Google, my boondoggle, and why the revolution will be summarized

There’s a very interesting article in the current Atlantic Monthly written by Nicholas Carr called, and asking, “Is Google making us stupid?” The author, and, presumably, we the reader, could once wade through large pieces of writing, from novels to long-form articles with ease. Concentration was a virtue and a captured commodity. But we have lost our way. Google, Yahoo, the Internet, etc., have made undivided focus frustratingly difficult. To be sure, it has made some things go a lot smoother as well.

Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

We’ve gained something, it’s undeniable. But we’ve lost another. Carr on brain plasticity:

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

It has the ability to reprogram itself, and become reprogrammed within altered environments. Evolution. We spend a considerable amount of time in an information network that values efficiency and immediacy above depth. This will have an effect on us, our minds.

Carr intimates a relationship among concentration, deep thinking, and, even, humanity. Can the way we read, play, chat, and become distracted, online really erode all that?

From The Beatles’ “I’m only Sleeping”:

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there's no need

I'll describe myself, thank you very much.

I was looking through some old books of mine, when I found Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I haven't read philosophy in a while, so it was refreshing to read a few chapters from that book. Here's a passage I liked, and found particularly moving:

The drama of an individual life, or of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a preexistent goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached. Neither a constant external reality nor an unfailing interior source of inspiration forms a background for such dramas. Instead, to see one’s life, or the life of one’s community, as a dramatic narrative is to see it as a process of Nietzschean self-overcoming. The paradigm of such a narrative is the life of the genius who can say of the relevant portion of the past, “Thus I willed it,” because she has found a way to describe the past which the past never knew, and thereby found a self to be which her precursors never knew was possible.*

In this Nietzschean view, the impulse to think, to inquire, to reweave oneself ever more thoroughly, is not wonder but terror. It is, once again, Bloom’s “horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or replica.” The wonder in which Aristotle believed philosophy to begin was wonder at finding oneself in a world larger, stronger, nobler than oneself. The fear in which Bloom’s poets begin is the fear that one might end one’s days in such a world, a world one never made, an inherited world. The hope of such a poet is that what the past tried to do to her she will succeed in doing to the past: to make the past itself, including those very causal processes which blindly impressed all her own behaving, bear her impress. Success in that enterprise – the enterprise of saying “Thus I willed it” to the past – is success in what Bloom calls “giving birth to oneself.”

*When he writes “because she has found a way to describe the past which the past never knew was possible”, he refers to the individual’s creation of a new language, a new set of metaphors, to describe, or re-describe, the past. Freedom and autonomy find their elbow room with that task.

on silence

By Pico Iyer

Silence, then, could be said to be the ultimate province of trust: it is the place where we trust ourselves to be alone; where we trust others to understand the things we do not say; where we trust a higher harmony to assert itself. We all know how treacherous are words, and how often we use them to paper over embarrassment, or emptiness, or fear of the larger spaces that silence brings. "Words, words, words" commit us to positions we do not really hold, the imperatives of chatter; words are what we use for lies, false promises and gossip. We babble with strangers; with intimates we can be silent. We "make conversation" when we are at a loss; we unmake it when we are alone, or with those so close to us that we can afford to be alone with them.

In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.

Here's an article on war; on whether or not it is caused by innate drives; how we can overcome a pugnacious past; and what may lie in wait to prevent this flight to Brotherhood.

A crucial first step toward ending war is to reject fatalism, in ourselves and in our political leaders. That is the view of the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who is renowned for his conservation efforts as well as for his emphasis on the genetic underpinnings of social behavior. A rangy man with a raptor’s long, narrow nose and sharp-eyed gaze, Wilson has not budged from his long-standing position that the propensity for group aggression, including war, is deeply ingrained in our history and nature. He notes, however, that group aggression is highly “labile,” taking many different forms and even vanishing under certain circumstances.

He is therefore confident that we will find ways to cease making war on nature as well as on each other, but it is a race against time and human destructiveness. “I’m optimistic about saving a large part of biodiversity,” he says, “but how much depends on what we do right now. And I think that once we face the problems underlying the origins of tribalism and religious extremism—face them frankly and look for the roots—then we’ll find a solution to those, too, in terms of an informed international negotiation system.” Wilson pauses and adds, “We have no option but optimism.”