About

The Philosophy of Technology (or the Next Great Work in Philosophy)

a proposal by P. K. Carlisle

In college I was a philosophy major. Introductions to new people generally followed a formula thus [you can always tell a philosopher because philosophers use 'thus' a lot, it's not copyrighted by philosophers, but it may as well be]:

Other person: So, what are you majoring in?

Me: I'm double majoring in Philosophy and Foreign Language.

Other person: Oooh! You must be smart! [Subtext, always implied through body language, never stated: Good luck eating doing that!]

On the other side of the equation, I used to have a professor who would go off on the most glorious rants. As one of my fellow students said of him 'Put a nickel in and wind him up, and off he goes'. It was fun. Philosophers have a strange sense of humor sometimes. One rant was about students overly concerned about being 'marketable'. He was wrong and right.

He was wrong because Maslow's Hierarchy is true. (Interesting bit of philosophy trivia suitable for your next party...if you want people to give you very strange looks, that is: psychologists and philosophers both claim Abraham Maslow as one of their own. Because structured psychology as a science existed in his time, he was a psychologist. A hundred fifty years before that, he would have been a philosopher, arguing about the meaning of life with Berkeley and Hume.) You need funding to do philosophy. In days gone by a philosopher, composer or other creator would find some royalty as a sponsor. This was good and bad. It was good because creativity happened, as funded by that king, or the other prince. It was bad because the composer, artist or whatever would have to then have functionally illiterate royalty saying “I vanted a valtz! Proper music is a valtz!” Whereupon the philosopher, composer or whatever promptly disappeared into obscurity to reappear 300 years later on Amazon or Sirius. It's all good. Everyone remembers Mozart and Beethoven, how many people remember their royal patrons?

My professor was right because, assuming funding, to do philosophy is to think and to write without worrying about whether the result is marketable as much as it is true. What care I for the merely marketable if in 200 years future philosophy majors debate Machiavelli and Hume and Carlisle? [It will go vaguely thus]:

First person: So, what are you majoring in?

Second person: I'm majoring in Philosophy.

First person: Oooh! You must be smart! [Subtext, always implied through body language, never stated: Good luck teleporting anywhere doing that!]

The days of royalty as funding are no more. In a world filling with democracies, Kickstarter is the new sponsorship. As with the king's waltz, nobody will see the finished product until the night of the big soiree. Thus there is always the risk that some people will not like the finished product. Consider:

The ancient Greeks liked Socrates so much that they killed him with that fabled hemlock cocktail.

Galileo was so well regarded that he was excommunicated.

Descartes was so well thought of that he was accused of heresy.

These are occupational hazards of doing philosophy.

So exactly what is philosophy anyway?

My definition is that philosophy is the synthesis of sophistry. [That helped, didn't it?] Try this. In the beginning there is sophistry, or, if you prefer, sophistry happens. A good all-American example is the Patriot Act. Passed in a hurry after 9/11, it provided emergency powers and a sense of security. Now, a decade later, we start to examine the Patriot Act and cherry pick the things that work and debate the things that don't seem to work so well. Something new results. Sophistry is not so much deception itself, it is more a euphonious summary of perceived truth. What is retained as our beliefs and values and lessons learned, what survives the tests of deeper examination, becomes philosophy.

And philosophy ties in with technology how?

In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes says,

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

Now Sherlock Holmes wandered through a foggy Victorian London which believed in phrenology. That was a pseudoscience in which the bumps on your head were indicative of mental characteristics. Our ideas about the brain have changed considerably since Holmes and Watson fingered one another's skulls or hailed a hansom cab and dashed into the night after Professor Moriarty. Yet on some level, Sherlock Holmes might have been right after all.

Today, information comes in the form of a tweet. One hundred forty characters. Or a text. One hundred sixty characters. Twitter users follow thousands of people, more still on Facebook. Everyone tweeting, tweeting, tweeting and posting, posting, posting. A lot of information coming in. Maybe more than we can realistically synthesize.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury writes,

“You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motor-cycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment.”

The same is true of television news shows. They read emails on the air. They read tweets. That's content. That's the new news. Lots of opinion, how much thought?

Question:

ARE WE GETTING SMARTER WITH MORE INFORMATION, OR JUST MORE CHOCK FULL OF BRADBURY'S 'FACTS'? ARE WE, AS HOLMES SAID, LOSING TRACK OF INFORMATION EVERY TIME THAT WE TAKE MORE IN? ARE WE DOING ANYTHING WITH THESE 'FACTS' OR ARE WE TAKING IN SO MUCH SO QUICKLY THAT WE CANNOT PROPERLY CONSIDER ALL OF IT IN CONTEXT?

As technologies evolve, they interlink. Our smart phones talk to our laptops. We go online with a hamburger or a coffee. Everyone knows where you've been. When you log in at Starbucks or McDonald's, the corporations know it. You drink latte, you eat burgers. Have we got a coupon for you!!

Yahoo! knows if you've been shopping for shoes. Google knows if you emailed your friend about the shoes. Visa know where you bought the shoes. The NSA knows if you have holes in your socks.

Many people approve of this. If you drink latte and eat burgers, you don't want a coupon for salads. If you are looking at shoes, you want all of the shoe related input that you can get. Other people are less comfortable with this degree of corporate knowledge and perceived manipulation of the individual. Young people, the greatest consumers of information technology, are split, but tend toward accepting a loss of privacy in exchange for immediacy. Also, you need some new socks.

Yet sophistry synthesizes into philosophy over time. To waive privacy today is still essentially voluntary because the model is in its early iterations. A significant body of law does not exist regarding privacy in the information age. More important, a well considered philosophy does not exist in this regard, either. Eventually both will exist. Perhaps to opt for privacy will not be an option in fifty years. The decisions we make today will help decide.

Question:

WHAT IS THIS PRIVACY THING ANYWAY? SHOULD WE WANT IT AS A MATTER OF COURSE AS FOUND IN THE FOURTH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION? IS PRIVACY A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT? WAS ERIC SCHMIDT OF GOOGLE CORRECT THAT IF WE HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE, WE SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT ANYWAY?

Should we limit privacy according to the principle of utilitarianism, and say, 'up to the point of the greatest good for the many'? In that case, who is the 'many'? Stockholders who profit when they know about your shoes? The individuals who get to shop for their own shoes without pressure? Not so simple after all.

These are only two of the questions that a philosophy of technology must address.

The answers are coming, Neo.

The answers are coming because they must. Whether people strive to address the questions or simply take the path of least resistance and let 'others', custom, legislation or judicial precedent decide for them. Personally, I would prefer that people at least know why they do whatever it is that they choose to do.

Thanks for the techno-philosophy primer, you're saying, but where do I come in?

I want to write a piece of the philosophy of the information age. A friend in college used to call it 'talking to dead philosophers', as in “Oh, you're talking to dead philosophers again. Okay, see you later.” This was identifiable by my tendency when doing philosophy to pace back and forth tossing a Hacky Sack into the air and catching it while debating aloud with the philosopher on whom I was writing, until, suddenly, I'd drop the Hacky Sack, rush to the computer and bang out half a page on whatever I was working on. There's more to it than that of course, but that was the visible manifestation. I gather it was humorous to see.

I am the right person in the right place and at the right time. I have the specific education. I have the appropriate experience. If it was ever important to examine the philosophy behind rapid technological advances, that time is now.

It's good to be an alpha, not like those betas who just do a Google search.

I love technology and philosophy. I don't think that technology is a bad thing. Look at Kickstarter. I do think that it has to be considered, and principles derived and reasoning codified. It is a new world now. Laws from fifty years ago are being retrofitted with varying degrees of success to current technology to which they were never intended to apply. Schools have to decide if Wikipedia is an 'academic resource' [please, no]. That says that we as a society have not thought adequately about the implications of technology. How to use it, yes. How to improve it. Constantly. Implications of privacy, quality, content, security, and others have not necessarily been sufficiently considered. But we act anyway, because immediacy is the name of the game. That might not have us end up where we want to be in future generations.

As above, philosophers still require sponsorship. You are my twenty-first century equivalent of royal sponsorship. Times have changed. The need for philosophy has not changed. I think that this project is worth doing. I hope that you agree and will pledge accordingly.

Q: What qualifies me to write this book?

A: I have a Bachelor's in Philosophy and Languages magna cum laude, and a Master's in Information Systems. I love philosophy and technology. I'm a techno-philosopher, or a philoso-technophile. Either way, I'm some kind of plugged in.

Q: Where will I publish this book?

A: The plan is to self publish. As we have seen above, philosophers do not always say things that people want to hear (at least not for the first hundred years or so). There is a possibility that no publisher would touch a book if the results take me to truths that they do not want to hear. “The market isn't ready for this.” they'll say. “Our stockholders would not like this.” they'll say. “Have a hemlock cocktail, it goes down smooth.” they'll say.

Q: What about that typo? How can you write if you make typos?

A: That's what editors are for. Seriously, I didn't even see the typo you're talking about, but I just added this Q&A because I assume there is one I missed. I type like the wind to get my thoughts down and typos happen. Even when I proofread and could swear I've caught them all.

Q: Are there any rewards if you sponsor this creative venture?

A: Ah, those perks. We can do this in three possible ways. I may just dedicate the book to the dozen largest sponsors of the project. Your own little piece of immortality. Future academics and translators will write ponderous introductions and speculate that I had numerous lovers.

Depending on variables too distant to realistically contemplate at this juncture, I can provide signed copies to the top dozen sponsors. I would not be averse to this. It will go this way: The book will sit on your shelf and be a conversation piece that you can be proud of for years to come. Your kids will inherit it. They will read it and use it once for a footnote in a college term paper on which they'll get an 'A'. They will put it in the attic where their kids will discover it and sell it on a reality television antiques show for a few hundred dollars. They'll take a vacation with the proceeds and meet the man or woman of their dreams. Your doing! So many good things will happen, how can you resist?

Pledges of $25 or more will receive a free digital copy of the book. It doesn't stack on the bookshelf or store in the attic nearly as well, and signing your tablet for you is not a practical idea.

Pledges in any amount are welcome and warmly appreciated.

Regardless of your pledge amount, if as has happened before in history, this work should cause me to be hauled up before a tribunal for heresy, bad taste, or any of the many other things that the truth has been called when unpopular, I can assert that you, dear sponsor, knew nothing as regards actual content at the time that you sponsored me.

Q: What if I arrive at a truth that you don't want to hear?

A: I love philosophy. I love technology. It might be a truth that I also don't want to hear. If you feel strongly about it, doubtless others will as well. You can join the mob of villagers coming after me with pitchforks and torches.

[Images from istockphoto, Wikimedia Commons, Stock.xchng, The GIMP]