Yes to technology, but let’s not replace the tablet for the brain
As many scientists and philosophers remind us, we must be grateful to technological evolution but be careful not to gradually translate the faculty of thinking, choosing, deciding from the mind to an object. The article by Francesco Provinciali
What emerges from a re-reading of Blaise Pascal's Thoughts , in addition to the amazement aroused by his multifaceted intelligence (he was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, theologian) and by the hermeneutic-interpretative intuitions matured in his short, intense of life".
By dismantling the granite Cartesian certainty of the “cogito ergo sum”, Pascal enhanced the dimension of divergent thought by approaching the esprit de geometrie with the esprit de finesse . On reflection – we are in the seventeenth century – the theme of the philosophical problematization of life begins with him as it developed in the 1800s and 1900s and has come down to our days, in the post modern, post ideological, and post global .
Human existence generates more problems than certainties in the eternal present while the exploration of the future does not concern only science: in the folds of its anthropological implications and in the karst cavities of its individual and social implications there is room for every aspect of culture, ethics of behavior, production of thought. If we approach the problematization of living with the certainty of the rational dimension that pursues codifiable solutions, we see for example the Kantian passage from the outside to the inside of us, the ineffable cosmology of Leopardi, the Hegelian dialectic which is perhaps the most characteristic and significant cultural passage of Western civilization. , what makes – to tell the truth – fraught and full of difficulties the acclaimed path of integration with the deeply rooted totalizing and dogmatic conceptions of other civilizations. And if, jumping two centuries forward and now looking backwards, we consider the two most famous authors of dystopian novels of the twentieth century, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and their best-known works ( 1984 for the first, The New World and Return to the new world for the second) we grasp some exponential themes of today's cultural drifts: the uncertainties and anxieties of the present, the unknowns and fears of the future, the homologation of thought, the loss of individual freedoms, the disorientation in the face of a global and elusive world, existential loneliness, the search for landings that avoid the dangers of apocalyptic and impending shipwrecks, the meaning of life: the incipit from which Pascal started realizing that science and technology do not solve the congeries of human problems.
Only that the freedom of divergent thought with respect to the constraints and algorithms of rational certainties can generate lacerating dystonia and latent inner conflicts.
Whether it is codified by binding rules or managed by strong and homologating powers, the future always appears as a place of uncertainty and indeterminate. Only an explorative mind capable of organizing and describing reality by borrowing it from observation and fictional imagination like that of Zygmunt Bauman could bring order and synthesize the great themes of our time.
But in the background, that intuition of approaching the logic of "the knowledge of the left hand" (as Jerome Bruner would have defined it three centuries later) of the meek and introverted Pascal introduced a theme that has become essential since the age of enlightenment in then and that concerns, in fact, the meaning of existence and its direction of travel. And so today, in this eternal present with no solution to the great problems of humanity, full of conflicts, hateful and ephemeral, resentful and individualistic, we can better understand – starting precisely from Pascal's distinction – why a great philosopher like Heidegger ever intuited that the prevalence of calculating thought inevitably leads us sooner or later to come to terms with ourselves.
The logic of interests and of change passed off as progress, the massive introduction of technique and then of technology in our life is inexorably changing our vital horizons towards a speculative dimension of existence: we do and design only what becomes useful, it produces profit, so the desire for possession and the conquest and use of every corner of the planet gratifies us much more than the gratuitousness of a free gesture.
In this dimension it is difficult to think of concepts such as the common good, while peace and freedom are always evaluated from subjective points of view. Because the intrusiveness of technology and the product that replaces thought today has totalizing dimensions of possession.
As Severino and Galimberti rightly observe, science pursues progress but the human mind, the psyche, cannot adapt to keep up with it. What then is the real danger of this drift? That the objects of use, the tools that technology produces and the very concentration of all efforts in a continuous overcoming of what we already have at our disposal create a sort of obsolescence of thinking thought (of the faculty and capacity to think) on the thought thought (the packaged product that replaces thought).
Technocracy now dominates man's habits and behaviors.
In an interesting book entitled The man with the brain in his pocket , Vittorino Andreoli considers how it is easier, faster and more available to use a smartphone or tablet to find the solution to every problem of everyday life, rather than rely on reasoning, for example. a mental process.
The risk is to gradually translate the faculty of thinking, choosing, deciding from the mind to an object.
There is not only a utilitarian value in this practice (what would make it justifiable): since it becomes a way to pass the time, what Pascal himself called divertissement , a thing an end in itself. Think of the domination over men that can be exercised by those who hold the power to manage the construction and finalization of these technological tools on a world scale, orienting and homologating the dominant thoughts-thoughts. We owe to Orwell the definition of "big brother", a sort of dictator of minds who, through rules and hierarchies, ends up dominating the world through the behaviors of domestic and relational life, preordaining and finalizing them according to an ethic that expels democracy and freedom.
Now we owe immense gratitude to science, to technological evolution, to the enormous advantages they have produced in human life. Think of medicine, engineering, communications: everything aims at improving living conditions, how to overcome a disease, how to build a secure bridge, how to speed up the bureaucracy, how to connect people in every corner of the planet.
The problem begins when this positive virtuality generates forced actions, when science is no longer neutral but placed at the service of hidden purposes that go beyond the concepts of shared ethics and generate insoluble bonds between the person and the object.
Those involved in education and training know how useful it is to have increasingly advanced equipment that facilitates knowledge. All, however, are realizing the enormous damage that the digitization of learning and the entry into that unknown universe enclosed in a plastic box can generate. The fundamental dichotomy concerns the split between real and virtual life, their continuous interconnection, the inability for young people (and adults) to interrupt flows of knowledge and passages of data that can affect the behavior of everyday life. , to the point of confusing the game with the simulation, the real proximity with the imaginative one, the perception of self-control and of things.
How many dangerous games are on the net? What inscrutable knowledge await web surfers at the crossing of the lawful and the danger of no return?
He feels the need to digitize not only the mass of public services, for a better use and perceivable usefulness, but – for example – all the learning processes, forgetting that true culture requires a slow and conscious metabolization of what you learn, so that it remains traced in the mind and heart rather than in a tablet.
Let's go slow, slow pede . We try to deepen and maintain knowledge of the subject (the person, the pupil) as well as improve the technical characteristics of the object.
What is striking is the lightness with which politics supports certain market trends without evaluating their consequences on the growth and development processes of children and young people who are learning.
But since they learn above all by induction and through the examples of adults, it is necessary to review the whole process of pervasive digitization that often simplifies, sometimes complicates our lives.
Think for example of the elderly: a generation that – in a country with a population decline – takes on the appearance of a silent or silent majority.
How many of them would know how to use tools that they have ignored all their lives simply because they did not exist?
These aspects, including human ones, are almost never considered, generating in fact processes of generational marginalization.
For some years the theme of the "Metaverse" (a term coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, author of the postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash ) has been establishing itself as a network of interconnected virtual worlds where users can interact, build and buy digital objects and carry out activities. games and entertainment in digital contexts.
This parallel world will absorb all virtual experiences from the birth of the internet onwards.
The digitization of society and of the world is an unstoppable trend which, however, postulates – with a grain of salt – the knot of its governance, reasoning with the head we have on our necks rather than with the one we keep in our pockets.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/si-alla-tecnologia-ma-non-sostituiamo-il-tablet-al-cervello/ on Sat, 15 Oct 2022 06:04:53 +0000.