Our Oceanic Data Environment and the Paradox of Choice
What is it like to be a bat? is the title of a paper by Thomas Nagel in the Philosophical Review in October 1974 that is widely quoted and discussed among philosophers. But you don’t have to be a philosopher to see that the question goes straight to the mystery of consciousness. Is the consciousness of a bat anything like ours? What about a wolverine, a gecko, a sea urchin?
How does an animal’s environment shape its consciousness? You’d expect that the consciousness of a wandering albatross, who spends months at a time on the wing without ever touching land, has to be wildly different from that of a mole who spends most of its time underground in the space of half an acre.
For more on wandering albatross flight, see this will blow your mind
It’s all very well to imagine yourself a wandering albatross. It sounds like a glorious life, untethered by our bonds to mere stationary places and to people who do not soar thousands of miles at a stretch.
But, what is it like to be a fish?
Evolution has finely tuned your nervous system to make sense of your land-based environment. Plunge into an alien environment such as the ocean, and your tuning isn’t so fine. You become, one might say, at sea.
Your life as a fish is very complicated. Scary too.
Here’s the thing about being a sea-dweller: you have few sharply defined boundaries between one micro-environment and another. One of the most unbounded animals is the sperm whale (OK not a fish but you get the idea), which dives as much as 3,900 feet deep. Sperm whales range throughout every ocean (although they are rarely seen because they spend much of their time hunting giant squid). They are masters of three dimensions, taking full advantage of the fact that instead of sharp boundaries there are gradients (pressure and temperature) that allow awesome freedom of movement.
Main point: to live like a fish in the ocean would be profoundly disorienting to a human mind. So much space, inhabited by an unthinkable variety of creatures! How do you tell up from down? So few places that are safe. . . when a marlin comes upon your school, there’s nowhere to hide! The best you can do is to get in the middle of the swirling bait ball and hope the marlin spears one of your mates before it can get to you.
A marlin, swordfish, shark, or other lethal predator can attack from any direction (including above and below) at any time! This is a precarious existence! That’s why fish have eyes in the sides of their heads.
Of course, the flip side is that your food (assume other fish) can be anywhere, moving in any direction: up, down, front, back, or sideways, and if you don’t keep constant watch, you will starve.
The physical precariousness of your everyday fish can be likened to the precariousness of the human mind in the ocean of the Internet. This is not to say that your mind is as vulnerable to lethal attack as a codfish is to a shark. It is to say that in pursuit of mental sustenance, you are bathed in a medium teeming with junk food and predators as well as the nourishment you’re seeking. Unlike the sperm whale, we are not masters of, but rather subjects of, our multidimensional electronic world.
Today’s “e”-world is a sea in which any fact, pseudo-fact, non-fact, threat, boast, conspiracy theory, hypothesis, speculation, totally made-up stuff, informed commentary, ignorant commentary, edgy ideas, boring ideas, etc. can come at you at any time from any direction, as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Podcasts, texts, tweets, emails, videos, SnapChat, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, blog posts (uh-oh), advertisements for stuff you never asked for and will never want and some of them start talking out loud to you before you even know they’re there—the mind-predator swooping in.
Even the stuff you’re seeking often turns out to be repetitive, predictable, and tiresome. But to get anything done in this environment—a fish has to eat—you are regularly exposed to this enormous din.
The price we pay for the availability of so much diverse data is fatigue and disappointment that all that stuff doesn’t satisfy a craving for meaning .
A case in point, for me, is The Daily Kos, to which I, as many a good liberal, e-subscribe. It points me to good stuff, but it also points me to a lot of stuff which does little more than reinforce my biases and stir up my emotions. Not educate me. Even though I’m aware of that, once I’ve opened the Kos email, I find myself clicking on one bias-confirming headline after another. And sometimes click on one of the boxes on the bottom (“Where Lance Armstrong Lives Now Will Astonish You”), and find myself diverted but dissatisfied. I often turn away from The Daily Kos malnourished. (Will I unsubscribe? Never! I don’t want to miss out on the latest right-wing outrage. Mindfulness is not an option when there’s so much crazy you have to keep track of.)
The eyes in the sides of my virtual fish head keep tugging me back and forth towards various foods, most of which are not more nourishing than junk food. And some are toxic.
It matters, of course, that much of this stuff is new and available for self-education. Your fishy mind does not eat only psychic junk food. It also matters that much of this provender is not available through traditional sources such as newspapers—you have a wide range of sources, to include online newspapers and far more. You can get wiser—in addition to being merely aware—in ways you never could before you sank into the Internet. But what compass can you use to acquire wisdom? Which brings us to. . .
The Paradox of Choice
In the sea of the Internet, you are subject to what psychologist Barry Schwartz, in a slightly different context, terms the Paradox of Choice. It’s the title of one of the books he’s written, and also the subject of a TED talk in which the key idea is, a superabundance of choices can lead to psychological paralysis (Which frozen pizza among three dozen possibilities should I take home?) and/or a quick dissatisfaction (I should have got the white cheese). Incidentally, Schwartz also uses a fish analogy.
In case you haven’t seen it (it has over six million views), here’s Schwartz’s TED talk: Schwarts on The Paradox of Choice
By now you may be ticked that I am practicing exactly the kind of diversion of attention that I complain of. Do you need links to sperm whales and albatrosses to follow my thesis? Of course not. It actually detracts from my message—but I can’t help myself! You know the feeling, right? I am not trying to run an experiment on you, I am just following my Internet-induced impulses. I want to have fun! I want you to have fun! Maybe it will keep you reading. But at what price?
On the other hand, Barry Schwartz’s TED talk is directly relevant, so you might want to take a look and listen. The fish comes at the end.
Disorientation Serves the Bannon-Trump-Putin Axis
Boundaries and standards are melting away as a consequence of sheer volume and absence of direction. It’s as disorienting as weightlessness. It is in this kind of environment that a bizarre entity such as the Trump phenomenon can thrive. It revels in disorientation and bafflement, enough of which turns off rational faculties and turns on the amygdala. Survival-driven emotions kick in: fear, rage, panic, no matter what your place is on the political spectrum. When that happens, the time is ripe for cabals such as the Steve Bannon Cabinet to take over. It is no accident that the initial salvo of Trump presidential edicts produced chaos and misunderstanding; the chaos serves as a deliberate mask for the deeper agenda (this is hardly an original idea, but I can’t remember where I got it from, or even if it’s true, but it very well could be true).
It was more than thirty years ago that the song by The Police, “Too Much Information” was a hit. That was only a foretaste. Did they know what was coming? Given the sparse sources of information then (no web-based social media, email, texting etc.), if that complaint was true then, it is truer today by at least an order of magnitude. Anybody know what Sting has to say about that today?
“Information” itself has become harder to come by, if by information we mean data (i.e., any images, sounds, text) that has been put into some kind of structure, or meaningful form. These days, it is too much unstructured data (to include images and sounds as well as words and numbers), rather than information, that is forever nagging at our attention.
Is “Consciousness” really something to get worked up about?
Consciousness shift is an issue that is not getting enough attention. (Actually, it’s getting a lot from researchers, but not from the public, and not enough to move the needle.) This is not so much about our individual inner worlds as about our collective consciousness, and the impact that today’s overwhelming data environment is having on it. The environment that is shaping our consciousness is an unprecedented experiment in human development. We don’t have enough experience with it to understand where it’s going. It is also, increasingly, our own creation. But we’re not reshaping that creation, we’re just adding to it, one app at a time. We’re in a feedback loop revolving at an ever faster rate. Can we do a more conscious job of shaping it?
The Trump phenomenon and the revival of right-wing nationalism in Europe make me wonder: could these evils have come back to life without the Internet in its current form? Can we change the data environment to make it more widely hospitable to reason and kindness? Can we direct it at all, or does it have its own relentless dynamic? Marshall McLuhan made the case that radio facilitated the rise of Hitler—the perfect medium for his message. But Hitler is gone, and radio marches on for the overall good. Good or bad, it was a genie that could never have been put back in the bottle. We cannot put the Internet genie back in the bottle, but we have a chance of modifying and moderating its impact. Perhaps.
Much is being made of “disruptive technologies,” and razor-sharp brains at the digital cutting edge seem to think they are not all that risky. But what I’m hearing from them is that since these technologies are inevitable, the best, most realistic course is for us to adapt. They point out that the massive socioeconomic shifts of the Industrial Revolution ultimately led to human betterment. We are versatile, flexible animals, and will in time turn all technologies to our advantage.
But. . .
The most encompassing disruptive technology is the Internet, and its pervasive effects are altering our consciousness in profoundly new ways. The digital data revolution is different from phases such as the Industrial Revolution in that it works directly on consciousness itself: what we see and what we hear, and how we see and hear it. And maybe we’re getting a little too much of a Good Thing.
Very profound stuff! I must admit that my reactions to what is going on with Trump & his minions are much simpler and very frustrating.
Hi, Ed, thanks for the comment. At least somebody reads these posts!
I was groping up a level because I’ve been finding myself just all too reactive, in the way you mention. It’s hard to quiet one’s anger sufficiently in order to reason quickly. Anger is good when it prompts productive action, but not when one just bathes in it.
You personally are already doing important, tangible things for society in your average day, but people like me have to stretch to (or try to) directly help the human condition – and the world’s condition. This blog is part of my attempt to raise consciousness (or at least entertain it), and sometimes to advocate. But it sometimes feels a little empty just to be spreading verbiage
All that said, I still believe the problem of disrupted consciousness needs to be addressed publicly, however immaterial it may sound. All I hear on that score is people complaining about distractions and “fake news” and too much texting. But there’s more going on than just annoyance. Especially for kids, who are growing up in a world altered beyond my understanding. There’s no doubt they’re quicker, but no doubt most of them are still shallow. They’re just kids, after all. Will they go deeper as they grow?