Philosophy 101 Unit 1

When you read Jenkinson’s ‘Collaboration with Machines’ a few things become clear.  Jenkinson sides with Gehlen in that both believe that technology frees man by creating new possibilities for him.  For Jenkinson, this means new ways to make music, fundamentally changing the music created.  This freedom strikes a frightening note when the composer finds himself “in a wasteland of desolate freedom” (169).  Jenkinson finds anyone who believe he is solely in control (and machines innocent bystanders) to be delusional, and furthermore to be hampering their own creative efforts.

What implications does this have?  Going back to the book Dan mentioned in class a while back, Nudge, about how our surrounds impact all our choices, I think this has a huge impact.  Not to side with a Nazi, but Heidegger was right about enframing.  Living in this technological world does impact the way that we think.  Expanding that to a moral context, our technological surroundings impact what we ought to do by changing what we can do.  The possiblity of a “curtosy call” or a quick email changes our societal obligations and expectations.

But Nudge has something to say about Jenkinson’s Collaboration that goes beyond the social realm and says something about cognition.  The way food in a cafeteria is arranged, for example, impacts the choices we make.  If healthier food is in the front and we see it first, we tend to eat healthier (consider that when your first stop in Allen is the desert counter and perhaps veer left to the fruit instead).  In that same way, if machines are around, they impact our choices.  Having a music-making machine, like in Jenkinson’s article, changes the type of music he made.  Jenkinson romanticizes that a little in saying the machine should also get credit for the music produced, but from the Nudge perspective the inspiration  for the music was the machine.  He goes so far as to say that the person making music on a computer is a “machine user-artist” (170).  To me, that’s like saying, “he’s not a pianist, he’s a piano user-player.”  It seems wordy and unnecesary to make such statements.

Then Jenkinson makes a jump to the island of conclusions that is nearly impossible to follow.  He says that music frees us from “the problem of bodily death” (171).  He says that the goal of an artist is to encode himself in his work which becomes an envoy of the self, therefore surviving past the death of the body.  As machines’ involvement in the artistic process increases, our work serves as a dual envoy of both creators, we begin to feel both inferior to and jealous of machines.  I cannot deny that my word processor changes the writing process, but I cannot agree that producing a novel makes me feel any less afraid of death.  I would like to finish a novel by the time I die because it is one of my goals, but it in no way changes the nausea  I experience when I consider being dead.  As a creative person, I appreciate the romanticized view of leaving part of oneself in art, but even if I agreed with that premise, my fears about death remain.

I have a problem with Jenkinson’s writing.  The further you get into the article, the less need he feels to explain any of his premises with examples or explainations.  That entire last paragraph needs expanding.  I’m not saying I disagree with everything, but frankly the arguement is unwarrented.