None of this is inevitable, however. How could it be—the changes in our form of life that digital ways of knowing are bringing have yet to fully unfold. We should not fear information technology per se, or the “Internet” in the expanding Internet of Us. It is the “us” part—or our uses of technology—that we must mind. We are becoming more powerful knowers. We just must also strive to be more responsible, understanding ones.
Acknowledgments
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to talk about these subjects with many wise and intelligent people, including Robert Barnard, Don Baxter, Paul Bloomfield, Sandy Goldberg, Patrick Greenough, Hanna Gunn, Julian Jackson, Casey Rebecca Johnson, Brendan Kane, Junyeol Kim, Nathan Kellen, Tom Lynch, Helen Nissenbaum, Nikolaj Jang Lee Pedersen, Duncan Pritchard, Baron Reed, David Ripley, Paul Roberts, Marcus Rossberg, Evan Selinger, Nate Sheff, Tom Scheinfeldt and Daniel Silvermint. A special shout-out to the Block Island Cognitive Research Institute, who heard early versions of these ideas (over and over again): Paul Allopenna, Terry Berthelot, James Dixon, Inge-Marie Eigsti, Lisa Holle, Jim Magnuson and Emily Myers.
Nate Sheff and David Pruitt were of great help in researching various materials in the initial stages of this project. Early drafts of the manuscript benefited heavily from comments by Patricia Lynch, Phil Marino, Kent Stephens, Tom Stone and Steven Todd; Terry Berthelot provided invaluable commentary on a later draft. Portions of this book were given as talks at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, the University of Edinburgh, the University of St. Andrews, Northwestern University’s Kaplan Humanities Institute, University of Cincinnati’s Taft Center, Syracuse University, Ohio State University, the American Philosophical Association, Yonsei University, TEDx, the Chautauqua Institution and SXSW. Portions of chapters 4 and 6 build on ideas I first tried to express in “A Vote for Reason,” “Privacy and the Concept of the Self” and “Privacy and the Pool of Information” in the New York Times’ The Stone blog, as well as “The Philosophy of Privacy: Why Surveillance Reduces Us to Objects,” May 7, 2015, in The Guardian. The ideas of chapter 1 draw inspiration from “NeuroMedia, Knowledge and Understanding,” published in Philosophical Issues: A Supplement to NOÛS, vol. 24 (2014).
Finally, I owe special thanks to my agent Peter Matson and my editor Phil Marino, who both believed; editor Allegra Huston, who clarified; my sisters Patty, Bridget and Rene, who taught; and to Terry and Kathleen, who not only understand, but help me do the same.
Notes
Preface
1. Russell, “The Expanding Mental Universe.”
Chapter 1: Our Digital Form of Life
1. So far, most research focusing on BCIs concerns how to get information from the brain to the computer in order to bring about some external effect—such as controlling a robotic arm, or moving a cursor or an object like a wheelchair. Ongoing research is geared toward making prosthetics or providing therapy by directly stimulating the brain, although there are also people working on using BCIs for gaming. A chief problem facing such research is that signals from the brain—typically recorded noninvasively with electrodes attached to the scalp—are quite noisy. It is hard to filter out the information you really want. (One researcher compared it to listening to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp.) Nonetheless, advances are ongoing; in September 2014, an international team of researchers announced the first successful brain-to-brain verbal communication using BCIs. The researchers reported being able to send thoughts of words (in this case “Ciao” and “Hola”) to other people’s brains over the Internet without typing on a keyboard—just by thinking. See Grau et al., “Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication.”
2. For more examples of cyborging, and some related thought experiments, see Rose, Enchanted Objects, 23ff. See also Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs.
3. Levy, In the Plex, 67.
4. For discussion, see Brian Merchant, “With a Trillion Sensors, the Internet of Things Would Be the ‘Biggest Business in the History of Electronics’,” Motherboard, October 29, 2013. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-internet-of-things-could-be-the-biggest-business-in-the-history-of-electronics. Accessed September 4, 2015.
5. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 11.
6. Mayer-Schöneberger and Cuker, Big Data, 9.
7. Floridi, The Fourth Revolution. 25–58.
8. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 52.
9. Wittgenstein, Philosphical Investigations, 226.
10. Recent books reflecting these themes include Weinberger, Too Big to Know; Bilton, I Live in the Future; Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society; Rudder, Dataclysm.
11. James, Pragmatism. 164–65.
12. Wieseltier, “Among the Disrupted.”
13. A few other sticks have been placed in the stream, for example: Carr, The Shallows; Roberts, The Impulse Society; Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0.
14. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” See Gleick, The Information, for discussion.
15. Grimm, “Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?”; Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge, 185–96.
16. Bostrom, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” Bostrom’s argument is ingeniously simple: Assume that in the future, some culture of super beings eventually reaches technological “maturity.” That means they can, among other things, make SIM programs that, unlike current SIM programs, are completely lifelike—that would even have, as it were, conscious SIMs. Second, assume that these future super beings would want to run such programs—maybe they are curious how people in the past might have lived, or maybe just to amuse themselves. Assume too that if they ran one such program, they could, and would, run millions. If they do, the math of the situation is clear. Each SIM program would have billions of SIM lives. There are millions of SIM programs. If so, the set that would include all the “real” people that ever lived would be much smaller than the set of all SIMs. Thus, given the assumptions, it is more likely that you are in the bigger set than in the smaller. It is more likely that you are a SIM.
This is an interesting result, in part because the argument is so simple. Whether we should be worried, of course, depends on how much stock we are willing to put in the assumptions: that technological maturity will happen before we all kill one another, or the sun burns out, or whatever; and that future people will be interested in running millions of SIM programs with billions of SIMs each. Moreover, as Bostrom is perfectly up-front about, there is the question of whether SIMs could ever be conscious in the way we are conscious, not to mention able to coherently consider the thought that they are.
Chapter 2: Google-Knowing
1. As the philosopher Hilary Kornblith has noted, it is consistent with this thought that we may not need to appeal to receptivity to explain the cognitive behavior of particular organisms. If all I wanted to explain was why some particular bird—a plover, say—leaves its nest and thrashes about an area while moving away from the nest, I need only appeal to its “belief” that there is a predator nearby. Whether there really is a predator nearby is irrelevant. But when it comes to explaining the capacities of species, things are more complicated, precisely because we are interested in how these capacities are adaptive. See Kornblith, Knowledge and its Place in Nature, 53–55.
2. I say in most cases, but it is possible, even plausible, that in some cases our cognitive capacities are actually spandrels. That is, certain capacities—the capacity for abstract thought might be an example—are by-products of selective pressures aimed in a very different direction.
3. Reliability in this sense is much discussed in contemporary epistemology, where seminal texts on the topic include Goldman, “What is Justified Belief” and Epistemology and Cognition. In the sense intended, a mechanism will be more reliable the higher the ratio of accurate to inaccurate information it produces over a given time. Just how high the ratio is will vary, and it will be environmentally dependent. For some organisms, mechanisms and environments, a given organism will be perfectly successful alo
ng some measure by employing an informational mechanism that is reliable at a ratio only slightly greater than chance. In other cases, a significantly higher degree of reliability will be imposed by environmental demands. Thus, for example, a given bird’s visual mechanisms must be very reliable at detecting moving objects if it is to succeed in capturing its prey. Yet the same bird’s ability to discern stationary discrete object-pairs might only be slightly better than chance.
4. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 105.
5. Ibid., 86.
6. Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla, 5.
7. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0, 69–90.
8. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 58.
9. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”
10. Descartes, Meditations, 12.
11. My description of this problem is influenced by Edward Craig’s description of the “epistemic state of nature” in Knowledge and the State of Nature, 11–13.
12. Put another way: reasonable belief matters because epistemic trust matters. Yet this is consistent with reasonable belief having value in its own right. After all, one might think that believing reasonably is simply intrinsically good, in the same way one might think it is intrinsically good to act in morally responsible ways. This would be natural if you thought of reasonable belief as grounded in the intellectual virtues.
13. See Lynch, In Praise of Reason, 79–88, for a more detailed presentation of this point.
Chapter 3: Fragmented Reasons
1. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, 187.
2. For a useful version of this definition, and discussion of the themes of this chapter in general, see Coady, What to Believe Now, 120.
3. For some influential examples, see Putnam, “Bowling Alone,” and Turkle, Alone Together.
4. Some researchers have recently argued that online communities can indeed build social capital—if under certain conditions. See, for example, Sajuria et al., “Tweeting Alone.”
5. For a discussion of this, see Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization and Media Habits,” and Iyengar and Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media.”
6. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0, 69–83.
7. Ibid.
8. Yardi and Boyd, “Dynamic Debates.”
9. Hemingway, “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking.’ ”
10. A. Peter Galling, “Do Creationists Reject Science?,” February 4, 2008. Available at: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2008/02/04/do-creationists-reject-science. Accessed August 25, 2015.
11. Philosophers typically take ancient skeptical arguments as challenges to the possibility of knowledge. Whether they are depends on what kind of knowledge you have in mind. They don’t challenge what I’ve called receptive knowledge, since all that is needed for such knowledge is belief formation that is reliable in fact. What they challenge is the possibility of reflective knowledge and giving reasons for what we believe to those who see things differently. They challenge reasonableness. See Wright, “Scepticism and Dreaming”; Pritchard, Epistemic Luck; and Sosa, “How to Resolve the Pyrrhonian Problematic,” for similar views.
12. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 272–73.
13. Hazlett, “The Social Value of Non-Deferential Belief,” 9.
14. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xvii.
15. See also Uhlmann et al., “The Motivated Use of Moral Principles”; Graham et al., “Mapping the Moral Domain,” 366.
16. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 89. Haidt’s fascinating and perceptive book concerns much more than the points focused on here; its principal aim is to diagnose the causes of ongoing political rifts.
17. Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,” 820–25.
18. Ibid., 817. I don’t meant to suggest, and neither does Haidt, that such feelings can’t be defended.
19. See Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 41, and the view of Flanagan and Williams in “What Does the Modularity of Morals Have to Do with Ethics?” On the following point about changes, see Paxton et al., “Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment.”
20. Haidt, “Reasons Matter.”
21. For an overview, see: http://www.apa.org/about/policy/parenting.aspx.
22. Adam Liptak, “In Battle over Gay Marriage, Timing May Be Key,” New York Times, October 26, 2009.
23. Bloom, “The War on Reason”; Bloom, “How Do Morals Change?”
24. Mercier and Sperber, “Why Do Humans Reason?,” 59.
25. As Nathan Kellen reminds me, even here it is difficult, as debates over the continuum hypothesis (the idea that there is no set of real numbers whose size or cardinality is intermediate between the reals and the naturals) show.
26. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 85.
27. Ibid., 310.
Chapter 4: Truth, Lies and Social Media
1. “The ‘Truth’ Deleted from Internet in China,” Daily Telegraph, July 13, 2002.
2. Stanley, How Propaganda Works, 54.
3. https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/when-did-dinosaurs-live/what-really-happened-to-the-dinosaurs/. Accessed August 25, 2015. This alarming result has been noticed by a number of science bloggers as of this writing.
4. Floridi, The Fourth Revolution, 50.
5. Ibid., 43.
6. For excellent explanations of social construction, see Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction” and Resisting Reality. Here I am concerned with the construction of both intentional and nonintentional objects.
7. Flanagan, Dreaming Souls, 134.
8. The most famous being Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 40-41.
9. It is worth emphasizing that this line of reasoning is not intended to show, absurdly, that we want all of our actual beliefs to be true. I believe many propositions that I don’t want to be true. Beliefs about the future of global warming or the continuing spread of AIDS in Africa number among them. But the fact that I don’t want these particular propositions to be true is entirely consistent with it being the case that I care about believing what is true and only what is true, whatever that turns out to be. See Lynch, True to Life, 17–18.
10. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the younger you are, the longer you’d be willing to try a super-SIM life—and one would predict that trend to reverse at a certain age. That is, one would expect older, healthy, and reasonably happy people to be willing to try out the SIM life, but for a shorter period of time (again, other things being equal: persons of any age who are miserable or unhealthy might well sign up for SIM lives permanently).
11. D’Agata and Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact, 107.
12. Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, ‘“Revealed: Us Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media”’, Guardian, March 17, 2011.
13. Ian Urbina, “I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot,” New York Times, August 10, 2013.
14. Silverman, Verification Handbook.
15. Weinberger, Too Big to Know, 112.
16. Achinstein, The Nature of Explanation, 69.
17. Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine , October 17, 2004.
Chapter 5: Who Wants to Know
1. Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 75.
2. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 75–77.
3. Scalia (dissenting), Maryland v. Alonzo King, Jr.
4. For an in-depth discussion of some of the complexities here, I recommend Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context, 67ff. See also Lane et al., Privacy, Big Data and the Public Good.
5. Barton Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani, “In NSA-intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outweigh Those Who Are,” Washington Post, July 5, 2014.
6. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-23/nsa-analysts-intentionally-abused-spying-powers-multiple-times.html. Accessed August 24, 2015.
7. See this ruling: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/22/us/22nsa-opinion-document.html, 16, n. 14. Accessed August 25, 2
015.
8. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-12_rg_final_report.pdf.
9. As of 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s official report was still allowing significant, if more limited, incidental collection. See: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ppd-28/2015/overview. Accessed August 25, 2015.
10. Bloustein, “Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity,” 974.
11. Ibid., 973.
12. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 9.
13. Sue Halpern, “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014.
14. One example is the introduction of contrary counsel. For some of the complications facing such a proposal, see this report from the Congressional Research Service: “Reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts: Introducing a Public Advocate,” available at: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R43260.pdf. Accessed August 25, 2015.
Chapter 6: Who Does Know
1. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 47.
2. Weinberger, Too Big to Know, 45.
3. Caldarelli and Catanzaro, Networks, 16.
4. Clark and Chalmers, “The Extended Mind.” See also Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, and Clark, Supersizing the Mind.
5. Goldberg, Relying on Others, 79ff.
6. Gilbert, Joint Commitment, 23ff. See also Gilbert, Sociality and Responsibility.
7. You might think that one way of understanding Gilbert’s view—namely, that groups can literally have beliefs that are completely independent of their members’ beliefs—is that it is a thought too far; compare it to U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s infamous claim that “corporations are people too.” It is not literally true. Perhaps all the examples show is that individuals, in so far as they are group members, can be implicitly or tacitly committed to a proposition that no group member is committed to as an individual. After all, the interviewer example presumes that the tacit commitment in question is itself a product of the individuals’ beliefs. If so, then perhaps the best we can say is that what we can loosely call the group’s implicit commitment “supervenes” or is a product of the individuals’ commitments.
The Internet of Us Page 17
