Possibilities and Inclinations: Mediums, Choices, and Free Will

Last night I was out with some friends and I came upon a distinction that helps me deal with two pressing issues of mine. One is a more specific issue, and one is a more general issue of which the former is an example.

The specific issue is the internet, the enormous amount of information it gives us access to, and the way it tends to lead to a distractible mind that doesn't fully engage with all the available information. In other words, there is tension between the possibilities of the internet as a medium, and the inclinations of the internet as a medium. Sure, the internet has enormous potential to open us up to other people's cultures, to other people's thoughts and feelings, to anything in the world. But how does the nature of the medium itself encourage us to engage with this enormous amount of information? Does it not encourage us to shallowly leap from one tab to the next, clicking as many links as possible? Doesn't the internet's inclinations detract from the possibilities of the internet? I fear that people focus too much on the possibilities of the internet without reckoning with its inclinations. Since reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, I have been much more aware of the internet as a medium and not simply as a source of content. I think that this distinction between possibilities and inclinations will help me analyze this issue more carefully. So that is what I want to do.

But I also see this is part of a larger issue. I think that this distinction between possibilities and inclinations can also help me grapple with what I perceive as inadequate definitions of 'choice' and 'free will'. I often think that these ideas of choice and free will are muddled and are discussed like their efficacy is somehow self-evident. But doesn't it seem like it can be awfully hard to choose the right thing? Doesn't it seem like we are inclined to do certain things? Whether it is our macro cultural situation or our micro personal situation, doesn't it seem like the notion of 'free will' comes into violent confrontation with our inclinations? What I'm saying is that free will doesn't function like some light switch that you flip, it isn't a mechanical, easy, or directly applicable process. It is always a relative thing. We are not simply choosing into a void of possibilities, we are choosing against a set of inclinations. But to me it seems like people speak of choice as simply a world of possibilities, and all we have to do is seize upon the correct possibility. And I think the ubiquity of metaphors about 'seizing' the moment and the like suggest that choice is not that simple of an issue. We have to seize choices and freedom because we are already dealing with a world of inclinations that forces our decisions to be forever relative, forever combative. There is no choosing unless we are choosing against something else. There are no simple possibilities without already existing inclinations. In short, I think that the notion of choice needs to become less reductive and far more nuanced, and I think that we can do this by recognizing that our possible choices are always working in relation to our already existing inclinations.

So I will just spend a little bit of time, a few paragraphs, dealing with the more specific issue of the internet and the more general issue of choice. I am hoping that by first writing on the specific example of the internet I will be able to clarify these terms, which will hopefully allow me to give a closer look at the issues of choice and free will. Here I go.

Now, as I said, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows was a very interesting book that has prompted me to consider the internet as a medium and not a simply a source of content. Carr's main concern is how mediums implicitly encourage certain types of behavior. He addresses this issue by talking about how each medium has its own 'intellectual ethic'. Carr notes that inventors rarely consider the intellectual ethic that their new medium encourages. The intellectual ethic is something that lies behind the scenes of a medium. Carr argues, furthermore, that each medium comes along with its own unique forms of neuroplastic change. The brains of literate people, for example, look and work differently from the brains of illiterate people. The internet, too, causes unique neuroplastic changes. I admire Carr for incorporating new findings about neuroplasticity into his work on the intellectual ethic of books and the internet. My reading on neuroplasticity has always been fruitful, and I think that it has implications that go way beyond the field of neuroscience. The discovery of neuroplasticity has implications for all of the humanities, for most fields, I bet. Carr dares to ask what types of neuroplastic changes are associated with modern mediums?

But anyways, as I said, Carr discusses the intellectual ethic of both books and the internet. So, what are the intellectual ethics if these mediums? If the medium is indeed the message, as McLuhan argued, then what is the message of these mediums? I will be cursory about this so that I can get to my main concerns.

Carr believes that the book encourages long concentrated bouts of attention. He thinks that the invention of the book did a lot to enhance our ability to concentrate and to follow narratives. The internet, on the other hand, encourages us to be distracted. It encourages us to click as many things as fast as possible, to fly from one page to another. Carr believes that the internet's intellectual ethic is ultimately one of distractibility and shallow engagement with many different things. Not that the internet has to be used this way, but that the internet encourages us to think in this way. The inclination of the internet as a medium is to make us distracted and shallow.

Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic and too gloomy doomy. But I think that Carr's stance, and my stance, is in response to a discourse that only speaks of the wonderful possibilities of the internet. People talk like the only thing to be worried about is how there is all of this information for us to gather. The internet = more date. More data = smarter people. Not always the case. We don't always need more data, what we need sometimes is slow and lazy rumination. This reminds me of Guy Claxton's emphasis on d-mode thinking: an over-deliberate and rational form of thought that places all of its faith in date and logic. The assumption seems to be that people are logical, and that given access to large amounts of information they will choose to intelligently engage with it. But that only gives credence to the hypothetical possibilities of the internet, and ignores the real inclinations that the internet encourages. Speaking personally, I feel that the internet just lets me lazily glide from one website to the next, playing computer games, looking at facebook, so on. I think that we need to start paying a bit of attention to the inclinations of the internet as a medium, and stop focusing so much on the possibilities of its content. Not because its content isn't vast and amazing. It is. But because the inclination of the medium, its intellectual ethic, has the power to render its possibilities moot. It doesn't matter if we have access to tons of information if we are being implicitly encouraged to shallowly engage with games and facbeook.

In short, if we started to look at the inclinations of the internet we might see that its possibilities are not as rich as we have supposed.

Now how applicable are these ideas to the rest of life and the ideas of choice and free will? We suppose that 'if only people made the right choices they would be able to take advantage of the internet's awesomeness. But what Carr's work shows us is that it isn't that simple. That the internet is subtly encouraging us to not take full advantage of its content. That the medium itself contains a message of distractibility and shallowness. So perhaps the most important conclusion to draw from Carr's work is that 'choice' is not something that is enacted rationally in some kind of void, but is rather something that is always relative. We have to choose in the face of inclinations. We have to do battle with the intellectual ethics that are communicated to us by our mediums. Free will is about struggling against already established inclinations and intellectual ethics.

So then, if choice and free will become a matter of dealing with and reacting to already established inclinations and ethics, then how far do these implications go? If it is a matter of mediums,how mediums encourage us to behave, and how they structure our choices, then what is and is not a medium? Can the city itself be considered a medium of life and expression? Can the capitalist system be considered a medium? If so, how do these mediums structure our lives?

Let me take the example of libraries, because I think that the internets about them are in many ways be similar to the ones about the internet. And it also gives me an example to discuss the city, urban lay outs, as a medium in itself. So, people may say 'the library is right there, if people only choose they could go and read and learn anything they want'. But then why aren't people taking advantage of the library? Why isn't everyone in the city flocking to the library to learn and grow as people? Because the city as a medium for existence encourages lots of behavior that is not about libraries. The city is also loaded with bars and with liquor stores and strip clubs and drugs and restaurants. So the city, therefore, implicitly encourages all kinds of vice that would prevent people from taking advantage of the benefits of the library. The implicit ethic of the city, the inclinations of the city, prove stronger than the hypothetical possibilities of learning. So, just an example of how in general choice should be thought of more in terms of the inclinations that we are going against, and less in terms of the hypothetical possibilities.

Now, if this idea of choice as being more about overcoming a medium's implicit inclinations and less about hypothetical possibilities, then how far can this idea be taken? What in life can be considered a medium? And how do those mediums effect the way we make act? How do those mediums structure choices? Can the capitalist system itself be considered a medium for life? It certainly seems like it is a medium for all of our actions. If this is the case, then don't we need to start thinking about choice in society the same way that we think about choice in specific mediums like the internet? Don't we have to recognize that the medium is providing us with a set of inclinations that are often counter to how we conceptualize our possible choices? It seems to me that this would help us accept the relative nature of choice, that we would always be choosing against or with the implicit ethic of our social system.

Free will has to be relative, a relationship. It has to be about moving through already established ethics and inclinations. Perhaps society establishes for us an existential ethic. We are unconsciously told what the best ways to live. And if society can be considered a medium for our choices, then we need to reckon with the implicit existential ethic. Because only by adopting a new definition of choice as a relative action. Ummm. Possibilities and inclinations. We need to stop relying so much on this idea of what is possible, and start thinking about what is implicitly encouraged. Because choice is always in relation to these underlying inclinations. The internet is just a good example of this idea. The internet is a world of massive possibilities, but the implicit intellectual ethic is in opposition to these possibilities of education.

I have lost my steam on this essay. I'm not sure why I feel so tired. But I think that I need to let this idea, this distinction between possibilities and inclinations mature. I think it can hopefully be fruitful. I really need to ask myself more about this question of mediums. What exactly is a medium? Where do they end and begin? How do we choose? How do mediums effect our choices? Why do we have so much emphasis on the possibilities of choices? What is a medium? What is a choice?

I feel tired. But I suspect these are fruitful lines of thought. And I want to pursue them. But I can't right now. But in the future I will hopefully read with these ideas in mind.

Original notes:

- The city as a medium

- The capitalist world as a medium

- The entire world as a medium

- Subjective experience and emotions as a medium

- All of these having their own corresponding implicit 'existential ethic'

- It is both macro and micro
- Does the temporality of choice fit in somehow?

The Internet Crazies

The internet is not as amazing as I claimed yesterday. It is amazing. It is a wild thing.

But I already feel myself leaping from tab to tab. I already feel the distractibility. And I guess it is okay. It just worries me in some ways. I'm just not so sure about this internet thing. I can just go and do anything else all the time. I don't have to stay on a single page. I can just move from tab to tab. I can look at news. I can play online games. I can do so many things. But the thing is that I want to do all of them very quickly. I don't know what I really want to do.

The Internet Is Amazing

I am so pleased to have gone a whole month without the internet.

Even that brief hiatus has effectively destroyed my familiarity with its majesty.

I fear that in the future I shall once again become numb to its wonder.

So this is a reminder to future Riley: The internet is an amazing beast.

It holds many treasures and many pitfalls.

Use it wisely: for blogging, for researching, for music.

Not for distraction and not for time wasting. Or perhaps time wasting is fine. Whatever.

I just read so much about the internet and its effects on my brain. Norman Doidge and Nicholas Carr gave me sufficient warning. I hope that I can heed those warnings and engage with this medium intelligently.

Distractibility and Whatever Else Happens

So I just want to write about anything at all.

Today I assembled my Ikea bed in my new apartment. Now I'm back at my aunt's house, hanging out. Gonna go out later and get some food and drank, but for now I'm just relaxing. The rest of my moving will be done tomorrow. I'll move my clothes, my books, my other things. I need to get a bedside table. I lost my swiss army knife tweezers. They fell down the sink drain. Upsetting.

I need to fix this one thing in my new apartment. It is the little ring in the bathroom that would hold a hand towel or something. Maybe I don't need a hand towel, but I don't like having just some random screw sticking out of the wall, and some random ring not hanging on that random screw.

I am finding my distractibility to be pretty startling. Whoa and then without even thinking about it I just opened another tab and started looking at Facebook. Fortunately, because I was writing about it, I realized that I had been distracted from the previous sentence and immediately closed Facebook and came back to writing.

But gosh it is so easy to just stop looking at things and start looking at other things. Oh and then I just opened up New York Times and then immediately closed it again. The Shallows has really made me a lot more reflective on how I am engaging with the internet, what my attention span is like. What the internet does. I don't know. It is awfully odd to me. It is confusing me.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night about the internet and history and other stuff. We often talk about the internet. I think mainly because it is hard to establish clearly what is going on to us with this new electronic medium. The question is of benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are obvious: access to information, expansion of culture, expansion of people's horizons. But at the same time the drawbacks may counterfeit these benefits. If the internet is making us distractible, destroying our attention span, then what does cultural expansion matter? If people are being taught to engage with culture in superficial ways then is it really expansion?

I don't know. I just don't know. To me it feels like a crucial question for our age. For this time. Contemporary culture, the internet, the age of information, democracy and capitalism. My aunt made the point that education is essential to democratic societies because we need an informed electorate. But right now it seems as though our voting turn outs are really low. Less than 50%? About 50%? Less than 60%, definitely. So then what to do about education in America? Are people really informed on the issues? When did rhetoric become more important than real issues? Probably at least since the Cold War. Maybe before. I just don't know enough about history.

I sure do think a lot about graduate school. Whether I'm gonna go into a history program or an interdisciplinary program. My interests are so broad. My aunt told me that she can see me ending up at History of Consciousness, or at Chicago Committee on Social Thought, something interdisciplinary. She says that after talking to me a lot she sees how large my interests are and how I'm trying to weave them together. I think I can weave things together quite well. But what kind of program will help me do this stuff the most? I just don't know.

But fortunately I can keep reading for a while longer before I need to decide.

Lol I also just realized that the title of this blog is funny in some way. Distractibility and whatever else happens. I want my own writing to distract me. I want to flow from one topic to the next without knowing what I'm talking about. I'm not focusing. I'm not following linear chains of thought. Certainly Mr. Carr doesn't think that all thought needs to be linear, but that the age of the book did encourage this type of thinking, and that it has certain benefits.

Who knows.

I don't want to end this post yet. I want to keep going for a minute. But I don't know what to write about.

Tonight is an interesting night because it is the last night I'll be staying in my aunt's house. She sure has been great to let me stay with her. But now I'll be having my own apartment. Wild stuff.

I lost my Orca card last night. Huge bummer. I'll get a new one. But it just sucks to have to pay for buses now while I don't have it. Oh well. I will be happy when I don't have to worry about it anymore.

I feel really tired. Not sure why. Oh wellllll. Tonight I want to do something. Yup, gonna.

Oh why does this post feel so inadequate. I feel like I can't talk about what I want to talk about. Not because I'm afraid to talk about things. Well, I am. But also because I don't know what to talk about. I want to talk about romance and love. I want to talk about new socializing and feeling weird. Life is about to change again. Living in my own apartment is going to be a totally new thing. Life is about to change again. I suppose that is the pressure I feel. Is this room. This room that has become familiar over the last six weeks. Now I'm gonna have another new room to get comfortable with. So be it. Just feels strange. I just know it is gonna be new and interesting. HOW EXCITING.

How unthinkable, too.

That is the thing. Unthinkable.

I look forward to being settled in my new apartment. Then I will perhaps be able to write this new essay I have planned. I don't like having it planned and not writing it. So why aren't I writing it right now? Who knows. I'm preparing mentally for a number of things.

I'll write it. That is also what I really want to do, and what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about Zen and creativity.

Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" as Genealogical History: Some Rapid Reflections on This Exciting Book

So last week I started reading Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. I find it very compelling. I only have sixteen pages or so left. I plan on finishing it tomorrow morning on the bus. What a treat.

His main purpose is to argue that the way we engage with the internet is causing changes in our brain that lead to shallower engagement with written works, and thus leading us to shallower and more superficial forms of thought in general. He argues that books effected our brain by cultivating a focused, attentive, and contemplative frame of mind that was more inclined to intellect and creativity. He believes that the transition from the age of books to the age of the internet is bringing about a new type of mind in which we mostly think in these shallow and superficial ways. Thus the title The Shallows.

All of this hinges on two things that I can think of right now: 1. the science of neuroplasticity, which claims that our brain is plastic and changes throughout the entire life span as a result of experience, and 2. the idea that the mind is a result simply of the brain.

The former is a relatively new discovery in the neurosciences, and the latter seems hard to deny. I am digging the book.

It excites me for a lot of reasons and I am going to have to give it an extended treatment in later posts. I am even thinking that I will have to simply integrate it into my essay on The Principles of Art that I am working on. But I'm not sure how I would do that exactly. But I'll worry about that when I finish reading it and when I get further along in the writing of my next large essay project (which I'm not very far into yet).

But I would quickly like to say a few things that are really exciting me about The Shallows, simply to catalog and get my thoughts flowing a bit.

First, I just want to say that I really am enjoying Carr's literary style. He has a masters in English from Harvard and so writes with a nice flourish to his sentences. Not sure how to describe this exactly. I am in someways bad at picking up on the stylistic elements in writing. But I like the way he writes. I just like the way it flows.

I also like the way that he includes memoir in the book. He discusses his personal relationship with computers, what it was like for him to grow up while computers were first being created, and what happened to him later in his life. He talks about what it was like to write the book, how he had to adjust his writing, his blogging, his access to computers. You definitely get a sense of the person. You get a sense that he is deeply troubled by the way that he has been personally been effected by the internet. I like that.

I like it because it reminds me of David Shields. I really enjoyed Shields' Reality Hunger and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead. Creative non-fiction is a very exciting genre to me, and Carr is doing a branch of it that I am very excited about. Interdisciplinary work that combines neuroscience, history, and contemporary cultural criticism. Uh, how loud do I have to say fuck yeah? I mean, really great stuff.

And I guess one reason I find it so compelling is that the central idea to all of it is neuroplasticity. I've read two books directly about neuroplasticity and have dabbled in some other stuff. I find it to be a very exciting field that his implications for almost every aspect of life. I think that it is really important stuff. So I'm glad to see that he is thinking about how the internet would be engaging with our plastic brains.

One of the most exciting things for me is something I wrote about in my essay of 8/30 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In that essay I claimed that neuroplasticity implied that minds and history were inseparable. Because brains are plastic, and change based on experience, then minds from different historical periods must look different. Therefore, if we want to understand minds, including our own minds, we must understand history.

Carr's book seems to function on this assumption that the quality of minds and history are inseparable. In particular, I like his chapter called 'Tools of the Mind'. He discusses how in different historical moments people engaged with different external tools to shape their minds. He uses neuroscienctific research on reading to show that literate people have radically different brains than illiterate people. He then speculates about how the invention of the printing press and the spread of mass reading changed brains and thus created new types of minds.

He then does a very good job of asking very 'modern' questions. I quoted modern because I am using the term in the way the Foucault defined it. He said that modernity was an attitude in which an individual tried to understand the nature of their own being by referring to history. That is what Carr is doing. He asks explicitly the questions 'how are the ways we think changing? what is the internet doing to us? what is happening to us right here right now?' Those are the quintessential modern questions. What is happening to me? And how can history help me understand what is happening to me right now?

I think that it resembles a work of genealogical history. He is using history to try and figure out what is going on with our minds right now at this moment. History is not simply there for its own existence, it is there to help us understand our situation and to act more intelligently in our situation. If you glance at my essay of 8/30, that is precisely what I am talking about: the use of history for a tactically useful understanding of the present.

In particular, he is doing a good job of dealing with the history of the industrial revolution, and the history of computers. He never makes explicit reference to Guy Claxton's work Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, but he tackles many of the same issues. He discusses how the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalist economies made efficiency paramount. He claims that these industrial and capitalist views of the economy eventually came to influence the way that people thought about thinking. Thought became something to be measured in terms of efficiency.

He also does a good job of engaging with the question of the rise of computers. The most important issue is the frequent metaphor of comparing the brain to a computer. This implies certain things about how thought 'should' work. But he says that the metaphor is wrong. Which of course it is! The brain doesn't process things in binary, or with algorithms. Clearly neurons work differently than computers do. Here I am pleased to see Carr falls in line with John Searle, a philosopher of minds, institutions, science, and other things. I like Searle, and he has been speaking out against comparing the brain to a computer since at least 1984. Good stuff.

This is all very cursory, but to summarize, I like Carr because he has a literary style that incorporates memoir into his creative non-fiction project. I like him because he recognizes the link between minds, brains, neuroplasticity, and history. He seems to be doing something that resembles Foucault's genealogical history, which I love. He is being so modern in his writing. I'm happy to see that the ideas I have been talking about, rather abstractly, can be executed as eloquently as Carr is doing it. I am also happy to see that he is (implicitly) lining up with Claxton and Searle by recognizing the role that the industrial revolution played in creating this overly 'efficient' and shallow mode of thinking, and by rejecting the comparison of the brain to a computer.

I do have one complaint, however. It has to do with the way that he is using Jeffrey Schwartz's book The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. I loved Schwartz's book. So exciting and interesting.

Carr has it in his bibliography, and I believe only quotes it once. It is a good resource simply because it legitimates neuroplasticity and provides good background information. But Carr fails to engage with the three most important aspects of Schwartz's argument: the notion of 'self-directed neuroplasticity', the relationship between Buddhist mindfulness and self-directed neuroplasticity, and the relationship between quantum physics and self-directed neuroplasticity. Yes, I understand that those threads can be hard to pull together, especially the quantum argument. But, I dunno. To me it seems like Carr is hinting or getting so close to the idea of mindfulness sometimes. He says that by being attentive we can combat the shallow thinking encouraged by the internet. Mindfulness is all about attentiveness. Perhaps he doesn't think the US would accept these ideas so readily, or get them. The quantum thing I can understand avoiding. It would be hard to talk about that without stepping into a lot of muck. Really fascinating claims, but really tricky stuff, especially given the Schwartz is a mind body dualist, which doesn't jive exactly with the rest of Carr's argument. But anyway, the bottom line is I find it disappointing how both Carr and Norman Doidge (in The Brain That Changes Itself) fail to engage with these crucial components of Schwartz's main argument. The link to Buddhist mindfulness is absolutely essentially.

Mindfulness could give us a way to exert meaningful self-directed neuroplasticity, and fight the enticement to shallow thinking that the internet is presenting us with. My ideas all come back to creative self-directed neuroplasticity. Schwartz's book is booming with hope for this idea, exploding with this idea that we can take charge of our brains plasticity and begin to change it for the better. I just hope that in the last sixteen pages Carr is able to enable some new form of agency in this world of neuroplasticity. I want Carr to give me tools to change my own life. He is certainly giving me tools to understand myself, but is that enough? How am I to convert this new understanding into meaning changes, not only in my life, but in my brain? Which of course would be the same thing.

I just want Carr to talk about self-directed neuroplasticity that is aimed at combatting the effects of the internet. But who knows. I'll finish it tomorrow.

Over and out.