Posts Tagged ‘humanity’
“Walking is man’s best medicine”*…
Thomas J. Bevin on the essential virtues of walking as inactivity…
… The vital thing to understand- and the point that I want to stress the most- is that walking is not an activity. Or rather, it should not be conceptualised as and reduced to being a mere activity. It is much more than that because it is much less than that. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.
You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
Which is why it is such a shame when people pollute their potentially edifying walks by turning to their ever-present phones. When I walk the streets and alleys of my city I constantly see people either shouting inanities into their phones or else using them to wirelessly pump music or podcasts into their eager ears. Walking thus becomes reduced to a mere mode of transportation for the carless and these reluctant pedestrians become- like so many other one-person-per-vehicle drivers- detached and isolated units moving through space. The audio and the journeying cancel each other out and it all bleeds into one, it becomes a blur that blots out the boredom of not being at your destination yet. Worse still is when this is combined with step counting apps or wristwatches which tragically instrumentalise the beautiful art of wandering around and turn walking into a metricated means of merely keeping the body alive and in some sort of working order. Such devices reduce us to machines, and one of the great tricks of Capitalism or The System or however you want to conceive it is that it not only turns us into machines for consumption and generating wealth for The Economy, but it also burdens us with the upkeep of the machinery that we have been reduced to becoming…
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… When you start tracking your step count when you go for your daily constitutional you turn the walk into ‘free time’ in this sense. It becomes an Activity, something that is Good For You. And this only compounds if you listen to some manner of Educational Podcast as you do so. The thrillingly, daringly subversive non-activity of moseying around the neighbourhood for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of being alive, able to walk and out of doors degenerates into just another means of being visibly productive. Because eking out maximum amounts of productivity from every moment of our days has been working out so great for us thus far. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and we are all so play-deprived that many of us are becoming passive, disembodied viewers of our own on-screen lives…
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… what does it say then when walking- something that is already complete and requires no thought or effort or expense- is polluted and diminished into just another opportunity to consume and document said consumption? What does it say when we so thoughtlessly desecrate our leisure like this? I would argue that to do these things is more than a little dehumanising.
Animals survive and act and react but only humans can opt out of this cycle and into the higher realm of inactivity. Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being– that makes life human. Responding to stimuli alone, satisfying needs as they arise alone makes life nothing more than a cycle of biological survival.
The beauty is in the gaps. Art and culture arise from the blank spaces (which may be why these vital spheres in particular seem to be diminishing in this time of always on, always available activity). Uselessness and purposelessness are true luxury, true wealth. Look at any heart-stirring ceremony or custom or event- they are filled with detours and excesses, they are far from efficient. You could easily workshop a way of getting to the same basic endpoint much, much quicker and in doing so you would kill everything that made that ceremony unique and beautiful and, well, ceremonial.
The luxury of the aimless walk is one of the most accessible and readily available blank spaces we have. It is no coincidence that such a stroll will all of itself produce ideas and insights and new observations. In the absence of a task the mind will begin to play. It will be free. This is why walking and creativity go absolutely hand in hand. Insight comes to the contemplative and contemplation comes from inactivity, from not trying to generate insights, or indeed trying to do much of anything at all. In a try-hard world this is a difficult truth to convince people of. Because it asks for patience. It asks for more than mere effort. It asks for participation in the world as it is, which for the mind that has always trained itself to be busy is a big ask indeed. But it is the only way to be free…
Reclaiming our humanity: “Walking as Inactivity.”
And for a reminder that this wisdom has it place in the technical sphere of our lives: “Design for lingering.”
Sadly apposite: “More on Pedestrian Deaths.”
* Hippocrates
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As we amble, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a man who walked both aimlessly and purposely, Lewis Mumford; he was born on this date in 1895. A historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and cultural critic, Mumford is probably best remembered for his writings on cities, perhaps especially for his award-winning book The City in History. (See also The City— the extraordinary film that Mumford made with Ralph Steiner and Wiilard Van Dyne, from an outline by the renowned documentarian Pare Lorentz, with a score by Aaron Copland.)
Mumford’s approaches to technology, its history, and its roles in society were acknowledged influences on writers like Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Amory Lovins, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Thomas Merton, and Marshall McLuhan. In a similar way, he was an inspiration for the organicist and environmentalist movements of today.
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and “the going becomes the goal.” Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and build-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale….
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities…
– Lewis Mumford, The City in History
“We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents”*…
Mariel Goddu suggests that humans have a superpower that makes us uniquely capable of controlling the world: our ability to understand cause and effect…
Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.
In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.
The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door.We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.
Most people don’t realise that any of this is a cognitive achievement. But, in fact, it is highly unusual. No other animal thinks about causation in the hyper-objective, hyper-general way that we do. Only we – adult humans – see the world suffused with causality. As a result, we have unparalleled power to change and control it. Our causal understanding is a superpower.
The scientific story of how our causal minds develop features another superpower: human sociality. It’s our unique sensitivity to other people that lets us acquire our special causal understanding. The story also raises questions about ‘other minds’. If our causal understanding is the exception, rather than the rule, then how does the world show up for other animals? If we try to suspend the causal necessity that structures so much of our experience, what’s left over?
I’m going to suggest that what remains is our experience of doing – a value-laden, first-personal and inherently interactive perspective. It is in this involved, participatory ‘point of do’ – as opposed to a detached, objective point of view – that the seeds of higher cognition take root. Appreciating that our original perspective is action-oriented and goal-directed can also help us understand our own shortcomings – and how to change them…
Fascinating– and timely: “Suffused with causality,” from @marielgoddu.bsky.social in @aeon.co. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Stanley Cavell
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As we appreciate agency, we might send carefully-analyzed birthday greetings to Erich Fromm; he was born on this date in 1900. A social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist, he was an important member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States).
Fromm’s overriding interest was in the he connections between psychology and society. His first seminal work, Escape from Freedom (1941; known in Britain as The Fear of Freedom) is considered one of the founding works of political psychology. He wished to see the creation of a sane society meeting human needs with harmony between men and nations in a nuclear age, and helped organize the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957.
“We are saved by making the future present to ourselves”*…
Recently, Steven Johnson (and here) received the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center. Presented by his friend and mentor Marty Seligman, it honored Johnson’s “work over the years advancing the cause of human flourishing.”
From his acceptance speech…
… I’ve always been drawn to… long-term perspectives, where you position yourself… in the larger context of hundreds or thousands of years of human suffering and progress. Some of my California friends even built an entire organization to celebrate that long-term view: the Long Now Foundation, which is dedicated to thinking on the scale of centuries or millennia, encouraging us to get out of the 24-hour news cycle that dominates so much of our lives today. A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.
And here I want to bring us back to another idea that Marty Seligman has been an advocate for. Almost ten years ago, he edited a collection of essays called Homo Prospectus which had a huge influence on my thinking about the world. The core idea behind that book was that a defining superpower of human beings is our ability to mentally time-travel to possible future states, and think about how we might organize our activities to arrive at those imagined future outcomes.
“What best distinguishes our species,” he wrote in the introduction to that book, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain.”
It is unclear whether nonhuman animals have any real concept of the future at all. Some organisms display behavior that has long-term consequences, like a squirrel’s burying a nut for winter, but those behaviors are all instinctive. The latest studies of animal cognition suggest that some primates and birds may carry out deliberate preparations for events that will occur in the near future. But making decisions based on future prospects on the scale of months or years — even something as simple as planning a gathering of the tribe a week from now — would be unimaginable even to our closest primate relatives. If the Homo prospectus theory is correct, those limited time-traveling skills explain an important piece of the technological gap that separates humans from all other species on the planet. It’s a lot easier to invent a new tool if you can imagine a future where that tool might be useful. What gave flight to the human mind and all its inventiveness may not have been the usual culprits of our opposable thumbs or our gift for language. It may, instead, have been freeing our minds from the tyranny of the present.
The problem now is that the future is getting increasingly hard to predict, in large part because of what has started to happen with artificial intelligence over the past few years. I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at transformative changes in technology, and I’ve come to believe that what we’re experiencing right now is going to be the most seismic, the most far-reaching transformation of my lifetime, bigger than the personal computer, bigger than the Internet and the Web. And while there is much to debate about what the impact of this revolution is going to be for the job market, for politics, and just about any other field, there is growing consensus that it is going to provide an enormous lift to medicine and human health. The Nobel Prize for chemistry going to the AlphaFold team last week was arguably the most dramatic illustration of the promise here. Earliest this month, Dario Amodei—the founder of the AI lab Anthropic, makers of Claude–published a 13,000 word piece on where he thought we were headed with what he calls “powerful AI” in the next decade or two. The line that really struck me in the piece was this:
My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years… a compressed 21st century.
Whether or not something that dramatic does come to pass—and I think we have to take the possibility of it seriously—it seems clear that given the kind of biological and medical advances that AI will likely unlock, there is significant headroom left in the story of extended human lifespan, perhaps even a sea change in how we age. That is, on one level, incredibly hopeful news. But it is also the kind of change that will inevitably have enormous secondary effects. To understand just how momentous those changes could be, take a look at this chart:
That’s the 6,000 year history of human population growth. You might notice, if you really squint your eyes, that something interesting appears to happen about 150 years ago. After millennia of slow and steady growth, human population growth went exponential. And that’s not the result of people having more babies—the human birth rate was declining rapidly during much of that period. That’s the impact of people not dying. And while that is on one level incredibly good news, it is also in a very real sense one of the two most important drivers of climate change. If we had transferred to a fossil-fuel-based economy but kept our population at 1850 levels, we would have no climate change issues whatsoever—there simply wouldn’t be enough carbon-emitting lifestyles to make a measurable difference in the atmosphere.
The key idea here is that no change this momentous is entirely positive in its downstream effects. Trying to anticipate those effects, and mitigate the negative ones, is going to take all of our powers of prospection.
When I was putting together my thoughts for this talk, my mind went back to the one time I spoke with Marty, about five years ago, when I was writing about cognitive time travel for the Times Magazine. As usual, I was incredibly behind in actually doing the reporting for the piece, and I’d called Marty desperate for a few quotes on a tight deadline. He very generously found time for me, but he had to do the call from an animal hospital, because as it happens he and his family were in the middle of putting their dog down. So our very first moments in conversation with each other plunged right into the depths of loss and grieving and the strange bonds that form between animals and humans. There was no small talk.
As I said earlier, death is, in the most basic sense, the termination point of human flourishing. But it’s also the shadow that hovers over us while we are still alive. We have done so much to minimize that shadow over the past century or two, going from a world where it was the norm for a third of your children to die before adulthood to a world where less than one percent do. But what does it mean for human flourishing if that runaway life expectancy curve that we’ve been riding for the past century keeps ascending? What does it mean if AI starts out-performing us at complex cognitive tasks? How do we flourish in that brave new world? Do we take on a new responsibility—not just ensuring the path of human flourishing, but also the flourishing of our AI companions? These are all difficult questions precisely because of time. The rate of change is so extreme right now we don’t have as much time to learn, and adapt. The doubling of human life expectancy was a process that really unfolded over two hundred years, and we’re still dealing with its unintended consequences. What happens if that magnitude of change gets compressed down to a decade?
I don’t know the answers to those questions yet, I’m sorry to report. But maybe spelling them out together helps explain something about what I’ve tried to do with my career, which I think from afar can sometimes seem a bit random, bouncing back and forth between writing about long-term decision making or exploring the history of human life expectancy and building software with language models. This award is called the Pioneer Award, and while I’m deeply honored to receive it, I don’t think of myself so much as a pioneer in any of these fields, but rather as someone who has consistently tried to find a place to work that was adjacent to the most important trends in human flourishing, so that I could help shine light on them, explain them to a wider audience, and in the case of my work with AI, nudge them in a positive direction to the best of my ability. That you all have recognized me for this work—pioneer or not—means an enormous amount to me. You can be sure I will do my best to savor it…
On progress, the “compressed 21st century,” and the importance of foresight: “Ways of Flourishing,” from @stevenbjohnson in his newsletter Adjacent Possible. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* George Eliot
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1873 that Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. It became the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
“What a piece of work is a man”*…
The estimable Samuel Arbesman on the path dependency of our fundamental ideas about ourselves…
Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.
But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?
In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic! [your correspondent heartily agrees]), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:
In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.
In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.
This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.
This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:
And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States.
In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are…
From his marvelous newsletter, Cabinet of Wonders: “Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures,” @arbesman.
Pair with his earlier piece: “Archaeology of Biology and Software.”
And for a(nother) taste of Brian Klaas (@brianklaas), see “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we ruminate on the roots of our (received) realities, we might recall that it was on this date in 3 BCE that a planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus was visible… and may have been the Star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament.
In this pre-dawn, “morning star” conjunction, the two planets appeared very close to each other in the sky (a mere 0.07° apart as viewed from Earth). It occurred when the planets were in the last degrees of the zodiacal sign of Cancer which was the concluding sign for interpreting that astrological year. The same two planets met again just ten months later (June 17, 2 BCE), even more closely, almost touching (0.01°), in an “evening star” conjunction in the first degrees of Leo, the beginning sign of the new astrological year. These two unions of Jupiter and Venus might well have been interpreted as the close of one age in history and the beginning of another age in 2 BCE.
For more on these conjunctions and other potential candidates for “historical Star of Bethlehem” (and an explanation of how/why the astronomers/astrologers who sighted the star became Magi/Wise Men in Church teaching) see here.
“No one hates war like a soldier hates war”*…
… Which can be a problem for military leaders, one they’re looking to technology to help address. First, we make soldiers stronger…
Cyborgs and genetically enhanced “supersoldiers” are projected to be the warfighters of the future, according to a recent RAND Corporation report. Published on January 2, 2024, the report, “Plagues, Cyborgs, and Supersoldiers: The Human Domain of War,” highlights advances in human-machine systems, along with AI and synthetic biology as being among the technologies that will be used to engineer the future warfighter.
According to the report, these technologies will give rise to seemingly telepathic capabilities where soldiers will be able to control machines using their thoughts, along with the ability to genetically modify warfighters, so that they will be able to survive in “the harshest of combat environments.”
“The Future of War According to RAND; Cyborgs and Genetically Enhanced Supersoldiers”
… then we numb them to feeling…
The Pentagon is looking toward a future where the U.S. deploys “super soldiers” directly inspired by Captain America and Iron Man, officials said at a recent conference…
[Research scientist J.J.] Walcutt talked about synthetic blood and replacing night vision goggles with eye drops (two things the Pentagon is working on) while a slide behind her showed off a “soldier of the future” whose body is “flooded with pain-numbing stimulants” and has the “ability to regrow limbs & quickly heal wounds like a lizard.”
Next to this was a quote that referenced Robocop. “Enhanced soldiers would be reduced to bionic men, who run fast, do not need to sleep, eat and drink very little, and can fight all the time. A new species is born: Homo robocopus,” it said. It’s a direct quote from a 2019 European report about the ethical concerns of the world’s superpowers attempting to engineer super soldiers…
…
“So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life,” [the moderator asked].
“Termination,” [Irwin Hudson of the U.S. Army Developmental Command] said, making a grim joke.
The panelists laughed.
“Pentagon Scientists Discuss Cybernetic ‘Super Soldiers’ That Feel Nothing While Killing In Dystopian Presentation“
Both articles are chilling– and worth reading in full.
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As we contemplate conflict, we might wish a wistful Happy Birthday to a man whose voice is sorely missed in conversations like these– the mathematician, biologist, historian of science, literary critic, poet and inventor Jacob Bronowski; he was born on this date in 1908. Bronowski is probably best remembered as the writer (and host) of the epochal 1973 BBC television documentary series (and accompanying book), The Ascent of Man (the title of which was a play on the title of Darwin’s second book on evolution, The Descent of Man)… the thirteen-part series (which is available at libraries, on DVD, and on and off on streaming platforms), a survey of the history of science– from rock tools to relativity– and its place in civilizations, is still an extraordinary treat… and a reminder of the importance of bringing a humanistic perspective to any discussion of what science and technology might make possible.
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