Soul Space

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 1 - Soul Space

In this chapter, Wertheim shows how different the Middle Age's conception of space is from our own, using Dante's The Divine Comedy as evidence of this. In this work, Dante formalized a new space to allow for the religious idea of accounting of sins: Purgatory. This makes this "a rare instance in which we can see clearly the emergence of a new space of being" (67), and therefore a great parallel with and insight into our own creation of cyberspace. In some respects, she argues, Dante was engaged in the task of creating a virtual world, mapping heaven and hell and in between. But this is Wertheim's point: "The 'virtual worlds' being constructed on computers today usually bear little or no relationship to the world of our daily experience. For most VR pundits, escape from daily reality is preciselythe point. Dante, however, was not trying to escape daily life; on the contrary he grounded his 'virtual world' in real people, real events, and real history" (50).

This, I feel, is the difference between escapism and sublimation. And what worries me is that the technology we create now caters to escapism, when it has the potential to facilitate wonderful sublimation, creation, a greater experience of our actual world.

Another thing that is evident beneath the surface of Dante's work, foreign as it may be to us now, is the orientation characteristic of the Middle Ages whereby people are guided "by a spiritual compass rather than a physical one." In other words, Dante's map was in a way spiritually correct, i.e. it resonated with a spiritual truth; regardless of the fact that we know that physically it makes no sense. (We have been to the moon, and we have not passed God on the way.) Other examples from the time, like the mappae mundi, represent completely warped landmasses with Jerusalem at the center. This makes a different kind of sense. And it is quite amazing to realize how foreign this type of thinking is to us now. Much has changed in our worldview; and yet we can never seem to imaging any other kind of thinking being possible than the worldview we currently hold. Thus is the nature of a paradigm. As Wertheim writes,

A major problem, I suggest, is that the very questions raised here are quintessentially modern. They are framed within the context of our purely physicalist paradigm, which was quite alien to the medieval mind-set. When we ask if Dante 'really' believed in a set of heavenly spheres or a hellish chasm inside the earth, we are asking questions about physical space. In our minds we start wondering how far above the earth the lunar sphere would be. How far below the surface would the second circle of Hell be found? At what longitude might Purgatory be? We do this because we cannot help it. Our minds have been so trained - so brainwashed - to think of space in purely physical terms, it is almost impossible for us to think in any other way. It is not just that we have been to the moon and found no crystal spheres, or that we have circumnavigated the globe and found no terraced mountain; we simply cannot imagine a place being 'real' unless it has a mathematically precise location in physical space (69).

In Dante's time, it was possible to perform what we might think of today as amazing feats of intellectual acrobatics. Dante used somewhat familar means - geometry - but to bizarre ends, coupled with poetic language. "Passing through 'the skin of the universe' the virtual Dante looks out to see a Blazing Point of light around which circle nine rings of fire: God and the angelic orders symbolically rendered in light. Here, all directions and all dimensions fuse: 'the Burning Point is not only the center, the innermost, but also the highest, the outermost' reference. In this single point of infinite love is contained the whole of time and space" (72-3).

The key to this creative interpretation of religious experience is that "Body-space and soul-space have been melded into one-space. The mystery is beyond intellection" (73).

How foreign! How wonderful!

I get frustrated when people are so resigned to the state of things, poo-pooing alternative visions for our world with a simple, defeatist, "It's just the way things are." But as this example highlights, everything is a product of its time yet - or indeed, therefore - subject to change! This is why it is so important to be cognizant of the ways our technology is changing our very humanness! I am reminded of Marx's assertion that there is no such thing as 'human nature' per se, and that what we think of as being innate to our humanness is in fact historically situated. "Life," he argues, "is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

The question I am left wondering, however, is whether a spiritual conception of our world is actually possible when we live amongst technologies that so aggressively assert a scientific paradigm. How can we reconcile technologies with spirituality when the two embody entirely separate ways of thinking? I suppose the answer lies in the realization that what we really need is a paradigm shift, and entirely new way of thinking that allows for both, or for something new and more harmonious with our mental health and wellbeing.

The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Introduction - The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

From the outset, it appears that Wertheim is very much arguing the opposite of me: that the Internet offers new spiritual potential. Or at least she suggests that people experience a new space for their souls in cyberspace. For example, she quotes Kevin Kelly who says, "I have experienced soul-data through silicon;" and Michael Heim who writes, "Our fascination with computers is... more deeply spiritual than utilitarian;" "In our love affair [with these machines] we are searching for a home for the mind and heart."

On some level, this seems particularly sad to me. We are like the orphaned animal cuddling up to a stuffed animal surrogate. Cute - but heartbreakingly sad.

But then, Wertheim is not arguing this clinging to the Internet as a "disembodied paradise for souls" is healthy. Instead, she writes, "I see this trend as inherently problematic." On the other hand, her task in the writing of the book is to explain why people have been brought to this state where they must seek new space for their souls. She does so by tracing not just the technology, but the culture that gave birth to its science. This includes following the story of the changing Western mindset, the art and history and science that progressed through the ages to eventually give birth to our new world in which the Internet makes a kind of sense as a surrogate home for the soul (or in her words, "creates such a hospitiable climate for quasi-religious dreaming about cyberspace").

A brief way to characterise our new climate is to compare it, as Umbert Eco did, to the last days of the Roman Empire: corrupt, fragmented, "marked by inequity." According to Wertheim,

Ours also seems to be a society past its peak, one no longer sustained by a firm belief in itslef and no longer sure of its purpose. As part of the response to this disintegration, Americans everywhere are looking to religion for new grounding in their lives.... US society today vibrates with 'spiritual' yearnings. Like the late Romans we too are searching for a renewed sense of meaning (21).

The irony of finding a spiritual home in the Internet is that it is decidedly secular: "The religious appeal of cyberspace lies then in a paradox: here we have a repackaging of the old idea of Heaven but in a secular, and technologically sanctioned format. The perfect realm awaits us, we are told, not behind the pearly gates, but beyond the network gateways, behind electronic doors labeled '.com', '.net', and '.edu'" (22).

But as I have mentioned previously in this blog, echoed here by Wertheim, "People will only adopt a technology if it resonates with a latent desire" (27). Are there not other ways of meeting these needs than by retreating into the space behind our computer screens? Wertheim writes,

The failure of modern science to incorporate this immaterial 'I' - this 'self,' this 'mind,' this 'spirit,' this 'soul' - into its world picture is one of the premier pathologies of modern Western culture, and sadly, one reason many people are turning away from science. Sensing that something crucial has been occluded from the physicalist picture, they are looking elsewhere in the hope of locating this missing ingredient (38).

Another way of describing this home-seeking behavior is that it is escapism, pure and simple. People can be whoever they want to be on the Internet, shedding their flaws that they are ashamed of, without having to actually fix them. And Wertheim writes, "Some champions of cyberspace dream of escaping entirely from what one commentator has called 'the ballast of materiality'" (23).

Mostly, Wertheim describes the situation as a problem of overcrowding: "In the modern scientific world picture it is a matter of cosmological fact that the whole of reality is taken up by physical space, and there is literally no place within this scheme for anything like a spirit of soul or psyche to be. In the vision painted by modern science, the physical world is the totality of reality because within this vision physical space extends infinitely in all directions, taking up all available, and even conceivable, territory" (31). As Wertheim goes on to explain in later chapters, our very conception of the space we inhabit has profoundly altered our worldviews, evidenced by and reinforced by art, literature, and science... and eventually manifested in our technological innovations. These changes, as she maps out so convincingly, involve the steady climb of physicality in our thinking about our world, such that it supercedes all other forms of 'reality' and in the process uproots them, making them (things like the soul, emotions, dreams) homeless, ungrounded.

She warns against the lazy characterization of modern scientific thinking as dualistic. "This world picture is entirely monistic, admitting the reality of the physical world alone" (34). "How," she asks, "did we go from seeing ourselves at the center of an angel-filled space suffused with divine presence and purpose to the modern scientific picture of a pointless void" (35)? "How did we go from seeing ourselves embedded in spaces of both body and soul, to seeing ourselves embedded in physical space alone" (36)?

And the most important question of all: "how has this shift in our vision of space affected our understanding of who and what we are as human beings" (36)?

Some final thoughts

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 5, Chapter 14: Future Humors

The book concludes somewhat less triumphantly than expected. E.g.:
"I've argued that when you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. On the other hand, I've also argued that computationalism, a philosophical framework that doesn't give people a special place, can be extremely useful in scientific speculations. When we want to understand ourselves on naturalistic terms, we must make use of naturalistic philosophy that accounts for a degree of irreducible complexity, and until someone comes up with another idea, computationalsims is the only path we have to do that" (177).

But we simply must do better! "Treating people as nothing other than parts of nature is an uninspired basis for designing technologies that embody human aspirations" (178).

Lanier seems to be articulating something very similar to my argument that we need more "spiritual" engagements with technology; i.e. these engagements need to be uplifting and meaningful. The final sentences of his book read: "For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us" (192).

Making the Best of Bits

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 4, Chapters 12-13: Making the Best of Bits

This seems a particularly poignant observation: "People can make themselves believe in all sorts of fictitious beings, but when those beings are perceived as inhabiting the software tools through which we live our lives, we have to change ourselves in unfortunate ways in order to support our fantasies. We make ourselves dull" (156-7).

Lanier proposes that we cannot escape the need for computationalism, but that we should consider adopting an alternative form of it, what he calls "realism" (157). This is based on the understanding that what makes us human is the result of a tremendous history of evolution, and that we have been "refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality" (157). In Lanier's "realism", "what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonasbstract continuation of reality" (157). I'm not sure I find this comforting. At least it does little to assuage my concerns that we are fiddling with things we cannot possibly imagine the consequences of, and that it may be negating what millions of years of evolution worked to create.

Lanier discusses at length how computers have gotten smart enough now to recognize human facial expressions (159). To do so, they had to perform a feat of abstraction (although Lanier did not couch it as such). In other words, they had to discover the commonalities between all smiles, for example, in order to be able to recognize a smile. What I think this example shows is that computers fundamentally rely on abstraction, and it is no wonder that the more we engage with these computers, the more we become comfortable with abstracting ourselves as a series of ticked boxes on a profile page.

I also couldn't help but notice that Lanier himself got entirely carried away with all of the exciting things that computers could do. Could they detect odors? Ooh! I think this precisely illustrates his previous complaint, that we are seeking to create echoes with our technology. Why are we working so hard to create technology that can simulate humans? Should we not imagine an entirely new entity, one that can do things that we never could do?

The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 3, Chapters 9-11: The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness

"Flatness" is the term that Lanier uses to describe the way that each new technology is made using the same resources as every other one (120), which "reifies our philosophies through the process of lock-in before we are ready" (119).

One manifestation of this flatness is the way in which, with all of the promise of newness afforded by web 2.0, we are in a creative rut, stuck trying to recreate earlier technologies. It is kind of bizarre that the most celebrated web 2.0 output is a reinterpretation on a pretty bland creation, the encyclopedia.

We will know we have made progress if we manage to generate entirely new things with the internet. In a way, this is a variation on the architectural notion of "truth to materials." Why do we seek to digitize things that were perfectly good non-digital creations? We should be using technology to enable us to do things that we never could have before. This requires us to be creative in our technological designs. As Lanier correctly notes, "Making echoes of this material in the radical, new, 'open' world accomplishes nothing. The cumulative result is that online culture is fixated on the world as it was before the web was born" (123). Put another way, "Freedom is moot if you waste it" (131).

Lanier suggests we ought to rethink the idea that open source is the answer in all cases; that it is "automatically the best path to creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts" (126).

He also suggests that we continually seek closer and closer simulacrums, because "what makes something real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion" (133).

One of the tradeoffs we've accepted for supposed freedoms in web 2.0 is that we now have a disconnect between numerical popularity and intensity of connections with people in the cloud (137). Furthermore, technologies like Wikipedia make us (and search engines) lazy (143): we automatically defer to it as the easy truth.

To overcome this, we may want to develop alternatives for interaction that allow for greater contextualization.

And before we idolize a technology, we need to consider what life would be like without it. Would the world cease to exist without Wikipedia? If not, if nothing is lost, how valuable is it really? Lanier writes, "It seems to me that if Wikipedia suddenly disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors and with a greater sense of style and presence" (143). That its form might be less consistent (i.e. non-standardized) may in fact be a blessing. What's wrong with a bit of human touch? This would be a nice relief from the otherwise constant promotion of the idea that the collective can better provide "truth" than an individual. Two heads are better than one, we say; but we also say that too many cooks spoil the broth.

An example of this possibly better encyclopedia is that produced by ThinkQuest, which required contestants to learn how to "present their ideas as wholes, as well as figure out how to use the new online medium to do that" (146). This reinforces highly valuable skills! These are things we should cultivate!

Quantified selves

Ick! This doesn't sound appealing to me at all:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/data-driven_liv.php

A new way of reading

I'm not sure I buy the Utopian vision of a world of more engaged reading. Something doesn't ring true in then encomium on the new wave of reading devices:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html