New Tech, New Thoughts
One of the most remarkable things about new technology is how they impact our thinking and enable us to think in new ways. The fruits of our search for metaphors to adequately describe the new situations we experience often prove useful when applied in landscapes entirely foreign to the technologies for which they were developed.
There are three levels of thinking that I consider:
(1) thinking through the technology: this entails using the sense perceptors afforded by the new technology to experience reality through heretofore unimaginable vectors,Of the three the existence of the first is perhaps disputed by many people but as it concerns the rest of my writing I will not deal with it here. The second seems to be useful without contention, while the third might be dismissed as mere language by some, as not really affecting our understanding. However I contend that the third mode is as potentially advantageous and hazardous as the prior two, that these metaphors expand the scope of our understanding, enabling the concretization of concepts that are mainly abstract, and in its expanded form it leads to a mode of thinking whereby all experience becomes subsumed by the dominant technological metaphor, and this is not without consequence.
(2) analytical models developed to cope with the new technology: it is not uncommon for previously obscure mathematics to suddenly find themselves not only useful but in high demand with the emergence of new technology, or for new technologies to open up the path toward new mathematics - computation provides an excellent example of this,
(3) experiences of technology used as metaphor outside of the domain of that technology: examples abound, such as a crowd becoming electrified, or of images being encoded onto the film
In my mechanisms course at university, my professor quipped that if you wanted a good suspension design for a vehicle you should not get a group of mechanical engineers to do it, but rather seek out a team of electrical engineers. The reasoning is fairly simple: electrical engineers would recognise the suspension problem for what it was, one of taking a set of inputs (e.g. a bumpy ride) and translating them into a desired set of outputs (e.g. a smooth ride) - just signal processing - and they would employ the tools and mathematics of signal processing to the task and devise the appropriate solution. Mechanical engineers would be prone to thinking in terms of a mechanistic paradigm, trying to introduce the requisite mechanisms early in the problem rather than later on and end up with a complicated design steeped in the history of prior designs.
A team of electrical engineers did design an automobile suspension and this was briefly shopped around by audio company Bose, but ultimately the design proved too heavy, large and costly to integrate comfortably with the plans of incumbent automotive corporations (CNET, 2016). Impractical as it may have been, the test videos of the re-fitted test cars Bose made provide a strong case for the value of thinking of a problem outside of the accepted paradigm. Further, there is a field of study dedicated to modelling mechanical systems similarly to electrical systems, effectively translating springs, dampers and masses into equivalent electrical circuit diagrams - sometimes referred to as the mobility analogy. This exercise led to the seeking out of a mechanical counterpart to the capacitor in electrical circuits which led to the discovery of inerters (Smith, 2003), with inerters having started to play a role in Formula 1 racing a few years back. It was a device that we couldn't even conceive of until the problem was reformulated in a completely different paradigm.
Both of the above examples speak to the power of using the metaphors from one domain - the electrical - and applying it to a usually separate domain - the mechanical2. But that these metaphors may be so useful, that they seemingly unlock latent potentialities does not speak to their conformity with an underlying nature. The mobility analogy is useful not because the structure of reality is electrical, but because its structure is so deep and rich that it can only be approached through multiple vantage points.
When metaphors become totalizing, when they are used not in concert with multiple approaches but become a singular lens through which knowledge is made to conform, then they become dangerous, for our experience of reality is then contracted rather than expanded3.
You're Smarter Than You Know
There's this rather unfortunate tendency in any kind of discussion of general ideas to refer to an anonymous "most people". Most people simply go about their daily lives and... or Most people just want to relax after a hard day's work so... etc. Such statements ring false because they are understood not to include the messenger and - furthering the conspiracy - do not include the receiver, since to receive such a message excludes one from the contemptible category of "most people". This construct is unproductive because one cannot develop a positive theory and praxis for social improvement predicated on the assumption of a majority contemptible class. Who are these "most people"? Have we met them? The starting point for engagement with reality and human relationship is necessarily ourselves - we map our experience of reality onto others, through discourse they help us to uncover where adjustments need to be made in the terrain. We should start with the premise that others - indeed "most people" - are just like us. This is optimistic because it suggests that what is needed to effect change is not some vast educational campaign, enlightening the masses who are disinclined and disinterested in learning, but rather that given just enough relevant information they will readily catch on to what we are trying to say, and further, provided that the information really is relevant to them, they will be quite curious as to what we have to say. This is pessimistic because it clues us in to the reality that what we are sorely lacking is actions - means of articulating our ideas - that would effect change. Why can't we all just do x? The same reason you can't seem to do x. Not because you aren't aware of x, but because you lack any way to move in that particular rhythm.
When we get hold of a new idea, something that just seems so right and aligns with our experience but which we have never heard expressed before, there is often a feeling of elation and relief. Elation because we feel that understanding has been brought to what was previously only distantly and dimly known and relief because seeing this understanding so reproduced and articulated through another mind validates our own experience. But what is really happening is that we are recognizing the linguistic articulation of something that we already know. It is less a revelation and more a translation, as knowledge from separate parts of our limbic system are (re)presented to us in the language with which we are already familiar. Perhaps we have not spent long hours pondering deep philosophic concepts or poring over the the works of the Western canon, studiously taking notes, constructing arguments and counter-arguments and wrestling with the ideas therein. In this regard we must concede a deep disadvantage to writers and speakers who have done so in our ability to present our ideas in a linguistic context. But reading, writing, and even reflection (here used in the sense of an articulate narrating self going over concepts, ideas, or the events of the day) is only a limited and narrow form of thinking. We spend our day actively engaged in the world and with others, and this engagement is the true province of rich thinking. "Deep thought" can only take us so far, and this is actually not very far at all, what is most important is continuous and deep engagement with the world around us. In this way, we think new thoughts and become specialized and highly skilled thinkers in the aspects of reality that we learn to articulate ourselves in. We already know so much of what we can supposedly learn from a lot of thinkers because these thoughts are drawn from the world around us - the same world we are daily engaged with - and are merely how those thoughts are expressed through language.
The Dangers of the Virtual
What is dangerous about the virtual is its ability to substitute itself for rather than complement reality and the consequent deleterious effects on our thinking. Perhaps the defining characteristic of virtuality is its lack of resistance, its seemingly infinite plasticity in the face of our whims. This is supposed to be its key promise, what makes it so liberating and desirable, but it is also its key pitfall. Resistance is the way through which we come to know our reality. We feel rocks rather than being able to pass through them and what we interpret as obstacles in our daily struggle are in fact clues to different motions and rhythms through which we could be moving through reality. These motions are pathways of thought that can be forged in our bodies and the virtual collapses this possibility, forcing us to rely only on old already well-worn pathways.
The power of abstract thinking is precisely in its free-floating "frictionless" nature, allowing us to completely decontextualise things and only at the moment of our choosing dropping in the representation that we wish. But abstract thinking is nothing without experience. It takes spatial and temporal understanding to be able to manipulate these symbols at all and breakthroughs in abstract thinking are more likely to come about through unusual encounters with reality than through countless hours spent staring at the page. Abstract thinking is synergistic with limbic thinking.
With virtuality, there is the promise/threat of subsuming reality rather than any contentedness with being synergistic alongside it. We are enticed to enter and remain in a world without friction, the very thing which is necessary for us to know anything.
You Are the Company You Keep; Which is Why You Think Like a Phone
Allowing our reality to be entirely mediated through the virtual stunts our capacity to grow in those aspects of reality that the virtual misses. Because thinking is inextricably linked with action, and action is always necessarily relational, the depth of our experiences, our very horizon of being is limited when we restrict those relations.
That the virtual leaves out part of reality is not a matter of technological development; better and more subtle rendering or more tactile feedback does not "close the gap". There is an infinity of depth to reality. Even once we develop virtual visual feedback to match the amount of visual information that can be processed by the human eye, this only fixes the virtual reality to the present state of development of the human eye. No growth of the human is possible since the virtual reality is fixed precisely to only that which a specific definition of the human can sense. At present we are faced with astonishingly crude representations of reality which are heralded as "nearly indistinguishable" from the real and are invited to submit to even this impoverished notion of the real. Such a submission does not entail stunting of human potential, but a severe diminishing of what the human already is.
Text messaging, phone and video calls are used as substitutes for rather than supplements to real human interaction to the point that for many people real human interaction becomes uncomfortable to the point of impossibility, requiring the mediating safe harbour of the OLED display.
The Insidiousness of Specialization
Specialization enables us to achieve, with increasing perfection, more sophisticated thinking or specific pathways or motions of reality. There are clear benefits to it, but to specialise is to necessarily deprive ourselves of opportunities to generalise. Reality is so rich, so diverse and so complicated that it is a far better strategy to try to comprehend it through multi-limbed approaches. We should feel our way out in multiple directions. This is not to discount the value of depth perception/expression/feeling but it is a caution that we deprivilege certain of our sense perceptors at our peril.
Part of what the virtual does is to unify all interfaces. This essentially makes us all specialists in the same field. Specialisation is not really about superficial categories like topics of study, it's about how we use our sense organs - our bodies - to probe and thereby know reality. If we replace reality with a mediated interface to reality and limit and unify our interfaces to that reality (degrees of knowledge) we effectively collapse the possibilities for thinking. An anthropologist who spends most of her time in front of her computer researching, a novelist who writes all day on her laptop, and an engineer who spends his time designing components in CAD software are all engaged in thinking the same kinds of thoughts. Their ability to come up with insight and bring about innovation is contingent upon their interactions with the world, interactions that they are likely to deem as "not working". But with an increasingly virtualised world, these possibilities become scarcer and scarcer.
What is needed then is a plurality of interfaces - we need to be extending our bodies not limiting them. The virtual needs to be recognised as synergistic to reality rather than emancipating us from it. Reality is not something to be escaped, it is to be embraced, and the virtual offers us the power to imagine new ways of embracing it. Resistance in the virtual also needs to be recognised as a feature, not a bug. The imperfect reality of implementing the virtual often leads to annoying little resistances, these stops and stutters, jagged artifacts and other such "undesirable" effects are in fact new ways of thinking through the world, new pathways of knowledge, and so long as they do not become exclusive articulations but exist alongside a multiplicity of paths, their effects are not harmful and may help us to know more than we can yet imagine. This is not a call for designers to call it a day with buggy software and give up on improvements, but rather to carefully consider these effects when they arise and alongside seeking to eliminate them, investigate how they may be exploited and put to use.
The Confusion of Language
Language confuses the subject of thinking because it is the primary means by which we communicate our thoughts to others. Some may even doubt that the thoughts which we are unable to articulate are even thoughts at all.
The "great" or "deep" thinkers of our time - academics, writers and other such public figures - should not be considered as such, but more properly understood as rhetors. Rhetors because it is rhetoric in which they specialize and are skilled in. Their thoughts are never so deep or great or profound, rather their talents lie in their abilities to convey these thoughts in speech and in writing to a wide audience in a manner that is broadly considered to be both entertaining and enlightening. Contrary to what many might have one believe, thinking is not something that one must hone through years of diligent study, preferably while locked away in seclusion surrounded by voluminous tomes of recognized import.
What the term limbic thinking aims to get at is the idea that thinking is primarily a way of engaging with the world. The limited domain to which thinking is generally considered is that of the engagement and manipulation of abstract symbols and concepts which serve as representations of things in the world occupying space within a constructed or simulated reality. Prodigious reading, writing, and the analysis of text does make one a better thinker, but only in the limited domain of the manipulation of symbols which we call words. It is through a magician's trick that we mistake the symbols for the reality and the thinking for real thinking. So it is with the semiotician, who through diligent study becomes quite expert both in the understanding and manipulating of language, able to wield words to stunning and convincing effect. The semiotician then comes to see linguistic structure as underlying all of reality, since we are seemingly able to represent reality using this structure. However these totalizing ideas, tantalizing though they may be on the page, have a way of slipping through one's hands like water the moment the attempt is made to realise them through praxis. Reality isn't language, it isn't abstract symbols or any other convenient thing, it is simply the messy and complex realisation of being that must be felt to be known.
(1) the phonetic alphabet as innovated by the ancient Greeks,It has often been said that English is the language of science. Chinese scientists and engineers often confirm that it is necessary to communicate in English to do science. This goes much deeper than simply the many specialist terms that have been innovated in the English language. Indeed it is not especially English that is necessary for science. French fares quite well, as does German, Spanish or any of the other Romantic and Germanic languages. What is lacking in languages like Chinese and Japanese and many others is not so much vocabulary to cover domain-specific terminology, but rather a use-system that allows for the thinking of certain kinds of thoughts. What is necessary is a phonetic alphabet and corresponding language as scientific thinking is an outgrowth of the phonetic thinking made possible by this language structure5.
(2) logographic characters as used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other writing systems, and
(3) the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and its corresponding framework of mathematical logic4.
Languages are at base a game of symbol manipulation. What gives languages their power is their seeming ability to translate objects in the world into symbols in the mind which can then be readily manipulated and sometimes returned to the world in a transformed capacity. But languages are not the final say on thinking. They are merely one type of vessel into which we pour ourselves, discovering both the extents of the vessel and the depth of ourselves in the process. They cannot hold everything. That language is insufficient at expressing thoughts has been routinely pointed out by the existence of art which is not merely more efficient or more specific than language, but also richer and fuller, while also being seemingly more ambiguous and less defined.
The ancient Greeks and philosophers of the Far East understood that there were things that could simply not be expressed. Socrates is said to have spent long hours in contemplation, which is not contemplation as we would understand it, but rather a deep astonishment at the very fact of existence that gives way to the inexpressible. Within Daoism, there is the concept of The One, which is that of which nothing can be said. The ultimate reality transcends language, it can only be felt, perhaps vaguely, through the engagement of the mind as a sense organ.
By contrast, the Talmudic and later Christian tradition took a rather banal and limited view of ultimate reality - the so-called "God" - and conflated it with language. God not only speaks the Word but is the Word. In this way semiotics is a kind of reinscription of Christian philosophy in a secular context; reality is understood as signs and symbols, a kind of code that can ultimately be read.
You Don't Have a Body of Knowledge, You Are a Body of Knowledge
Learning to dance is not simply the acquisition of a new skill to be added to a repertoire - in fact, no skill is simply that. Rather in extending one's body one also extends the limits of one's perception. You are learning how to articulate yourself in new spaces. You don't just learn how to dance, you learn how to think in dance.
This is what is so destructive about linguistic conceptions of thought. They presume that all that can be known is translatable into language, that language is the basic nature of thought. Indeed that thinking itself has a basis or an "essence" which is a linguistic representation. But just as numeracy opens our minds up to previously untold frontiers of mathematical thinking, we may well ask what aspects, surfaces and depths of reality we are occluded from seeing by our servitude to a linguistic paradigm6.
Art Exists to Complicate the World
What is the purpose of an object? Can't we communicate ideas just as well through language? If not, shouldn't we then simply aim to perfect this language so that we can communicate clearly enough to eliminate the need for all this messy stuff? This line of inquiry is not as abstract or theoretical as it may at first appear. Indeed many today are operating under the premise that we can and should simply be perfecting our representations so as to do away with the need for the clutter. This is the promise of certain virtual-reality proponents who would extol the virtues of living in a cramped and barren apartment (lower environmental impact you see) while escaping into the fantasy of living inside of whatever spacious mansion you so desire. Long-term they say, we will eliminate the need to return to reality, so that the virtual will substitute for the real, and then who can say what is so virtual about it?
This all assumes that the representation is all we have, all we can ever have. If thinking is like language, and our reality is structured by thought, then any sufficiently complex linguistic system can serve as our reality. But if thinking is limbic, if it is non-essential and fluid and extends itself into the spatiotemporal domains where it finds room, then this represents a severe short-circuiting of human potential. We presume to know everything that we can know and then proceed to close our minds off from the world of experience.
Any reductionist approach to art clarifies only to the extent that it is not followed through to its logical conclusion7. Of Modern Art, it has been said that it took the radical approach of taking its intended effect - the emotional state of the recipient - as its starting point and worked backward. But the end vector of an approach fixated on the emotions of recipients is not art works but simply electrodes wired up to the brain, triggering emotional response via signal. If you simply wanted to make people feel happy or sad or transcendent or some other thing then you would become deeply involved in neuroscience and cybernetics. That one becomes an artist instead can only be read as a tacit admission either of laziness or in duplicity in representing one's goals.
Art is craft. The art work and the craft work are one and the same. What makes something art is not the effects or non-effects it produces in the recipient - art is certainly not whatever makes one feel something - but simply its presence as an artefact. Art and technology are two sides of the same coin, produced by the same hand; the transformations and transmutations of the material world. That the nature of art is so contested has to do with the invention of an elevated status - divine, transcendent, or famous - conferred onto art works. Everyone wants the respect and the recognition conferred to the artist, so everyone wants their work to be considered art. But if art were rightly considered as the lowly thing that it is - the stuff of nature that has been turned in the hand - there would not be any debate at all. At the "know it when you see it" human-pattern-recognition-intuition level we know that art and craft are the same. A dance performance is not an art work. This is not to denigrate dance, which is perhaps a far more beautiful and more human articulation of thinking than the contemptible objects deemed "art": paintings, sculptures, and other clutter. It is only because we have decided that only art can move us that such declarations are contested; when something that is decidedly non-art does indeed move us, we must retroactively proclaim it as art. This itself is part of historical reductionist thinking - greatness comes from the artist (earlier) or the art (later) or the recipient (later still) - that builds a theory around exclusivity.
If art is not about producing emotion in someone else, nor about communicating some idea; if art is not reducible to any such near-sighted system, then what is it for? Art exists to complicate the world. We turn over nature in the hand to remake it, thinking in doing so we understand it a little better, that we have reduced it, essentialized it, or at least pointed it in that direction. But the allure of art lies in its non-reductive qualities, in its material inability to be reduced. Art reproduces reality and in so doing re-instantiates its complexity.
In our modern terminology art should be thought to encompass the vast canvas that is generally given over to "product". The iPhone is an art work, just as is the Wassily chair. But product is too narrow a category. It is an unfortunate consequence of the totalizing capitalist ideology that to be explicable at all an object must be a product for use or, preferably, consumption. Looked at closely however and the utility of an iPhone is just as ambiguous as a talisman, a pendant or a painting the cost of which could rival the GDP of a small country. These are human things and ways of interacting with the human world. If our interactions only become messier and more complicated as a consequence, then we can be sure that we are making art.
Final Articulations
Perhaps the foremost objection to the idea of limbic thinking is that this is simply not what thinking is. Thinking is to be thought of only as those activities traditionally held to be such, and other forms of expression are not to be confused or conflated with the activity of thinking. The point of the idea of limbic thinking is to create an awareness that this traditional domain is only part of the territory, that if we are truly interested in what thinking is, we will discover that it is this very act of expressing ourselves in the world8.
Conventional theories on thinking - thought as language or as visual or some other paradigm - explain thinking in terms of one category of thought. They then begin to bring all activities of human expression under this narrow definition, necessarily excluding, forcing conformity and generating hierarchies in the process. Limbic thinking moves in the opposite direction - thinking as we understand it is itself understood as part of a landscape of expressive possibility.
Reality is not reducible. It is that which cannot be reduced. The goal is not to bring existence to bear under some totalitarian reductionist principle or order but to continually extend ourselves along the infinite pathways which comprise reality. We should be inventing new languages, new instruments, new modes of thinking, new ways of continuously confronting and colliding with the material world.
Footnotes
1 In a sense, limbic thinking has already been discovered by machine learning researchers even if its implications have not been recognized or acknowledged. Machine learning algorithms, with their emphasis on accumulating vast quantities of data, serve as testimony to the necessity of colliding with reality. Although this reality is mediated, abstracted and decontextualized as "data" so as to be machine-digested.↩
2 Of course, electro-mechanical systems and devices and therefore their analysis is nothing new. However, it is typical in such systems to separate the domains, to apply the appropriate equations and methodology to the appropriate systems rather than insisting upon a synthesis whereby the separate domains can be made analogous to one another. Any synthesis would typically be made at a higher level of abstraction - on the level of control theory - which uses coarse-graining that makes it inappropriate at the level of individual, specific, physical components.↩
3 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, steam technology provided the dominant technological metaphor. The universe was conceived of as a steam engine and so too was the human psyche. Rage was pent up so that we needed to let off steam. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the computational worldview has come to encompass thinking: the universe is variously conceived as a kind of computer (or as a simulation running on a computer) and so too is the human psyche, with consciousness itself conceptualised as a kind of subroutine running atop the complex parallel-processing neural wetware of the human brain.↩
4 The numeral system unleashes mathematical thinking which we regard as synonymous with or the base for abstract thinking. One cannot get very far thinking mathematically without number. Our thoughts in this domain progress apace with our linguistic innovations.↩
5 It is tempting to imagine what science might look like in the East had Asiatic peoples developed it on its own. But science, as we understand it, would never have come about except through a phonetic language structure. The result of a Chinese Science would be so different from the Western outcome that we would deny it the status of science.↩
6 To assert that the material world is not at base linguistic is not to suggest that it cannot be interpreted that way, or that such an interpretation is without merit. Rather it is to say that such an approach, no matter how thorough, necessarily misses something.↩
7 The reduction of art into language collapsed art. Here text on a wall in a gallery space. Behold! The written word. Interesting, but no longer distinct, no longer art.↩
8 Against this, it may be said that limbic thinking confuses expression with thinking and that thinking is more limited than expression and is not intended to cover the totality of human experience. However, when thinking is recognised as the processes that occur in the mind it is evident that it must be synonymous with expression and to exclude expressions is to claim their non-existence. Colloquially speaking we talk of acting without thinking, but a much more expansive view of thinking is claimed in studies of the concept.↩
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