“No Man is an Island”, especially as the “future becomes the instant”
In today’s edition of The Guardian ( “Elon Musk wants to put chips in our brains. I’d prefer to stay human”, Dec. 23, 2018 ) Harvard Humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt writes,
“The human condition, in its wonder as well as its woe, is defined by uncertainty and risk, ambiguity and intuition, stupidity and spectacular creative intelligence, all premised precisely on the fact that we do not each have wired into our skulls what Neuralink dreams of giving us: the data and the computational capacity of “governments and large corporations”.
Professor Greenblatt continues;
“I personally rely on the wisdom and the visionary generosity of such cultural heroes as Shakespeare and Montaigne, Yo-Yo Ma and Paul Farmer, none of whom (I know for a fact) ever had a chip implant.”
While I very much appreciate Professor Greenblatt’s reliance on the “visionary generosity” of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Yo-Yo Ma and Paul Farmer, he should appreciate that all of us do not have his intellectual ability to consume and comprehend the the works of genius like those on who he can rely.
Most of us rely on an intelligence that is much more suited for comrehending the thoughts and ideas of “the people and things that surround us” as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write about in their book The Knowledge Illusion.
According to Sloman and Fernbach human beings”
“can reason by deliberating, thinking things through carefully. But we don’t do that very much, and we’re not very good at it as individuals. We need a lot of help. We often use things in the world to help us, like whiteboards and computers. But more than anything, we use other people…We learn best when we’re thinking with others.”
Human beings are able to work together, aware of others and what they are trying to accomplish. We pay attention together and we share goals. In the language of cognitive science, we share intentionality.
Sloman and Fernbach have great reservations about the use of technology to enhance learning in humans. According to them, “Technology exacerbates the knowledge illusion because it is a powerful source of information. It lacks the critical ability that humans possess: It doesn’t share our intentionality.”
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also had concerns similar to Sloman and Fernbach but his were much more technical. According to Allen enabling improvements to human intelligence “means not just knowing the physical structure of the brain, but also how the brain reacts and changes, and how billions of parallel neuron interactions can result in human consciousness and original thought.” In order to create an adequate simulation of the real ongoing neural activity of an organism, you also need a vast amount of knowledge about the functional role that these neurons play, how their connection patterns evolve, how they are structured into groups to turn raw stimuli into information, and how neural information processing ultimately reflects an organism’s behavior.
Allen went on to point-out that because of what is known as the complexity brake scientists find that as they go deeper and deeper in their understanding of natural systems, they typically find they are forced to continuously expand their scientific theories in more and more complex ways… “brain simulation projects underway today model only a small fraction of what neurons do and lack the detail to fully simulate what occurs in a brain…Progress here is deeply affected by the ways in which our brains absorb and process new information, and by the creativity of researchers in dreaming up new theories.”
Dr. Greenblatt may not be as concerned with Elon Musk’s technology disrupting the “uncertainty and risk, ambiguity and intuition, stupidity and spectacular creative intelligence” of the human condition as much as he might with with it disrupting our ability to share intentionality with other human beings
For his part, after considering the modern-day thoughts of Dr. Greenblatt along with the works of Sloman, Fernbach and Paul Allen, Mr. Musk might also want to supplement his thinking with some of John Donne’s thinking from the 15th century.
“No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”
John Donne
