When the Partially Examined Life discussion of human enhancement (Episode 91) turned to the topic of digital technology, the philosophical oxygen was sucked out of the room. Sure, folks conceded that philosopher of mind Andy Clark (not mentioned by name, but implicitly referenced) has interesting things to say about how technology upgrades our cognitive abilities and extends the boundaries of where our minds are located. But everything else more or less was dismissed as concerning not terribly deep uses of “appliances”.
I think this is a misguided way to look at technology. It dramatically underestimates how technologically mediated behavior can impact character and autonomy.
Ok, let’s start where the action already is. Within the philosophy of mind, there’s lots of debate about whether, as Clark and David Chalmers insist, technologies like iPhones should be considered bona fide parts of our minds. Here’s Chalmers:
“I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain . . . The iPhone is part of my mind already . . . [Clark’s] marvellous book . . . defends the thesis that, in at least some of these cases the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me . . . When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.”
Now, this is not the place to assess the philosophical ideas that Clark and Chalmers propose. That would require us moving beyond empirical studies of how effectively humans can offload computational tasks to technology into complex and contentious metaphysical territory. But if you’re unfamiliar with the discussions and want a quick sense of the reasons marshaled to justify the “extended mind” thesis, check out this engaging TEDx talk and NY Times think-piece. And, if you want to understand why more traditionally minded philosophers reject the outlook, read Jerry Fodor’s lively book review of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension.
Regardless of whether you believe that technology is best viewed as a tool for solving cognitive problems or as an integral part of our mental machinery, there’s an important distinction to draw—one that was absent from the Partially Examined Life conversation and, so far as I can tell, doesn't get much play in academic philosophy. (Although useful parallels can be drawn to ideas defended by Albert Borgmann, a major thinker in the Philosophy of Technology.)
Outsourcing tasks that solve cognitive problems is not morally equivalent to outsourcing tasks that manage close personal relationships.
Let’s consider a concrete case. Imagine using an app that reminds you to contact your significant other and even suggests what should be conveyed when it reaches out on your behalf via time-delayed text messages that appear to be coming from you. Are these functions nothing more than variations of longstanding time-management technologies that alert us to scheduled appointments and important dates?
This is no mere hypothetical thought experiment. Over at The Atlantic and Wired I recently discussed two apps that offer users these exact features: Romantimatic and BroApp. With respect to neurotypical people using the former, I wrote:
“There’s no shame in recording some special, easy-to-forget events on a calendar. There’s nothing wrong with soliciting advice from friends and family as to what type of a gift your partner would prefer for some occasions. And under some circumstances—like when you’re trying to avoid a nasty fight—it is perfectly fine to get advice on how best to word a sensitive point. But these moments of dependence on others for relationship management—of both people and things—should be the exception. If they are the rule, your character is impaired. Serious questions need to be asked about why that’s the case and how often you’re behaving inappropriately . . . . While the person who needs a tool like Romantimatic isn't morally callous, I do wonder how well they respond to other social situations that require conscientiousness and caring.”
With respect to the latter, I wrote:
“Ultimately, the reason technologies like BroApp are problematic is that they’re deceptive. They take situations where people make commitments to be honest and sincere, but treat those underlying moral values as irrelevant — or, worse, as obstacles to be overcome. If they weren’t, BroApp’s press document wouldn’t contain cautions like: ‘Understandably, a girl who discovers their guy using BroApp won’t be happy.’ . . . It’s easy to think of technologies like BroApp as helpful assistants that just do our bidding and make our lives better. But the more we outsource, the more of ourselves we lose.”
David Berreby thought long and hard about these points, and in a great piece for Big Think came to an important conclusion about how some instances of technological outsourcing can diminish autonomy.
“Romantimatic doesn't help you with a decision to text ‘I love you’ at 3:15. It makes the decision (and, if you're using it to the hilt, it also decides that the text will contain those precise words). . . . When you outsource decisions that require self-monitoring and self-management, then, you're giving up some autonomy. First, you are, literally, making fewer decisions about what to do. Second, you are trusting yourself less, setting aside your own understanding of your condition in favor of supposedly objective measurements.... Third, you're offloading the real work of decision-making—the psychic act of ‘self-binding,’ forcing yourself to do what you aren't at the moment inclined to do. Something else is doing that job.”
And, as Michael Sacasas, creator of the blog, “The Frailest Thing,” aptly points out, we not only should distinguish intellectual from ethical processes, but we further ought to make the conceptual slice by giving deep philosophical thought to the difference between ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’ labor.
“The problem, I think, involves a conflation of intellectual labor with ethical/emotional labor. For better and for worse, we’ve gotten used to the idea of outsourcing intellectual labor to our devices. Take memory, for instance. We’ve long since ceased memorizing phone numbers. Why bother when our phones can store those numbers for us? On a rather narrow and instrumental view of intellectual labor, I can see why few would take issue with it. As long as we find the solution or solve the problem, it seems not to matter how the labor is allocated between minds and machines. To borrow an old distinction, the labor itself seems accidental rather than essential to the goods sought by intellectual labor.
When it comes to our emotional and ethical lives, however, that seems not to be the case. When we think of ethical and emotional labor, it’s harder to separate the labor itself from the good that is sought or the end that is pursued.
For example, someone who pays another person to perform acts of charity on their behalf has undermined part of what might make such acts virtuous. An objective outcome may have been achieved, but at the expense of the subjective experience that would constitute the action as ethically virtuous. In fact, subjective experience, generally speaking, is what we seem to be increasingly tempted to outsource. When it comes to our ethical and emotional lives, however, the labor is essential rather than accidental; it cannot be outsourced without undermining the whole project. The value is in the labor, and so is our humanity.”
If we value conscientious relationships and thoughtful decision-making, we'll need to be vigilant about preserving them in the years ahead. A recent poll conducted by Amy Vernon can make us feel optimistic about the future, but as it becomes more and more technologically-tempting to disburden ourselves of life’s hard but crucial work, we'll need to be crystal clear about when the line shouldn't be crossed that divides cognitive from moral outsourcing.
Evan Selinger
I’m not sure that technology today is affecting us more than that of technology of the past; I suspect we’re so taken with the complexity of the current technological model and prevalence of science that we forget just how, well, human we are. I’m more interested in the limitations of science on the human condition than all this fancy speculation about where we might go. For example, can we demonstrate a hard and complex problem solved through a computer in a way that a human can grasp easily? No matter the complexity of our technology we still face a bunch of human problems of both cognition and comprehension that few seem worried about in SciFi?
Well put “forget just how, well, human we are” and “No matter the complexity of our technology we still face a bunch of human problems”. Or as Nietzsche put it “Human, All Too Human”
My misgivings about all of this utopian (or dystopian) sounding futurism is like you to get to a Star Trek like future it isn’t only technological advancements we need, we don’t need some new i-Whatever, we need cultural, economic, social advancements and that is more likely to come from philosophy and psychology than the “hard sciences”.
Don’t get me wrong I love SciFi and technology but merely living longer or being able to replace an arm or something isn’t going to get us there.
I could be wrong but it seems more likely to come from a book like Jonathan Haidt’s than David Brin’s books.
http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2014/03/24/a-righteous-mind-on-jonathan-haidt-and-morality/#more-25696
“If abuses are destroyed, we must destroy them. If slaves are freed, we must free them. If new truths are discovered, we must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of people. The grand victories of the future must be won by humanity, and by humanity alone.” Robert G. Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899)
“But everything else more or less was dismissed as concerning not terribly deep uses of “appliances”.”
and
“I think this is a misguided way to look at technology. It dramatically underestimates how technologically mediated behavior can impact character and autonomy.”
and
“If we value conscientious relationships and thoughtful decision-making, we’ll need to be vigilant about preserving them in the years ahead. A recent poll conducted by Amy Vernon can make us feel optimistic about the future, but as it becomes more and more technologically-tempting to disburden ourselves of life’s hard but crucial work, we’ll need to be crystal clear about when the line shouldn’t be crossed that divides cognitive from moral outsourcing.”
Very interesting post. I take a bit of a cuationary note from this. I can think of one thing now with technology of drones some one can kill people while being completely safe in a different place as if watching and playing a video game. It’s not nessasarily moral outsoucing but it is stages of removed in a way that I could see get worse.
Part of the bank and real estate collapse was everyone putting repsonsibilty off onto some one else. And that didn’t take very much technology to do.
In the Brin discussion a thought that came to mind was if one of your copies while out getting new experiences for you one commits a crime or accidently kills some one in say a car accident. Wouldn’t you ultimately be responsible some how? Or what if some porpusely used them to commit crimes? I don’t know.
I took it from the discussion after the Brin episode was that it’s all interesting and references were made to the hive mind of one character and the Brog, the Matrix and how SciFi and Brin explores these interesting ideas. But it would have been a lot or impossible rehash all of the SciFi books and movies that explore these things.
But I think I have to agree with them that a lot of this really comes down to policy or legal or medical issues more than philosophical problems or ideas for a future that may or may not be a long time away such as real A.I. or combining the human brain with computers or uploading etc… What little I know of neuroscience is there isn’t any “consciousness” in the brain to upload. There is just the brain and consciousness is an emergnet property of the whole.
If you have a car and it runs/works and you can get in it a go where you want but you can’t upload its’ “running”.
Unless you take a dualistic Cartesian take in which case how then do we upload a spirit or soul into a computer? I don’t know what a spirit or soul is much less of how it could go in a computer.
There was mention of Chalmers who gets characterized as a dualist but his odd take is what he calls “naturalistic dualism”: naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. So he’s an emergentist or maybe an emergent materialism and really not a real dualist such as Descartes was. Because his emergent mental states are not separable from the brain-body as a whole.
The diference of Chalmers and Jerry A. Fodor is what the word “mind” refers to or means.
Dan Siegel has another take on “mind”.
“The mind—the regulatory process that creates patterns in the flow of energy and information—can be described as emanating in part from the activity of the neurons of the distributed nervous system. Keep in mind that the “single-skull” view of mind as merely a product of the brain may be too limited. We have evolved to be social, and mental processes are a product of our inner neural connections as well as our interpersonal communicative connections with others. Without this reminder, it may be too easy to slip into the linear thinking that “mind is simply the brain’s activity.” The scientifically grounded view proposed in this text is that the mind arises from beyond the functioning of an isolated nervous system. Both our internal
neural functions and our shared communicative processes give rise to the process defined here as mind.
It is important to underscore this issue right from the start. Sometimes neuroscience researchers or the popular media imply that the mind is simply the output of the brain. In this often-expressed view, mental life is equated with brain activity—an outcome of the firing of neurons within the brain.
But in this book I take a broader view that perceives mental processes as emerging from neural functions throughout the whole body (not only the brain in the skull) and from relational processes (not only from one bodily self or nervous system). The mind is embodied, not just enskulled. And the mind is also relational, not a product created in isolation. These relationships include the communication an individual has with other entities in the world, especially other people.
http://www.drdansiegel.com/pdf/Chapter%20excerpt%20from%20TDM%202nd%20Ed..pdf
The Emerging Mind: How relationships and the embodied brain shape who we are
audio/mp3
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2012/the-emerging-mind-how-relationships-and-the-embodied-brain-shape-who-we-are
But now I’m thinking of Siegel, Chalmers, and Fodor rather than technology per se. I’ll have to think about this a bit more.
much respect
An after thought. Unless we have cultural, economic, and social changes and advances I can see the first applications of “appliances” and copies/clones/robots and gene enhancements/changes being used first for military applications/soldiers.
Evan I don’t see how “essential” functions as anything more than an honorific here, what makes this way of thinking/prioritizing “deep”?
Have you read Rorty’s reply to some similar work by Dreyfus&Spinosa: http://philpapers.org/rec/RORNAT
I’m not sure I understand your question. Can you please re-phrase, perhaps with more detail and more direct analysis of the post? Thanks!