In our simulation year 2024, people have never been better at hating the powers that be simulation– In other words, there is hatred of digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics, for their on-trend status, don't rely on the vague, apathetic, technophobic emotions now and. Now they have research papers to back them up. They have bestsellers to choose from Harari And HaidtHe has – he has a picture of complacency –figuresI don't know if you've heard, kids are killing themselves for being busy in class.
None of this bothers me. Well, teen suicide obviously happens, it's terrible, but it's not hard to dismiss the arguments blaming technology. What's hard to get over, and what bothers me, is, I guess, an exception to this rule: the anti-technology argument put forward by modern philosophers.
By philosopher I do not mean some glorified self-help statistics-promoting author. I mean a deep-level, ridiculously learned hyperanalyst, someone who breaks problems down into their relevant bits so that, when those bits are put back together, nothing looks the same. Descartes didn't just say “I think, therefore I am” off the top of his head. he had to go so far In Before he could get to his classic one-liner, he humanly tore his head away from everything else. (Except God. People always forget that Descartes, the inventor of the so-called rational mind, could not take away God.)
For someone trying to make the case against technology, a Descartes-style line of attack might go something like this: When we go as far into the technology as possible, set aside everything else and approach the problem. Break it down into its component parts, where will we end up? Right there, of course: on literal bits, the 1's and 0's of digital computation. And what do the pieces tell us about the world? I'm simplifying here, but pretty much everything: everything. Cat or dog. Harris or Trump. Black or white. Nowadays everyone thinks in binary terms. Because this is what has been implemented and established by the dominant machinery.
In short, the strangest argument against digital technology is this: “I binarize,” computers teach us, “therefore I am.” Some technocrats have been proposing versions of this Theory of Everything for some time; Earlier this year, Aidan Ivens, an English professor at Dartmouth, published the first proper philosophical codification, as far as I can tell, Digital and its dissatisfactionI've had a little chat with Evans. Good boy. He claims he's not a technophobe, but still: it's clear he's distressed by world-historically digital life, and he roots that distress in the fundamentals of technology.
I might have agreed, OnceNow, as I say: I'm upset. I am dissatisfied. The more I think about the technophilosophy of Evens and others, the less I want to accept it. I think there are two reasons for my dissatisfaction. A: Since when are the base units of? Anything Direct the entirety of its high-level expression? Genes, the basic units of life, are responsible for only a sub-majority percentage of our development and behavior. Quantum-mechanical phenomena, the basic units of physics, have no effect on my physical actions. (Otherwise I'd be walking through walls—when I wasn't, half the time, I'd be dead.) So why do binary digits, forever, define the limits of computation and our experience of it? When complex systems interact new behaviors always have a way of mysteriously emerging. Nowhere in Individual Bird can you find flocking algorithms! Turing himself said that you can't tell by looking at computer code, completelyWhat will happen.
And two: blaming technology's discontinuities on 1's and 0's treats the digital as an endpoint, as some kind of logical conclusion to the history of human thought—as if humanity, as Ivens suggests, has The dreams of an enlightened rationality have finally been achieved. There is no reason to believe such a thing. Computing for most of its history, No digital. And, if Predictions about analog return True, it won't remain completely digital for much longer. I am not here to say whether computer scientists should develop chips uniformly or not, I just want to say that, was it supposed to happenIt would be foolish to claim that all the binarisms of modern existence, so well established in us by our digital machinery, will suddenly collapse into nuance and glorious analog complexity. We invent technology. Technology did not invent us.