Rudderless

Imagine that we are always and only contextual.

It's easy enough to talk about ourselves as beings who often have good and bad things happen to us as organic creatures. An illness that may kill us is bad; apparent health is good. Certain bacteria promote healthy operations within the system that is our body; others promote disease, death, decay. This seems "bad".

However, these are simply natural processes and only the mind that speaks and considers itself a discrete, unique entity that values life (continued living) AS a discrete, unique entity (mind) will be wont to assign a valuation to a measure of health or well-being. Sick is bad; not-sick is good.

Life happens (but is not necessary); death happens and is necessary. I find this statement endlessly fascinating.

However, once we start thinking along these lines we must try to reduce this unique being that has a self-obsessed mind to something more common and natural. After all we are only another form of mammal.

So, like all other organic life, our discrete, unique self as a body/mind must expire. This is not a unique occurrence and in fact is so commonplace that it must be one of the oddities (weaknesses?) of the human that the contemplation of it unhinges so many of us.

Still, if we think of ourselves as "like" all other beings we can also consider ourselves as "like" all other planetary "metabolisms". If the planet is our primary organic being (this is Gaia, yes?) then perhaps we are only a species of metabolic action. If so, the planet, if it has a "mind", might label us "good" or "bad"?

The point, moreover, is that humans measure all things by human standards--and these, sadly, tellingly, are short-sighted (just like the duration of our lives, so our common interest) and have only self-preservation as a consideration.

The real error as regards how the human fits in with the planetary comes in the form of the mind itself--or the self-regarding mechanism that creates the discrete idea of unique human being. Mind sees "me" as highly valuable and my selfish desire for my continuing existence is necessary to me. However, as regards planetary systems, wherein species come and go (and lovely is the rose) a billion times over, this is a gross error in understanding "one's place".

As philosophy is simply a backwards attempt to assign meaning to the meaningless so do we attempt to create meaning in our ecological and environmental organic "uniqueness" among our planetary brethren.

And as long as we exist (in our minds) "outside" of the natural planetary parameters of "duration" we will continue to simply create master-narratives that allow us to continue the mass delusion of our unique species.

Until we are no more.

World Enough...and Time?

Two from A.R. Ammons that might work to focus our thinking after yesterday's post: the first "World", seems a thumbnail ecology (yet inclusive of all); the second, "Peak", diagnoses our dilemma as human mind within that ecology of "actual trees" and "high tides"--humans desire a place/time "beyond" the world in the poem "World" and the result...well, the final two lines could not be a more ruthless truth.

World

Breakers at high tide shoot
spray over the jetty boulders
that collects in shallow chips, depressions,

evening the surface to run-off level:
of these possible worlds of held water,
most can't outlast the interim tideless

drought, so are clear, sterile, encased with
salt: one in particular, though, a hole,
providing depth with little surface,

keeps water through the hottest day:
a slime of green algae extends into that
tiny sea, and animals tiny enough to be in a

world there breed and dart and breathe and
die: so we are here in this plant-created oxygen,
drinking this sweet rain, consuming this green.


Peak

Everything begins at the tip-end, the dying-out,
of mind:
the dazed eyes set and light
dissolves actual trees:

the world beyond: tongueless,
unexampled
burns dimension out of shape,
opacity out of stone:

come: though the world ends and cannot
end,
the apple falls sharp
to the heart starved with time.


["Peak" should have indents at the 2nd line, 5th line, and 11th.]

Slaves to the Idea of the Tower

My friend Marc over at Disquiet reviewed Doug Rushkoff's recent book about technology, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, while proscribing its dictates into a "guide" for musicians in the technological age. That review is linked below.

Rushkoff's product page (link below) says this:

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

I commented on Disquiet's FB post:

I always feel ambivalent about these kinds of self-help books for the Age of Technicity. On the one hand, the train of obeisance and acquiescence to our future with mediating machines has left the station (about the time real trains left the station!), but on the other I always want to fight against "acceptance manifestos"--there is no real way to "manage the machine" and in the end the only folks that can remotely pretend to are already those working that angle of the tech game (already a specialization in the world of our current view of the magic of technology). I feel it's closer to an addiction and this would be like saying to the smoker, just be sure to grow your own tobacco so you can be the one addicting yourself in just the right amount.

Further to the point--Rushkoff is a self-promoting "counter-revolutionary" (no clue what that means in this context) and "expert" in all things digital, but who, to my mind, is like an embedded "journalist" in the current terror campaigns--he's promoted the very war he sends back dispatches from and profited by this medium and speaks from within its parameters.

His goal has always been to make you comfortable with the medium that is remaking you.

Don't fight it, Brother, Sister...learn the best way to please IT and IT will smile upon you.

This is a real concern and has been one for aeons regarding our knowledge of the world. Philosophy has debated this knowing the world via "theory" or "practice". Of course, it's not a very real dichotomy as the two must go hand-in-hand (like lovers are supposed to; there's a thin line between love and hate).

But I think the worst thing has been happening; practice is all most of us "know". We know there is a machine and we know what we can see and use of the machine--my "knowledge" of the laptop I'm using is literally a surface knowledge...plastic keys, power cord, etc., I know nothing of its guts; I know even less of it's software (though I can name some programs).

One might believe that knowing programming will help you "direct" technology to your benefit (and it might create economic opportunities for you, I can't disagree)--but knowing coding is also a surface knowledge.

What do I know of anything? is finally a very important first question. Nothing is my best answer at this point (thank you, Michel).

I know that given the above you have to assume that I am skeptical of most of this kind of reaching after technical skill without understanding the history of our machine-driven species (emphasis on "driven"). I know nothing of how anything works--cars, computers, airplanes, refrigerators, animal bodies, atoms, bombs, seeds. Yes, I can find out the "guts" of most of these things. Yes, that is my responsibility (and I take it this is likely Rushkoff's message at bottom--I didn't read the book, only the review and the promotional page), but what am I learning?

How to better "use" technology? Perhaps this is all we can do. If so, then I propose the President add "philosophy of technology" to his list of educational priorities--I don't think it was in the SOTU. We are, as Hedges has detailed in a talk linked to in a previous post here, erasing the subjects of our liberal arts education like languages, art and music at all levels and re-tooling what's left of them to be subservient to all-mighty STEM. Just as one learns languages best at the earliest age of immersion, so too one can learn philosophy. Our children begin as philosophers but are quickly turned into technologists. "Why" is discouraged; "How to" encouraged.

I often wonder if real wisdom lies not in knowing the consequences of your "practice" but rather in knowing that a tower stretching to the heavens is irrelevant and makes us simply slaves of the idea of the tower.

Review of Program or Be Programmed by Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet.com

Rushkoff's Product website

Episteme and Techne--Stanford

Montaigne

Teaching Tech

Philosophy for Kids