Thomas A. Shakely

One of the more frustrating things in the world is the tendency of news media and the scientific community to speak about human beings and of investigations into the brain, cognitive science, etc. in terms of “we did X, man did Y”, as if actions and reactions can tell the story of either Man or Mind — as if they can speak to purpose or meaning, or make judgments on the perennial question of Why?

It’s the tendency to boil down reality to biology, as if, by detailing the processes of chemical and physical reactions in the body, we can infer the reason for that body in the first place, and, more broadly, for the natural world that hosts that body.

John Searle spoke with Reason Magazine in 2000, and in the interview came this gem:

Searle: Behaviorism was the idea that when you do a scientific study of the mind, you don’t actually try to get inside the brain and figure out what’s going on, you just study overt behavior.

Reason: Inputs and outputs?

Searle: Inputs and outputs. And the science of psychology on the behaviorist model was you were going to correlate these stimulus inputs with the behavioral outputs. It’s a ridiculous conception of the mind–the idea is that there’s nothing going on in there, except you have the stimulus input and the behavioral output.

The best comment about behaviorism is the old joke about the two behaviorists after they just had sex. He says to her, “It was great for you, how was it for me?” (Laughter) If behaviorism were right, that ought to make perfectly good sense, because there’s nothing going on in him except his behavior, and she’s in a better position to observe his behavior than he is.

Leon Kass has spoken to the problem of the micro versus macro view of Man:

The science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. Medicine, then and now, has no concept of the human being, of the peculiar and remarkable concretion of psyche and soma that makes us that most strange and wonderful among the creatures. Psychiatry, then and even more now, is so little chagrined by its failure to say what the psyche or soul is that it denies its existence altogether. The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: the word “health” does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent.

We live in an age concerned primarily with dialing down with atomistic focus into the functioning of biological life while typically ignoring the larger question of purpose.

When Nicholas Carr published his six page cover story, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic earlier this year, he fired the first serious shot in what must become a central discussion of our generation.

Carr’s assertion is anecdotal and introspective. He’s careful to note in his shot-across-the-bow article that we still “await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition”.

His central point is a compelling one: the internet is re-wiring the way we think and relate to facts, friends, and reality. It may even hold the power to change how we perceive human-ness.

William Deresiewicz made a similarly important point in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2009 in The End of Solitude:

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing “in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,” “bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

Isolation, intimacy, and proximity remain as important now as in the past, but I wonder how actively thought is given to these things by the youngest generation.

Perhaps Deresiewicz asks it best with his opener: “What does the contemporary self want?”

Pulling from Carr’s Atlantic piece:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

Put another way: are we going to be a people who approach the world with a sort of ruggedness and skepticism informed by an understanding of past and present of a decent depth, or will we be more like sponges, absorbing — but not necessarily processing or placing into a context — minute-to-minute information?

Leon Kass provides greater depth in this respect:

No friend of humanity should trade the accumulated wisdom about human nature and human flourishing for some half-cocked promise to produce a superior human being or human society, never mind a post-human future, before he has taken the trouble to look deeply, with all the help he can get, into the matter of our humanity—what it is, why it matters, and how we can be all that we can be. …

Only a few, a small percentage, of a culture can focus on such questions, on getting into the “matter of our humanity” — an elite, if you will, tasking with the preservation of a culture and its identity.

Solitude, though, is often one of the preconditions for deep thought, and unless we can move beyond a knee-jerk reaction of “change = progress” and a sense of technology as an inherent good, it’s difficult to imagine a return of solitude.