learning be a good example for the typical internet Adab!
For sure, external factors to come into play. External to our existing concepts at least… like Allah. I don’t count “God” as beyond our concepts, indeed it is what we want (or at least historical/ancestral momentum wants) it to be, but for a “trustworthy handhold that will not break” (2:256).
I’ll have to look up “Behave”, it sounds too interesting to pass up. Before zooming past the Qur’an though, may I recommend looking at Mr Sam Gerrans’ hermeneutics on (if not his entire worldview derived from) it.
Love and respect to you sir. Salaam.
PS. Please get in touch with me via this throwaway email address: lymchan [a] hotmail.com
I suspect after reading “Behave” we will have more to learn from each other about 😀 .