每日一抄20170816

Michael Patrack Lynch

So imagine that you had your smart phone miniaturized and hooked up directly to your brain,

now you have the thought that your brain chip could be able to upload and download to the internet at the speed of thought,

accessing social media or wikipedia would be a lot like well from the inside, 

at least like consulting your own memory,

would be easy and intimate as thinking,

but what if it makes it easier for you to know what's true,

just because a way of accessing information is faster,

it doesn't mean it's more reliable of course,

and it doesn't mean that we would all interpret it the same way,

and it doesn't mean that you would be any better at evaluating it ,

in fact it might even be worse,

because you know more data less time for evaluation.

you know something like this is already happening to us right now,

we already carry a world of information around in our pockets,

but it seems as if the more information that we share and access online,

the more difficult it can be for us to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake,

it's as if we know more but understand less,

now you know it's a feature of morden life,

i suppose that large swathes of the public live in isolated information bubbles,

you know we are polarized not just over values but over the facts,

and one reason for that is that the data analytics that drive the internet get us not just more information but more of the information that we want,

our online life is personalized everything from the ads we read to the news that comes down our facebook feed is tailored to satisfy our preferences,

and so while we get more information, and a lot of information, 

ends up reflecting ourselves as much as it does reality,

it ends up i suppose inflating our bubbles rather than bursting them,

and so maybe it's no surprise that we're in a situation, and a paradoxical situation of thinking that 

we know so much more and yet not agree on what it is we know,

so how are we going to solve this problem of knowledge polarization.

but one obvious you know tactic to try to fix our technology to redesign our digital platform,

so as to be make them less susceptible to polarization,

and i am happy to report that many smart people at google and facebook are working on just that,

and these projects are vital,

and i think that fixing technology is obviously really important, 

but i don't think that technology alone fixing it is going to  solve the problem of knowledge polarization,

i don't think that because i don't think the end of the day is a technological problem,

i think it is a human problem,

having to do with how we think and what we value,

in order to solve it,

i think we're going to need help,

we're going to need help from psychology and and political science,

but we're also going to need help i think from philosophy,

because to solve the problem of knowledge polarization,

we're going to need to reconnect with what's one fundamental philosophical idea,

that we live in a common reality,

now the idea of a common reality is like i suppose a lot of philosophical concepts easy to state,

but mysteriously difficult to put into practice,

to really accept it i think we need to do three things,

each of which is a challenge right now,

first we need to believe in truth,

you might have noticed that our culture is having something of a troubled relationship with that concept right now,

you know it seems as if we disagree so much that as one political commentator put it not long ago,

you know it seems as one political commentator put it not long ago,

it's as if there are no facts anymore.

but that thought that thought it actually an expression of a seductive line of argument that that's in the air it goes like this

we just can't step outside of our own perspective we can't step outside of our biases,

every time we try we just get more information from our perspective,

so this line of thought goes we might as well admit that objective truth is an illusion,

or it doesn't matter because either we will never know what it is,

or it doesn't exist in the first place, now that's not a new for philosophical skepticism about truth,

in during the end of the last century as some of you know

it was very popular in certain academic circles,

but it really goes back all the way to the Greekphilosopher Protagoras,

it's not farther back where Protagoras has said that objective truth was an illusion,

because man is the measure of all things,

man is the measure of all things,

that can seem like a bracing bit of reapolitik the people or liberating

because it allows each of us to discover our or make our own truth,

but actually i think it's a bit of self-serving rationalization disguised as philosophy,

it confuses the difficulty of being certain with the impossibility of truth,

look of course it's difficult to be certain about anything,

we might all be living in the matrix,

you might have a brain chip in your head,

feeding you all wrong information.

but in practice we do agree on all sorts of facts,

we agree that bullets can kill people,

we agree that you can't flap your arms and fly,

we agree or we should that there is an external reality and ignoring it can get you hurt,

nonetheless skepticism about truth can be tempting,

because it allows us to rationalize way around biases,

when we do that we're sort of like the guy in the movie

whoe know he was living in the matrix,

but decided he liked it there anyway,

after all getting what you want feels good,

being right all the time feels good,

so often it's easier for us to wrap ourselves in our cozy in information bubbles,

live in bad-faith and take those bubbles as the measure of reality,

an example i think of how this bad faith gets into our action,

is our reaction to the phenomenon of fake news,

the fake news that spread on the Internet during the American presidential election 2016,

was designed to feed into our biases,

designed to inflate our bubbles,

but what was really striking about it was not just that it fooled so many people,

what was reallu striking to me about fake news the phenomenon is how quickly itself became the subject of knowledge polarization,

so much so the very term fake news now just means new story i don't like,

that's an example of the bad faith towards the truth that i'm talking about.

but the really i think dangerous thing about skepticism with regard to truth,

is that it leads to despotism,

man is the measure of all things inevitably becomes the man is the measure of all things,

just as you know every man for himself always seems to turn to be only the strong survive.

at the end of Orwell's 1984,

the thought policeman O'Brien is torturing the protagonist Winston Smith into believing 2+2 equals 5,

what O'Brien says is the point is that he wants to convince Smith

that whatever the party says is the truth,

and the truth is whatever the party says,

and what O'Brien knows is that once this thought is accepted,

critical dissent is impossible,

you can't speak truth to power if the powe speaks truth by definition,

okay so i said that in order to accept that we really live in a common reality we have to do three things.

the first thing is to believe in truth,

the second thing could be summed up by the Latin phrase that Kant took as the motto for the Enlightenment, Sapere Aude.

or dare to know or as Kant wants dare to know for yourself.

now i think in the early days of the internet,

a lot of us thought that information technology was always going to make it easier for us to know for ourselves,

and of course in many ways it has,

but as the internet has become more and more apart of our lives,

our reliance on it and use of it has become more passive,

much of what we know today we Google now,

we download prepackaged sets of fact,

and sort of shuffle them along the assembly line of social media,

now google knowing is useful precisely because it involves a sort of intellectual outsourcing,

we offload our effort onto a network of others and algorithms,

and that allow us of course to not clutter our minds with all sorts of facts,

we can just download them when we need them and that's awesome,

but there's a defference between downloading a set of facts and really understanding how or why those facts are as they are,

understanding why a particular disease spreads or how mathematical proof works or why your friend is depressed,

involves more than just downloading,

it's going to require most likely doing some work for yourself,

having a little creative insight, using your imagination,getting out into the field, doing the experiment, working through the proof, talking to someone.

now i am not saying of course that we should stop google knowing,

i just say we shouldn't overvalue it either,

we need to find ways of encouraging forms of knowing that are more active,

and don't always involve passing off our effort into our bubble,

because the thing about google knowing is that too often it ends up being bubble knowing,

and bubble knowing means always being right,

but daring to know daring to understand means risking the possibility that you could be wrong,

it means risking the possibility that waht you want and what's true are different things,

which brings me to the third thing that i think we need to do if we want to accept that we live in a common reality

that the third thing is have a little humility ,

humility here i mean epistemic humility which means just in a sense knowing that you don't know it all,

but it alse means something more than that ,

it means seeing your worldview is open improvement by the evidence and experience of others,

seeing your worldview is open to improvement by the evidence and expericence of others,

that's more than just being open to change,

it's more than just being open to self improvement,

it means seeing your knowledge is capable of enhancing or being a rich by what others contribute,

that's part of what it's involved in recongnizing that there's a common reality that you too are responsible to,

now i don't think it's much of stretch to say that our society is not particularlygreat at enhancing or encouraging that of humility,

i mean that's partly because well we tend to confuse arrogance and confidence,

and it's partly because well, you know arrogance is just easier,

it's just easier to think of yourself as knowing it all,

it's just easier as thinking of yourself as as having it all figure it out,

but that's another example the bad faith towards the truth i've been talking about,

so the concept of a common reality like a lot of philosophical concepts,

can seem so obvious that we can look right past it,

and forget why it's imortant.

democracies can't function if their citizens don't strive,

at least some of the time to inhabit a common space,

a space where they can pass ideas back ad forth,

when and especially when they disagree,

but you can't strive to inhabit that space,

if you don't already accept that you live in the same reality.

to accept that we've got to be believe in truth,

we've got to encourage more active ways of knowing,

and we've got to have the humility to realize that we're not the measure of all things,

we many yet one day realize the vision of having the internet in our brains,

but if we want that to be liberating and not terrifying,

if we want to expand our understanding and not just our passive knowing,

we need to remenmber that our perspectives as wondrous beautiful as they are.

are just that perspectives on one reality.

thank you.