A vision of students today
If you still read this blog, how true does this ring?
Welcome HTEC A 07
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The Holy Grail
I found it: the full Bowerbird special, by David Attenborough. This is amazing, I highly recommend you watch it.
Attenborough in Paradise: Bowerbirds - The art of seduction (Amazon Link)
Full Movie (Warning: 700 Megs)
Still Having Difficulty With The Clark vs. Descartes Problem?
I was recently surfing the web- marveling at how vast and unorganized the internet really is… when I came across an undelivered speech prepared for a conference on Science & Literature in 1991 in Montreal. It happened to be about the nature of the mind and intelligence. In short: a fascinating read. Thought I’d post it! Have fun!
~Jeff
http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/MindAndIntelligence.html
“Human nature and technology”
We are unknown to ourselves… and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves — how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? … Whatever else there is in life, so-called ‘experiences’– which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us ‘absent-minded’: we cannot give our hearts to it– not even our ears! rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: ‘what really was that which just struck?’ so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, ‘what really was that which we have just experienced?’ and moreover: ‘who are we really?’
On the Genealogy of Morals, preface, Nietzsche
Notice the title of this post is in quotes. Remember what that means?
One of the most common criticisms on the evaluations was that the course title and description did not accurately reflect the course content. I admit that I was not as strong on the ‘human nature’ aspect as I was on the ‘technology’ side. But I think I can defend my approach.
Almost everyone we read agrees that a discussion of human nature cannot discount the effects of technology on our social and individual lives. I went into the course with the strong bias that the title of the course was entirely redundant- there is no discussion of human nature without discussing technology, and there is no discussion of technology without a treatment of human nature.
But as the Nietzsche quote above suggests, the two discussion are not just mutually reinforcing. Both bear a strong parallel, emphasized later by Heidegger and Jonas, not to mention Gibson: in neither case do we understand what is going on. We can’t explain our own selves any better than we can explain our technology. We lose ourselves, including our technology, in the process of living our lives. Not until later can we stop and ask the question “who are we?” and “what are these machines that are so important to our lives?”
Gehlen suggests that the inorganic is fundamentally more knowable than the organic. This may be questionable epistemology, but it implies that the technology that surrounds us is easier to discuss than our own nature. We saw during our own brainstorming session at the beginning of class that our opinions on technology were much less articulate than our understanding of human nature; and yet, our discussion of human nature was often confused, overly general, and served to simply reaffirm our received biases. By the end of the class, we were talking much more intelligently about technology, and everyone claimed to have a hightened sense of awareness of the affects of technology on their own lives.
I’d like to think that this process entailed not only a deeper understanding of technology, but also a deeper understanding of your nature as a human being. Since we never had the opportunity to close that chapter of the discussion, I’d like you guys to use this post to respond to the following question: How has your understanding of human nature changed since you’ve taken this class?
Sam’s Notes
Jeff was kind enough to send me Samantha’s notes from class. I’ve included it here, but be careful, its a big file. Its about 40 pages of notes from the first two weeks of class. You want to remember what Heidegger said about standing reserve, or who the heck Latour was? Go back through the notes! Reading over them myself, I’m surprised at the range of material we covered.
HTEC Notes 2006 (10.8 Megs)
HTEC Represent!!!
Tina is the most awesome person in the whole wide world. You can see the whole Princeton experience on Webshots.
If anyone has more pictures, please post em here!
EDIT: I just got this note from the CTY administration:
The HTEC page looks good. I hope the students continue to use it after the sumemr ends. One administrative thing that I hate to mention but I have to is that pictures of the students can’t be posted online by staff members (since we don’t have parent approval). I only bring it up because we had some problems with this at Carlisle after first session eneded, so if you could take that picture down I would appreciate it (just in case anyone else happen upon the page from my office-a remote possibility). This would avoid any problems later down the road if someone (especially a parent) gets pissed off about it. I hope the MIND class is as fun as HTEC was.
So I can’t post the pictures, no matter how great they are. I heard people complaining about this at Princeton as well, worried that suddenly all those pictures were on the internet. “Do they even realize what they are doing by posting those? These kids have no idea,” they said. I thought, “My kids understand the internet better than you do, buddy.”
Oh well.
EDIT 2: Also, there is no way in hell that any class could be as fun as HTEC. What what.
A bleak end?
I realize that, after lots of optimistic discussion (at least on my part) about technology and human nature, we left off on a rather bleak note. NSA wiretapping, global warming, net neutrality, genetically modified foods (and their corporate backers), and nuclear annihiliation are all rather depressing subjects, especially when we think that there is little, if anything, that we as individuals can do about it. But my intention wasn’t to depress you, it was to leave these questions open as issues that you will have to confront in the future, and probably a lot sooner than you think.
The last lecture I gave discussed stigmergy as a form of externally structured organization of lots of relatively dumb units. Because of their ability to modify the environment in order to organize a kind of ’social’ behavior, ants and termites are able to create large, complex systems from relatively simply parts. I raised the question, are we just ants trapped inside a technologically enframed social order of which we have only a very dim understanding? A lot of you seemed resigned to this idea, or were just too depressed (or tired) to object.
Well, I feel compelled to say: we aren’t ants. We are each complex creatures with our own drives, interests, and perspectives, and we are all in control of how we act on our individual situation. Each of us decides how we treat our environment, our relationships, our technology, and ourselves. You were all very eager to explore your own, unique interests in class and voice your opinions with force and passion, even when it ran against my own view. Your perspective shapes how you act in the world, how you evaluate and make decisions, and ultimately makes you the person you are. We aren’t just ants, mindlessly responding to the technology around us, because we are capable of constantly reassessing out situation, and reinterpreting our value and position in the system, even when it seems mindlboggling immense and out of our control. None of us can grok the system, but we can grok our place in the system, and thats what ultimately matters to our lives.
When I defended Squarepusher and Bleecker, and in particular the idea that machines can be genuine participants in social situations, I was defending the idea that some, maybe most, of the credit for our technological situation is owed to the technology itself, which evolves and changes in ways that few people understand, and even fewer can anticipate. But I never meant to suggest that human creativity and individuality is undermined by technology, or that we have reduced anything important about humanity to mere mechanization. Individual human lives are enhanced by technology, and everyone we read agrees with this claim in some form or other, but we are still the driving force of innovation, creation, and the labor process as a whole.
To say that machines deserve some of the credit is just to say that no one is really responsible for today’s technological situation. But we are responsible for who we are, and the role we play in that system. So it is up to you to decide how you are going to play this game, and how you plan on responding to these impending challenges.
Group Presentations CTY06
Here are each of your presentations, in Power Point format:
Group 1 question: How is individuality shaped by technology?
Presentation
Group 2 question: What is humanity’s technological response to loss?
Presentation
Group 3 question: How do human relationships change when they are mediated by technology?
Presentation
Group 4 question: Are there natural limits to technological change?
Presentation