MIT Session #3: The Web and Reality
I’m teaching the third and final session of my mini-course at MIT on Tuesday, 7-9, building 1, room 390. The session is modestly titled: “Our World — The Reality of Connections”
Here’s an outline of what I think I’ll be saying during the Me Speak portion of the session. I’d appreciate it if you’d kick the bejeezus out of it before I present it. Thanks.
What makes the real world real?
It’s persistent.
It’s (roughly) the same for all of us.
It’s where the matter is. (But what makes matter interesting is that it’s persistent and the same for all of us)
Why are these marks of reality? Real = what exists independently of us.
From this comes an awfully lot:
The valuing of facts, knowledge as knowledge of facts, objectivity as the mood of facts.
How do we know that which is independent of us? Create an inner representation.
Then how can we know anything? Certainty grows as the mark of knowledge.
This view is deeply alienating:
We are alone in our own minds, each with our own inner representation of the external, real world.
Can’t ever really see what’s real – stuck with what our head can hold.
Separates meaning and being. What is is essentially devoid of meaning, while what something is as is dependent on how we take it and thus is essentially unreal.
But is the real world really like that?
Individuality is secondary: we can only be individuals because we are born into a social order, language, etc.
Science works and it has priority if your project is to see how the world works without our involvement, but that is only one valuable project.
The real world is ambiguous and continuous. The inaccuracy of our measurements is not due to the failing of our instruments.
And we lose much in being objective (yadda yadda).
Now let’s talk about the Web.
What happens to knowledge on the Web? Becomes voiced, situated, based on care.
What happens to individuality on the Web? Becomes social.
What happens to meaning on the Web? Meaning is the matter of the Web.
So, the Web fails the test of reality as what exists independent of us, and as the residue after meaning has been withheld. But that sense of reality is corrupt and alienating. The Web’s realness has to do with connection, meaning and passion…just what our alienated view of reality in the RW lacks.
No wonder the Web feels familiar and important.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Hi,
I don’t mean to be harsh, because you’re asking all the “right” questions. And I’m definitely for anyone and anything that engages self and others in that activity. So, good, yes, keep it up.
BUT, you should also know that you’re reinventing the wheel. If you take any philosophy courses, you know that these questions have been covered quite extensively, since the beginning of time.
Nevertheless, by all means, continue. Because every breath we take gives them new meaning in the NOW. That’s what makes BOTH doing them now AND studying how they were spoken of in the past so utterly relevant ALL THE TIME.
Sky
Sky, it probably hasn’t escaped Dr. Weinberger’s attention that these are fundamental philosophical questions. I trust that somewhere in his doctoral studies on Heidegger, someone may have acquainted him with the basics of philosophical inquiry.
Perhaps the reason he didn’t lay the matters out as philosophical basics lay in his interest in the way the questions are framed when you approach them by way of the internet (lower-case “i”) and the Web. Since the course title isn’t Philosophy 101, he’s probably not engaging the questions as he would in an intropductory philosophy course.
Thanks, AKMA. And, Sky, I should have put in at least a pointer to the fact what I’m laying out is a basic phenomenological (primarily Heideggerian) response to the various dualisms that philosophy’s given itself.
I think Richard Rorty’s essay makes some points about the nature of truth and the real world that help shed some light on some of the questions you pose. http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/000517.html#000517
RL is what kills you. Skipping over Descartes and right into Keanu :), this is an underlying theme in cyberpunk writing and films. The Matrix loses its punch without the RL connection to bodily harm (as does eXistenZ, Lawnmower man, etc.). The meat matters.
While consciousness may be increasingly divorced from our corporeal selves (depends on who you ask), most still have a visceral (!) reaction to the idea of shock feedback on cell phones or video games, and a similar reaction to the idea of subdermal electronics or cyborgs. This kind of stigmata of imaginary cyberspace–a connection to the body and to death of that body–seems to me to be a common feeling for why the web is less real than “RL.” I.e., what is real is only what is connected to us *physically*.
This seems to me to be a common idea in discussions of cyber-reality though not one I’m particularly attached to, so to speak.
Perhaps what is real is also what we are familiar with. When we discover something new and amazing, we have the expression “unreal!” (perhaps followed by “man!” if you are old enough). Does anyone think a bank account is not real anymore – or money is not real, for that matter?
These certainly fail the reality test as described by David. We end up with bits of paper and coins and cards and passbooks to provide a physical connection to money and accounts, which helps make them real – that is, helps make it possible to become familiar with them. On the Web, the physical connection might be the computer screen and keyboard, which will help to make it real (at least if we are already comfortable with using a computer). But David is saying that the “Web’s reality has to do with connection, meaning and passion”; but I think only after we feel more familiar with it, and start to realise that there is are “real people” on the other end of those connections – which is something we are familiar with.
Well, something like that anyway.
Thanks for the Rorty link. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by him, but didn’t read anything by him or any other philosophers during the Great Forgetting, a period that lasted from 1986 until very recently.
WRT Vergil: Yes, I hear people routinely refer to paper tickets as “real” tickets as opposed to e-tickets. I’ve never heard anyone call an e-ticket a “real ticket.” Anyway, I think we don’t call all unfamiliars “unreal.” Rather, it’s what’s unfamiliar and matter-free. Or something like that. Finally, was it John Austin who said that just because we talk about things being “unreal” doesn’t mean that there is a property called “real”? Or was that Wittgenstein? I’m pretty rusty…
WRT Alex: Yes, the body is hugely important here. I had a bit about that that I dropped out of the outline because I’m not sure I believe it. It’s in SPLJ towards the end. I make a stretching-it case for the Web’s virtues being the virtues of being embodied: having a point of view, being attached to something in a Sorge-ful way, recognition of finitude, etc. Anyway, the tie of reality to death is obviously crucial. And to sex. (This is a point you make well in your review of SPLJ lo these many months ago.)
Sky : I agree. Though I sense the internet is to a philosopher what a microscope is to a biologist.
In fact, I can easily misunderstand the internet to be one giant macroscope. It enables me see the RW, from an order of magnitude accross time and space, that previosly I hadn’t.
Mind you I suspect that real world always existed. And a few philosophers, poets and religious types had glimsed it but with the internet its coming into full view of everyone.
I wonder what Luenhoke ( apologies I’m not going to look it up ) thought he saw when he first looked down his microscope.
Sky : I agree. Though I sense the internet is to a philosopher what a microscope is to a biologist.
In fact, I can easily misunderstand the internet to be one giant macroscope. It enables me see the RW, from an order of magnitude accross time and space, that previosly I hadn’t.
Mind you I suspect that real world always existed. And a few philosophers, poets and religious types had glimsed it but with the internet its coming into full view of everyone.
I wonder what Luenhoke ( apologies I’m not going to look it up ) thought he saw when he first looked down his microscope.
I am glad to see that another member of the alex tribe has expressed things embodied. I am I, not he (Halavais not Golub), just so as not to take credit where it is undue. I don’t suppose Sting or Madonna have this problem…
Anyone who’s been on the Web for more than six months knows that it feels familiar and important because it breaks our hearts more quickly than RL would. What happens to knowledge? It’s withdrawn as unprofitable. What happens to individuality? It’s given up as too much work or too offputting to the hitcount. What happens to meaning? It’s what we used to do before we started that new job. As the years go on and the links go bad and the one-eighth-remembered work vanishes faster into a more thorough loss than paper (no matter what its acid content) ever knew, I become more wary of “connection, meaning, and passion…” without some grounding in some more material sense of communal responsibility. It reminds me of the torrent of “death artist” virtual reality stories in the 1980s. It reminds me of “we work hard but we play hard” yuppies. A two-week vacation from alienation doesn’t threaten alienation; a virtual death doesn’t reshape our life. It may keep us at it longer, that’s all.
Since your audience seems to be potential converts, I reckon proselytizing is appropriate. But there’s my kick, and I’d be happy to feel it bounced back.
One key element is the personal and optional nature of the web. I can choose to debate epistemology with you and AKMA, rather than discussing who is going to win the Super Bowl (did that happen yet?).
In RL, my family have been involved in a very uncouth debate over whether persistent violators of the dog-leash by-laws in out local park should be rewarded by having 20,000 sq ft of this commons enclosed for their private benefit. Pointing this out lead to verbal abuse from the dog mob.
On the net one can ignore this and move on. In RL, it means that we may end up with an officially sanctioned dog toilet at the bottom of our garden.
Spot on Kevin.
For me one of the most powerful aspects of the web is that for the first time we get to choose who we relate to. In the past we were constrained to a high degree in our life choices by where we were born, what our social group was, where we ended up working etc. With the web we can seek support and reference from likeminded people wherever we are and this offers us more choices as we construct our experience of the world.
Hmmm. Free association about the Web and the question of reality: the first thing I think of is the printing press and the impact that it had on world history. It’s not so much that tool itself had or has power, but that the communication it renders possible is different, richer and fuller than ever before. This is real and powerful …and, I might add, empirically verifiable.
Because richer, deeper, more complex and passionate communication changes our thinking, it changes us. Ultimately, changed thinking produces changed behavior. To quote James Allen (1864-1912): “Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.”
So, another way to answer the question “is it real?” is to look at one’s own behavior and ask, “can I find evidence of any actions I have taken that I wouldn’t have otherwise?” (I can). Since different thinking is a necessary factor in stimulating different action(s), our Web connections again pass the reality ‘test.’ ….It is essential to keep in mind that just because something is intangible doesn’t mean it’s not real(just as tangibility does not necessarily imply reality).
WRT various Alexes: Sorry! I shoulda checked the link. Do’h! Good to hear from both of you, though.
WRT Ray: Hmm. While not denying any of the situations you point to, I still find the Web liberates my heart, not breaks it. After 10 yrs on the Web and 15+ on the Internet, I’m still filled with joy by people’s generosity. I’m not arguing with you. Just testifying.
WRT Kevin and Euan: Absolutely. But I think about this in terms of time, too: RL is distressingly continuous while our life on the Web is intermittent. And voluntary.
I wonder..persistently..about what a collective view of RL will become when enough of “us” (old enough to remember B&W TV with a round, non-remote dial, electric typewriters, calculators as something astonishingly different, no PC’s, etc.) will have been replaced in the mainstream (workplace, teachers, caregivers) with people who, as kids, learned to integrate their thumb action unconsciously with their eyes as they whupped their Dad or Uncle at “Soccer Mania”.
Do they perceive “matter” in the same way – and in case this seems like a dumb question – I’ve always wondered how many urban and semi-urban kids have seen cows, know milk comes from from them there cows….and so on. Will they understand “matter” or RL differently, given the constant stream of electronic imagery and data, using cell phones as an extension of their voices and ears?
Where’s the dividing line (age, culture, ?) where some form of consciousness (and RL) that groks digital being differently starts ?
Please post more comments, I will visit this site again soon.
Weinberger on Life Online
MIT Session #3: The Web and Reality. I’m teaching the third and final session of my mini-course at MIT on Tuesday, 7-9, building 1, room 390. The session is modestly titled: “Our World
“Hmmm. Free association about the Web and the question of reality: the first thing I think of is the printing press and the impact that it had on world history.” – Sara (previous post)
Yes. Every great stride in human history has occured when communication is increased.. We are in the middle (web explosion – blogs) of another great communication increase..
good website