We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Via Nicolas Bate
Let’s say the mind is separate from the body; maybe it can be optimized like an industrial process. If the mind is software running on the hardware of the brain, maybe it can be debugged and, gradually, perfected.
On the other hand, if mind is just what the brain does, then as the world affects our brains, the changes become what we think. As we scatter our attention through the always available immaterial world of digital devices, we must become physically attenuated as well. A book or a photograph represent a reality one step away, but one that we can mentally step into and inhabit. Email, messaging and social media are all many steps away–bigger, wider, less personal and less immediate.
Perhaps we become diffuse, abstract and extended in a disintermediated online world. Faster and less solid, having lost its “specific gravity”. It’s all too easy to be part of the crowd in world where nothing is real or permanent.
Then we leave the infrastructure- the computer systems, smart phones, social media platforms, mapping programs, music selection, all for those very clever technologists to run and further optimize, providing us more content, ever faster, all free. Leaving the world to be run by those who know how to minister to the machines that provide our virtual experience, never understanding that we ourselves have become the product, no longer the agent, no longer ourselves. Left with an urge to be real.
“Half the people buying vinyl don’t actually bother listening to it: “
