07/15/2021
Mark C. Taylor on Technology, Cybernetics, and Intervolution
A conversation with Professor Mark C. Taylor on the topic of his new book: Intervolution – Smart Bodies, Smart Things (Columbia University Press, 2020). Mark C. Taylor is Professor of Religion at Columbia University and the Cluett Professor of Humanities emeritus at Williams College. Outro song: “Soliloquio” by Alusa Fallax
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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In titled opinions, most people call it a podcast.
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I call it a radio show on KZSU 90.1 FM.
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Nowadays, every third person seems to be starting up a podcast,
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making it that much harder to hear the silence.
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Remember our earlier theme song, "Silence Must Be Heard"?
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Fact.
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Apple added podcasting to his iTunes 4.9 music software in July 2005.
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Fact.
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Two months later, entitled opinions uploaded its first show on iTunes.
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Before the word podcast had even entered the English language.
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And here we are, 16 tumbling years later, still doing our thing,
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still trying to make it real compared to what?
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Still offering sanctuary to those who practice the persecuted religion of thinking.
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Not the kind of thinking that goes into our handheld devices,
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or into the software that enables this show to reach the uttermost ends of the earth.
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But the kind of thinking that remembers just how thoroughly our world fosters the oblivion of being.
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As Heidegger once put it, the growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being,
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which determines the age.
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[music]
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There's nothing more difficult than to think your way into the oblivion that determines the age,
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especially when that oblivion is so epidemic that we remain completely oblivious to it.
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But as I say, the great thing about Alzheimer's is that you get to meet so many new people.
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For the amnesiac, everything is new, original and novel,
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but I'll stick with comrade Hoderlin who once wrote, "On no account, do I wish it were original?"
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For originality is novelty to us, and nothing is dear to me than things as old as the world itself.
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That's the challenge to think novelty through the oldest of the old, which never gets told.
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[music]
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The one thing one can say about the person who joins me on entitled opinions today is that he doesn't suffer from unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking.
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Mark Taylor thinks in the face of anxiety, he responds to the call of thought from wherever it beckons.
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Mark Taylor is a philosopher, an artist, a professor of religion at Columbia University,
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and the author of more than 30 books, all of them deeply thoughtful.
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In the past three years alone, he has published four major titles.
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Last works, lessons in leaving, abiding grace, time, modernity and death, seeing silence,
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and inter-volusion of book that came out this year 2021.
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And if that were not enough, he has two more on the way.
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Images, three inquiries into the technological imagination, and a friendship in twilight letters from the 2020 lockdown.
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Both are connected to the topic of his most recent book Inter-volusion, which we'll be discussing with him today.
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Mark Taylor, welcome to the program, and thanks for joining us on entitled opinions.
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I'm delighted to be here, Robert, and delighted to be in conversation in this form.
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I feel we've been talking to each other for many years with our shared interests in gardens and forests and even cemeteries.
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That's true. Well, we've been in conversation through reading each other.
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I've been reading you for a long time as well.
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I finally managed to find a way to get the audio quality high enough that I can actually conduct a show with you, even though he was on the East Coast here.
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So in a minute, I'll ask you what you mean by inter-volusion.
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But first, let me mention your book's subtitle, Smart Bodies, Smart Things.
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You raised some really provocative philosophical questions in these pages, like, "Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is natural? What's artificial?"
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Could you share with our listeners how and why your own bodily experience has led you to these insights into the boundaries of bodies as well as the nature of biological cybernetic and socio-political systems that inter-volusion your book deals with?
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Sure. The philosopher Martin Hatter once observed that for the crafts, the craftsman does not become aware of the tool until it breaks.
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About 40 years ago, my body broke and I became aware of my body in ways that I had never been aware of it.
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Before I developed Type 1, insulin-dependent diabetes. And I did what I always do.
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I tried to understand it by studying and that took me into a journey of exploring recent advances in biology and biochemistry.
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And the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew.
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And over the course of the years that I've had this disease, the treatment has changed in extraordinary ways.
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And as I studied the biochemistry of the disease and came to understand the various forms of the treatment I found that I had to begin to understand changing technologies in the relationship between the so-called natural and the so-called artificial.
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So I gather that there's been a breakthrough recently in the technology where before you had administered many thousands of shots of insulin for your condition and all these blood tests and it was extremely
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I mean, it's an effect of digital pancreas.
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And it just seems like I've indicated that it's been enormous. And indeed, insulin was only discovered in 1922. So, you know, 100 years ago, I would have been dead a long time ago.
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It's important to understand the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.
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What you read about is epidemic of diabetes that is going on in this country and it is extraordinarily important and it's not getting the attention that it needs.
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But the major increase in diabetes is in Type 2, which is not insulin dependent and is not an autoimmune disease.
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That is usually able to be controlled by diet and oral medication because the pancreas still produces some insulin but not enough.
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And Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas, which is where insulin is produced in your body and insulin is needed to process all forms of sugar and carbohydrates, glucose, fructose, sucrose.
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When the body produces no insulin, you have to introduce it artificially into the body to process the glucose.
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The long term problems with diabetes are chronic disease. It's a tough disease. I always say the difficulty with diabetes is it never takes a holiday. It's 24/7, 365.
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It's a constant process of monitoring and adjusting because you're trying to do for your body or to officially what the body or your body does naturally for itself.
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As you indicated, when I first started, I had to test my blood three or six or seven times a day. I had to inject insulin as needed.
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Gradually, they began to change this technology by developing an insulin pump. The search for the insulin pump goes back to the 70s.
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When the first insulin pump was literally larger than a backpack you would wear on a long mountain hike, the device that I now wear on my belt that you mentioned is smaller than a deck of cards.
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The initial pumps, you admit it rather than giving yourself the injection, you injured the number of carbohydrates and it would calculate how much you need and release it.
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The other major breakthrough that has made these changes in treatment possible has been the introduction of continuous glucose monitors, which require sensors, which are injected into your body.
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After it changes, the sensors are 10 days. The sensors test your sugar level subcutaneously, which is not quite as accurate as in the blood.
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The sensor has on top of a transmitter that transmits the glucose reading directly to the pump using Bluetooth and registers it on the pump.
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As you said, run by artificial intelligence, when you start on the pump you have to inload a lot of data about insulin sensitivity and this is that and the other thing. Once that is in there, the pump monitors your glucose level and it just insulin dosage automatically.
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That is all done through an algorithm. It is a closed loop system. The efficacy of these pumps is extraordinary.
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It has been a huge life-changer for you.
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It also, through this personal experience, you have come to realize as you put it that you are in meshed in a technological revolution that has very broad implications for all of human society and for the future of humanity.
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You mentioned that its revolution has all cut up with ultra high speed network computers, huge quantities of data, which are gathered from the internet and other sources, the expansion of wireless networks, the explosive growth of mobile devices and so forth.
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This whole technological revolution is raising these questions of what do we mean by the human? What is a body? Is there a viable ontological distinction between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence and so forth?
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What are the most philosophical implications? Would you like to elaborate on in terms of this realization of yours?
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You are right. Much of Western thought, not just Western thought, it may be related to neurological structures in the mind.
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Things in terms of binary oppositions. We structure the world as we say natural artificial nature, culture, inside, outside, up, down, north, south, east, west.
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The implications of that way of structuring the world, and that is what it is, the question of whether the world is structured that way is another question and an important one.
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But there are philosophical, I think there are actually religious and theological implications.
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The psychological, the social, the political and the economic implications of that kind of dichotomous thinking, if you will.
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Now, in terms of the immediate issue to which you point, what I began to see was, what happened was when I got this new close loop pump, I began to try to understand that.
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As I tried to understand diabetes before, and we need to talk about diabetes because it is related to this question that you are raising.
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But as I began to, and it proved to be more difficult than I thought, because it turns out that companies aren't all that eager to explain to you what's under the hood and how these devices work.
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But the more I dug around with the help of my doctor, my doctors at the Mary Clinic at Columbia, I was able to get a pretty good handle on how these devices work.
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And it does work as I indicated, and as you underscored through artificial intelligence.
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But then, as I began to try to understand artificial intelligence, it became clear to me that even though we hear about this every day in the news and in the media.
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We really, I did, and I think many people really don't understand what's meant, what is going on with this artificial intelligence revolution.
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You know, we think in terms of robots, human-wide robots are too deep to do and something like that, or the simulation of human consciousness, that's all going on at one level or another.
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Whether or not we're ever able to simulate human consciousness is another issue.
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So, the more important and more influential revolution that's taking place now, isn't a function of this, but I call it a distributed artificial intelligence.
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These networks that have proliferated in the last 20 years or so have created a new condition.
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And this new technology that is not only running in pump, but what became clear to me was that if you get under it, if I can understand how this pump works.
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I can understand the new world that is emerging in our midst.
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So, the use of the pump is sort of a way to see what's going on in all these dimensions of our experience.
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And part of what's at the heart of that is the emergence of neural network artificial intelligence, which differs in significant ways from what was called good old-fashioned intelligence.
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The idea of neural networks, and obviously the connection that is made in between the way in which the brain works and the way in which these are so-called artificial networks work.
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Because the idea goes back to the 40s, but it wasn't, neural network technology did not really become viable until the 80s and the 90s because-
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What is it exactly?
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So, in sort of good old-fashioned, what they call good old-fashioned artificial intelligence is basically talked about.
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Many of us remember Gary Casparov playing the playing chess against the IBM computer and losing to that.
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And lots of talk about the end of the human as you suggest.
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But the way in which that form of artificial intelligence work was to give the computer rules or principles or program and then force-feed it a lot of data to which it would apply these rules.
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Neural network artificial intelligence is self-educating, it's self-programming.
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And so what it requires and the reason that it could not develop from the 60s to the 80s, they call it the neural network winter was because there was inadequate data.
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With the advent of the internet and all these media and everything, there are massive massive massive amounts of data that's what's called big data.
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And the way in which artificial networks, the way in which neural networks work is that you can either tag the data and let them educate themselves or you can just give the data to the network, set the parameters of what you want as the outcome.
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And it will keep training itself and it has- it has a method by- it's a recursive method by which it corrects its faults.
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So for example, one of the best known applications of this is image recognition, where you just give the computer massive massive massive amounts of data and it eventually educates itself in terms of the kinds of images, the ability to recognize those images.
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So it's basically that kind of notion of artificial intelligence now that is informing, I mean not just my pump, but all the pop-up ads you get, I mean all of this targeted marketing, using politics as well as in commerce and the like.
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I mean that's the way that, I mean that's the way that you combine those self-correcting algorithms with high-connecting the high-speed networks and it's doing all the stuff on the fly in this.
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And this is one of the way in which financial markets are not running.
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I mean 70 or 80% of the trades now being done on financial markets are algorithmic.
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And those traders who are doing that, they have no idea what they're trading. All they're doing is making investments on nanosecond differences, seven seconds of long-term investment.
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On price differentials, that have nothing to do with the company or whatever it's related.
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It's all on autopilot. As is my pump.
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So all that's fascinating from a one point of view, from another point of view given what I stated in my intro, can one really call that thinking.
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I mean when the investment firms are not doing any kind of analysis themselves, they're not doing an expectation, they're just allowing algorithms to make decisions for them.
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Isn't this the essence of what Heidegger saw as the complete thoughtlessness of the age of technicality?
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It's tough question. Robert, I don't mean to duck it.
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We have to make some distinctions where it's not always clear.
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I think one has to distinguish thinking from cognition, from intelligence.
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And there's not a clear and accepted definition on those categories.
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But people in single disciplines let alone between and among them.
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Let me begin by saying something about Heidegger.
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I'm going to have to come back and I'm going to have to back fill in all this.
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One of the extraordinary things about Heidegger that has always impressed me was his prescient recognition of the implications of certain technologies back in the post-war period.
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He was very attentive to atomic technology, which is obvious reasons after the roshma.
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But he saw more quickly than many of their philosophers, the importance of cybernetics.
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Can you explain to our listeners briefly what is cybernetics?
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So cybernetics basically developed during the war.
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And it grew out of research for military applications.
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But what was done with this cybernetics system was they were trying to figure out how to have projectiles and missiles.
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They could guide, be guided towards certain targets.
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And they had to create a system that, by the hand, a feedback loop.
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It allowed it to have to be able to control itself.
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So I mean it was a self-directed kind of model.
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Now the cybernetic model is a negative feedback.
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So the simplest example of this kind of system is to thermostat your house.
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It gets too cold.
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The furnace goes up to a warm and goes down.
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It's a negative feedback.
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It's a negative feedback system and that.
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But what it does is to begin to break that.
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Because one of the fundamental differences between the living and the non-living historically,
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and this was crucial in the early years of modernity with Newton,
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in a mechanistic universe.
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You have a system of efficient causality with no,
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I mean two kinds of causality, efficient causality in which A causes B and what's called final causality,
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in which you interpret causality in terms of the gold toward which something is moving,
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rather than that which was antecedent to it.
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So that part of the revolution of modern science was to get final causality out of natural systems
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and that only efficient causality.
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The cybernetic system sets up a, it complicates that kind of structure.
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Because it gives you a quasi-tealogical structure for a machine.
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And so that begins to erode this whole distinction between the natural and the more,
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the michenic and the organic.
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So they began to emerge and at the same time all of this was going on and related to it,
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you have the emergence of information theory in the 40s.
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And what began to happen was that there came to be,
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and beginning to understand, rather than having the opposition to the mechanism and organism,
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that opposition began to erode as, as you had machines that were operating more like organisms.
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It led to understanding organisms more in terms of these,
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what they later were called auto-poetic or auto-telect self-organizing systems.
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I mean the notion of self-organization is crucial.
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Do you think Heidegger had a, a, a, a proleptic vision of what cybernetics would lead to?
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Well, I think in some ways I think he was very present.
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In other ways, I think the technologies about which he was worried lead in directions and correct what he was worried about.
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But I'm trying to, I mean where, where I think,
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Heidegger foresaw the point that you are pushing,
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and Kierkegaard before, who's work after all he, he depends upon.
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He saw the ways in which these technologies were,
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as it were, taken human individual and the decisiveness of that human individual out of the group as it were.
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That is, we're making, we're making human being a function of larger systems.
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Right.
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And again, I mean the whole debate, I mean my intellectual life and prompting my life has been torn between Hegel and Kierkegaard.
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And this is the issue at stake in the two of them.
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And for Hegel, the, the individual is a function of the system and for Kierkegaard, the individual was primary and, and the system is secondary.
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Kierkegaard was the first to my knowledge to recognize the impact of modern mass media in a book he published in 18.
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Kierkegaard from 1813 to 1855 in 1846 he published a book called the Modern Age, which is a critique of modern mass media.
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He was thinking primarily of newspapers, but it's even more applicable to our social media and TV network.
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And he's already misbeeciced the one that you're making that what happens in these networks here in the media networks was that people are programmed.
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I mean these technologies that I was just talking about in terms of artificial intelligence in the life and targeted advertising.
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Right.
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What they're using these technologies to do is to program you to want what they want you to want.
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Right.
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So then rather than becoming an individual with your own decisions and this, that, the other thing.
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Right.
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You're running on a program somebody else wrote.
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And increasingly, not even sure who wrote the program because one of the things that is happening now is that in these networks and with these algorithms, they're producing, they're, they're producing forms or artificial intelligence and algorithmic intelligence that are more complex and that are so complex and so fast that human beings can't intervene.
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| 00:27:06.500 |
Not only that, these programs are now able to program themselves in ways that humans cannot program.
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There's a cybernetic, if you will, relationship between the individual and the system in this or in this case between the organism environment or here between the human and technology.
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Because it's a feedback loop.
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It's going to be a positive feedback loop which is different.
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We talk about that.
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But in this feedback loop, we create the technologies that create us.
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The whole division between mind and body or organism and about its species.
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It's a species because, I mean, go back to Heidegger and the craftsman and the tool.
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As soon as human beings picked up that stick, it began to change their brain physiologically.
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Yes, but Heidegger's essential insight about authenticity is that when it's when the tool breaks down.
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That you realize that you are not subsumed under the larger world of things.
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There's something outstanding or existing in design which all of a sudden you realize, wait a minute.
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Correct.
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Correct.
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And in that sense, he's clear recording.
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And he's emphasis on the individual and the individual action intentionally.
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I think there are problems with that notion of individuality.
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I think there's an over-infices on the isolated and separate individual.
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I think, if I can close the problem in terms of Hego and Kirk, because it's clear for me.
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For Hego, the authenticity, and that's one of Heidegger's favorite words, comes with the individual standing alone in isolation from other individuals, making a free decision that constitutes his identity, if it will.
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That's a clear cigar.
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That's a clear cigar.
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That's a clear cigar.
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Yeah, that's a clear cigar.
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| 00:29:10.500 |
It's Abraham out there away from Sarah and the family and the community.
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On Mount Moriah, look at a God and the isolated from Isaac making that decision.
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Right.
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So for Hego, I mean, Hego sees that notion of individuality rather than being the culmination of particularity.
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And it's completely abstract and indeterminate.
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Because, for Hego, Hego sees all, if we look at this in terms of identity and difference, he sees the identity of any particularity as differential.
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He sees it as a function of difference from otherness.
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And therefore, as relational.
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So for him, for Heidegger, it is the full participation in the social totality that constitutes the individuality of every singular individual.
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Completely different.
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| 00:30:08.500 |
Now, we need to talk about the Baoqimist or diabetes in a certain way.
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Because the body itself is an information processing network of networks.
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That's what I call an intran that.
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All right.
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| 00:30:22.500 |
I'll loop back your question in a minute.
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But diabetes is basically an information processing mistake.
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| 00:30:31.500 |
The way in which autoimmune disease works is that the systems that are supposed to protect the body from invasion by the other turn on the body and just itself and destroy it.
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At mistake, mistake the self for the other.
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Right.
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Right.
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And one of the major textbooks that he was in medical school for immunology is called self other disease.
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That I mean, so each each cell in your body has a protein structure on the top that on on the surface that identifies it as self.
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| 00:31:09.500 |
Right.
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| 00:31:10.500 |
And the rhetoric of immune disease and autoimmune disease is all espionage warfare, coding, decoding, surveillance.
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| 00:31:22.500 |
It's really very, very interesting.
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| 00:31:24.500 |
I mean, we see some we you get some of this in the recent pandemic with COVID because basically COVID and then the vaccines which are done with messenger RNA all involved this kind of interaction.
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And one of the one of the things that has made COVID so difficult as I understand it.
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So difficult to deal with is that it is unusually capable of hiding of concealing themselves or of concealing itself during the earliest stages of the infection.
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So that it gets going before the immune system can respond.
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So it's all it's it's hide and seek.
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So if you look at the immune system as this kind of communication or information network, but that that is only one network among all these other networks in the body which are communicating with each other and all these, you know, intricately complicated.
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| 00:32:21.500 |
So it's not only that I'm that I'm interconnected in this and this is what you asked about inter inter pollution.
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This is what I mean by right.
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In other words, Nietzsche has a phrase in sort of toaster.
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It's one of my favorite.
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| 00:32:58.500 |
It always philosophy.
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Everything is in everything is entwined in meshed in amort.
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I think everything's entwined in master did not think everything is an amort.
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But it's that notion of intertwining of inter relationship.
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And it's trying to think of a way to describe this situation and that those inter relationship suits are both synchronic and diacronic that is to say those inter relationships that are constitutive of individuality as such are both a function of a relationship to all entities and other organs and at a given time and over a course over the course of time.
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| 00:33:37.500 |
It's a developmental structure as well and they're all inter related.
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| 00:33:43.500 |
I mean, social, biological, economic, the culture of the technological.
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| 00:33:48.500 |
They're all inter related in a time.
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| 00:33:50.500 |
So for that developmental, for the diacronic process, evolution wasn't quite the right word for me.
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Because you think of evolution as the opposite of in pollution.
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I mean, it's the unfolding rather than the folding into.
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| 00:34:03.500 |
So the sort of the oaks and the acorn.
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Coevolution, which was a popular word back in the 60s, right, suggests the two sort of parallel developments.
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| 00:34:13.500 |
What I was trying to look for was the way in which these trajectories are interwoven.
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And that's why I sort of came up with this notion of inter pollution and starting with the friend of mine.
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We thought we made up the word.
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I then checked the OAD and discovered that in fact it was Milton who came up with the word.
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And Hawthorne uses it in Scarlet Library.
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So that's a genealogy I can accept.
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| 00:34:39.500 |
But it's a kind of relational and developmental notion.
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| 00:34:42.500 |
So can I clarify for the audience that I'll just quote you.
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| 00:34:48.500 |
You say that in contrast to evolution, which is an unfolding over time, intervolution is an intertwining over time,
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| 00:34:55.500 |
a developmental process in which seemingly discrete bodies and things cooperate to weave mutually adaptive webs.
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| 00:35:04.500 |
So the Internet of Things, which you've talked about earlier, and the Internet of bodies,
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| 00:35:11.500 |
which your pancreas, artificial pancreas is, you know, an example of that.
|
| 00:35:16.500 |
It's a case study of this connection between the Internet of Things and the Internet of bodies.
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| 00:35:22.500 |
And hence your subtitle, "Smart Things, Smart Bodies," are thus joined in an inter-volutionary network, which is gestating nothing less than the human being of the future.
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| 00:35:33.500 |
So let's take a jump here into the speculative world historical destiny if you want to use a Hegelian term for what inter-volution, as you understand it,
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| 00:35:49.500 |
So it means for the actual understanding, if not definition of the human species, because it sounds to me like everything that traditionally defined the human is now put into question and put into a condition of crisis by virtue of the emerging technologies and smartness of both artificial intelligence
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| 00:36:18.500 |
and what we're learning about the way in which the body, the individual body and the larger organic body of the Earth are networks, the communicative networks of relationships.
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| 00:36:31.500 |
So, you know, I don't want to say that we have to base our notion of the human on the individual.
|
| 00:36:38.500 |
I would rather maybe go back to the notion of mortality.
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| 00:36:43.500 |
I think that's even more high to Gary in the Kirk-Gigardi, and that if the human is essentially the mortal being, then what does inter-volution mean for the future of what the Greeks call the mortals as opposed to the immortals?
|
| 00:37:03.500 |
There are several strands to this important question. One is sort of the status of what would mean by the human and its future of our future, there are probably several others too, and one is more calorie.
|
| 00:37:21.500 |
I'm related by one of the distinguished for the moment. On the former question, yes, I think that certainly as I had dug into this work of the biological and the technological, some of these distinctions are getting harder and harder to draw.
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| 00:37:44.500 |
I teach a seminar called "After the Human." And I begin that class by asking the students, do you think human being is, as we now know it, is the last stage in the evolutionary process?
|
| 00:38:00.500 |
And of course they almost all say no. And then I ask them, well, what comes next? And of course they don't know.
|
| 00:38:10.500 |
None of us knows, but it's a question that they haven't asked. Now, I don't presume to say what comes next, but what I do firmly believe is that human being has emerged from pre-human forms of animal forms of life.
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| 00:38:29.500 |
And I do not think we're the end of the process of this process. I think other forms of life will evolve from us. That we are the human being, as we now know it, is a passing phase in a much longer process.
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| 00:38:44.500 |
It sounds to me from reading you on this, that our future evolution is quite clear. We're going to become the Borg collective of the scientific and the organic are going to fuse and merge.
|
| 00:39:02.500 |
But I think that the rabbit, they already have. I mean, do an extraordinary extent, that is to say, I mean, so think of writing as a technology.
|
| 00:39:17.500 |
I mean, you know, as well as I do, Plato was concerned about writing because he was afraid that if writing came, we would lose our capacity for memory.
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| 00:39:28.500 |
But Mark, we have all sorts of these moments in the history of of human culture where you have new technologies that are introduced. Everyone is very pessimistic about them and then they get incorporated and they go on.
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| 00:39:41.500 |
But I have a feeling and it's your book that convinces me that this is not of the order of what has come before. We are on the precipice of something that is really quite unprecedented.
|
| 00:39:54.500 |
And it's not just another kind of momentous technological or cultural revolution. It's some essential metamorphosis of the very species being of the human. I think I don't know.
|
| 00:40:11.500 |
I think that's probably so. But I think that what that will entail will be a much closer interfacing as it were of the technological and what we now call the human.
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| 00:40:29.500 |
I mean, if you go back to what we didn't really talk about so what happens with this Internet of Things, we have all these smart devices. They're then all wired together your smartphone and you know, and with all of this, all of these sensors embedded in everything.
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| 00:40:45.500 |
All those devices are coming to each other all the time. Right. And it's as if we are living within a computer simulation. Right. So you have what I call an expanded mind. Right.
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| 00:40:57.500 |
You have distributed intelligence. It's an expanded mind, but I don't want to what to spice it up. Let me just say it's an expanded thoughtless mind.
|
| 00:41:06.500 |
Well, I mean, what do you mean by thinking that's the question from a high to very important view.
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| 00:41:14.500 |
This is not thing as I say, I would want to at least make a distinction in cognition and thinking. I mean, and part of what is distinctive, I think I believe about human thinking is it's thinking about thinking.
|
| 00:41:30.500 |
And this is this is the topic for another conversation. It's thinking about that which cannot be thought.
|
| 00:41:41.500 |
Right. Now that's that's that's distinctive, but it, but I still I still would want to say that these technological prosthesis. Right.
|
| 00:41:52.500 |
We offload cognitive processes onto these.
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| 00:41:56.500 |
Under these prosthesis to the extent that we become a prosthesis of the prosthesis.
|
| 00:42:03.500 |
All right. Our memories are downloaded in our iPhones or, you know, whatever, whatever these devices are that this happened is, you know, you've written another book on silence that we want to talk about it on another, on another show, but if you think about thinking as a listening.
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| 00:42:21.500 |
And if you're thinking of you say the thinking that which is unthought, if you think of thinking as a listening to that which perhaps cannot either be calculated, it cannot be measured, it cannot be reified.
|
| 00:42:35.500 |
Then it's a that's a very different kind of listening, a thoughtful listening meditative listening, then the Borg who plug into the collective and are hearing the entire collective drone of the of the super organism and the super intelligence of a cybernetic feedback loop in their minds. That's that's a different kind of listening and a thoughtless listening.
|
| 00:43:00.500 |
Yeah, I mean, I do not disagree with that. And you know, when I wrote the silence book, I hadn't, I wasn't planning to write this book.
|
| 00:43:12.500 |
I mean, this one just sort of emerged when I got my new pump, but they complement each other in these ways.
|
| 00:43:21.500 |
But what I would say with respect to your point here and we can talk about that more later is that the kind of thinking that you're talking about, and that we both have been preoccupied with for a long time. That's passing away.
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| 00:43:41.500 |
And, you know, and it's my new thing. So where I live here in the Berkshires and there's a woodland path that I go back all the time that connects where I live to art museum and Williams College.
|
| 00:44:04.500 |
And I frequently pass on that path of students or people walking with their iPhones and ear, ear things in walking to the forest.
|
| 00:44:18.500 |
Right. Again, this this topic for another time. There is an aversion to silence. There is an aversion.
|
| 00:44:27.500 |
No, they have to be plugged into the collective all the time. Right. Yeah. You know, they bring their human, they bring their secular world with them into the natural world and so that they they drown out the silence. And I know that now I've gotten a little bit more.
|
| 00:44:44.500 |
Let's say tolerant of when I see that myself because I imagine hopefully that maybe they're listening to entitled opinions.
|
| 00:44:52.500 |
Well, I was I was just going to say that because you know, I mean, here are the ironies. You and Victoria depend upon precisely the I mean, podcast didn't exist when you started this program.
|
| 00:45:06.500 |
And you know, and now I mean, I don't do social media. I don't deliver. I do email and that's it. But you know, but try to stay.
|
| 00:45:22.500 |
Well, you know, listen, I developed a certain following over the years. Otherwise, I would be the first one to stop podcasting because when I started that there were very few intellectual shows on the air. There was you know, our time and entitled opinions in the very first year or two.
|
| 00:45:39.500 |
And but now every, as I mentioned in the intro, every third person has a podcast and there's so much noise out there that I say why should I add to the noise by continuing you know to produce shows on entitled opinions.
|
| 00:45:50.500 |
But the reason I do it is because we can have thoughtful conversations like this one that are not that frequent in the end.
|
| 00:45:57.500 |
And you know, 20 years ago in 1998, I started a company with a man by name of Herbert Alton is a New York investment banker to do online education.
|
| 00:46:11.500 |
Because I had a moment of epiphany I done in 1992 I then of course using teleconferencing with Helsinki and then about mid 90s I started webcasting my classes.
|
| 00:46:22.500 |
And like you with your podcast, I had this vision the company was named global education network.
|
| 00:46:28.500 |
That the world would be a better place if everybody in the world can sit around a seminar table and talk about Hegel and Kierkegaard throw an Emerson right.
|
| 00:46:39.500 |
And we could have done it then but nobody would work and I wanted educators to be involved at that point because I knew of commercial if commercial.
|
| 00:46:52.500 |
I had a prize gotten involved it would not be what it and and the spring wheel we'll move into that world overnight some of its good some of it's not good but you know again with all of this stuff.
|
| 00:47:06.500 |
The technologies that are used for detrimental or nefarious purposes can also so for instance the the facial recognition that we that I mentioned as an example earlier on.
|
| 00:47:19.500 |
I mean that's being used for surveillance for all you know for all kinds of problematic and for commercial but it's also one of the most efficient forms of analysis of X-rays.
|
| 00:47:33.500 |
I mean radiology is you know and it can detect tumors five years before the human.
|
| 00:47:40.500 |
No I that's true there's there are blessings and I'm deeply grateful to all that I'm grateful to it for keeping you alive and I'm going through what you you had to do it before you know the the pump and so forth.
|
| 00:47:54.500 |
And essentially I'm not for or against anything except I'm for anything that will enhance or promote the cause of thinking in the meditative sense that we were talking about and I will always try to meditate against whatever promotes thoughtlessness and.
|
| 00:48:14.500 |
Well part of what responsible thinking requires is understanding what's emerging right in our and in my experience.
|
| 00:48:27.500 |
As a humanist within the academy there is an there has been enormous aversion to understanding these technologies their implications their possibilities and their downfall.
|
| 00:48:43.500 |
And I mean in certain ways I'm not a technological determinist but you're not going to stop.
|
| 00:48:53.500 |
Some of these development and so the question becomes you know how one intervenes to the answer is trying to look a little bit of education now or how one and that's what you do with your podcast.
|
| 00:49:04.500 |
How you could intervene or deploy these technologies that are being used for these other purposes for cultivating thought reflection and criticism I'm that's really have to be realistic about the kinds of you know the and the rapidity.
|
| 00:49:24.500 |
The rapidity with which these technological changes are taking place follows a mind.
|
| 00:49:32.500 |
And the distance between where political discourse is and and this is huge.
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| 00:49:40.500 |
That's a great place to end our show mark and you know I think that it goes circles around that famous dictum of high digger that there were it's quoting the poet Hohlu Ling about there where the.
|
| 00:49:53.500 |
The same power also grows so let's hope then.
|
| 00:49:58.500 |
The dangers of the technological revolution that you're you're writing about has this kind of saving power somewhere within it and it's probably.
|
| 00:50:09.500 |
Has to do with the way that we we relate to it think it and.
|
| 00:50:15.500 |
I could not agree with you more that we that.
|
| 00:50:19.500 |
One of the most important tasks of thinking is to think about the emergence of these these new forms of being here.
|
| 00:50:27.500 |
I mean hope is hard one but hopelessness is too easy.
|
| 00:50:32.500 |
I agree with that as a teacher and as a parent we we owe you other people hope.
|
| 00:50:40.500 |
Well said we've been speaking with Mark Taylor on entitled opinions mark this is the first of more conversations to come I hope so.
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| 00:50:49.500 |
I don't know where doing and thank thank you for your thoughtful engagement.
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| 00:50:54.500 |
You take care and.
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| 00:50:56.500 |
I want to tell our listeners we're going to be following up with Mark Taylor with a show on silence and how why and how silence must be heard.
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| 00:51:05.500 |
Bye bye.
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