Listen first, write later

There's a nice profile of Jaron Lanier in the current New Yorker by Jennifer Kahn. It's locked to non-subscribers, but still on the newsstands. In it he's very wise, in the way (as we learned last year in the "Future of Life" course*) of You Are Not a Gadget, on the importance of actually existing and creating as a human being in your own right and not being content merely to reflect passing currents  in the enveloping cyber-sea around you. Re-tweeters, attend:

If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?

(*NOTE TO SELF, on a possible future course. "Philosophy and the Internet: Staying Human in the Information Age")

In the Chronicle of Higher Education awhile back Lanier commented on techno-Utopia and New Atheism, shaking his head at

a new sort of "nerd" religion based around a core belief that a global brain is not only emerging but will replace humanity. It is often claimed, in the vicinity of institutions like Silicon Valley's Singularity University, that the giant global computer will upload the contents of human brains to grant them everlasting life in the computing cloud.

And,

There is right now a lot of talk about whether to believe in God or not, but I suspect that religious arguments are gradually incorporating coded debates about whether to even believe in people anymore.

That's always the most important question. He still believes. Of course he does. Look again at that little girl.

not so special

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked scholars and artists what they think will be the "defining idea of the next decade." Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) responded:

Consider the common practice of students blogging, networking, or tweeting while listening to a speaker. At a recent lecture, I said: "The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn't to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?" Jaron Lanier: The End of Human Specialness

Consider, indeed.

lab rats

New Yorker

What if Nick Carr is right? ("Net turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers for social & intellectual pellets")

cognitive surplus

The up-side of Internet overload: Clay Shirky applauds creative, cooperative, constructive public uses of  "dead time" not available to people in the pre-digital age. "Free cultures get what they celebrate," Shirky quotes Dean Kamen. That might be good news, if we can get over the infantile and inexplicable fascination with LOLcats and the like and really celebrate things that make a constructive civic difference. Time only will tell if it's Shirky's or Nick Carr's future, or something else entirely.

What you do with cats on your own time is still, of course, your own business. Up to a point.

spiritually drained

J&M would like to leave the worldly world behind, too. They're like, y'know, balefully influenced by terse text/netspeak...

But they're not the only ones who need to unplug and reconnect. At least on Sunday. (Beginning next week?)

BTW: here's what urbandictionary.com says "FTW" means...

holy google

People have been thinking about the question Stephen posed in class yesterday for awhile, here's an excerpt from an old essay suggesting the possibility of an emergent Internet intelligence. Google's not God, but it's something. (Still working on the connection to Job and Ecclesiastes. I'll Google it.) 


The pooling of human consciousness may begin with the transferral of all our knowledge to computers. This is already happening on the Internet. At a later stage of scientific advancement, a physical connection of humans to the matrix at higher and higher levels (via advances in nervous/computer interface technology) will be possible. Thereafter, with humans completely interconnected through a network, questions might arise as to the relevance of the physical world. Could we simply upload all our consciousness to this virtual world? Would we then create a comparable world inside the network?
This advancement in interpersonal communications is set to continue, the ultimate stage being the development of a totally integrated system of human communication, which is likely to be achieved by highly advanced human--computer interface systems. Preliminary research on this subject is already being done, for example in the implantation of artificial retinas, connected to the opticnerve, into eyes of blind people. As computers are already interconnected, the merging of humans into a super-high-bandwidth computer network will bring about the next level of human evolution: a human-computermeta-network.

Just as the merging of a large number of individual cells ultimately led to the development of consciousness, the merging of humans into an interconnected computermeta-network will eventually create a collective consciousness for all the individual participants. The forerunner of this "global" consciousness is already evident: our world is already described as a global village...

spirited atheist

At least one New Atheist rejects the "kinder, gentler" label. My bad? Susan Jacoby does not want to belong to that particular club if it will have someone like her for a member...


For the record, though, my "kinder, gentler" list is not exclusively distaff. James, Sagan, Gould, and-- among the living-- Ruse, Shermer, even (arguably) Dennett in some contexts. 


Also for the record: Dennett did not "coin the term 'Bright'..." He did endorse it, but he really says lots of respectful things about religion as a form of life.


But, it's great to see Jacoby joining the ranks with her new Washington Post column. An excerpt from the first edition:


Speaking only for myself, I find that awareness of my inevitable extinction enhances rather than diminishes my life. This awareness makes me want to leave something behind, if only a piece of scholarship that will be useful to some seeker of knowledge in a library of the future. I will admit that I am deeply disturbed by the possibility that libraries may become extinct, although the digital world offers a kind of eternal life that neither an atheist nor a religious believer could have predicted when I was a child. The novelist Milan Kundera has written about a number of developments the Creator never imagined--among them surgery and humans' relationship with their dogs. To that I would add the internet. The digital world, because it is a product of human intelligence, is a part of the nature (for better and for worse) of which men and women also comprise a finite part. To fill our portion of the universe with the best achievements possible, through our love and our work, is purpose enough for a lifetime and requires no transcendence of nature and no afterlife.