This Age of Digital Science Fiction
I often marvel at this age we are tumbling through. The headlines
boggle my mind, throw me off any sense of logic.
For example, the opening paragraph of this article this week:
Many Brazilians
cannot read. In 2000, a quarter of those aged 15 and
older were functionally illiterate. Many simply do not want to. Only
one literate adult in three reads books.
1. Learn to say, "I don't know."
If used when appropriate, it will be often.
I practice saying "I don't know," but I stumble on the words, they seem
ungainly and what shouldn't be said.
Practice, practice.
What should we know?
Is there any center to hold to?
Now? Today?... this year?
I dig into my files and find this quote.
In a sense, all
technology is
biotechnology: machines interacting with
human organisms. Technology is designed to overcome the frailties and
limitations of human beings in a state of nature -- to make us faster,
stronger, longer-lived, smarter, happier. And all technology raises
questions about its real contribution to human welfare: are our lives
really better for the existence of the automobile, television, nuclear
power? These questions are ethical and political, as well as medical;
and they even reach to the philosophical and spiritual. On the whole,
we seem pretty well adapted to our technology, at least on the face of
it -- but there have always been doubts about whether the human soul
thrives best in the oppressively technological world we have created
for ourselves. (I am continually struck by how much time I have to
spend fixing the machines that supposedly improve my life.)
By
Colin McGinn, NY Times, May 5, 2002
"In a sense, all
technology is
biotechnology...."
It feels true. It feels alien. Where are the bright science fiction
visions of technology opening us to new adventure?
What is adventure now? What isn't seen as "safe - playing as through at
risk"?
Charles Perrow is a sociologist known for studying
industrial
accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants,
airlines, and shipping. In Normal
Accidents, he wrote that "We
construct an expected world because we can't handle the complexity of
the present one, and then process the information that fits the
expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might
contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we
make our construction." The snowmelt in the Siskiyou Mountains, the
unseasonal rains, were unexpected and unlikely interactions in a system
involving water, air, gravity, and terrain faced by boaters on the
Illinois River. The possibility that the river could rise 15 feet to
reach a flow rate of 13,500 cubic feet per second was outside the
normal experience of the river's guides, contradicting their model. It
may seem difficult to believe that they could have missed the trees
zooming down the river and the noise it was making, but it might be
easier than it seems.
Mental models can be surprisingly strong and the abilities of working
memory surprisingly fragile. A psychologist who studies how people
behave when they're lost told me, "I saw a man I was hiking with smash
his compass with a rock because he thought it was broken. He didn't
believe we were heading in the right direction."
...we all make powerful models of the future. The world we imagine
seems as real as the ones we've experienced. We suffuse the model with
the emotional values of past realities. And in the thrall of that
vision (call it "the plan," writ large). forth and take action. If
things don't go according to the plan revising such a robust model may
be difficult. In an environment that has high objective hazards, the
longer it takes to dislodge imagined world in favor of the real one,
the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is
not. It's a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of
the plan, too.
Psychologists who study survival say that people who are rule followers
don't do as well as those who are of independent mind and spirit. When
a patient is told that he has six months to live, he has two choices:
to accept the news and die, or to rebel and live. People who survive
cancer in the face of such a diagnosis are notorious. The medical staff
observes that they are "bad patients," unruly, troublesome. They don't
follow directions. They question everything. They're annoying. They're
survivors. The Tao Te Ching says:
The rigid person is a disciple of death;
The soft, supple, and
delicate are lovers of life. ¹
We must plan. But we must be able to let go of
the plan, too.
Everyone, to one degree or another, sees not
the real world but the
ever-changing state of the self in an ever-changing invention of the
world. We live in a continuous reinterpretation of sensory input and
memories, and they are contained in presets that can, at any given
moment, light up neural networks in a shifting kaleidoscope of energy
which we come to think of as reality. It is all part of the dynamic
dance of adaptation that accounts for our survival as an organism and
the survival of the species.¹
I ponder how.
Knowledge of the sort you need does not begin with
information, it
begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty
road from experience and perception to correct action.¹
And I ponder if reading helps or hinders.
2. It is easier to get into something than it is to get
out of it.
"In nature, adaptation is
important; the plan is not.
It's a Zen thing.
We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too."
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